News, September 22, 2026
Upcoming Events
Andrew Polk: Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Monday, September 28th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, 1B20 Auditorium (lower-level)
Andrew Polk is a printmaker, painter, and educator whose career spans nearly six decades of technical refinement and formal experimentation. Since beginning his professional practice in 1968, Polk has established himself as a versatile figure within contemporary American print culture, rejecting stylistic stagnation in favor of continuous discovery and conceptual risk across printmaking, painting, and digital media.
Polk’s body of work moves fluidly from non-objective abstraction to meticulous representation across lithography, watercolor, drawing, digital programming, video, and installation. Driven by the philosophy to "stay inspired," Polk transitions to new aesthetic territory whenever a direction risks becoming predictable. Despite shifting styles, core thematic threads—human vulnerability, structural balance, and narrative ambiguity—interweave through his entire trajectory.
Polk served for thirty-two years as Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona, leading the lithography department. Following his retirement as Professor Emeritus, he relocated to rural Indiana, co-founding L-vis Press alongside his artist wife, Kathryn Polk. Polk has participated in over 600 exhibitions worldwide, and his work is held in major collections, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Denver Art Museum, and the Tucson Museum of Art.
Cultural Crawl at the Visual Arts Complex
Art & Art History Department Open House & Art-making on the VAC Plaza
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 from 10am to 3pm
Join us at the Visual Arts Complex for Culture Crawl 2026! We’re hosting an OPEN HOUSE to showcase the amazing work happening across our department and among our Art & Art History students.
Head to the plaza for refreshments and visit information tables hosted by:
- ATLAS Institute
- Conference on World Affairs
- CU Study Abroad
- Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
- Museum of Boulder
- Boulder Art Affiliates
ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½Æƽâ°æÏÂÔØ the Culture Crawl:ÌýThe Culture Crawl is a campus-wide event celebrating ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½Æƽâ°æÏÂÔØ arts & culture. Stop by the different locations to take part in immersive activities, performances, artmaking, food tasting and more. Pick up a free Culture Crawl t-shirt at any event (while supplies last) and swipe in with your Buff OneCard to enter a prize raffle. The more events you attend, the more opportunities to win.Ìý
James Nisbet: Visiting Art History Scholar Lecture
Thursday, October 8, 2026 at 5:45pm
Lecture: Immersive Waters, or Notes Towards a Genealogy of Water Art
As a long-standing and vital element in the production of visual art, water had been employed variously—as subject, liquid base for pigments, and fundamental to the cleaning and maintenance of tools—from time immemorial through the mid twentieth century. Today, the use of water as an artistic material in the production of different forms of sculpture, performance, and installation art is so common that it would be all but impossible to systemically track its use. In the interim—that is, during the latter half of the twentieth century, coincident with dramatic ecological changes at a planetary level—the element of water began to be employed in the work of the postwar neo-avant-garde, and, increasingly, throughout subsequent experimental movements of the twentieth century. Taking select contemporary practices as a point of departure, this paper will consider the range and genealogy of these activities—focused primarily on North America and Western Europe—in the hope of distilling the disparate instances in which water appears during the period of 1945–2000 into a more closely connected series of conversations among artists and orientations of practice.
James Nisbet is Professor in the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, with special interests in ecocritical visual art and the history of photography. Nisbet’s research has been supported by institutions including Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, Georgia O'Keeffe Research Center, Dumbarton Oaks, and Getty Research Institute. His book projects include Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (MIT Press, 2014), Second Site (Princeton University Press, 2021), and as editor with Lyle Massey, The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment (University of California Press, 2021).
