Stephen Fleischman Lecture: Harper on Practice

David R. Harper gives the 2026 Stephen Fleischman Lecture at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Thursday, April 23, with a free talk at 6 p.m. and advance registration encouraged. (mmoca.org) The museum lists the event in its Lecture Hall at 227 State St., with a public reception in the Rooftop Lounge at 7 p.m. and a cash bar afterward. (visitmadison.com) Harper is a Milwaukee-based artist whose work moves across sculpture, textiles, ceramics, stained glass, and found imagery. The museum says his lecture will focus on a practice built around how memory takes shape in objects. (mmoca.org) That idea runs through Harper’s solo exhibition, *Good Morning Sweetheart*, which opens at the museum on April 22 and stays on view through August 30, 2026. The show fills the State Street Gallery and Lobby with couches, perfume bottles, motel soaps, detergents, birds, flowers, and other domestic objects that Harper remakes and recombines. (mmoca.org) In one gallery, the exhibition centers on a suspended mid-century couch upholstered in handwoven pink, sherbet, melon, and honey tones and embedded with cleaning products. In another, the show includes large embroideries, stuffed horses with embedded objects, ceramic vases covered in cast cicadas, and ceramic flower bouquets. (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. (davidrharper.com; saic.edu) The Stephen Fleischman Lecture was established in 2016 to honor Fleischman’s tenure as museum director. The museum says an endowment funds a free annual spring lecture by people who have made “exceptional contributions to art and culture.” (mmoca.org) For Madison, the lecture lands as the museum opens a new Harper exhibition and continues a series tied to one of its longest-serving leaders. For visitors, the immediate deadline is simple: Thursday, April 23, at 6 p.m. (mmoca.org)