Spend your lunch hour with media artist and designer Matt Kenyon as he discusses his practice and upcoming exhibition opening November 13 at The Sculpture Center.
Kenyon’s talk will take place during Lunch on Fridays from 12:15 to 1:30pm Friday, November 6 in CIA's Peter B. Lewis Theater.
Matt Kenyon’s S.W.A.M.P. (Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production) focuses on critical themes addressing the effects of global corporate operations, mass media and communication, military- industrial complexes, and general meditations on the liminal area between life and artificial life. SWAMP has been making work in this vein since 1999 using a wide range of media, including custom software, electronics, mechanical devices, and oftentimes working with living organisms.
This edition of Lunch on Fridays is held in partnership with The Sculpture Center.
Artwork Credit: Matt Kenyon, The Tell, 2026.
Speaker Bio
Matt Kenyon is a media artist and designer. Kenyon’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, MOCAD Detroit, Science Gallery Dublin, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, and the International Print Center and The Museum of Capitalism. He is a TED Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and his work has been awarded the FILE Prix Lux. His TED talk “A Secret Memorial for Civilian Casualties” has been viewed over 800,000 times and translated into twenty-five languages.
He has given artist talks at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, the KHOJ International Artists Association in New Delhi, the Art Foundation Moscow Biennale, the Prindle Institute Ethics Symposium at Depauw University (as a keynote speaker), Virginia Commonwealth University, the Wexner Center in Columbus Ohio, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Eyeo Festival at the Walker Art Center.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and Gizmodo, and has also appeared in edited volumes such as A Touch of Code (Gestalten Press) , Adversarial Design (MIT Press) and Code as Creative Medium (MIT Press). He lives and works in Buffalo, New York, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo, and director of the undergraduate program in art.
Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Kenyon’s father worked as a paper salesman for 30 years and his stepmother worked as a crisis counselor in one of the last remaining leper colonies in the USA. Both his father and stepfather were Vietnam veterans. He paid his way through college working in a series of colorful jobs: a face-painting clown at a regional nuclear power plant and an HVAC “air-balancer” on the world’s third-largest movable oil rig.
Parking
Lunch on Fridays attendees may park in CIA's Lot 73 and Annex Lot, both of which surround our campus. Please note that signs posted around those lots correctly state that parking typically requires a CIA permit or visitor pass and that violators will be ticketed. However, to accommodate our valued Lunch on Fridays attendees, that policy won't be enforced during the program. Have questions? Please contact Reinberger Gallery at reinbergergallery@cia.edu or 216.421.7407.
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