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

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.

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

"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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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/

ART REVIEW: All of the Dream, None of the Penance

All of the Dream, None of the Penance

It might as well have been a dream. I walked to the house alone. The gate was broad, the door unlocked. Night crept along the wall, rippling among the stones. I went in. There was no scaffolding to crawl around in, only the cellar.

An empty hallway with no welcome: it led to the stairs which led to the basement. An impressive array of colored glass hid high on the wall. Blue and yellow panes crept onto the ceiling, turning with the last of the twilight. The sound downstairs was social/casual.

They congregated in loose groups on the cement. Their voices, elegant for the harshness of the room, passed like strands of a drying river. What little light there was collapsed in yellow plumes along the wall. Some fled down the halls which opened around us, vanishing before they could reach the end. The room was nauseously formless. It seems unfair to ask for harmony, teleology, or resolution, but only so much as it seems unjust to ask for spring or the consummation of a feeling in another’s eyes.

With such demands I turned to the paintings. If these were a part of the show, or the rooms a part of the paintings, or both or neither, I have no idea. A poem answers a poem, a painting waits in another. I could find nothing here, at least yet. A future may come in which these are bright pillars. A worker at Lascaux finds Klee’s Angelus Novelus beneath a creek, Brancusi’s Sleep in a new passage.

I kept looking up the stairs for something to lead us from the dark, a lion or a bear. We were lost. None of it made sense. But the world around us was different, changing in subtle, wonderful ways. A new carnival raised its tent over the night, taking up residence for an entire week. Although everything failed, or failed to even make clear its criterion for failure, the room refracted in the frames, casting shifting evanescent colors.

Cracks and accretions bent to the paintings on the wall. They were portraits of generalized acquaintances with sunken Egyptian eyes. A pall of stone passed into the cellar. We were trapped, thieves in the pyramid. They made this clear. The faces could be anyone in such dim light, a gallery of lost frontier families or a galley of the first sailors, tossed between rock and rock.

It was hard to determine anything more about the paintings, whether they were a part of the opening or not. So strange how their gaze spread across the room- more alive than any of our own, older, wiser- and fled through a window onto the street, ancient and more permanent. No one paid them any attention. Their travels will end at a mountain. They have a different time and a longer memory than us.

And so they absorbed the room, refracted the street, the city, the oceans and glaciers- all of it loomed. Centuries-old words crackled across the frames, pooling on the wall or flickering like coals in the corner. I caught a bit of Alexander Pope, which I confirmed later:

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall:
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;

These words meant something different in the cellar. The cracks and deformities of the wall altered the stanzas and sentences, changing the argument. The same with the lines from Wyatt. The room was indeed growing. Everything was quiet until a dog scampered across the floor above us, scattering several small animals, or so it seemed. The slats blinked as they passed. I had seen his eyes earlier; they indicated nothing.

Someone spoke of the paintings, suggesting that they were allegorical but allegories detached from any underlying doctrine, like saints of an unfathomable religion. “Like us this evening,” he calmly explained. This may have been joke. No one knew. Someone else cited Georges Didi-Huberman, who I also tracked down. After marveling that the abstract art of his own time had enabled him to see, and be struck by, certain colorful, constellated panels of Fra Angelico which his discipline had not only ignored but consigned to nonexistence, meaninglessness, he asks:

What, in the discipline or “order of discourse” of art history, has been able to maintain such a condition of blindness, such a “willingness not to see” and not to know? What are the epistemological reasons for such a denial- the denial that consists of knowing how to identify the slightest iconographic attribute in a Holy Conversation while at the same time not paying the slightest attention to the astounding three-meter by one-and-one-half-meter blaze of color situation just below it?

I wasn’t sure who the speaker was, whether it was Wisdom, Folly, Pestilence, or Beauty that registered shock at the blindness of men. No one led us out. There were no insights in the quarry. We quit the basement of the arts of our own will. Thought holds to a different ridge.

