The Visiting Artist, Scholar, and Designer Program explores critical, diverse, and creative inquiry. This interdisciplinary initiative enriches the academic experience at RMCAD and serves the greater Denver-metro community by inviting the public to attend a variety of evening lectures and events presented by our roster of distinguished guests. Program visitors also engage with RMCAD students and faculty through private events, such as studio visits, gallery talks, intimate luncheons, and workshops. The Program was awarded Westword’s Best Of Denver 2016: Best Incubator for Visiting Artists and Scholars.
The Program is structured around a yearlong investigatory theme. Past lecture series themes include Identity, Interventions, and Humor.
The 2016/2017 VASD Program lecture series will present a variety of perspectives highlighting the extraordinary aspects of the most common element of our humanity: the senses.
Sensual experiences are simultaneously ordinary and mysterious. They constitute and construct our everyday life, allowing us to navigate, understand, and interact with the world. As delicately complex, malleable membranes bridging our inner selves to the exterior environment, the senses can also be deceived, altered, heightened, distorted, damaged, and augmented to affect our interpretation and perception of life. Advances in science and technology, as well as the enigmatic occurrences of clairvoyance and intuition, expand empirical knowledge beyond the corporal limitations of the traditional five senses.
Contemporary artists, scholars, and designers are creating and studying ways to stimulate and satiate the multifaceted senses, influencing our interactions and knowledge of the world and of our selves.