The director of an innovative art space, a painter who draws inspiration from medieval Italian paintings and video games and a photographer whose installations blend documentary and fictional forms are featured speakers this winter in the Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture series at UC Davis. Offered by the College of Letters and Science’s Department of Art and Art History, the talks take place at 4:30 p.m. at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Museum of Art and are free and open to the public.

Dena Beard, executive director of The Lab, a 34-year-old nonprofit experimental music and art space in San Francisco, will speak Jan. 31. At The Lab since 2014, she led the organization through a rehabilitation of its facility and inaugurated a program of commissioned artistic projects. She served as an assistant curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive for six years and earned a master’s degree in art history, theory and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sangram Majumdar freely borrows from medieval Italian paintings, Indian miniatures, early video games, and other disparate sources in his paintings to examine the cyclical nature of history and the connections between cultural centers in Asia and the West. The artist, who appears on Feb. 7, has had solo exhibitions at the Asia Society Texas Center and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York. He studied at Indiana University and the Rhode Island School of Design and is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. 

Rodrigo Valenzuela’s photography, video and installations blend documentary and fictional forms often involving narratives of immigration and the working class. A native of Chile based in Los Angeles, he will speak Feb. 28. Valenzuela has had recent exhibitions at Cloaca Projects, San Francisco; Laurence Miller Gallery, New York; the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum; and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. He is an assistant professor at UCLA and winner of a 2017 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors award.

The series will continue in spring quarter with Edgar Arceneaux (April 4), Frances Stark (May 2) and Sarah Cain (June 6).

For more details about the series, visit artstudio.ucdavis.edu.