BENNINGTON — Bennington College’s Fall 2025 Visual Arts Lecture Series (VALS) welcomes Jordan Ann Craig on Tuesday, Nov. 18 and Eric Mack on Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025. All lectures are free, open to the public, and will take place from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in Tishman Lecture Hall on the College’s campus. The theme this term is “Feeling Flat: Surfacing, Structure, Affect, and Method in Contemporary Art.”
“We’re thrilled to welcome Santa Fe-based artist Jordan Ann Craig, a painter and printmaker whose approach to abstraction is grounded in Cheyenne imagery and material culture,” said J. Vanessa Lyon, professor of art history at Bennington and Director of the series since 2017. “Craig’s vibrant large-scale geometric paintings are both visually captivating and animated by history; I’m eager to engage works from her recent solo show as well as new projects.”
Now in its tenth year, the current aim of VALS is to invite accomplished visiting artists, curators, historians, and critics from underrepresented backgrounds to engage the college community with contemporary art practices. VALS features celebrated artists who have remained path-breaking and original for decades as well as newer makers who are garnering international attention.
“The next two visiting artists are a good example of the breadth of the series and my interest in hosting cutting-edge emerging artists working beyond the artworld poles of L.A. and New York as well as mid-career makers at the top of their game,” said Lyon. “Eric Mack’s multimedia sculpture practice, for example, has been on my radar since I first encountered it at the Whitney Biennial in 2019. Like many Bennington students, I’m energized by Mack’s use of found objects, clothing, photographs, and painted textiles to create experimental forms of sculpture. His artist talk will be a fitting grand finale for a theme exploring the uses and meanings of surface in all dimensions.”
Craig is a Northern Cheyenne artist living and working in Pojoaque Valley, New Mexico. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her BA from Dartmouth College. In 2017, Craig was awarded the H. Allen Brooks Traveling Fellowship as well as the Eric and Barbara Dobkin Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research (SAR). In 2019, she was awarded artist residencies at the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence (RAiR) Program. Her work is shown nationally and internationally at venues including the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center and San Francisco’s McEvoy Foundation for the Arts with recent solo shows at October Gallery in London and Hale Gallery in New York City.
Mack lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in New York and his MFA from Yale. In 2017, Mack was the recipient of the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award, selected by artist Lorna Simpson, and completed the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva Island, Florida, and an artist-in-residency at Delfina Foundation in London. His institutional solo exhibitions include Lemme walk across the room at Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2019; In austerity, stripped from its support and worn as a sarong at The Power Station, Dallas in 2019; and Eric Mack: Vogue Fabrics at Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 2017. Major group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Ungestalt at Kunsthalle Basel in Basel, Switzerland, in 2017; In the Abstract at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017; Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2017; Making & Unmaking: An exhibition curated by Duro Olowu at the Camden Arts Centre in London in 2016; and Greater New York 2015, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York in 2015. Mack’s work is in the permanent collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Past lecturers this term have included architect and professor at Yale School of Architecture Sunil Bald and Brooklyn-based artist, educator, and community organizer and professor at the University of Vermont Mildred Beltré. For a complete list of past lecturers, visit www.bennington.edu/visual-arts-lecture-series-vals.