SkowheganTALKS, a lecture series organized by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, features conversations between some of the most influential visual artists working today. The third talk of the second season of the series includes a conversation between artists Carrie Moyer and Mira Schor.

SkowheganTALKS features recent alumni of the residency program of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in conversation with artists who have been faculty members at Skowhegan. While the association with Skowhegan is the common factor among the artists, the conversations are not intended to focus on the artists’ respective experiences at Skowhegan, but rather will address subjects of broader interest including the participating artists’ current and past work and the challenges and opportunities that are characteristic of working as an artist today. An especially interesting aspect of SkowheganTALKS is that the conversations are also intended explore the mentor-student relationship, a model that is becoming increasingly important for young artists in New York and worldwide.

Carrie Moyer (Skowhegan Participant 1995; Resident Faculty, 2010) is a Brooklyn-based painter and writer. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Moyer is known for paintings that merge the gestures of Modernist abstraction with the iconography of late-twentieth-century liberation movements. She is also one half of Dyke Action Machine!, a public art project she founded with photographer Sue Schaffner. Between 1991–2004, DAM!’s culture-jamming campaigns dissected mainstream visual culture by inserting lesbian images into recognizably commercial contexts. Her paintings and public interventions have been widely exhibited and reviewed nationally and internationally. Moyer’s essays and reviews have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Modern Painters, the Brooklyn Rail, and Gay City News. She has received funding from Creative Capital, Peter Norton Family Foundation, and Art Matters, among others. In 2009, Moyer was honored with both a Joan Mitchell Award and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She is an Assistant Professor and the Graduate Director for Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She is represented by CANADA Gallery in New York City. This fall her paintings will be included in The Jewel Thief, an exhibition co-curated by Jessica Stockholder and Ian Berry for the Tang Museum, Skidmore College.

Mira Schor (Skowhegan Resident Faculty, 1995) is a painter and writer. She received her MFA in painting from CalArts. Schor’s work balances political and theoretical concerns with formalist and material passions. Her work has included major periods in which gendered narrative and representation of the body has been featured, in other periods the focus of her work has been representation of language. In both painting and writing, Schor’s areas of interest include the gendered production of art history, the analysis and praxis of painting in postmodern culture, and the relationship between political and conceptual concerns with the materiality of expression. In recent paintings, Schor moves beyond language to the depiction of the form of painterly thought and continues her interest in narrativity. In 2009 Schor exhibited her work in a one-person show at Momenta Art in Brooklyn. She is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles. A new collection of Schor’s writings, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, edited and annotated by Schor, were published in 2009. Schor is also the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture and co-editor with Susan Bee of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory and Criticism and M/E/A/N/I/N/G online. Schor is an Associate Teaching Professor in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design. Her honors include awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and Pollock-Krasner Foundations. In 1999 she was awarded the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. She received a 2009 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to fund her blog.