Matthew Mazzotta Artist’s Lecture – The Architecture of Social Space: Creating Spaces of Critique Within the Places We Live

This event is free and open to the public, and is presented by GENERATOR: USF Contemporary Art Museum

Matthew Mazzotta works at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism, focusing on the power of the built environment to shape our relationships and experiences. During his presentation, Mazzotta will expand on how his community-specific public projects integrate new forms of civic participation and social engagement into the built environment and reveal how the spaces we travel through and spend our time living within have the potential to become distinct sites for meaningful exchange. His artist’s talk will also provide insight into his process of community listening to engage people from a range of backgrounds in dialogue to create new models of living that contribute to local culture beyond the economic realm.

Mazzotta’s projects have been internationally recognized and his most recent site-specific public art commission, a larger-than-life flamingo, titled HOME (2022), has already established an iconic and memorable presence in the Main Terminal of the Tampa International Airport.

About the Artist – Matthew Mazzotta’s public projects have received international art and architecture awards such as “Architecture Project of the Year” by the Dezeen Awards at the Tate Modern in London, and six of his projects have been recognized by the Americans for the Arts. His work has been featured on CNN, BBC, NPR, The Huffington Post, Discovery Channel, and Science Magazine to name a few, and presented at the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC. Mazzotta received his BFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Master’s of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology. He is TED Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.