3.31.2009

Leigh Van Duzer (MFA '10) Awarded Summer Artist Residency



Leigh Van Duzer will be in residence at the Hambidge Center in Georgia for two weeks in June. The mission of Hambidge is to provide a residency program that empowers talented artists of all disciplines to express their authentic voices. Situated in the mountains of North Georgia, Hambidge is a sanctuary of time and space that inspires artists by providing them with the setting and the solitude to create works of the highest caliber.

View Leigh's work at www.leighvanduzer.com

3.30.2009

Lecture Review: Christopher Wood, Temporalities of the Cult Image

Christopher Wood’s Lenten lecture, “Temporalities of the Cult Image,” began with a tomb. He did not go there to rest but to sing something to the surface, a beloved perhaps, however weary. His words made the stones to weep, the skies to darken. So rise she did, threatening to harrow the art-hell around us, not that it needs it.

Ideas about Augsburg and the 15th century never remain in Augsburg or the 15th century. They cross the sea, sinking impasse after impasse. Dr. Wood’s thoughts passed through Belgium and an infinite Calais to our own darkened streets, flirting, pollinating.

The Gothic cathedrals stand at the edge of the Renaissance, something anonymous and endlessly vexing, unseemly in their vitality. If we can resurrect enough of their conceptual underpinning, we think, something vigorous might rise in our own time. As Dr. Wood acknowledged, however, the tools to excavate a different age are art-historical, themselves products of the Renaissance. Perhaps our assumptions merely press upon their own, obscuring more than illuminating.

Such an imposition, nonetheless, may be kin to their spirit. So he began the lecture with an early Renaissance tomb in Augsburg. St. Simpert, a local saint, died in the 9th century; his bones soon vanished. When they unearthed an unknown sarcophagus a half-millennium later they quickly attributed the remains to St. Simpert. Order was reestablished; pilgrimages could begin. They commissioned a new tomb, with a sculpture on top bearing the “likeness” of the lost saint, a likeness based on no portrait or description. But the justification for such an obvious lie might have been more than economic. Here Dr. Wood extended his claws.

Few believed the bones were St. Simpert’s, he claimed, or that the sculpture resembled him. Such facts were beside the point. Resemblance and authenticity are contingencies of the world. It little mattered to them whose bones they were or how his face actually looked. The new saint was simply St. Simpert, although it wasn’t. Truth to them was eternal, non-temporal; the world was fallen, whatever obtained in it deceitful and erroneous.

The sculpture reflected a certain conception of arts and the artist. Creation was not mimesis, a place to mirror nature and reproduce her forms, but rather an opportunity to improve upon an error, to return life to lost saints. Art was another avenue by which grace conveyed itself into the world.

The artist was a creator. As a creator he could mimic the Creator and not bother with the particulars of a broken creation. He can resurrect kings and overcome the fallen order, reestablish that which has passed into oblivion, restore something of beauty and good, in this case the face of a worn saint. The medieval craftsman’s artistic vitality, still unfathomable, attests to the force of such a method. Pilgrims arrived, miracles shone in the cornice, visions descended on the town; the kindness of god was never-ending.

Contemporary art strays somewhat into this field, however accidentally, often seeking to restore inarticulate truths by adhering neither to fact nor account- by this indicating, however weakly, the substance of something else. Something better left unsaid, in fact, to evade manipulation. Icons of medieval art never reflected natural reality. Memories of this erupt in the abstract movements of the twentieth century, passing through Malevich and others. Nothing seems lost, only complicated.

Even museums preserve the medieval ideal. The modern wings attest to its presence. Alongside the conception of art as something which bases its meaning in an accessible historical moment, there is a lingering appeal to an eternal world of forms. Most works include a placard with the artist’s name, nationality, and life-span. These help us to fix a piece in time, to savor its historical associations. Wagons circle Paul Klee on the prairie: he was in the Bauhaus in 1922? Art history is most comfortable with a meaning that comes of such temporal designations. There is work to be done here, not metaphysics. Since the Renaissance, paintings signify in time. Dr. Wood’s work on anachronism has sought to loosen the discipline from its historical basis, or at least engage it.