The night outside was different. Not better or more manageable, quite the opposite. A dense thicket lined the street. We walked beneath the bare trees. Shadows formed on the windows, wherever there were lamps really. The rose-like figure of woman appeared on the shade of a world less solid. There is so much to see. I would trade none of it for understanding. Some forgetful few crossed the river, the others waited on the bank.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism.” Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

--
John Paetsch is Associate Editor for the Penn Art Review. Paetsch is a Master of Liberal Arts candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied art history and philosophy as an undergraduate and delivered a Symposium paper on Mondrian.

LECTURE: Jose Roca lecture this Friday, Feb. 27th. 5pm in Meyerson Hall, B-3.

Graduate Fine Arts Lecture

José Roca, Curator

LECTURE: Friday, February 27 at 5:00 pm

Meyerson Hall, Room B3
210 S. 345h Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

José Roca, the Artistic Director of Philagrafika 2010, is a Colombian curator working from Bogotá and Philadelphia. Among his recent curatorial projects are:

Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence, a traveling exhibition produced by iCI (Independent Curators International) currently on tour (2007-2009); Botánica política, Sala Montcada, Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona (2004); Traces of Friday, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2003); TransHistorias, survey of the work of José Alejandro Restrepo, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá (2001); Define "Context", APEX Art Curatorial Program, New York (2000); Ruins; Utopia, survey of Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, Bronx Museum for the Arts, New York and Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas (2000-2001)

Tiger Strikes Asteroid (a gallery owned and operated by Penn MFA alumni) will have its inaugural exhibition March 6th!

Getting Ready for the Prom

Phillip Adams (MFA '06)
Tim Gierschick
Alexis Granwell (MFA '07)
Alex Paik (MFA '05)
Nathan Pankratz
Caroline Santa (MFA '07)

Exhibition Dates: March 6 - 27, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 6-9pm

Tiger Strikes Asteroid
319 North 11th Street, 4th Floor
Philadelphia PA 19107

HOURS
Friday and Saturday 12pm-6pm and by appointment

EMAIL
TigerStrikesAsteroid@gmail.com

BLOG
http://tigerstrikesasteroid.blogspot.com/

Alexi Worth's (MFA Senior Critic) profile on W. African artist published in the NYT Style Magazine, Feb. 22, 2009

El Anatsui, Hover, 2005

A Thousand Bottles. . . (excerpt follows)
By Alexi Worth

"MEET EL ANATSUI, THE AFRICAN ARTIST WHO USES ‘EMPTIES’ TO REINVENT SCULPTURE.

ONE DAY 10 YEARS AGO in the countryside of southern Nigeria,
a slim middle-aged man drove past a bag of garbage. Garbage is not an unusual sight in West Africa; village roads are often lined with a parallel hillock of trash — dusty bottles, spoiled food, tin cans, car parts — out of which small trees sometimes grow. But this solitary bag looked promising. It was a quiet, sunny late afternoon in the dry season. The man stopped the car and walked over to look inside. A decade later, the contents of that bag have toured the world from Wales to Arizona and come to rest, transformed but recognizable, in some of the world’s most famous museums..."

Read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/02/22/style/t/index.html#pageName=22nigeria

David Aaron Mette (MFA '09) appointed as Editor of the Penn Art Review

The Penn Art Review is an extension of the Penn MFA Forum. Entries to the Penn Art Review will be posted on the MFA Forum and archived separately until the site develops several columns for each beat of this ever-changing and growing entity. David Aaron Mette, MFA '09, is serving as its first editor. Mette can be contacted at: theywerered at aol.com

About Mette: An excerpt from his paper "Sovereign Communication: Reading The Deconstruction of Discursive Language in Bataille" presented at an international conference on art and humanities this past January:

