Sandy de Lissovoy is the Next Speaker in the Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk Series De Lissovoy will deliver a lecture on “Unpacking an Art Exhibit and Thinking Like Collage” on Jan. 27.

By Emily Innes
January 16, 2025

Sandy de Lissovoy, assistant professor of studio art, will deliver a lecture on “Unpacking an Art Exhibit and Thinking Like Collage” at Washington and Lee University at 12:30 p.m. on Jan. 27 in the Harte Center Gallery inside Leyburn Library. The talk is free and open to the public.

The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, the Museums at W&L and the University Library and is part of the University Library’s Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk series, which invites W&L faculty to showcase their scholarship to the campus community. The Basse series is made possible by the Anne W. and Edgar A. Basse Jr. (’39) Endowment, which was created in 1988 to support the varied activities of the University Library Special Collections & Archives.

In his talk, de Lissovoy will discuss how his recent artistic projects evolved from sketches to a realized formal exhibit. To maintain a cohesive theme across a body of work, an artist must balance the challenges of a sustained process with the energy and excitement of the initial sparks of inspiration. De Lissovoy will discuss how the intermingling of ideas and processes resembles collage, and how this approach becomes a conceptual process as much as a material one. He will draw on his recent exhibitions at Kunstraum m3 (Berlin) and Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as well as the work that is emerging from his recent residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.

“My creative practice may appear like the output of different artists, using lots of different materials and strategies,” de Lissovoy said. “This is because it wanders into a lot of different domains of interest. Like many of us, I’m concerned about a lot of aspects of our fragile world. I read the news, I live on the planet, and I think about distinct experiences of people and places outside of my life. Life can feel like a collage, work can happen in fragments, and I’ll unpack some examples of bringing ideas together to make an exhibit or body of work.”

De Lissovoy’s artistic practice considers contemporary thematic problems in politics and the environment and intersects these themes with speculative and contingent forms, bringing material conditions and sculptural abstraction into aesthetic meaning. In recent artistic projects (including a 2024 installation at W&L’s Staniar Gallery), de Lissovoy has altered the shapes of topographical maps of mountains into suspended sculptures and used the mapping shapes of partisan gerrymandering in work that critiques that problematic political process.

De Lissovoy received his bachelor’s degree from California College of the Arts and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He joined W&L’s faculty in 2019 and teaches courses concentrating on 3D processes and sculpture.