From a Distance / Virtual

Winter and Spring 2025 Arts Education Webinar Series

The California Arts Project in collaboration with Dr. Ahran Koo, CSU Fresno, are providing six webinars featuring AI artists, AI art educators, and artists whose work centers on social engagement.

No Fee Required

Dates & Times

 

AI and Art Education: Reexamining Creativity, Cognition, and Pedagogical Approaches with Nicholas Leonard
Wednesday, February 12, 2025  4:30–6:00 PM (PT)

This presentation explores how AI’s entanglement with art making encourages exploration regarding creativity and cognition to audit current art education pedagogy. Highlighting recent research findings, Nicholas shares various influences of AI for art making proposes strategies for meaningfully integrating AI into art classrooms.

Bio: Dr. Nicholas Leonard is an art and design education scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of digital technologies, creativity, and digital art pedagogy. He has given over 90 presentations, including two TEDx Talks and has published multiple articles on the topic of AI in art education. He received his PhD in Art and Design Education from Northern Illinois University. Prior to that, he was an elementary art educator in Michigan. He received his undergraduate degree in art education from Hope College and his master’s degree in art education from the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

 

Bias in the Code: Unpacking Power Structures Through AI Imagery with Ye Sul Park
Wednesday, February 26, 2025  4:30–6:00 PM (PT)

The landscape of visual culture is increasingly intertwined with images created by both humans and nonhuman machines, including AI. In this presentation, Ye Sul Park will introduce how a critical content analysis of AI-generated images can serve as a pedagogical tool to examine power structures in society. Participants we will practice how to unpack the biases embedded in AI imagery, drawing on a method proposed by artist and researcher Eryk Salvaggio.

Bio: Ye Sul Park (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Art Education at Penn State University, who is interested in how new media and emerging technologies reshape art pedagogies and relational dynamics between humans and nonhuman machines. Through her research and practice, Ye Sul aims to help students navigate the evolving media environment creatively and critically.

 

Speculation As Resistance with Morehshin Allahyari
Wednesday, March 12, 2025  4:30–5:30 PM (PT)

In this presentation, Morehshin Allahyari will use Speculation and Re-figuring as frameworks for thinking with and through her research-based practice. How can speculation become a toolset for re-figuring the past and its relevant histories so that we can imagine factual and fictional possibilities in the present and the future? What is the value of speculation in times of crisis and dystopia and how can we use it to turn around power structures?

Bio: Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری‎), is a Bay Area based Iranian-Kurdish artist, using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication. She uses these processes to refigure myths and history weaving together complex counternarratives. She has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops including Venice Biennale di Architettura, The Whitney Museum, Pompidou Center, MoMa, V&A. She is an assistant professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford.

 

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Wednesday, March 26, 2025  4:30–5:30 PM (PT)

Bio: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Mexican-Canadian media artist creates platforms for public participation by using robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, and telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics, his interactive works are “anti-monuments for people to self-represent.”

He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His works are in collections around the world such as MoMA, Guggenheim, TATE, Reina Sofía, and Hirshhorn.

Recent exhibitions include “Unstable Presence,” a mid-career retrospective co-produced by the MAC de Montreal and SFMOMA; “Common Measures,” his first solo exhibition at PACE Gallery ; and “Translation Island,” a 2-km parcours in Abu Dhabi.

 

Chris Johnson
Wednesday, April 9, 2025  4:30–6:00 PM (PT)

Bio: Chris Johnson is a photographic and video artist, educator, curator and writer. Chris studied photography with Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Wynn Bullock. He was a Full Professor, now Professor Emeritus, and served as Chair of the Photography Program at the California College of the Arts for 11 years.

His photographic artwork has been published and exhibited widely and is represented in collections including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson Arizona, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In Fall, 2022 his fine art photographic portraiture were exhibited in a solo show at the Monterey Museum of Art.

Chris Johnson has served as President of SF Camerawork Gallery, Chair of the Cultural Affairs Commission for the City of Oakland under Jerry Brown and Director of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography. He serves on the Board of the Oakland Museum of California and is Board President of the Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. Additionally, he authored The Practical Zone System: for Film and Digital Photography; currently in its 6th edition. His public art works and projects are featured in the recently published book titled Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, Routledge Press.

 

Critical Art Pedagogy: What Art Can Teach with Suzanne Lacy
Wednesday, April 30, 2025  4:30–6:00 PM (PT)

Bio: Suzanne Lacy is a Los Angeles-based artist and a pioneer of socially engaged public performance art. Her installations, videos, and performances deal with sexual violence, rural and urban poverty, incarceration, labor, and aging. Lacy’s large-scale projects span the globe, including England, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, Ireland, and the US. In 2019, she had a career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent project initiated in 2019, Uncertain Futures, has explored intersectional issues on paid and unpaid work through the lens of women over 50, focusing on gender, age, race, disability, and class and its final exhibition presents the concluding element of an immense collaborative work combining art, research, and activism on view at the Manchester Art Gallery. She is a professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California and a resident artist at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica -CA.

 

Moderators
Dr. Ahran Koo, Associate Professor, Curriculum and Instruction, CSU Fresno
Armalyn De La O, Int. Executive Director, The California Arts Project