The Baker Museum Exhibition Lecture
Artist Talk with Ran Hwang
Ran Hwang, Artist Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., Senior Curator, Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College
The exhibiting artist Ran Hwang will discuss her choice of materials and imageries, her complex work process and her career in conversation with Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., formerly The Baker Museum’s Curator of Modern Art. Hwang will discuss her 30 years of artmaking and select major international exhibitions and installations across the globe. She will also discuss how witnessing September 11 in 2001 became a watershed moment which led her to create the type of works on which she has been focusing, utilizing multitudes of buttons, threads and pins. Hwang will also broaden the understanding of her cultural heritage in Asian literati painting and her Buddhist perspective on life, suffering and spirituality. Join the artist in this illustrated talk moderated by the exhibition’s curator.
Born in South Korea in 1960, Ran Hwang earned a BFA in fine art and MFA in art practice from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and she also attended the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. She now splits her time between New York and Seoul. Hwang’s works are found in the permanent collections of acclaimed international venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing; Dubai Opera House, Dubai; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, to name only a few.
Hwang has shown her work extensively in international galleries and museums. Between 2019 and 2021, Hwang had four solo shows at Leila Heller Gallery in both Dubai, UAE, and New York locations, and, in 2017, her monumental multimedia installation of Becoming Again was shown as part of Joseon Korea: Court Treasures and City Life at the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore. In 2015, Hwang had large-scale installations of her monumental threaded birds, Ran Hwang: Untethered at the Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art); and Game of Artifice at IMAS (International Museum of Art and Science) in McAllen, Texas. To name some of the group exhibitions that featured her work in the past five years alone, they include: Immersive at Des Moines Art Center and OMNI VERSE at Museum SAN in Wonju, South Korea (2022); No Strings at National Glass Centre in Sunderland, U.K. (2021); DIFC Sculpture Walk at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) in Dubai, UAE (2019); Paper Moon at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete in Rethymno, Greece (2018); Trans Allegoria at the Mykonos Biennale on Mykonos, Greece (2017); and Infinite Blue, drawn from the permanent collection at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2016-18).
Hwang received a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation in 2015 and earned numerous artist residencies, including MASS MoCA Residency Program, Massachusetts; Artist Residency, International Museum of Art and Science (IMAS), Texas; and Full Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Residency Program, Vermont.
Rangsook Yoon
Rangsook Yoon
Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., who joined Artis–Naples in June 2019, is formerly curator of modern art at The Baker Museum. Initially trained as a specialist in early modern European art, she earned her Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Born and raised in South Korea, she earned her BFA in French language and literature from Korea University in Seoul and M.A. in art history from Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio. Over the past decade, Yoon has curated over 30 museum and gallery exhibitions on subjects ranging from European old masters paintings and prints to modern and contemporary artworks of diverse media. She curated exhibitions such as Allure of Ancient Rome (2014) and Fashionable Portraits in Europe (2015) at Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, and more recently at The Baker Museum, Looking at Words: A Poetry of Shape from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation (2019-2020), Florida Contemporary (2019-21; 2022-23), Subject Matters: Selections from the Permanent Collection (2020-22), Making a Mark: American Women Artists (2021) and Recent Acquisitions: 2019-Present (2022-23).
Prior to her appointment at The Baker Museum, Yoon was the director of experiences and curator at the Art & History Museums, Maitland, Florida, where she curated exhibitions such as Women of the Research Studio: Past and Present (2018), Art 31: Fiber Art (2018) and Maitland and African-American Experiences Then and Now: J. André Smith and Jane Turner (2019). She also administered the institution’s acclaimed artist residency program, among other responsibilities. Before moving to Florida in 2013, Rangsook was an art history professor, holding positions at Trinity University in Texas, Central College in Iowa and Chapman University in California.
Yoon is currently the senior curator at the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College.
Program Information
Program Information
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