The talk, which will take place in our Dorothy K. Hohenberg Auditorium, begins at 6:30 p.m. Please join us for a reception beforehand, beginning at 5:30 p.m., with drinks and a performance by Opera Memphis. This event is free and open to the public; however, space is limited.

E.V. Day, a New York-based artist whose work explores themes of sexuality and humor while employing gravity-defying suspension techniques, will discuss her Rotunda Projects installation, E.V. Day: Divas Ascending.  This series of sculptures transform familiar icons of women’s empowerment and entrapment into new objects that confound conventional readings of these clichés. Using tension to suspend, stretch, and shred garments and to create forms that the artist likens to futurist abstract paintings in three dimensions, Day has created work that transforms rigid symbols into a range of emotions: anxiety, ecstasy, liberation, and release.

Recently awarded the prestigious Rome Prize for Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome, Day worked for a year in the Eternal City where she continued a 20-year practice of creating sculptures that interact with and respond to grand architectural spaces. Divas Ascending originated as a fourteen-sculpture installation at Lincoln Center and has traveled to The Kentucky Center and Houston Grand Opera. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including G-Force at the Whitney Museum at Altria, a survey exhibition at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and installed work at various locations including Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Day received her MFA in sculpture from Yale University School of Art. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the New York Public Library, the Saatchi Collection, the Lever House, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and in numerous private collections. In addition to the Rome Prize, she has been awarded grants and residencies from Versailles foundation Munn Artists Program, at Claude Monet’s Garden, Giverny, France; ArtPace International Artist-in-Residence, San Antonio, Texas; NYFA: New York Foundation for the Arts; Dieu Donné Lab Grant in NYC and Residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with funding provided by the Joan Mitchell Foundation.