Stephen Prina, conceptual artist and musician, will be a guest speaker at 8 p.m. Nov. 5, as part of the UNLV art department's Visiting Artist Program, coordinated by art professor Robert Wysocki. The lecture will be held in Classroom Building Complex, Room A-108, on the UNLV campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Prina's diverse and complex artworks examine the foundation of cultural production and consumption. His art objects draw attention to the making and preservation of art and cultural history, as well as the systems of the art business.
"The culture industry has expanded and colonized every conceivable productive space, and I am not going to sit back and lament," Prina said. "I want to get it out on the grid so that I can analyze it and see how it operates."

In 1995 Prina began a very serious course on the films of Keanu Reeves, which on the surface, could have been taken as a joke. Very academic in nature, this course used Reeves as a means of analyzing modern film and contemporary culture, focusing not only the movies he'd made, but also the philosophical texts of Michel Foucault and others, and showing the place they all took in modern life.

Prina was born in Galesburg, Illinois and received his M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1980. He is currently on the graduate faculty at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Prina has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and has been included in both the Carnegie International and Documenta. Recent exhibitions include two solo shows at Friedrich Petzel Gallery (New York), Galerie Ghislane Hussenot (Paris). Past solo shows include: P.S. 1 Museum (New York); Crousel-Robelin BAMA (Paris); Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Group exhibitions include: Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Museum of Modern Art (New York); J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.