The West Virginia University School of Art & Design will host two visiting artist lectures in February, kicking off the semester with style and creativity.

Lily Cox-Richard will speak about her exhibit “The Stand (Possessing Powers)” at 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 2, in Bloch Hall at the WVU Creative Arts Center, with a reception to follow.

Cox-Richard is a sculptor based in Houston, Texas. Her recent projects focus on systems and networks that are ubiquitous yet often unnoticed: the electrical wiring and plumbing in the walls, the sprawling mycelium underfoot and the goods created by cottage industries. She has been awarded an Artadia grant, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows and residencies at the Core Program, Millay Colony, RAIR Philadelphia and the MacDowell Colony.

In her artist statement Cox-Richard said, “my sculptures engage vernacular forms that are familiar, yet, having drifted from their original contexts, their significance can seem hazy. By digging into cultural and material histories of things like belt buckles, lightening rods and sweetgrass baskets, I foreground their infrastructure, trace their legacies, and test their potency. This work emerges from my interest in how histories reveal idealized notions of an earlier national identity that persist in contemporary American culture. By opening up origin myths, I attempt to redraw lineages and trajectories – or at least imagine alternatives.”

In conjunction with Cox-Richard’s exhibit, the WVU School of Art & Design will host “Old Copper Futures”, a public sculpture created from recycled industrial materials.  The unveiling will begin at 4 p.m. on Feb. 2 at the Creative Arts Center.

Amy Schissel, assistant professor of painting, will discuss her exhibit “#everything that happens at once” at 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9, in Bloch Hall with a reception to follow.

In the exhibit, Schissel’s work confronts the current anxieties about the role of painting in the internet and information age through the development of site-specific immersive painting and video installations. It has been Schissel’s long-term project to navigate through a constant technological presence in a data-driven, media-saturated culture through work that hybridizes painted and digital languages, while addressing contradictions of identity in geo-political relationships.

  Schissel received her master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Ottawa and was the 2013 recipient of Ottawa’s Royal Bank of Canada Emerging Artist award. She was a finalist in the 2011 RBC Canadian Painting Competition and National Exhibition, touring the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Hamilton Art Gallery in Ontario and Toronto’s Power Plant. She was Canada’s 2009 recipient of the Brucebo Foundation Fine Arts Award and Residency in Visby, Sweden.

“The Stand (Possessing Powers)” and “#everything that happens at once” run in the Mesaros Galleries at the Creative Arts Center Feb. 2 – March 3. The Messaros Galleries are open 12 – 9 p.m. Monday – Saturday.