Visual Voices is a Professional Lecture Series offered by Mason Exhibitions. The purpose of the lectures are to broaden students’ exposure and vocabulary to professional work being created today. It also provides an opportunity for Art & Design students and members of the public to interact with speakers via a Q&A following their lecture, giving them the chance to exchange ideas and pose questions to the guest speakers.
If you miss the live presentations, recordings of the lectures will be available one week after the live event. Find recordings of the lectures on Mason Arts Amplified.
Visual Voices events are free to attend and open to the public. Registration is required!
For more information, please contact Jeffrey Kenney.
Thursday, February 12, 2026 @ 4:45-6:30pm
Sandy Williams IV
Hybrid Event (Harris Theater and Zoom)
Sandy Williams IV is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and professor. Their work studies the vernacular of time as it exists across social landscapes and as various units of measurement. Williams’s public artworks layer context against disenfranchised memories and often include emancipatory, live, shared experiences.
Williams’s work conjures communal catharsis and operates like an archive.
Williams is the recipient of the 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and the New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship. They have presented solo exhibitions at Palo Gallery (New York), 1708 Gallery (Richmond), the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (Ontario), Roanoke College (Salem, VA), Telematic Arts (San Francisco), Reynolds Gallery (Richmond), and Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville). Their work has been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, and the BBC. Collaborations include Creative Time, CulturalDC, and the Weeksville Heritage Center. Selected group exhibitions and performances include presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Virginia Beach, the Arlington Museum of Contemporary Art, the Harnett Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, The Shed (New York), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), Grounds For Sculpture, Martos Gallery (New York), M+B Gallery (Los Angeles), de boer Gallery (Los Angeles), Springsteen (Baltimore), and NADA House (New York). Williams has been an artist in residence at McDowell (New Hampshire), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), SOMA (Mexico City), ACRE (Chicago), and the University of Cumbria (UK).
This event will be held at the Harris Theater on the GMU Fairfax campus and online via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the Zoom link via email the day-of!
Thursday, March 5, 2026 @ 4:45-6:30pm
Sheryl Oring
Hybrid Event (Harris Theater and Zoom)
Sheryl Oring makes work that activates democracy through art. She is best known for her ongoing project I Wish to Say, in which she sets up a public office and invites members of the public to dictate postcards to the U.S. president, which she types verbatim on a manual typewriter. To date, she has typed more than 5,200 postcards to four presidents from hundreds of locations across the United States. Oring also creates prints, artist books, sculptures, and public artworks that foster dialogue and examine personal and collective histories. Her work has been presented at the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale; Bryant Park in Manhattan; the Brooklyn Public Library; the Free Library of Philadelphia; the Washington National Cathedral; and the Jewish Museum Berlin, among many other venues. In 2026, Oring’s work will be featured in America 250: Common Threads at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Oring has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Franklin Furnace, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, and the North Carolina Council for the Arts. She has completed public art commissions at the San Diego International Airport and the Tampa International Airport, and her work is held in collections including the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, and numerous university libraries across the United States. She is the editor of Activating Democracy: The “I Wish to Say” Project (Intellect Books / University of Chicago Press, 2016) and is currently completing a forthcoming book, Secretary to the People: Civic Engagement Through the Art of Sheryl Oring (Intellect Books / University of Chicago Press, 2027), edited by Corey Dzenko.
www.sheryloring.org
This event will be held at the Harris Theater on the GMU Fairfax campus and online via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the Zoom link via email the day-of!
Visual Voices lectures are now available to watch online! Mason Arts Amplified has a new look and platform to make watching and browsing arts content even easier. This online platform is a digital stage and learning space featuring curated arts experiences including livestreamed concerts, releases of previously recorded content, behind-the-scenes talks with artists, and more. It requires a free registration.
Past speakers have included:
Dr. Giovanni Aloi / Morgan Ashcom / Sadie Barnette / Sharif Bey / Rodrigo Carazas Portal / William Christenberry / Sonya Clark / Carolyn Drake / Andriy Dubchak / Kayla E. / James Elkins / Ann Fessler / Colette Fu / Maria Gaspar / Sam Gilliam / Steve Heller / Jon Henry / Leslie Hewitt / Kei Ito / Nora Krug / Steve Kurtz / Lucy Lippard / Taekyeom Lee / Ellen Lesperance / Ellen Lupton / MasPaz / J.J. McCracken / Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes MIller / Adriana Monsalve / Dorothy Moss / Silas Munro / Alyce Myatt / Laurel Nakadate / Jordan Nassar / Lori Nix / Mendi+Keith Obadike / Eddie Opara / Adriana Ospina / PARABOLA Architecture / Michael Rakowitz / Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz / E. Carmen Ramos / Wendy Red Star / Dario Robleto / Mia Eve Rollow / Chemi Rosado-Seijo / Phyllis Rosenzweig / Mario Rossero / Amanda Ross-Ho / Rozeal / Paul Rucker / Carrie Schneider / Simon Schwartz / Bahia Shehab / Kuiyi Shen / Renee Stout / Siebren Versteeg / Angela Washko / Robert Whitman / Daniel Wickerham and Malcolm Lomax / Bruce Willen / Deborah Willis / Krzysztof Wodiczko / Agustina Woodgate / The Yes Men
Land Acknowledgement
At the place George Mason University occupies, we give greetings and thanksgivings to the recognized Virginia tribes who have lovingly stewarded these lands for millennia including the Rappahannock, Pamunkey, Upper Mattaponi, Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Nansemond, Monacan, Mattaponi, Patawomeck, and Nottaway, past, present, and future; and to the Piscataway tribes, who have lived on both sides of the river from time immemorial. The education offered here is a credit to the land that has received our students. The good they will do in this world is the harvest of the soil upon which they stand, sit, and live.