Transgression and servility in Bataille

Transgression is a theme in Bataille’s writings that has issued a great deal of controversy. According to the Hegel that Bataille received through the lectures of Alexander Kojève, man is self-conscious being that is founded upon the initial negation of animality. From the sociological thinking that Bataille received from Durkheim and Mauss, this self-consciousness is contemporaneous with man’s institution of prohibitions, the development of tools, and the production of language as discourse. According to Bataille, these phenomena, which form the realm of the profane, result in man’s alienation from an initial inner experience, or the experience of the divine. Things that pose a threat to the orderly, homogeneous and thus profane way of life are prohibited and constitute the sacred or divine, which is dependent upon a negation of the first negation, or rather a contestation of the rules that had initially separated man from animal. Bataille writes:

What is denied in profane life (through prohibitions and through work) is a dependent state of the animal, subject to death and to utterly blind needs. What is denied by means of divine life is still dependence, but this time it is the profane world whose lucid and voluntary servility is contested (Accursed Share Vol. II-III, 92-3).

According to this statement the sacred is not just a return to simple animality, but a willed gesture of insubordination that allows access to nature “transfigured by the curse” (93). It is this accursed share that founds the excessive movements of the festival. And what are revealed through the sacred are the limits of life and the continuum of being in relation to a general rather than a restricted economy.

According to Durkheim, the sacred/profane is a kind of ur-dualism from which others evolve. In Bataille’s text it is acknowledged as a fundamental social rhythm that elicits a dual solicitation: one toward order, production, and accumulation and the other toward disorder, destruction and expenditure. The argument most commonly leveled at Bataille for his transgressive strategies is that by defying a prohibition, the validity of the power of the prohibition is ultimately reaffirmed in its naming. Focusing on the sacred/profane dualism as it is structured in language, Foucault notes, to kill god, one has to summon his presence. In his essay “A Preface to Transgression,” he writes:

Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred—is this not more or less what we may call transgression? In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating (Language, Counter-memory…, 30).

In this formulation, transgression is rendered as a violent contestation that is the very creation of the sacred established by the interdiction. As Mauss has noted, the interdiction exists to be violated. In all societies, there are interdictions related to sex and death; Bataille is not seeking to establish a world without rules, rather he shows the social reality of the rhythm that exists in the establishment of the limit that defines the sacred and the profane. It is this experience of the sacred through transgression which is a condition of possibility for sovereign moments of inner experience; significantly, for Bataille, transgression is spoken of in relation to a situation in which the king/god has been killed, which necessitates a more general discussion of transgression as an experience of limits. Foucault writes that the death of god “leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign”(Language, Counter-Memory. . . 32). With the demise of god, man is subject to limitless chance and now is capable of confronting death without the hope of redemption. In Foucault’s view, the death of god reflects the decline of the Adamic view of language that is derived from the gospel of John, the idea that the word is God and that the word made flesh; in the sense that philosophy historically places god in the realm of the transcendent as the word that exceeds all words, the attempt to establish a language which considers the death of god constitutes a Nietzschean endeavor of the re-evaluation of values, and consequently the deconstruction of philosophical subjectivity. But Foucault de-emphasizes transgression as a subversive force:

Transgression does not seek to oppose one thing to another, nor does it achieve its purpose through mockery or by upsetting the solidity of foundations; it does not transform the other side of the mirror, beyond an invisible and uncrossable line, into a glittering expanse. Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world); and exactly for this reason, its role is to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arise. Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being—affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone of existence for the first time (Language, Counter-memory. . . 35).

Transgression is a momentary transportation to a realm that imparts a kind of knowledge that can only be a moment of the unknown; it is a loss of ipséité, or the thing-ness of man, which ultimately provides the conditions needed for the possibility of ecstatic experience through sacred communion, or the disappearance of the real constituted by discourse and dialectics—a rhythm which makes and unmakes the world.

