Established with the generous support of alumna Penny W. Stamps, the Speaker Series brings respected emerging and established artists/designers from a broad spectrum of media to the School to conduct a public lecture and engage with students, faculty, and the larger University and Ann Arbor communities.

Rising young South African artist Mary Sibande constructs elaborate visual narratives to consider race, gender, and class in post-colonial South Africa. Rooted in her own family’s history of three generations of women as domestic servants, Sibande’s larger-than-life figures clothed in yards of fabric confront the viewer with the stark limits of cultural heritage as well as the possibility of transformation. While her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and throughout South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and France, SIbande’s exhibitions at the University of Michigan mark only the second time her work has been shown in the U.S.
Sibande’s Ann Arbor residency includes an original installation at the U-M Institute for the Humanities gallery, Penny Stamps lectures in Ann Arbor and Detroit at MOCAD, an open studio at the Stamps School on North Campus, and exhibition of Sibande’s existing work at Gallery DAAS, the U-M Museum of Art, and the Stamps School Slusser Gallery.