Stephen Fleischman Lecture: Harper on Practice

David R. Harper is giving this year’s Stephen Fleischman Lecture at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 23, with free admission and advance registration encouraged. (mmoca.org) Harper is a Milwaukee-based artist whose work moves across sculpture, textiles, ceramics, stained glass, and found imagery, and the museum says his talk will focus on how memory takes shape in objects. (mmoca.org) The lecture is in MMoCA’s Lecture Hall at 227 State St., and a public reception follows at 7 p.m. in the Rooftop Lounge with a cash bar. Space is limited, according to the museum and the Greater Madison Convention and Visitors Bureau listing. (mmoca.org) (visitmadison.com) Harper’s appearance lands one day after the opening of his solo exhibition, *Good Morning Sweetheart*, which runs from April 22 through Aug. 30 at MMoCA’s State Street Gallery and Lobby. The museum says the show brings together couches, perfume bottles, motel soaps, flowers, birds, and other household forms that are handmade, altered, and recombined. (mmoca.org) In the exhibition, MMoCA says memory works like a material rather than a theme: objects hold care, pleasure, grief, desire, and loss, and viewers build meaning by moving through the installation. That makes the lecture less a general artist talk than a live guide to the ideas behind the show now on view. (mmoca.org 1) (mmoca.org 2) 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 Stephen Fleischman’s tenure as MMoCA director, with an endowment supporting a free spring talk each year by figures who have made “exceptional contributions to art and culture,” the museum says. Fleischman, who led the Madison Art Center and later MMoCA for nearly 30 years, died in January 2024. (mmoca.org) (cressfuneralservice.com) For Thursday’s audience, the draw is straightforward: a free chance to hear the artist behind *Good Morning Sweetheart* explain how domestic objects, handmade surfaces, and memory fit together in his practice, then walk upstairs for the reception. (mmoca.org)