Brown Bag Talk: Tracy Hicks and Semiconductor, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows

Tuesday, October 12, 2010, 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.

Keck Center, 500 Fifth St., N.W., Room 109

No charge; Reservations and photo ID required

Bring your lunch; drinks will be provided

Join Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows (SARF) Tracy Hicks and Semiconductor, the artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, for a discussion of their research at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The SARF program offers visual artists the opportunity to spend two to three months working among the collections of the Smithsonian and with experts on staff. It is unique among artist residency programs, offering, instead of a studio, a dynamic research environment in which to investigate the objects, discoveries, and historical events that inspire creative work. The program brings artists together with Smithsonian experts in a variety of disciplines at museums and research centers in the United States and abroad, to explore cross-disciplinary connections between history, art, culture, and science.

Tracy Hicks is a Dallas-based artist whose work interrogates the act of collecting, encompassing a perennial, organic process of reimagining, reshaping and reinterpreting bodies of objects. For the past decade, he has delved particularly into natural history collections, with an emphasis on amphibian species that are under extreme stress or presumed extinct.

Visit Tracy Hicks' Web site

Semiconductor is artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Through moving image, sound and multi-media installations they explore the material nature of our world and how we experience it, questioning our place in the physical universe. Their film, Magnetic Movie, was featured at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in the fall of 2008.

Visit Semiconductor's Web site