In the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave, the distinguishing feature of the master is that he has risked death while the slave has chosen to conserve his life. This model is subject to a displacement by Bataille in what Derrida points to as a distinction of sense between lordship and sovereignty. According to Bataille there is a fundamental glitch that prevents the master or lord from the authentic experience of sovereignty: although the master has risked death, the experience of being subject to chance causes an anxiety that he must overcome in order to maintain his superiority, so he is dependent upon the slave for the recognition of his value. Derrida writes, “when servility becomes lordship, it keeps within it the trace of its repressed origin . . . The truth of the master is in the slave; and the slave become a master remains a “repressed” slave”(Writing and Difference 255). The desire and consciousness of the master are not only dependent upon but also historically constituted by that of the slave. Thus, the conservation of the original term in its negation is exactly the paradox that accounts for how Bataille’s revision of the master and slave dialectic illustrates the inevitable servility of the master. Discursive thought has an inherent positivity that is always recuperated. In order to escape this circularity, Bataille posits sovereignty altogether exterior and heterogeneous to the dialectic. According to Derrida, it is no longer even within the realm of the phenomenal. Withdrawn from the limit of knowledge and meaning:

. . .sovereignty is no longer a figure in the continuous chain of phenomenology. Resembling a phenomenological figure, trait for trait, sovereignty is the absolute alteration of all of them . . . Far from being an abstract negativity, sovereignty (the absolute degree of putting at stake), rather, must make the seriousness of meaning appear as an abstraction inscribed in play (Writing and Diff 256).

In contradistinction to the Hegelian concept of abstract negativity, or loss of meaning as a result of a negativity that is still discursive, sovereignty, or the operation of freeing desire from the desire of the other amounts to the radical exclusion or suspension of meaning that can only be laughter in the face of the limitless limit that is death.
--
Aaron Metté is a performance, video, sound and installation artist from the south who currently lives in West Philadelphia. He has also completed graduate work in Comparative Literature. Metté will receive his MFA from Penn in May.

Susana Jacobson (MFA Senior Critic) and Julie Schneider (Head of Undergrad Art at Penn) in exhibition at Rowan University, NJ

Susana V. Jacobson, Qu Pi, 2008

Rowan Gallery Addresses Women's ‘DOUBLE BIND’ In New Exhibit

GLASSBORO – Bringing an artistic view to Women’s History Month, the Rowan University Art Gallery presents DOUBLE BIND: Women Telling It Slant

Exhibition Dates: February 16 – March 20, 2009

A gallery talk followed by a reception is scheduled for Thursday, March 5 from 4:30 – 6:30 pm in the gallery.

“A person in a double bind receives a conflicting message, whereby the action taken is wrong no matter what choice she makes,” notes curator and gallery director Kathryn McFadden. “Catch-22s historically have been used to restrict women and challenge their roles as leaders. Considering Emily Dickinson’s suggestion to ‘Tell the truth, but tell it slant,’ this exhibition will feature works that address or question old-fashioned double binds and new-fangled twists through the artistic device of indirection.”

Works in the exhibition take on visual strategies such as metaphor, parody, irony and narrative. Artists represented include New Jersey artist Jackie Sandro as well as Susana V. Jacobson from Utah, Jennifer Justice from Illinois, Lauren McAdams from Arizona, Julie Saecker Schneider & Nancy Wright from Pennsylvania and Sylvia Sleigh from New York.

For information, call 856-256-4521 or visit www.rowan.edu/fpa/artgallery

The Rowan University Art Gallery
Westby Hall (lower level)
Rowan University
Route 322
Glassboro, NJ

Eileen Neff (MFA Professor and Critic) solo show opening at Locks Gallery Fri., Feb. 27th 5:30-7:30pm.

Eileen Neff, Before and Behind, 2009

Things counter, original, spare

Exhibition Dates: February 27 – March 31, 2009.
Opening reception: Friday, February 27, 5:30 to 7:30pm.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Things counter, original, spare, an exhibition of new photographs by Eileen Neff whose newest photographs of found and altered nature are a continuation of her work in digital construction and abstraction. In Things counter, original, spare, Neff’s photographs reflect upon and pull imagery from one another. The layering and repetition of images encourages cross-referencing and offers multiple readings of individual photographs and of the installation as a whole.

