Printmaking Artist to Give Guest Lecture Feb. 3

Joan Hall, the head of printmaking and the first recipient of a named professorship at the Washington University School of Art, will give a guest lecture at noon Tuesday, Feb. 3, in the University Galleries at Illinois State University.  Admission is free and open to the public.

Hall is a guest of the School of Art Visiting Artist Program.

Known for her innovative and large-scale approaches to printmaking and papermaking, Hall uses nautical themes and imagery to interpret experiences with the body and the environment.  Her recent work alludes to the sea and its power. She is also interested in the correlation between digital imagery and memory.  The ebb and flow of the ocean combined with the layering of memory and images inform Hall's large mixed media paintings.

She has exhibited internationally at The Saint Louis Art Museum; the Ohio Craft Museum; the Museum Aernstelle, The Netherlands; The Drawing Center, NYC; Haggar Gallery, University of Dallas; The Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, Hungary; the Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Wiegand Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada; Leopold-Hoesh Museum,  Germany; Musee D'Art, France.  Her work is in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska; Evanston Museum of Arts and Sciences, Indiana; Suwa Municipal Museum, Japan; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

Hall has received two National Endowment for the Arts/Mid-American Arts Alliance Individual Artists grants, one in printmaking and one in papermaking. Hall also received a commission from Absolut Vodka to design a billboard in St. Louis.  In addition to teaching printmaking and drawing, she is the director of Island Press, a university press known for its non-traditional approaches to the printed mark in working with visiting artists.

She came to Washington University in St. Louis in 1978, shortly after earning a master of fine arts degree from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.  Hall holds a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio, and studied at the Institute of Experimental Printmaking in San Francisco.   In 2000, she was named the first Kenneth E. Hudson Professor of Art at WU.

The next visiting artist on campus will be South Carolina-born New York painter Anna Schachte, who will be in residence for a month beginning Feb. 9.    She will present a lecture at noon Tuesday, Feb. 17, in the University Galleries.