The Spring 2026 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jack Bankowsky and Jason Smith.

Jan Tumlir presents Tala Madani

This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are not required.

Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) makes paintings and animations that prompt reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what get represented in art. In images of middle-aged men, typically naked and balding, slapstick humor is inextricable from violence, and destruction walks hand in hand with creation. Madani’s tactilely expressive creations combine the radical morphology of modernism with a contemporary sense of sequencing, and speed associated with cartoons, cinema, and television.

Madani has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2024); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2022–2023); Start Museum, Shanghai, China (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2019); Secession, Vienna, Austria (2019); Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2019); La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2016); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2014); and Moderna Museet, Malmö and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013). Madani lives and works in Los Angeles, CA where her 2023 survey at The Museum of Contemporary Art brought together fifteen years of the artist’s work.

Jan Tumlir is an art-writer and teacher based in Los Angeles, CA. He is a founding editor of the local art journal, X-TRA, and a long-time contributor to both Artforum and Frieze. More recently, he has joined the editorial team at Effects, a London-based journal devoted to “aesthetics in the shadows of the contemporary.” Tumlir has written extensively on such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Uta Barth, John Divola, Cyprien Gaillard, Allen Ruppersberg, and James Welling. His books include: LA Artland, a survey of contemporary art in Los Angeles co-written with Chris Kraus and Jane McFadden (Black Dog Press, 2005); Hyenas Are…, a monograph on the work of Matthew Brannon (Mousse, 2011); The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records (Onomatopee, 2015); and Conversations, produced in discussion with Jorge Pardo (Inventory Press, 2021). A book-length study of the role of gesture in painting is forthcoming. Tumlir has served as a faculty member of the Fine Art, Humanities, and Science departments at ArtCenter College of Design since 1999. In 2022, he joined the faculty of SCI-Arc as resident art historian.

Image: Shit Mom (DIY) (2025), Tala Madani. Photo: Coutesy of Flying Studio.

See the full Spring 2026 Seminar schedule here.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, BLUM, Hannah Hoffman, David Kordansky, and Jeffrey Deitch.

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 that 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—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.