In 2007, Eileen Neff was featured in a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, which is currently on view at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Ireland, and continues to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greenboro, NC, in 2009.

Eileen Neff’s work has been exhibited at P.S. 1, Long Island City, NY; Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery, PA; and Artist Space, NY, among others. She is the recipient of awards including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Fellowships in the Arts. Neff is currently an adjunct professor in the MFA program at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, a Graduate Seminar instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a Senior Critic in the Graduate Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, PA

contact Locks Gallery at 215.629.1000 or info@locksgallery.com

http://www.locksgallery.com/

John Moore (MFA Professor and Senior Critic) show opening TONIGHT Feb. 12th at Hirschl & Adler Modern, NYC

John Moore, A Fine Fall Day, 2008

JOHN MOORE

Thirteen Miles from Paradise: Four New Paintings

Exhibition dates: February 12 - March 14, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday, February 12 5:30-7:30pm

Hirschl & Adler Modern
21 East 70th Street
New York, NY 10021
Tel 212 535 8810

For additional information and images, please visit www.hirschlandadler.com

The Penn Art Review

The University of Pennsylvania MFA Forum (also known as the PennDesign MFA Forum) is undergoing several changes. In addition to blog entries related to "Arts in Philly" and MFA-specific activity at Penn, we are inviting graduate students from other disciplines (e.g. philosophy) to join the editorial board to develop an "Art Review" division for the site. The goal is to expand our understanding of "art" by welcoming different points of view.

Suggestions are welcome at lime [at] alumni.upenn.edu.
--Elizabeth Lim, MFA '07, Founding Editor, PennDesign MFA Forum

MFA Program and Kim Brickley (MFA '09) mentioned on Amy Stein's Blog

(left image by Kim Brickley, Gallbladder Canyon)

Amy Stein visited Penn's MFA program for a lecture and MFA critiques. A mutually insightful and enjoyable exchange took place. Here is the message from Amy's blog:

"Thank You, Penn! Before the week gets away from me I wanted to extend a big thank you to the hundred or so folks that braved the cold on Thursday to attend my lecture at the University of Pennsylvania. I also want to thank the wonderful students in the Penn Design MFA program I met with on Friday. Your work is truly impressive and your commitment is inspiring."

Stein's photography and related posts can be found on her blog at: http://amysteinphoto.blogspot.com/2009/01/thank-you-penn.html

See more of Kim's work: http://kimbrickley.com/home.html

Marcin Ramocki (MFA '98) film to screen at MoMA, NYC: Feb. 25 at 8:30pm

Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 8:30 p.m.

Theater 1 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1), T1
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street,
between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York, NY 10019-5497

Brooklyn DIY. 2009. USA. Directed by Marcin Ramocki. Brooklyn DIY is a long overdue examination of the creative renaissance in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Home to underground warehouse parties, anarchistic street creativity, and artist-run galleries and performance spaces, Williamsburg gave birth to one of the most vibrant and rebellious artistic communities to arise in the 1980s, permanently changing the city's cultural landscape. Featuring interviews with a host of artists and neighborhood characters, Ramocki's film captures life in a utopian universe made by artists, for artists—along with its inevitable decline in the face of real estate development, gentrification, and the post–September 11 market collapse. 75 min.

World premiere. Discussion with Ramocki and participants in the film. One of the interviewees is Matt Freedman, a MFA Senior Critic.

In the film exhibition series at MoMA Documentary Fortnight 2009

The 2009 edition of Documentary Fortnight, MoMA's annual showcase of nonfiction film and video, features more than thirty selections from across the globe. Several of this year's films focus on the American political landscape and zeitgeist, including a pair of works that offer different takes on Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States. Others tackle topics as varied as the tradition of marriage, nuclear missiles in North Dakota, and abandoned labor towns in California. The program also includes rare glimpses into life on war's front lines; inside dictatorships in Turkmenistan and Argentina; into the forefront of the anti-aging movement; and inside the latest developments in robotics. Other films take an avant-garde approach to personal experiences with chemotherapy treatment and travel-diary observations of the global community. An evening of new work made on Super 8mm film exhibits the vibrant resurgence of small-format film technology, while programs of films by young people of color and documentaries from Taiwan and Iran highlight important new voices and innovative techniques.

