Entering its 19^th season, the University of Arizona School of Art’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment (VASE) lecture series will feature Yoshua Okón, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Lauren Bon and Cannupa Hanska Luger in 2025-26.

The free, hour-long VASE presentations will be held at 5:30 p.m. 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.

Here’s the lineup (go to vase.art.arizona.edu for more bio details):

Oct. 16, 2025, Yoshua Okón: The Mexico City artist blends video, installation and performance to engage viewers in a dialogue concerning the complexity of contemporary society. He received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship and co-founded SOMA, an artist-run school in Mexico City dedicated to cultural exchange and the teaching of the arts.

Jan. 29, 2026, Ananda Cohen-Aponte: An associate professor of History of Art at Cornell University, she specializes in the visual culture of pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America. Her talk will explore the trafficking of portraits, talismanic objects, albums and numismatics that put the Andes, the Caribbean and North America into dynamic contact at the twilight of the 18th century. She is author of Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes (University of Texas Press, 2016).

Feb. 11, 2026, Lauren Bon: The Los Angeles environmental artist and activist is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Her studio’s ongoing civic enterprise, “Bending the River,” is an ambitious plan to redirect and reuse water flowing beneath the concrete channel known as the LA River.

April 2, 2026, Cannupa Hanska Luger: A contemporary artist indigenous to North America, he aims to reclaim and reframe a more accurate version of 21st century Native American culture and its global relevance. He uses clay, textiles, steel and digital media to distill cultural reflection into an object, installation or action. “Whether working with institutions, communities or with the land itself, my work is inherently social and requires engagement,” Luger says.

“During this season of VASE, voices like Yoshua, Ananda, Lauren and Cannupa will bring with them worlds of experience, imagination and urgency,” Alshaibi said. “For our students, these moments aren’t just about listening. They’re about stepping into the creative currents shaping art and culture today.”

Bon’s talk is co-sponsored by the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA). Last year the School of Art also collaborated with CAPLA on Ronald Rael’s talk.

The 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.