God Has No Spam Folder No 4 1633
Visiting Artist Lectures

Jessalyn Aaland

09/15/22

Please join us for a lecture with artist Jessalyn Aaland. She will also be our OS47 Artist-in-Residence later in the month.

Date: Wednesday, November 2, 2022, 7:30 — 8:30 PM
Location: Oxbow Studios*

Jessalyn Aaland is a Bay Area interdisciplinary artist working across social practice, painting, print, and sculpture. Her work often touches upon complex social issues, but with a sense of humor, hope, and joy. Much of her work explores how systems (such as the K-12 education system) function as sites for both conformity and resistance, and conveys the possibility that a more utopian society is not unreachable. Her socially-engaged projects address public audiences of everyday people (e.g. youth, teachers, workers), and often take the form of workshops and Risograph-printed posters and booklets. Aaland’s project Class Set has provided 20,000 Risograph-printed, artist-designed posters featuring social justice quotes to schools, libraries, and educational non-profits nationwide, and the designs and accompanying curriculum are available for anyone to download online for free. Her work has been supported with funding from Southern Exposure, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She has been an artist-in-residence at Facebook (Menlo Park), Real Time & Space (Oakland, CA), North Mountain (West Virginia), and Sim (Reykjavik, Iceland), and was a 2018-2019 Political Power fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

*Please note due to COVID-19 safety protocols this event will not be open to the public.

In the year leading up to Oxbow, I became obsessed with the program, I was entranced with reading testimonials and researching interdisciplinary learning styles. When I arrived at Oxbow I was never disappointed, despite my endless expectations. I will forever cherish the time I spent at Oxbow and the connections I made there. Through Oxbow I was able to hone into the ideas I was thinking about, to refine my artistic process and to see the world in a new light every day of my life. I'm not going to say that without Oxbow I wouldn't be the person I am today, but I will say that without Oxbow it would have taken me at least four years to become who I am after one Oxbow semester.

— Phoebe Dubisch, Fall 2018

At Oxbow, the eye and the hand are inseparable from the mind and because their peers are also artists, students adopt fresh attitudes toward their work.

— Charles Altieri, Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

Advice I would give to future students is to just do it and come to Oxbow and not overthink it because it will most likely (99.9%) be the best decision you have made in your life.

— Malachi Snyder, Spring 2018

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