Stephen Fleischman Lecture — Harper on Practice

Milwaukee-based artist David R. Harper is giving this year’s Stephen Fleischman Lecture at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Thursday, April 23, at 6 p.m. (mmoca.org) The lecture is free and takes place in the museum’s Lecture Hall at 227 State St., with advance registration encouraged because space is limited. A public reception follows at 7 p.m. in the Rooftop Lounge, with a cash bar. (mmoca.org) Harper works across sculpture, textiles, ceramics, stained glass, and found imagery, and the museum says his art studies how memory takes shape in objects. His installations ask viewers to move through a space and build meaning through proximity, perspective, and their own experience. (mmoca.org) That approach is visible in Harper’s solo exhibition, *Good Morning Sweetheart*, which opened April 22 and runs through August 30 at MMoCA’s State Street Gallery and Lobby. The show brings together couches, perfume bottles, motel soaps, detergents, birds, flowers, and fragments of figurative sculpture, with familiar household items remade into handmade or altered forms. (mmoca.org) One section of the exhibition centers on a lightweight mid-century couch upholstered in handwoven pink, sherbet, melon, and honey tones and embedded with domestic cleaning products. MMoCA describes it as a “memory bank” surrounded by a mobile with a patio umbrella and garlands of cast-ceramic Froot Loops. (mmoca.org) Another gallery includes large-scale embroideries, stuffed horses with embedded objects, shelves of ceramic vases covered in cast cicadas, and ceramic flower bouquets. The museum says those works treat memory as a material that can hold care, pleasure, grief, desire, and loss. (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 lives and works in the American Midwest. He teaches in the Painting and Drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in New Studio Practice at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. (mmoca.org) The Stephen Fleischman Lecture was established in 2016 to honor Fleischman’s tenure as MMoCA director. An endowment funds the annual spring lecture, which the museum presents with free admission as part of its public education program. (mmoca.org) For Thursday’s audience, the draw is straightforward: a free artist talk tied directly to a new Madison exhibition, with Harper explaining the practice behind objects that turn domestic memory into sculpture. (mmoca.org)