Spend a lunch hour learning about the latest in art and design during these Friday lectures. Each lecture features a variety of artists and designers from around the world, including CIA faculty and visiting artists. This event is free and open to the public. Pizza and beverages will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis. 

In partnership with FRONT Triennial: An American City, the Cleveland Institute of Art this summer will host an exhibition, The Great Lakes Research, in Reinberger Gallery. One of the 11 cultural exercises developed by FRONT Artistic Director Michelle Grabner, the exhibition will be the culmination of a research and lecture tour across the Great Lakes region that began in fall 2017.

In this special Lunch on Friday event, Grabner will join Reinberger Gallery Director Nikki Woods for an in-depth discussion about The Great Lakes Research and the role of the triennial in the context of the Midwest.  

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught for 20 years. Grabner has held teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cranbrook Academy of Art; Yale Norfolk; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts—Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and curated the 2016 Portland Biennial. Her reviews are regularly published in X-tra and Artforum.

In 2010, Mary Jane Jacob and Grabner co-edited The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, published by the University of Chicago Press. Grabner is represented by James Cohan Gallery in New York; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Gallery 16, San Francisco, Rocket Gallery, London; and Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Basel.

In 1999, Grabner and her husband, Brad Killam, founded The Suburban, the Oak Park, Illinois gallery where they hosted a range of international contemporary art. After 16 years in the Chicago vicinity, The Suburban began programming exhibitions in two storefronts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2009, Grabner and Killam opened The Poor Farm, the rural Wisconsin space dedicated to annual historical and contemporary exhibitions, lectures, performances, publications, screenings and alternative, pedagogical programs.

Nikki Woods is a gallery director and visual artist who lives and works in Cleveland, OH. Appointed the Director of the Reinberger Gallery of the Cleveland Institute of Art in January of 2018, Woods previously served as the Reinberger Gallery Acting Director, as well as the Project and Visiting Artist Coordinator. As Project and Visiting Artist Coordinator she co-curated exhibition projects and organized the weekly visiting artist lecture series Lunch on Fridays. Recent curatorial and co-curatorial projects include Living Dangerously: Angela Dufresne and Nicola Tyson, The Art of Exchange: Contemporary Cuban Art in Cleveland, and the forthcoming exhibition Portals_Thresholds. She holds a BFA in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art (2012) and is currently represented by Hedge Gallery (Cleveland, OH).