Adams-Tillim Lecture: Albert Chong
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Albert Chong will give the 2020-2021 Adams-Tillim Lecture. Chong is a contemporary artist working in the mediums of photography, installation and sculpture. His works have engaged personal mysticism, spirituality, race and identity, and numerous other topics as well as the beauty of images and objects as such. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, W. I. in 1958, he is the last of eight children of merchant Chinese Jamaican parents. Chong received his MFA from UCSD in 1991 and in the same year accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has received various prestigious awards for his work in the visual arts including a 1992 Individual artist Fellowship from the national Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of photography, and in the same year the Pollock Krasner Grant. Chong has also been commissioned by Absolut Vodka to add his work to the ongoing series in the work titled Absolut Chong.
The Adams-Tillim Lecture was established in 1992 by the late David Beitzel MFA '83, in honor of former visual arts faculty members Pat Adams and the late Sidney Tillim, both of whom David studied with while at Bennington. Pat Adams and Sidney Tillim served as longtime faculty members; Adams from 1964 to 1993, and Tillim from 1966 to 1993. The annual lecture brings leading visual artists, curators, and critics and art historians to campus.