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Otis College BFA Fine Arts Program Announces Anicka Yi as Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist

Anicka Yi and installation view of In Love With The World
Yi will give a lecture on Wednesday, March 2 via Zoom that is free and open to the public. 

The Otis College of Art and Design’s Undergraduate Fine Arts Department presents Anicka Yi as the Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Series speaker and Visiting Artist for Spring 2022. Yi will give a lecture about her work, process, and practice on Wednesday, March 2 at 7:00 p.m. PT; the lecture is free and open to the public and will take place virtually on Zoom (register to attend). 

Anicka Yi is known for her sculptural and installation works, often using unconventional materials, sometimes completely transforming them. Yi’s work involves scent, tactility, and perishability as a means to reconfigure the epistemological and sensorial terms of a predominantly visual art world. Yi is not only interested in materials research, but also in what collaboration between individuals and disciplines might mean in relation to friendship. Drawing upon philosophical and critical writings, Yi explores the political and ethical ramifications of these interactions. 

Yi lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Gladstone Gallery (Brussels, Belgium); the Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY); Fridericianum (Kassel, Germany); and Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, Switzerland), among many others. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2019 Venice Biennale; the 12th Biennale de Lyon; 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York; Studiolo in Zurich; MoCA, North Miami; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Sculpture Center, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gagosian, New York and Milan; Witte de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, among many others. She was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 2016, a MIT Artist Fellowship in 2015, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2011.  

Following such artists as Kara Walker, Ai Weiwei, and Olafur Eliasson, Yi has been commissioned for the annual Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Hyundai commission in London. Yi’s In Love with the World fills the Turbine Hall with hybrid biological and technological creatures called aerobes, whose forms have been inspired by ocean life forms. Filled with helium and propelled around the hall by rotors, they emit a faintly pleasant scent, while driven by an A.I. program and moving in unpredictable movements imbuing them with a sense of life more akin to animals than machines. The project will be on view through February 2022.

For more on Yi, please visit: Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi In Love With The World; Anicka Yi : Gladstone Gallery; and The Artistic Aromas of Anicka Yi in The New York Times.

Funded through a generous gift from Mandy and Cliff Einstein, the Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture Series provides Otis College students an opportunity to learn and engage directly with major figures in the art world today. 

Register to attend at this link

Main image, from left: Portrait of Yi; In Love With The World (Installation view of Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi at Tate Modern, October 2021; photo by Will Burrard-Lucas © Tate 2021), both provided by the artist.