For more information about Marcin see his website: http://www.ramocki.net/

REAL WORLD MFA talk Monday with Martin McNamara: 12-1pm White Room, Morgan Building

(click on image for larger view)

Martin McNamara is director and part owner of Gallery 339, Philadelphia's only art gallery devoted to photography. Mr. McNamara began developing the business five years ago, and the gallery opened with its first exhibition in April 2005. The focus of the gallery is contemporary photography, exhibiting a mix of local work as well as photography from around the world. Recent exhibitions have included a survey of work by Tina Barney as well as the show "Philadelphia Masters", which presented some of the city's most influential artists of the past forty years. McNamara's interest in photography developed as a collector.

http://www.gallery339.com/html/home.asp

Yale to start an online forum similar to the PD MFA Forum...

Nov. 2008 Yale Daily News reports "ArtParlor, or rather www.yale.edu/artparlor, is a new Web site that is working to create a community for artists and art enthusiasts both online and on campus."

The PennDesign MFA Forum serves a similar function, as a site not only for matriculating MFA students, but for alumni, Philadelphia artists, art enthusiasts, and those who are simply curious about arts in Philly. Most of the lectures are open to the public; the public is certainly welcome to exhibitions posted on the site. Part of the vision behind the site is to connect with the greater public through this expansive medium known as the Internet. The University of Pennsylvania is "the first" in many areas -- the first university; the first to offer courses in many disciplines; and perhaps significantly, the inventors of the first computer (built by Eckert and Mauchly).

FOUND IN PHILLY

FOUND IN PHILLY is a place to post photographs and videos found in Philadelphia. Send images or videos to Rich Wexler
shermanarts[at]gmail.com
http://foundinphilly.tumblr.com/

James Duesing Lecture TONIGHT, Feb. 5, 5:30pm in Van Pelt Library, 6th Floor

JAMES DUESING

Animation Lectures:

http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/

Wednesday, Feb. 4, 5:30pm

Animation Works of James Duesing

Thursday, Feb. 5, 5:30pm

An Artist's Perspective on the History of Animation

Rosenwald Gallery, sixth floor

Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center

3420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia

TONIGHT (Feb. 4): Penn First Wednesday at the ICA, Meet Campuzano and more: 7-10pm

February 4, 2009. 7-10pm

7:30PM / MEET THE ARTIST: Anthony Campuzano

8:30PM / PERFORMANCE: EXCELANO PROJECT

ICA is a laboratory for artistic freedom that fosters a creative dialogue through the presentation of world-class contemporary art on Penn’s campus. Join the adventure during the next Penn First Wednesday. Bring your friends, it’s free. Who knows, you might even meet the next Andy Warhol. BE RADICAL—we dare you!

For our February Penn First Wednesday, come early to meet artist Anthony Campuzano at 7:30pm as he leads a tour of his exhibition Touch Sensitive, currently on view in ICA’s Project Space. Make your own one-of-a-kind buttons with designs by the artist. Stay for a performance by the spoken word poetry group Excelano Project at 8:30pm. Be sure to catch a 60-second lecture by one of our Graduate Lecturers on Contemporary Art – they’ll be happening throughout the evening.

For more info: www.icaphila.org/students/

MFA Thesis Preview Exhibition, Opening THIS Friday, Feb. 5, 5:30-7:30pm

Thesis Preview Opening Reception.

This Friday, Feb. 5th from 5:30-7:30pm.

Meyerson Hall Gallery 210 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA



(See card at left for address and contact information.)