An oak is how it grew, how it fell, all its days, but much else as well. In Tim Hyde’s Video panorama of New York during which the camera fails to distinguish the city from a snowstorm, the city, a floating geometry of lost outlines, abandons its natural reality in a chaos of snow, assisted also by the peculiar whims of the camera. Six monitors hang side by side in a white room, each relaying an asynchronous loop of an aspect of New York in a blizzard. The buildings dissolve to some indissoluble essence, gray and powerful, occasionally crossed by a dark gull.

El Lissitzky assembles similar economies of floating geometry. His paintings and collages turn too against the world but in the service of a Revolution which hopes to found a workman’s Platonic paradise. And what of Kurt Schwitters, his merz-assemblages and merz-barns, cathedrals built of physical trash and intellectual ephemera?

One more anecdote. The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso, commissioned to sculpt the likeness of a boy, found instead a face that eluded him, drifting wrong in every stone he touched. Only when Rosso had a vision of the boy peering through a silk curtain could he complete the bust. He saw in this moment a likeness which more closely resembled the boy’s features than a mimetic reproduction of actual appearance ever could. In Ecce Puer the child undulates in a supple current of red stone. And so the eternal persists, if just in the corner of a still, on a joint in a wooden frame or amongst other residua.

3.22.2009

Undergraduate Fine Arts Senior Thesis Exhibiton Opening Reception this Thurs., March 26th...5-7pm.

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FINE ARTS SENIOR THESIS EXHIBITION

Opening Reception
: Thursday, March 26th from 5-7pm
Exhibition Dates: March 26 – April 30, 2009

University of Pennsylvania School of Design
Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery
200 S. 36th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

3.21.2009

"Ecology of Inequality" conference to be held at UPenn School of Design... April 3-4, 2009.

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Friday, April 3, 2009 - Saturday, April 4, 2009 at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design

The Ecology of Inequality is an examination of the systems, infrastructure and design processes that create or perpetuate the socio-economic and environmental stratification of our society.

Conference sessions will include a diverse pool of invited panelists, as well as intriguing submission from our Call for Papers. Presentations will evaluate the social conditions, historical precedents and design decisions that have led to today's conditions. The conference will also discuss contemporary approaches that are confronting the current power structure, or ones that are seeking to establish new, justice-oriented design strategies that replace the ecology of inequality with ecologies of equity.

Details and list of panelists and speakers available here: http://www.design.upenn.edu/unspokenborders09/schedule.htm

Organized by the PennDesign Black Student Alliance and the 2009 Unspoken Borders Planning Committee.

3.20.2009

Cay Yoon (MFA '10) and Jaime Roth (MFA '09) in group exhibition at The Gallery at 543 until April 3, 2009

Exhibition Dates: March 9 to April 3, 2009
The Gallery at 543 is located at Urban Outfitters Inc. Headquarters in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Below is the exact address:
The Gallery at 543
5000 S. Broad Street
Building 543
Philadelphia, PA 19112

See Cay's work: www.cayyoon.com

See Jaime's work: www.jaimeroth.com

Article about "Dirt on Delight" exhibition at the ICA published today in New York Times Art section... Jane Irish (MFA program Coordinator) mentioned!

Excerpt from the article written by Roberta Smith (NYT art critic):

"PHILADELPHIA — On a surprisingly regular basis, the tiny Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania here mounts exhibitions that make the contemporary-art adventures of many larger museums look blinkered, timid and hidebound. The institute’s current show is a lively case in point, never mind the ungainly, uninformative title: “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay.” Only the last word hints that this convoluted syntax might signal an exhibition of ceramic vessels and sculptures.

When this show is seen in person, it is unmistakable that it is wildly, exuberantly, yet quite cogently about things of a ceramic nature, many different things: large and small, abstract and representational, glazed, unglazed and painted, old and new.

The show’s determination to integrate ceramics into the art mainstream is nothing new. But its refusal to do so simply by slipping some universally agreed-upon ceramic exceptions into a show of painting, sculpture and so forth is close to groundbreaking...

Nods are given to some of the art world’s youngest and hottest users of clay, but also to artists with little art-world profile, like Philadelphia’s own Jane Irish and Paul Swenbeck or Jeffry Mitchell of Seattle. The show even has an outsider artist: Eugene von Bruenchenhein, better known for his sweetly (mostly) erotic photographs of his wife."

