Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia Ideas for Creative Exploration will host artist, educator and award-winning Web designer Amy Franceschini on March 6 at 4 p.m. in room 101 of the Miller Learning Center. Franceschini’s visit to campus and lecture is sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Lamar Dodd School of Art.
Franceschini will deliver the lecture “Art is a Verb,” which focuses on her recent work with sustainable energy, urban food production and dialogues between artists and scientists. She is the founder of Futurefarmers, a critically acclaimed group of artists and designers who have worked together since 1995. Their innovative studio produces art projects, design for print and interactive websites, workshops and research that explores social, cultural and environmental systems. Futurefarmers hosts artists from around the world in residency programs that offer a platform for collaboration and research.
Franceschini and Futurefarmers have been featured in exhibitions at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum; Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, where they were winner of the Prix Ars Electronica, the top prize in new media art; and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum for the Smithsonian National Design Triennial. Their clients include Adobe, Swatch, Hewlett Packard, Levi’s, Nike, LucasFilm Ltd., Dreamworks, the New York Times, PBS and Wired Magazine. They received a Webby Award in art and design and, in 2007, created the Twitter logo.
Franceschini received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from San Francisco State University and a master’s degree in fine arts from Stanford University. She is a professor of art and architecture at the University of San Francisco and a visiting artist at the California College of the Arts. Her latest work examines community, sustainable environment and the perceived conflict between humans and nature. She is co-editor of Farm Together Now (2010) and the co-founder of Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers and gardeners.
In addition to the lecture on March 6, Franceschini will participate in a public conversation about art and community on March 7 at 2:30 p.m. in room S151 of the art school. Both events are free and open to the public.
For more information about Franceschini, see http://www.futurefarmers.com. For more information on Ideas for Creative Exploration, or ICE, the interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at UGA, see http://ice.uga.edu/.