Mills College Art Museum – 2024 Jane Green Endowed Lecture in Art History: Hung Liu as Mentor

Join Mills College Art Museum for the annual Jane Green Endowed Lecture in Art History. This year’s event features a conversation about the legacy and mentorship of Hung Liu (1948-2021), acclaimed Chinese American artist and beloved professor of art at Mills College. Dorothy Moss, founding director of the Hung Liu Estate, will moderate the discussion with artists Rosana Castrillo Díaz, Nicole Phungrasamee Fein, and Mel Prest, alumnae of the Mills College MFA Program in Studio Art. Reception to follow.

Before the conversation, join MCAM Director Stephanie Hanor for a curator-led tour of Look Up to the Sky, an exhibition featuring the work of Hung Liu and women artists she mentored during her tenure as a professor of art at Mills College. On view from January 20 – March 24, 2024.

SCHEDULE
2:00pm – Exhibition tour of Look Up to the Sky, Hung Liu’s Legacy of Mentoring Women Artists
3:00pm – 2024 Jane Green Endowed Lecture in Art History, Danforth Lecture Hall
4:00pm – Reception

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

DOROTHY MOSS, PH.D. is founding director of the Hung Liu Estate. From 2011-2023, she held the position of curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG). During her tenure at the Smithsonian, she was a founding leader of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, serving as coordinating curator of the Inititiative from 2018-2021. Moss directed the 2013, 2016, and 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competitions. Her recent projects include the exhibition and book Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands (Yale University Press, 2021) and for which received the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize in 2022, and The Obama Portraits (Princeton University Press, 2020).
In 2015, Moss initiated IDENTIFY, the Portrait Gallery’s first performance art series featuring internationally- recognized artists, including Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Sheldon Scott, Wanda Raimundi Ortiz, James Luna, and Jeffrey Gibson.

Past exhibitions include Sweat of their Face: Portraying American Workers (2017) with David Ward; Portraiture Now: Faces of Battle (2017-2018) with Asma Naeem, Taina Caragol, and David Ward; One Life: Sylvia Plath, (2017-2018); One Life: Maya Lin (2022-2023); and most recently, Kinship (2023-2024) with curators Leslie Ureña, Robyn Asleson, and Taína Caragol.

ROSANA CASTRILLO DIAZ was born in 1971 in Asturias, in northwestern Spain, and currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Castrillo Díaz received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1993 from Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain; a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1996 from Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; a Post-Baccalaureate degree in 1999 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in 2003 from Mills College, Oakland, CA.

Since her arrival in the Bay Area nearly two decades ago, Rosana Castrillo Díaz has quietly built an artistic practice centered on an exploration of light. Her carefully considered, experimental body of work, most of which is abstract, consists primarily of sculpture and wall-oriented pieces that make use of a wide variety of materials and take many different forms, from veils of looped Scotch tape and balls of twisted paper to painted wall murals and, recently, works using text. She is concerned with perceptual issues—what and how we see—and the capacity to find beauty and inspiration in small moments or unexpected places. She has also consistently made drawings—not as preparatory sketches for works in other mediums but as a separate, sustained, truly exceptional strand of her creative output.

NICOLE PHUNGRASAMEE FEIN was born in Evanston, Illinois (1974) and grew up in Santa Barbara, California. She attended Tufts University (BA), the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (BFA), and Mills College, Oakland, CA (MFA). She has exhibited nationally and internationally including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Zurich, and Berlin. Her work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The Week, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Francisco Chronicle, Artweek and ARTnews. Her work is included in permanent public collections: the Achenbach Foundation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum; Blanton Museum; Fogg Museum; Hammer Museum; Menil Drawing Institute; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Fein is noted for her agile handling of pigment on paper. Going back two decades, her drawings are made sequentially. The work has evolved, but delicacy and tranquility are constant. Multiple layers of earth tones in overlapping strokes defined the earliest pieces, the result is visually akin to weaving. Gradually color choices expanded, and combined with predominantly horizontal lines, these evoked luminous landscapes or seascapes. Later, lines radiating from a central point in the Tondi series introduced the circle to what had been predominantly square.

MEL PREST is a non-objective painter whose work is focused on color and perceptual visual relationships. She has exhibited internationally with recent solo shows including: The Golden Hour at Schneider Museum of Art (2022), Time is Knots on a String at Galleri Urbane (2022), Color Unfolding at K Imperial Fine Art (2021), lux at Galleri Urbane (2018), Lilac Aura at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary (2017), In Praise of Planetary Time at B Sakata Garo (2016) in Sacramento, COLOR CHANT at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary (2015), Oakland; MoonBrightChime at Galleri Urbane (2014), Dallas. Her works have been included in group shows at: The Drawing Center, New York, NY; The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Saturation Point ACME studios, London, UK; Zeitgeist gallery, Nashville, TN; IS Projects, Leiden, The Netherlands; Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. Prest has been awarded funded artist residencies at: Ragdale, The Sam and Adele Golden Artist Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, The Wassaic Project and Vermont Studio Center, Bullseye Glass, among others.

Prest received her BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from Mills College in Oakland. Prest has taught at Mills College, San Francisco State University and adult education courses at: San Francisco City College, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts and Root Division. She is currently an advisory board member of Root Division, a non-profit arts organization in San Francisco and served as a board member from 2012-2014. Prest served on the advisory board of The Art Monastery Project, Calvi della Umbria and Labro, Italy from 2007-2010 and on the artist advisory board of Trestle Gallery in Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York from 2012-2021.

As an independent curator, Prest has organized shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Bay Area, New York, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich and Zagreb. She is also a founding member of Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial gallery initiative in Bushwick area of Brooklyn, New York.