The UI Stanley Museum of Art invites you to join them for the 2026 Bette R. Spriestersbach Endowed Lectureship, featuring artist Duane Slick.
Slick, an internationally acclaimed artist and educator, will discuss 36 years of studio practice across printmaking, painting, storytelling, artist books, and collaboration. The talk draws on his Indigenous heritage and upbringing in the Midwest, and on how these environments continue to shape his work.
This free lecture serves as a prelude to the exhibition Plants and Power: Art's Botanical Imagination, opening November 17. A recently acquired painting, Daylight Armature on Slow Substrate (2026), is the first work by Duane Slick to enter the Stanley Museum of Art collection and it will feature in the upcoming exhibition.
Diana Tuite, Visiting Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, will introduce the artist, and his talk will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
About the artist: Born in Waterloo, Iowa, Duane Slick is an enrolled member of the Sauk and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa (Meskwaki). Slick earned his BFA in painting from the University of Northern Iowa and his MFA in painting from the University of California, Davis. He has been Professor of Painting and Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design since 1995. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, including an Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Art; a Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM; a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant; a Rockefeller Foundation Grant; and a Robert Motherwell Fellowship. His work is the collections of The National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; DeCordova Sculpture Garden and Museum, Lincoln, MA; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; and the C.N. Gorman Museum, University of California, Davis. He enjoyed his first museum retrospective, Duane Slick: The Coyote Makes the Sunset Better, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2022.