Lecture

In celebration of its Centennial, Otis College of Art and Design will host a series of conversations with world-renowned artists and thinkers, funded through a generous gift from Mandy and Cliff Einstein. The series will provide Otis College students an opportunity to learn and engage directly with major figures in the art world today. 

Dozens of writers, artists, and Angelenos crowded into The Forum at Otis College of Art and Design to hear Roxane Gay, celebrated writer of both fiction and non-fiction, give a lecture that would kick off the Anaphora Writing Residency at Otis College. She answered questions from the audience about how to sustain a writing life, how to navigate spaces such as academia and publishing as a person of color, and about her own personal writing process, which has turned out several bestsellers and book deals for more upcoming titles.

How do you develop a theory of living in the world if you can never escape the confines of your own mind? How can you develop a relationship to the world if your philosophy of the world places humans at the center, and everything else in a separate category? These were just the beginnings of some of the questions touched on in Graham Harman’s discussion with Andrew Culp that kicked off the inaugural summer Los Angeles residency for the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art.

Creative endeavors can start locally to change the world. That’s one of the messages students can take with them from James Shen, Otis College’s 2018 Donghia Designer-in-Residence. Shen was born and raised in Los Angeles, but his vision for culturally-connective design has taken him to Beijing, China, where he runs People’s Architecture Office.

Otis College’s Architecture/Landscape/Interiors program presents the 2018 George H. Scanlon Foundation Lecture featuring Eric Höweler and J. Meejin Yoon, principals at Höweler + Yoon Architecture. The free, public lecture will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA) on February 21, 2018.