Read the full article here: www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/arts/design/20dirt.html

3.18.2009

Michael Brenson (MFA Senior Critic) participating in Review Panel event in NYC on March 20th at 6:45pm

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THE REVIEW PANEL


Friday, March 20, 2009 at 6:45 PM

The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, in conjunction with artcritical.com, presents the fifth season of The Review Panel. This popular series fosters awareness of contemporary art through critical dialogue. One Friday of each month, David Cohen, esteemed art critic and editor of artcritical.com, invites contemporary prominent art critics to discuss the ideas, issues, and aesthetics of current art exhibitions in NYC. This spring’s line-up includes (on Mar. 20th) Michael Brenson, Carol Diehl, David Ebony and on April 24th, Deborah Garwood, Blake Gopnik, and Alexi Worth (also an MFA Senior Critic). Museum galleries open to all Review Panel attendees one hour prior to the panel.

Location: The Huntington Library. Enter through the Academy’s Museum at 1083 Fifth Avenue @89th St.
Admission: $5, free for National Academicians, all students, and Friends Members.
Reservations are not required. Please come early to insure the best seating.

Partial funding for the Review Panel is provided by NYSCA, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Edith and Herbert Lehman Foundation.

For more info:
http://www.nationalacademy.org
http://www.artcritical.com/REVIEWPANEL/index.htm

3.17.2009

Brian Zegeer (MFA '05) in solo exhibition at Vaudeville Park, Brooklyn...CLOSING reception Sun., March 22, 7-10pm

Kral Majales (King of May) Brian Zegeer

Exhibition Dates: March 13 - March 22, 2009
Closing Reception: Sunday, March 22nd, 7-10pm in conjunction with a music event curated by Baby Copperhead.

Vaudeville Park
26 Bushwick Ave (L to Graham Ave)
Brooklyn , NY

Kral Majales
refers to the honorary title given to Allen Ginberg on a visit to Prague in 1965. This term serves as title for a stop-motion animation and sculptural installation inspired by a period in which I squatted in the former apartment of Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. My tentative relationship to the living space, due to my anticipated eviction and the experience of being in close quarters with the artifacts of such public figures, invests the work with a nomadic character--sculptural investigations ready to be scuttled, wire arrangements in suspension. The exhibition’s works are renderings of domestic life through the cracked lens of misappropriated fame, household objects invested with aura because of some arbitrary textual accreditation or appearance in a well-known photograph. This record of domestic life plugs in to a larger, mythic narrative, which is amplified by research into the lives of Ginsberg and his circle.

The installation also follows my interest in the languages of magical practice, by way of Harry Smith, another long-term resident of the space, and Ginsberg’s other notable peers, such as William Burrough’s and Brian Gysin. Several of the sculptures in Kral Majales are transcriptions of Smith’s installations and paintings that were created in the apartment, as well as Burroughs and Gysin’s Paris investigations into scrying (or mirror gazing), textual “cut-ups”, and image projections onto bodies.

Kral Majales
will have a closing reception in conjunction with a music event curated by Baby Copperhead on Sunday, March 22nd, 7-10pm.

Vaudville Park was started by Ian Colletti as an event space catering to artists and performance groups in the Williamsburg and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Open to collaborative and cross-disciplinary experimentation, Vaudville Park welcomes proposals for actions that trample on the conventional distinctions between artistic disciplines, styles, between the performer and audience, body and mind, hem and haw, pot and kettle, etc.

Vaudville Park weekday hours by appointment only. Email ianm.colletti@gmail.com or call 917-470-4755 to make an appointment.

For more info: www.vaudevillepark.com
See Brian's work: www.brianzegeer.com

3.15.2009

CANCELLED!!: Gary Hill NOT COMING this Tues., Mar. 17th


Unfortunately, the Gary Hill lecture has been cancelled. We will post the announcement when the dates are set for his rescheduled lecture!

GRADUATE FINE ARTS LECTURE
Gary Hill, Media Artist

(NOT) Tuesday, March 17th

Meyerson Hall, Room B-1
Univ. of Pennsylvania, School of Design
210 S. 34th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation, Hill has been working with video and sound since 1973. His intermedia use of text, speech and image explore the physicality of language and our thought processes. Hill creates complex installations which often solicit the viewers active involvement to the point of "completing" the works themselves.

Gary Hill has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the prestigious Leone díOro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 1998. His work has been included in six Whitney Biennial exhibitions since 1983 and in Documenta IX where one of his most ambitious works, Tall Ships, was premiered. His video, sound and performance work has been presented at museums and institutions throughout the world and will be the focus of an important survey in 2001 which is being organized by the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, and will travel to the Reina Sofia in Madrid and other venues in Europe and America.

