March 13, 3008. Brooklyn: St. Joseph's College Council for the Arts is pleased to announce that contemporary artists Lorna Simpson and James Casebere will discuss their individual approaches to visual expression as the featured speakers at the College's inaugural Presidential Arts Colloquium. Following their talks, both artists will take questions from the audience after their separate addresses. These lectures, which are also a part of the "Identity Formed And Transformed: My Self, My Community, My World" series, will take place on Thursday, April 3rd at the Tuohy Hall Auditorium, 245 Clinton Avenue, at 6:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public.

Lorna Simpson’s art practice has consistently examined the unseen forces that guide our reasoning around race, gender, identity and culture, challenging viewers’ perceptions of these subjects. Simpson first gained recognition for her pioneering large-scale, conceptual, photograph-and-text works that presented the African-American woman as a visual point of departure. In later photographic exhibits, she once again used the figure of an African-American woman with interject4ed text to challenge narrowly preconceived notions of race, gender, and identity. Most recently, Simpson has focused on conceptual video. Her latest DVDs examine themes of race, control, class and the viewer's perception of these issues. Last year, her career was the subject of a 20-year retrospective featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Along with this, Simpson's works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

For two decades, James Casebere has created increasingly complex table-sized models based on architectural and historical sources. The works are constructed of simple materials, and are reduced to their most important details. After they are built, Casebere takes the models into his studio and photographs them with artful lighting. The focus of his art is to examine institutional spaces and to bring into focus their relationships to social control and societal structures. For his most recent work, “The Levant,” Casebere’s research took him to the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. From his study, he created representations of archetypal Ottoman spaces to examine the "architecture of absence and silence.” His works have been shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name a few.

About St. Joseph's College

St. Joseph’s College has been dedicated to providing a diverse population of students in the New York metropolitan area with an affordable education rooted in the liberal arts tradition since 1916. Independent and coeducational, the College provides a strong academic and value-oriented education at the undergraduate and graduate levels, aiming to prepare each student for a life characterized by integrity, intellectual and spiritual values, social responsibility, and service. With campuses located in the Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn and in Patchogue, Suffolk, Long Island, the College offers degrees in over 22 majors, special course offerings and certificates, affiliated and pre-professional programs through its School of Arts and Sciences and its School of Professional and Graduate Studies.