Visiting Artist Lecture: Nicola López and William Morrow

Please join us on Friday, October 25 for a visiting artist lecture with Nicola López and William Morrow at 1:00 p.m. in Auditorium 150. 

Nicola López’s work in drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture and video examines and reconfigures our contemporary landscape. It points to connections and rifts between our human-constructed world and the systems and cycles of nature. She engages architecture and urban structure as ever-accumulating evidence of human aspirations and failures, often contrasting and intertwining them with geological and organic formations. Her work draws on anthropology, architecture, urban planning and historical and fictional explorations of utopia/dystopia. It also leans heavily into material process, intentionally bringing joy, improvisation, and care into the work as it reflects on human patterns of extraction and construction. López has participated in several residencies and received grants and fellowships including a NYFA Fellowship in Drawing/Printmaking/Book Arts, a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is held in numerous prominent institutional collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Denver Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum and the Inside-Out Museum in Beijing.

William Morrow is an independent curator, museum specialist, arts and culture consultant, and advisor to collectors based in Portland, Oregon. With over twenty years of experience curating high-level international art programs and expertise in building and interpreting major collections, he has become a highly effective thought partner to non-profit leaders and collectors across the country. His career-long commitment to fostering visionary artistic practices, deconstructing histories, and inspiring diverse audiences has been at the cornerstone of his curatorial practice.  

William has organized and curated hundreds of exhibitions, scholarly publications, lectures,  commissioned projects, films, dance, theater, music, and poetry programs that include some of the leading thinkers and creatives of our time. He recently curated the anchor exhibition for  Portland, Oregon’s 2023 Converge 45 Biennial and inaugural public exhibition for the Schnitzer  Collection Gallery, WE ARE THE REVOLUTION. In addition to curating the forthcoming survey,  Unsettled Horizons: The Expanded Prints of Nicola López for the Highpoint Center for  Printmaking, he is curating a major survey of the work of Ed Bereal for the Contemporary Art  Center, Cincinatti (2025).  

William was the founding Director of 21c Museum and Curator of the private collection of Laura  Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY; Curator of Contemporary Art, Denver Art Museum;  Curator Contemporary Art and Academic Affairs, Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University;  Director of Exhibitions, Schnitzer Foundation and advisor to top 200 collector, Jordan  Schnitzer, Portland, Oregon. William earned his master's degrees in art history and museum studies from the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and the Sainsbury Centre's School of World Art and Museum Studies at the University of East  Anglia, Norwich, England.

Hosted by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Sponsored by: The Fine Arts Department and the Alice Fjelstul ’96 Visiting Artist Program, in partnership with Highpoint Center for Printmaking.