Co-sponsored with Slought Foundation and Donald Young Gallery

For more info: http://www.donaldyoung.com/hill/gary_hill_index.html

A Conversation with Joshua Mosley (Acting Chair of MFA Program) and Elisabeth Camp at the ICA...Wed., Mar. 18th at 630PM

Conversation: Joshua Mosley and Elisabeth Camp

Whenever Wednesday, March 18 at 6:30pm

Joshua Mosley, who explores the limits of human expression and existential thought in his acclaimed installation dread, talks with Elisabeth Camp, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, about metaphor and the role of thought in perception, communication, and self-understanding.
A Spiegel Fund event.

Joshua Mosley: dread
Exhibition Dates: January 16 - March 29, 2009

Joshua Mosley titled his most recent installation dread after photographer Eadweard Muybridge's motion study sequences of a dog named Dread. Made over a two-year period, Mosley's dread is composed of five bronze sculptures, and a six-minute, black-and-white, animated video that combines computer and stop-motion animation, as well as the artist's own music and dialogue.

dread is installed in two adjacent rooms. The first houses five, small bronze figures on pedestals spaced about the room. Enter the second room to see the film, projected large so as to evoke the scale of the environment the characters inhabit: a real world place created using sequenced still photographs. But unlike the real world, music notes replace ambient sounds. Composed by the artist, each character has its own "soundtrack." dread follows philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal on something of a nature walk. They encounter flora and fauna, and engage in conversation about existence, God, and nature; in the end, they encounter Dread.

Institute of Contemporary Art
University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289
tel: 215.898.5911

For more info: www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/mosley.php

LECTURE: Barkley Hendricks...Wed, Mar. 18th at 5PM in the Upper Meyerson Gallery

GRADUATE FINE ARTS LECTURE
Barkley Hendricks

Thurs., March 18th at 5:00 PM

Upper Meyerson Gallery
Meyerson Hall
Univ. of Pennsylvania, School of Design
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Born in 1945, a Philadelphia native, Barkley Hendricks is best known for life-size paintings of African Americans depicted against flat backgrounds of silver or copper leaf. His subjects are usually ordinary people he encounters on the streets and then photographs. The results are empowering portrayals of individuals who seem at once vulnerable and confident. Working within a tradition of American realism, Hendricks imbues his portraits with the coolness of pop art and posters, and these works have influenced numerous younger painters who work within the tradition of black figuration.

Hendricks is a recent recipient of The United States Artist Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts. His first career retrospective; Barkley Hendricks: Birth of Cool which is currently at the Studio Museum in Harlem will be traveling to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the Fall of 2010.

http://www.nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions_hendricks.php

3.13.2009

ART REVIEW: Wanderer, Shadow, Cezanne

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
-Tennyson, Ulysses

Shipwrecked, stalked by notions of harmony and clarity, seeking in exile something truthful, he wanders. Strange land, known to none, with its disjointed towns and broken kingdoms, his home somewhere beyond the sea. He seeks certain essences, forms he knew before coming to this shore. Nothing will suffice. With color, line, and shape he starts on a pilgrimage for an uncertain end.

He is in the south of France. Everything here defies him, confounds his vision. All vantages are lacking. There is much that is lovely. Glimpses of what he needs persist here and there: the window of a house, two walls out-folded, the color of a shadow at noon, pines of an unrepeatable dusk- but they are alone and without form: insufficient. He needs more than isolated fragments, more than the hills and the towns, more than even the cypress. He builds a new land, one made of different perceptions and different times. It fails as well- as it must- but still approaches something of the harmony he dimly recollects.

Cezanne drifts through his paintings. Pilgrims come from the hills to see a martyr’s tooth, the leaves of an oak above a spring, or a tomb. Even pilgrimage has an end. A man walks through the night, pausing before a maple alike any other. She went west for years, returning without even a story. Others joined Cezanne on his walk, hearing:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

-Song of Myself, 2

Most striking are the small studies. Pure blue drifts from a ridge, orange from a corner of the sky. Uncluttered and largely white, black takes to the edges of things. Unlike the larger, finished paintings they register but one perspective. A promise of simplicity and purity hangs over them like a pall. They are abandoned, almost melancholic.

