Celebrating its 20th season, the University of Arizona School of Art’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment (VASE) lecture series will feature Dario Robleto, Cara Romero, Ana María León and Jorge Lucero in 2026-27.
The free, hour-long VASE presentations will be held at the Center for Creative Photography auditorium, 1030 N. Olive Road.
“VASE creates a space of encounter where artists, architects and scholars meet our students in the fertile ground between disciplines,” Regents Professor Sama Alshaibi said.
Dario Robleto
- Date: Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026, 5:30 p.m.
- Lecture title: “Ancient Beacons Long for Notice”
Robleto will discuss his interdisciplinary approach to crafting and conveying messages of emotion and identity into the cosmos, a kind of “humanities off-planet.” He is an American artist, writer and filmmaker based in Houston. His work has been exhibited widely and held in prominent collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Menil Collection and the National Gallery of Art. “Ancient Beacons Long for Notice” also is a film by Robleto — the third installment in a trilogy exploring the history and legacy of the Golden Record, a cosmic time capsule attached to NASA’s Voyager I and II space probes.
Cara Romero
- Date: Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2026, 5:30 p.m.
- Lecture title: “Photography as Praxis”
Renowned artist/photographer Cara Romero will give a career-spanning talk about the making of a contemporary Native artist, from her training at the Institute of American Indian Arts to founding the Cara Romero Gallery and Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero’s work — held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA — moves fluidly between fine art, documentary and cinematic staged photography, grounded in Chemehuevi epistemology, traditional ecological knowledge, and Indigenous futurism.
Ana María León
- Date: Thursday, Feb. 25, 2027, 5:30 p.m.
- Lecture title: “Spatial Solidarities at Dawson Island, 1889 & 1973”
León is an associate professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her newest book is titled “Spatial Solidarities: Architecture and Resistance in 1970s.” She will talk about Chile’s Dawson Island, the site of a detention and torture center for political prisoners of the Pinochet dictatorship, which violently took over the country in 1973. León will examine the similarities between the settler colonial Chilean state at the end of the 19th century and the dictatorship of the late 20th century, as well as spatial forms of solidarity mobilized by the individuals imprisoned by the regime to resist its violence and reclaim their agency. Her talk is co-sponsored by the College of Architecture, Planning & Landscape Architecture.
Jorge Lucero
- Date: Thursday, March 25, 2027, 5:30 p.m.
- Lecture title: “No Wasted Moves: On the Pliability of Teaching as a Creative Practice”
The Chicago artist and professor will expand on the pliability of a fully integrated teaching and creative practice. Showcasing major projects from the last 25 years, Lucero aims to present the possibility that conceptual art permissions open a path for rethinking how we test the expressive and inquiry potential of everyday institutions and materials we come in contact with. Lucero is a professor of Art Education in the School of Art & Design and a senior associate dean at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Prior to working in higher education, he served as a high school art teacher at the Chicago Public School District.
About VASE
The School of Art focuses on bringing diverse artists and scholars from around the world to our campus. These artists and scholars bring their own unique influences to the program by engaging with community members, students, and faculty through salons, lectures and exhibitions.
The VASE series is made possible by the School of Art Advisory Board Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment, the National Endowment for the Arts, the School of Art, the College of Fine Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence, the Center for Creative Photography and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Tucson.
Go to vase.art.arizona.edu for more details about the artists and scholars.
