Stephen Fleischman Lecture: Harper on Practice

Milwaukee-based artist David R. Harper will give the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2026 Stephen Fleischman Lecture at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 23. (mmoca.org) The free talk is scheduled for the museum’s Lecture Hall, with a public reception at 7 p.m. in the Rooftop Lounge and advance registration encouraged because space is limited. (mmoca.org) Harper’s lecture lands alongside his solo exhibition, *Good Morning Sweetheart*, which opens April 22 and runs through Aug. 30 in the museum’s State Street Gallery and Lobby. (mmoca.org) The museum says Harper works across sculpture, textiles, ceramics, stained glass, and found imagery, using handmade and altered household forms to explore how memory attaches to objects. (mmoca.org) In *Good Morning Sweetheart*, those objects include couches, perfume bottles, motel soaps, detergents, birds, flowers, ceramic vases, and fragments of figurative sculpture arranged across two connected spaces. (mmoca.org) One installation centers on a lightweight mid-century couch upholstered in handwoven pink, melon, and honey tones and embedded with domestic cleaning products; another anchors the show with Harper’s 2019 work *She Drank the Water That Was Meant for the Orchids*, now in the museum’s collection. (mmoca.org) Harper was born in Toronto, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and now teaches at both the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. (mmoca.org) The lecture series itself was established in 2016 to honor former museum director Stephen Fleischman, and the museum says an endowment supports a free annual spring talk by figures who have made exceptional contributions to art and culture. (mmoca.org) Fleischman led the museum for nearly 30 years beginning in 1991, according to the museum, a tenure that spanned the institution’s growth and the 2006 opening of its current State Street building designed by César Pelli. (mmoca.org) (visitdowntownmadison.com) Thursday’s event puts Harper’s studio practice in the foreground just as his objects move into the galleries, with the talk at 6 p.m. and the reception an hour later. (mmoca.org)