The exhibit includes artists like Charles Demuth, who saw in them a distillation of Cezanne’s excellence, and more importantly a way forward. Small, crystalline instances, the studies spoke to him as different parts of Mont Sainte-Victoire spoke to Cezanne. And just as he built of his impressions a world governed by the laws of harmony and beauty, so Demuth built of scraps his own cathedral.

Cezanne’s mountains are broken, his cities beyond repair. Transience shakes the paintings: skies bleed into walls, trees twist into homes, different dawns wash side by side over the same ridge. Nonetheless he sunk the most solid pier, stranded as he was ahead of us. Colors and shapes sink to the frame, almost to the shelf- yet this was the only place to anchor.

The narrative of the exhibit runs from an initial perception of an insufficient world to the fruitful dissembling of Cezanne’s corpus by successive generations. In pursuit of pure, stable forms everyone retreats. Ellsworth Kelly, in his own study of Mt. Sainte-Victoire, has set his hopes on a single, brittle line cutting across two crudely-joined pieces of paper. It resembles a ridge. I love it. References to the world have almost entirely vanished. Cezanne too pronounced it insufficient, though he assembled his otherworldly landscapes from the land. We have almost completely renounced it. Our hopes are elsewhere, maybe. And so it is.

I am a sojourner on the earth, and a pilgrim like all my fathers;
Woe is me that my sojourning is prolonged;
I have dwelt with the inhabitants of Cedar.
My soul has long been a sojourner.

Perhaps future generations will fill the slopes with grass, ring the peaks with cedar, throw shadow on the streams, maybe even add veins and moss to the outcroppings of rock. They could do less. They will wander the hills seeking the same, leaping toward fulfillment, despairing of possibility, falling short. The mountain might come to resemble our own. This will signal that something has returned to the world. Until then our bewildered minds make little of all the beauty we misperceive.

3.10.2009

Waiting in the Mountain, Waiting in the Night


By coming so close to fulfilling our truest, most errant desire- the desire to stop time- photography encourages despair, leaving us to a world we can only fitfully love, it passing so fast. Such frustration! Nonetheless light is beautiful, and color and shape somehow console us. Even after the most affecting image nothing can be done except to continue on in confusion, wearied of our accompanying pictures. But here is one of a heron through a glass, another of a girl beneath a sail. What wonders, what purity.

All we have is change, nothing of what we need. Why hold up a sieve to the light? Why force images, memories, and emotions into artistic forms? Even thought and theory try to stabilize what is unstable, to shape what is passing and beautiful. They pretend to know better. We can’t help it. Photography’s failure is often the most poignant: as in, here is a face before everything changed.

Near Los Angeles, itself an ephemeral mirage, someone went into the hills with a camera. They exposed the film for half a minute or more. These photographs are different. Not that they alleviate our confusion or clarify our thoughts, far from it, but they lead us again to wonder about the strangeness of the world, which is the only good anything can do. At the very least we find this ­at the beginning of philosophy. Why not return again to the beginning, not knowing it for what it is?

The pictures were taken at night, when a camera is almost useless. The borders are stable but tense. Dreams, prophecies, and other winds seem to press upon the edge, an angel ready to break into the image, threatening blindness. Fortunately he restrains himself. A flashlight illuminates the hills erratically. Sometimes the land moves, as when someone sends a stone crashing down the hill. They were still for years, possibly since the harrowing of hell, and are still again.

A lot can pass in thirty seconds, not much of it seen. The clouds gather, the grass waits, night moves as if in a mass. Mostly such processes are absent. Time is of the process, and wind and rain. An otherworldly quality pervades the valley. In the pictures a gray shallow stream wanders over the stones, small in the dry endless hills. Its torrents blur into sensuous curves, more opaque where the current is strong. The sound is almost audible. So small are these pictures, no larger than the least stone of the hills.

Light changes in intensity, shade faints by degrees. Everything is unmoored even as it appears still. We see objects as they pass through time, nothing remarkable. And so the artists evade the vain accumulation of details. Nothing is wearier than the world of things. This is unjust, and our own problem.

Because of the duration of the exposure even distant stones are incredibly distinct, as in a van Eyck. The philosophers of his time believed that if someone fell for an instant from God’s sight he would cease to exist. The Recognitions claimed that this informed Flemish painting’s obsession with detail. All the objects assert their individuality for fear that God did not exist. What would happen to them if they were vague or imprecise? I forget if this has been refuted.

