Contemporary art luminary Ann Hamilton speaking Sept. 27 at UA

Ohio native Ann Hamilton, one of contemporary art's most influential voices, will talk about and show her work on Thursday, Sept. 27, at 7:30 p.m. at the Stage Door of E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall, 198 Hill St., on the campus of The University of Akron (UA).

Free and open to the public, the event is presented by UA's Mary Schiller Myers Lecture Series. While in Akron, Hamilton will also work closely with students in UA's Myers School of Art and visit the Akron Art Museum.

The doors will open at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are not required, but open seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, call the Thomas Hall Ticket Office at 330-972-7570.

Hamilton is recognized internationally for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multimedia installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present.

Touching all the senses

Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton's art extends outward from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations.

Hamilton has been honored with the Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities, a 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, Sculpture and Installation Art, and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 1999, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. In 1999, she was the American representative to the Venice Biennale with an installation of walls embossed with Braille, which caught a red powder as it slid down from above.

Her works are in the collections of more than 30 museums worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; and the Tate Modern in London.

For more, visit the Ann Hamilton Studio online.

Media contact: Cyndee Snider, 330-972-5196 or cyndee@uakron.edu.