Artist and TV creator Ric Heitzman will present the next Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 21 in Richards Hall, Room 15.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln School of Art, Art History and Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students.
Working in multiple mediums, Heitzman has had a long career in the arts, media and popular culture. As a visual artist, he has exhibited drawings, design, paintings and performance in galleries and museums throughout the country, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Houston.
Much of Heitzman’s early career was devoted to developing series television. He designed and directed animated and live-action series for Cartoon Network, Children’s Television Workshop, CBS-TV and Fox-TV. Working with luminaries such as Tim Burton, Lily Tomlin and Eddie Murphy to turn their visions into film and TV. He has been awarded four Emmy awards for Co-Production Design, Art Direction and Title Design.
Heitzman is also a member of the Screen Actors Guild, voicing characters and performing puppetry for films and TV, such as “Team America,” “Muppetvision 3D” and, most notably, on “Peewee’s Playhouse.”
Heitzman has taught and lectured at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois Institure of Technology, University of Southern California and the California Institute of Arts. He is professor emeritus of Woodbury University in Los Angeles, where he taught storytelling, sound design and animation.
In daily studio practice, Heitzman draws, paints and builds sculpture as well as making animated short films in Los Angeles.
The remaining lectures in the series are:
Oct. 26: Christine Hult-Lewis, art history. Hult-Lewis is the interim pictorial curator at the Bancroft Library, the special collections library at the University of California Berkeley.
Nov. 9: Sama Alshaibi, photography. Alshaibi works between photography, video, performance and installation. In 2021, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography.
Nov. 30: Aaron Spangler, sculpture and printmaking. Spangler is best known as a sculptor, where he reimagines the traditional medium and technique of woodcarving with a contemporary eye.
Underwritten by the Hixson-Lied Endowment with additional support from other sources, the series enriches the culture of the state by providing a way for Nebraskans to interact with luminaries in the fields of art, art history and design. Each visiting artist or scholar spends one to three days on campus to meet with classes, participate in critiques and give demonstrations.