Different planes are present in the frames. Some of the stones shift in shadow, some never change. A lone light, guided by someone’s hand (such forms could not be random), wanders into the distance. There is nothing to indicate if these lines are more controlled or less controlled than a sculptor’s. The pictures seem full of symbols from an unknown culture, as if they document the unintelligible figures of its literary tradition. They are powerfully intact but only suggestive, a religion without a signifier, a people without an end. They affect us like the iceberg in Elizabeth Bishop’s The Imaginary Iceberg:

This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.
The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within.

No home can be made here; the mind gasps as if in a prison.
Some details disorient. Nothing seems of this world. The setting of the pictures encourages this- night in a barren waste. Even Ecclesiastes would appreciate it. Varied and hopeful are the hills.

3.04.2009

Edward Carey (MFA '09) and Alexis Granwell (MFA '07) chosen for juried group exhibition at DCCA...OPENING Fri., March 6th 5-9pm

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CROSSING LINES: 2009 MEMBERS’ JURIED EXHIBITION
Carole Bieber & Marc Ham Gallery
February 27 – May 24, 2009

ARTISTS’ RECEPTION
: FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2009
5:00 - 9:00 pm
GUEST dubstep DJ Kyle Tush

The theme for the 2009 members’ juried exhibition engages the latitude, limits,
and attitudes with which boundaries are either upheld or transgressed. Lines
demarcate parameters, thresholds, borders, and territories, which in turn define
the evolving notions of value systems such as nationalities and geopolitical or
social relations.

Crossing Lines is about accidentally, deliberately, or serendipitously mixed
signals in communication; paths crossing or colliding at an intersection; and the
blurred, erased, or reinforced boundaries of time, place, tradition, and genre.
This exhibition was guest juried by Darsie Alexander (UPenn MFA Senior Critic), Chief Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

For more info: http://www.thedcca.org

3.03.2009

Jamal Cyrus (MFA '08) solo show at The Kitchen, NYC, opening Thurs., March 19th

Jamal Cyrus, Shhh, 2007/2009, digital print on canvas

Winners Have Yet To Be Announced
Jamal Cyrus

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 19, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: March 19 – May 2, 2009

Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus’ work examines spaces between radical socio-political movements and untold histories. In Winners Have Yet To Be Announced, Cyrus presents a new series of drawings, sculptures, and videos that use Palmer Hayden’s seminal social realist painting The Janitor Who Paints (1937) as a point of departure. Evocatively reworking the symbolic and political traditions in Hayden’s painting, Cyrus explores the frequent slippages between the ordinary and the metaphysical. Exhibition curated by Rashida Bumbray

This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Dedalus Foundation, Inc., and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011

For more info: www.thekitchen.org

Marc Blumthal (MFA '10) will give a tour of the ICA's current exhibition, Dirt on Delight. Sat. March 7 at 2pm.

First Saturday Tour: Dirt on Delight
Saturday, Mar. 7th at 2pm

Lectures On Contemporary Art: Marc Blumthal on Dirt on Delight

Now in its sixth year, ICA’s Lectures on Contemporary Art program welcomes Marc Blumthal, an MFA candidate in the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, to present tours at the museum. Marc Blumthal’s geometric abstract paintings and prints investigate one's travels within the urban landscape, specifically looking at how light defines space. Blumthal joins current program participants Susan Fang, also an MFA candidate in the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Ruth Erickson and Yael Rice, both Ph.D. candidates from Penn’s Department of the History of Art.

The artists in "Dirt on Delight" include the current generation (Nicole Cherubini, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Jeffry Mitchell, Sterling Ruby, and Paul Swenbeck), artists who emerged during the 1990s (Ann Agee, Kathy Butterly, Jane Irish, Arlene Shechet, and Beverly Semmes), those who established clay as a critical material during the 1960s and 1970s (Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, Ron Nagle, Ken Price, Adrian Saxe, Beatrice Wood and Betty Woodman), and historic and outsider figures (Lucio Fontana, Peter Voulkos, and Rudolf Staffel, as well as George Ohr and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein).

Founded in 1963, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania is a leader in the presentation of contemporary art. Through exhibitions, commissions, educational programs, and publications, ICA invites the public to share in the experience, interpretation and understanding of the work of established and emerging artists.

For more about events at the ICA see: http://www.icaphila.org/events/

See Marc's work: http://marcedmundblumthal.blogspot.com/