UTSC Events Calendar
Visiting Artist Lecture: Shellie Zhang
Oct 17, 2023 01:00 PM
to
02:00 PM
AA 303
Registration Deadline: Oct 17, 2024 12:00 PM
Placemaking: Building Communities through Art
Artist Lecture with Shellie Zhang
Community is an important part of being an artist and conversely, artists build community, define place, and keep culture alive with their work. Thinking through the elements of placemaking-citizen well-being, reliable public transit, and the overall vitality of a community, 2023-2024 invites 9 artists to speak about the impact of community on their practice, the pivotal role placemaking serves in their works, and the ways in which artists actively build, maintain, and champion their communities.
**Registration closes at 12pm the day of - please arrive in person if you'd like to attend past the registration deadline.**
Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, history, migration and popular culture. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved.
Zhang has exhibited at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing), Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Museum Anchorage (Alaska). She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council's Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council's Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council's Project Grant to Visual Artists. She is a member of EMILIA-AMALIA, an intergenerational feminist reading and writing group. In 2017, She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award. Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Recent and upcoming projects include exhibitions at The Bentway (Toronto), Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver), and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. Zhang works with Patel Brown Gallery.