Alumni Artist Talk: Kyle Bellucci Johanson

You may have noticed the "reading room" and the "blueprints" that went up in Brushaber Commons last week. Created by Bethel alum Kyle Bellucci Johanson, university commons is a series of site-responsive experiments exploring questions about what architectures and actions are needed to enable assembly, coalition, and critical discourse in the 21st century. This reading area and artworks were created as a space to be in reflection and dialogue about what it means to be in community. This reading area is for the Bethel community, and you are invited to use this space and its books.

During Homecoming week, you're invited to Kyle's artist talk. Coffee and pastries will be provided. Please join us!

About the Artist: Kyle Bellucci Johanson completed a B.A. in Reconciliation Studies and Art from Bethel University in 2009. In 2008 he studied peace and conflict at the University of Ulster in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and completed an M.F.A. at California Institute of the Arts in 2016. From 2010 to 2014, Kyle worked as an educator at The LAB, an arts and wellness based program for young people in the St. Paul public schools, responding to the social and psychological effects of structural racism, economic inequality, and the prison industrial complex. Kyle was a 2015 founding fellow of at land's edge, an artist-led, autonomous, experimental platform focused on intergenerational mentorship and engaged programming in community-run spaces across east and south Los Angeles. From 2016 to 2018 he was an educator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently he is a lecturer in contemporary practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kyle's work has recently been on view at Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois), ALTES FINANZAMT (Berlin, Germany), Centro Cultual Metropolitano - MET Quito (Quito, Ecuador), The Bindery Projects (St. Paul, Minnesota), the Center for Integrated Media at CalArts (Valencia, California), and Human Resources (Los Angeles, California).

Working across media, Kyle's practice has centered on transdisciplinarity as a site for expanding critical discourse and political imaginaries. He builds inverted and imbricated architectures of performance, pedagogy, objects, moving image, and assembly, in order to disorder control systems, surveillance, and panoptic spectatorship.