The Spring 2024 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jack Bankowsky

Paul Sietsema in conversation with Jack Bankowsky

This event is free & open to the public. RSVP’s are not required.

See the full Spring 2024 Seminar schedule here.

Paul Sietsema (b. 1968) is known for paintings, drawings, and films that explore how imagery, form, and material affect our understanding of culture and history. Utilizing different mediums at each stage of his studio process, he often cycles between physical making and digital image manipulation. Working in series, he develops groups of subjects, including painter’s tools, newspapers, coins, rotary telephones, paper currency, and museum exhibition posters from decades past. He renders these objects by hand, with startling realism, employing labor-intensive techniques that mimic obsolete methods of mechanical reproduction. When Sietsema makes a film, he immerses himself in a historical or contemporary body of knowledge and its associated images and objects, whether abstract art via representations of paintings in postwar magazines or the décor of Clement Greenberg’s New York apartment, pre-colonial Oceania culture, philosophy of mind, or the filmic medium itself.

Sietsema has had one-person exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both New York, NY; and the Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Fellowship (2008), and a Wexner Center Residency Award (2010). Monographs on Sietsema’s work have been published by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthalle Basel, Mousse Publishing, and Sternberg Press. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Image credits: Courtesy of Artist

The Graduate Art Seminar is a forum for graduate students and members of the ArtCenter community to enter into dialog with internationally recognized artists, critics, and art historians. The Seminar is a core component of ArtCenter's Graduate Art program. The Seminar is also free and open to the public.

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio, which provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres of film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.