About this Event
Lucas Blalock presents Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Visiting Artist Lecture from 2000 at Skowhegan, along with an introduction and vegetarian BBQ* inspired by Mierle’s concept of “Maintenance Art.” Lucas chose Mierle’s lecture in part for its connection to a project he is currently developing titled Bake Sale for a Colonoscopy (2026), which is a rejoinder to Mierle’s idea of the symbolic power of tools that are seemingly out of scale to address the (systemic) problems at hand. Lucas’s Bake Sale hocks cakes and cookies as well as a collection of studio objects with the proceeds going to a nonprofit that buys and forgives medical debt. Mierle’s investment in everyday labor’s ability to draw our attention to systemic inequities has been a guiding influence on the development of this work.
This event is free and open to all. To stay up-to-date with Skowhegan's public programs, .
*light refreshments and BBQ will be served at the beginning of the event
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About the artist:
Lucas Blalock is an artist whose work, primarily in photography, mines both our everyday material culture and our image culture for the odd, the comical, and the overdetermined. Blalock’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the ICA LA, Los Angeles; Museum Kurhaus, Kleve, Germany, and the Abroms-Engel institute for the Visual Arts in Alabama, and many group exhibitions including the 2019 Whitney Biennial and Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at MoMA. Blalock’s photographs are held in numerous public collections and he has published multiple artist books that foreground his interest in pictures, process, and the slipperiness of representation. Blalock is an Assistant Professor of Art at Bard College, the author of Why Must the Mounted Messenger Be Mounted? (Objectiv, 2022), and a 2025 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow in Visual Art.
About the series:
In Echoes Research Committee, we seek to continue the tradition of learning and listening together. By revisiting and growing the dispersal of Skowhegan’s , we welcome new ears into our broader community. We invite an artist to select a lecture from the archival recordings and “perform” it anew, creating a reverberation for contemporary audiences.
This series is developed in collaboration with Bryson Rand.
Photo: Lucas Blalock. Pelican. 2026. Courtesy of the artist
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture - New York Office, 136 West 22nd Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
