University of Colorado

The Visiting Artist Program at University of Colorado was started in 1972 by retired painting professor Gene Mathews as a way to combat Boulder’s relative isolation from the greater “art world.”   According to Valerie Albicker, the director of the Visiting Artist Program, each discipline in the art department chooses one artist to invite each semester.  When artists arrive in Boulder, they are hosted by students in the Visiting Artist Seminar class.  Each semester the selected artists give one-hour public lectures in the Visual Arts auditorium at CU Boulder. 

Each recorded lecture is accompanied by an interview session.  The interview series, titled What Follows is a collaboration between the Visiting Artist Seminar and Dr. Steve Jones’ Television Production class.    Undergraduate and Graduate students in the Visiting Artist class take on the role of interviewer, composing questions and taking time to get to know the artist before sitting down for a 30-minute filmed conversation.  Television Production students compose, shoot, and edit the interview.

Art students are given the opportunity to interact closely with working artists, learning about their practices and sometimes developing enduring professional relationships.   Students also tackle the challenge of crafting an interview and having a conversation on film.  Production students learn to create a professional series for publication, developing their production and editing skills. The What Follows project results in a series of frank, largely unscripted question-and-answer sessions that cover topics important to arts students nationwide.

- via Ashley E. Williams,  Research Assistant, University of Colorado Boulder