Campbell’s lecture, “Art Advocacy: Paper, Glue, and the Fight to Free American Hostages Abroad,” will be held at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 26 at the Lang Hall Auditorium. 

In his lecture, he will discuss the street art method of wheatpasting and share his work with the Bring Our Families Home campaign, which ultimately contributed to the safe return of American hostages held abroad. 

Campbell (MA Communication Studies, 2021) is an artist, digital media producer and scholar originally from Ottumwa, Iowa, who prides himself on collaborating with local leaders to enable community-based art projects by teaching volunteers how to create art in their communities. In 2018, he was a Fulbright student research recipient working in Budapest, Hungary where he began experimenting with the method of wheat pasting. Since then, Campbell has collaborated with hundreds of volunteers across Iowa and garnered national media coverage from esteemed outlets such as NPR, CNN, The New York Times, Reuters and the Washington Post for his public art wheatpaste installations.

The Meryl Norton Hearst endowed fund (known broadly as the Hearst Lecture Series) was established in 1988 by a donation to the university from James S. Hearst in honor of his late wife, Meryl Norton Hearst. At the time, the gift was the largest the university had ever received. James S. Hearst, a poet, served as a professor of creative writing at UNI from 1941 to 1975. He received the university’s first honorary Doctorate of Letters degree.