In light of the COVID-19 global health situation and in a prudent exercise of caution, guest artist Marsha Cottrell will not be traveling for this year’s Susan Paul Firestone Lecture Series in Contemporary Art, scheduled for Monday, March 16, 2020. We look forward to rescheduling her lecture at Mary Baldwin University in 2021.
Mary Baldwin University’s 2020 Firestone Lecture in Contemporary Art will take place at 7 p.m. on Monday, March 16 in Francis Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. This year, New York-based artist Marsha Cottrell is the guest lecturer.
In her work, Cottrell repurposes the functionality of an electrostatic office laser printer, computer, and screen, and inventively utilizes the tools’ capabilities to create luminous images in layers of carbon-black toner. Her seemingly alchemical process gives material form to an open-ended exploration of the tensions and interplay between nature and technology, body and machine, exterior and interior in images that evoke visionary or dreamlike states, nature, and the sublime.
Cottrell has had solo exhibitions at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco, Eleven Rivington and Van Doren Waxter in New York, Petra Rinck Galerie in Düsseldorf, Germany, and most recently at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, N.C. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Cottrell’s work is in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship Grant. In 2019, she received an Anonymous Was A Woman award, which was created to support the careers of women artists over 40 years old.
In addition to her lecture, Cottrell’s visit to Mary Baldwin will also include meetings with 100-level studio classes and upper-level art students, and lunch with art students and faculty.
The Susan Paul Firestone Lecture Series in Contemporary Art is made possible by the generosity of donors in honor of the creative work and professional accomplishments of Susan Paul Firestone ’68.