Visiting Artist Conrad Bakker

The Department of Art & Design presents an informative program by visiting artist Conrad Bakker, "How to do Things with Things," Monday, January 24, at 7 p.m. in Haggar Auditorium, Room 119, Cook-DeVos Center for Health Sciences, 301 Michigan NE, on the GVSU Pew Grand Rapids Campus.

Bakker lives and works in Urbana, Illinois. His ongoing Untitled Projects engage the careful construction and specific placement of carved and painted objects so as to critically comment upon and make tangible the everyday economies between persons and things and spaces.

Bakker has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at Tate Modern (London), Galerie Analix Forever (Geneva), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (Chicago), among other prominent venues. His work has been reviewed or showcased in leading news and art magazines, and in 2000 he was a recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation project grant. The grant enabled the production of the "Untitled, Mail Order Catalog," a fully functional mail order catalog that sold carved and painted replicas of conventional mail order objects.

Recent work includes: "Size Does Matter," curated by Shaquille O'Neal for the Flag Art Foundation, "Untitled Project: Librarie [Geneva]" (as part of "Public Things") for Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva, Switzerland; and "Untitled Project: Book of the Month Club," for the group exhibition "Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Contemporary Art," Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Selected new projects include: "Untitled Project: Used Books" for the NY Art Book Fair at MOMA/PS1 (Fall 2010); and "New Image Sculpture" at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas (February 2011).

For more information, contact Hsiao-ping Chen in the Department of Art & Design, at (616) 331-3187, or [email protected].