Join us for an artist talk with Leslie Hewitt, presented as part of USC Roski School of Art and Design’s Handtmann Photography Lecture Series. Working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation, Hewitt addresses the illusionary potential of photography and the physical weight of sculpture. In her photographed arrangements, she assembles personal ephemera and the residue of mass culture to consider the fragile nature of quotidian life.

Leslie Hewitt studied at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and is the recipient of the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands. Hewitt has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Power Plant in Toronto, Artists Space in New York, Project Row Houses in Houston, and LA><ART in Los Angeles. She has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, among others. From 2012 to 2017, she was a faculty member at Barnard College in the Department of Art History, where she was actively engaged in the Harlem Semester.

Leslie is currently on the faculty of the School of Art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

The Handtmann Photography Lecture Series was established in 1999 as part of a larger endowment contribution that also established the Handtmann Prize for Photography prize and the graduate and undergraduate Photography Labs. Jan Handtmann, a Roski graduate and talented printmaker, has taken an active leadership role as a member of the school’s Board of Councilors for more than 20 years and has played a critical role in strengthening Roski’s photography program.

The Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California is a unique, supportive environment for creativity, experimentation and collaboration in the visual arts. The school encourages interdisciplinary approaches to studio art, design, curatorial practice and critical studies. With equal emphasis on making and thinking, the USC Roski School prepares artists, designers, curators and writers to contribute in new and meaningful ways both to their fields and to society at large.