Ron Nagle, prolific artist and Academy Award-winning musician, will be a guest speaker 8 p.m. Sept. 24 in the Classroom Building Complex, Room A108. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is part of the UNLV Art Department's Visiting Artist Program.

Born in 1939, Nagle was raised in the largely Latino Mission District of San Francisco. He received his Bachelor's degree from San Francisco State College and began to make artwork using a very small scale.

Between 1961 and 1978, he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, University of California at Berkeley, California College of Arts and Crafts, and several other schools. It was after seeing the work of Giorgio Morandi at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles that Nagle decided to make a body of work using the image of a cup, which before then had been solely a domestic icon.

Years later, and before it became a popular trend, Nagle was involved in the evolution of Postmodernism. He has exhibited at the Quay Gallery in San Francisco, the Charles Cowles Gallery in New York City, and Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco. Nagle has had over thirty solo exhibitions and has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions. He has work in The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Kruithuis Museum, s' Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Nagle has received numerous awards and fellowships including the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1979, 1986), Mellon grants (1981,1983), and the Visual Arts Award of the Flintridge Foundation in 1998. In addition to a highly regarded career in the field of ceramics, Nagle is also an accomplished musician. He has written, performed, and produced music throughout his life. In 1973, he was the recipient of an Academy Award of sound design for the film, The Exorcist. He currently teaches at Mills College in Oakland, California.