James Benning, an independent filmmaker and professor of film and video at California Institute of the Arts, divides his time between Val Verde, CA and a small town in the Sierra Nevada, where he built a replica of the cabin Henry David Thoreau constructed on Walden Pond in 1845. With fourteen feature length films to his credit, including Landscape Suicide (1987); California Trilogy (1999-2001); 13 Lakes (2004); Ruhr (2009); and most recently, Readers (2017), Benning has broadened his practice to encompass multimedia and installation work incorporating photography and archival material. His exhibition history includes installations at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1978); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1980); 21er Haus, Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2012); Argos, Centrum Voor Kunst en Media, Brussels (2012); and a trio of recent solos at the Museum of Natural History, Vienna; VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal; and Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (all in 2014). 2003 saw the release of Reinhard Wulf's feature-length documentary, James Benning: Circling the Image, and in 2007, the Austrian Filmmuseum published the monograph, James Benning, edited by Barbara Pichler and Claudia Slanar. Benning has exhibited regularly at Neugerriemschneider, Berlin since 2011.

Image: James Benning courtesy of Sharon Lockhart

Rachel Kushner’s new novel The Mars Room was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger, a New York Times bestseller, and is being translated into twenty languages. Her previous novels, The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba, were both finalists for the National Book Award in 2013 and 2008 respectively. She is the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Harper’s, and her art and culture writing in Artforum and the New York Times Magazine. Recently Kushner has contributed catalogue texts for the artists Seth Price, Laura Owens, and Richard Prince. She appears in James Benning’s 2017 film Readers, being and doing just that.

Image: Rachel Kushner courtesy of Gabby Laurent

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 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.