LRVS Visiting Faculty 2022

Emilio Rojas

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist, working primarily with the body in performance, using film, video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. Rojas utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His researched-based practice is heavily influenced by queer archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. His works have been exhibited in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia. Besides his artistic practice, Rojas is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth. Rojas recently  graduated from SAIC with an MFA from the Performance department. Galeria Jose de la Fuente in Santander, Spain and Gallleriapiú in Bologna, Italy represent Rojas’ work.

Kyung-Me

Kyung-Me lives and works in New York. Kyung-Me received an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Poor Thing with Sydney Shen, Hotel Art Pavilion, Brooklyn, 2018; Theatre of Cruelty with Ashton Hudgins, Museum Gallery, Brooklyn, 2018; Copy Kitty, Selena Gallery, Brooklyn, 2017; and Bad Korean, 17 Essex Gallery, New York, 2016. She is the author of Bad Korean, published by Spaceface Books (2016), and Copy Kitty (2020), forthcoming from 2d Cloud. Her illustrations have been published by The New York Times and BOMB Magazine.

Malcolm Peacock

Malcolm Peacock is an artist living and working in New Orleans, LA. He earned a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, in 2016, and an MFA from Rutgers University, New Jersey, in 2019. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines emotional and psychic spaces of Black subjects. Peacock is particularly interested in the intricacies of intimacy. He has shown with Cindy Rucker Gallery, New York, Terrault Contemporary, Baltimore, and Rose Arcade, Baltimore, among other venues. He has been a participant in residencies at The University of Pennsylvania, St. Roch Community Church, Denniston Hill, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Omari Weekes

Dr. Omari Weekes’ work focuses on the affective dimensions of spiritual experience for people of African descent in the United States and the Americas. His current book project, Lurid Affinities: Sex and the Spirit in Contemporary Black Literature argues that much black writing in the post-civil rights era thinks through the dialectic between the sacred and the profane not only through the expression of various desires that push up against traditional theological teachings about gender and sex but also by accounting for a matrix of pre-discursive intensities, attractions, and longings that help to organize the kinds of communities that black people construct for themselves. These affects are not diametrically opposed to religion; more precisely, these affective relations are often informed by various spiritual systems as they also inform African Americans’ understandings of their own spiritual selves. Lurid Affinities turns to the work of writers like James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jericho Brown, Toni Morrison, and others in order to explore how black writers register deviance and spirituality not as antipodal ideas but as imbricated components of black life.

Amber Husain

Amber Husain is a writer, academic, publisher and comrade. Her essays and criticism appear or are forthcoming in 3AM, The Believer, London Review of Books online, LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy and The White Review. Her first book Replace Me was published by Peninsula Press in November 2021.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Jessica Jackson Hutchins lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Hutchins’s expressive and intuitive studio practice produces dynamic sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics, all hybrid juxtapositions of the handmade. As evidence of the artist’s dialogue with items in her studio, these works are a means by which the artist explores the intimacy of the mutual existence between art and life. Her transformations of everyday household objects, from furniture to clothing, are infused with human emotion and rawness, and also show a playfulness of material and language that is both subtle and ambitious. Based upon a willingly unmediated discourse between artist, artwork and viewer, Hutchins’s works ultimately serve to refigure an intimate engagement with materiality and form.

Pao Houa Her

Pao Houa Her embraces photography as a language with the potential to, in her words, “tell the stories I wish to tell about geography, displacement, sexuality, and beauty.” Her was born in Laos, and she and her family are Hmong, an Indigenous people who primarily live in Laos, Myanmar, southwest China, Thailand, and Vietnam. When she was a child, Her’s family moved as refugees to St. Paul, Minnesota, home to a large Hmong population.

Her’s work is featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and an upcoming solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center.

Aki Onda

Aki Onda is currently based in Mito, Japan, after living in New York for two decades. He is particularly known for his “Cassette Memories” — works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by using portable cassette recorder over a span of last three decades. He creates compositions, performances, and visual artworks from those sound memories.Onda has presented his work at The Kitchen, MoMA, P.S.1 MOMA, New Museum, ISSUE Project Room, Blank Forms, ICA Philadelphia, REDCAT, Time-Based Art Festival, Images Festival, Novas Frequências, documenta 14, Louvre Museum, Pompidou Center, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Cartier, Présences électronique, Argos, Bozar, Wiels, ICA London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Counterflow Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Impakt Festival, La Casa Encendida, Caixa Forum, Serralves Museum, Nam June Paik Art Center, Sound Live Tokyo, Hara Museum and many others.