Artist Meena Khalili will give a lecture on her exhibit, “New in LOU, Drawn Daily,” on Thursday, Sept. 26 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

The lecture will begin at 4:30 p.m. in the Windgate Center of Art and Design Room 101. The exhibit is a record of the one year Khalili spent living in Louisville, Kentucky. She captures the life of the city through 365 drawings in pen, ink, and collage processes in small accordion fold books.

“As an artist and designer, I am inclined to organize, archive, and record,” said Khalili, assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. “The city of Louisville is a living organism behaving similarly to most other small-to-mid-sized cities across America. Some of the businesses archived in the project were closed down by the project’s final day, while some spaces revitalized and opened with new life. Even the unique signage of the city speaks to Louisville’s collective vibrant eclecticism.”

As a method of accountability, Khalili shared a daily drawing through the Instagram account @newinlu365. Collage is used throughout this work to develop a narrative between text and image for the viewer.

“In the ‘New in LOU’ series, I find this most appropriate as the city itself is a collage of sounds, images, billboards, historical sites, and churches,” she said. “Thus, a ‘text’-ural history is incorporated into the process of image creation. Most of the papers used are found in antique shops in the Louisville metro area, and many of them date from the 1800s to the mid-20^th century, a time of developing industry and growth of the river city’s economy.”

As a first-generation Iranian American, Khalili is fascinated with geography, impermanence, history, and translation. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration and a Master of Fine Arts in visual communication and graphic design from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.

Khalili’s work has been shown at the Type Director’s Club of New York, Chicago Design Museum, and galleries throughout North America, Canada, China, Indonesia, Croatia, Australia, and Moscow, with illustrations and book art in permanent collections at the VCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives, the Omni Hotel Louisville, and recently inducted artwork in the Library of Congress.

Khalili’s artwork will be on display in the Small Gallery at the Windgate Center of Art and Design through Sept. 29. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The lecture is funded by a grant from the Windgate Foundation.

For more information, contact Art Gallery Director Brad Cushman at becushman@ualr.edu or 501-916-5103.