Six MFA Alumni appointed to PDAA Board of Directors

The Penn Design Alumni Association announces its Board of Directors, which includes six MFAs:

Esperanza Altamar MFA’00; William Bickford MArch’02; Mark Brosseau MFA’01; Elizabeth Burling MCP’05 MS’05; John Carr MS’95; Richard Collier, Jr. MRP’77; Johnette Davies MS’97; Danielle Denk MLA’00; Kim Douglas MLA’96; Ke Feng MArch’98; Kathleen Grady MCP’05 MSW’05; Robert Hotes MArch’91 CRT’93; Christianne Kapps MFA’01; William McCullough MArch’92; Samuel Olshin C’82 MArch’86; Mark Pettegrow MFA’90; Peta Raabe MLA’82; Eileen Rojas MS’98; Jill Sablosky MFA’79; Robert Shamble MArch’86; Anthony Sorrentino MCP’05; Nancy Rogo Trainer MArch’85; Jason Travers MFA’98

With alumni residing in more than 70 countries, PDAA’s global reach is expanding more than ever. This past year our first international regional chapter was formed in Taipei, Taiwan where we have nearly 200 alumni. Closer to home we have 10 active regional chapters across the US connecting alumni through receptions, tours and events. As always, your support is greatly appreciated and we look forward to seeing you at future PDAA events.
--Catherine Gibson Broh MArch'96, PDAA President
Penn Design Alumni Office, pdalumni[at]design.upenn.edu

CONNECT WITH YOUR REGION:
Regional Directors:
Chicago: William Bickford MArch’02
Colorado/Wyoming (Denver): Jason Lally MCP’07, Marsha Wooley MFA’88
Florida (Miami): David Feinberg BArch’61
Los Angeles: Beth Wells Gensemer C’79 MArch’82
New York: Bridget Dugan MCP’87
San Francisco: Jennifer Hagan MCP’01
Seattle: Sara Belz MCP’04, Carmen Bendixen MCP’06
St. Louis: Nick Peckham BArch’67 MArch’73
Taipei: Chao Wen Chen MArch’00 MCP’00
Washington, DC: Julie Guerrero Schor MCP’97

Email addresses can be found on the Alumni Directory http://www.alumni.upenn.edu/

ARTIST LECTURE: Karyn Olivier: Thursday, Jan. 29 at 5:30pm, Meyerson, B-3

Karyn Olivier, Tether-ball (2003) and Bench (2005)

Thursday, January 29nd at 5:30pm

210 S. 34th Street 

Meyerson Hall, Room B-3

Karyn Olivier's works range from sculpture to large site-specific installations. Space is her principal medium, with which she creates complex intimation of solitude, interaction, secrecy, scale, and access.

In 2007 she was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and an Art Matters grant. She received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2003. This year Olivier will mount a public art project and participate in the Gwangju Biennial (Korea). Olivier will present a series of billboards in Houston, TX and a companion publication in 2009. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Karyn Olivier received her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BA in psychology at Dartmouth College. Olivier teaches sculpture at Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts. 

www.dunnandbrown.com/exhibitions-art-olivier.html

Susan Fang (MFA '10) to give talk at ICA as a part of the Coffee Talk series; Wed., Jan. 28, 5:30pm

image: Anthony Campuzano, Begrudgingly after Phyllis Schafly, 2008

Whenever Wednesday: Coffee Talk: Touch Sensitive
Wed, Jan 28 at 5:30pm

Susan Fang on Anthony Campuzano with Jeffrey Green, Assistant Professor of Political Science.

Susan Fang, an MFA candidate in the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, explores the sources and methods of Anthony Campuzano’s “abstract journalism,” followed by coffee and conversation led by Jeffrey Green, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Known for his use of found language, Philadelphia-based artist Anthony Campuzano activates texts from a variety of sources—newspaper headlines, Wikipedia entries, the covers of paperback novels, trivial cultural events, common clichés, pop song lyrics—in drawings that couple intense color with the tangible presence of the artist's hand.

Like his journalistic sources, Campuzano's use of language condenses—he distills language into succinct phrases that express a particular mood, recall a personal anecdote, or echo a national headline. What is removed textually is replaced visually through bold color and the blocky, erratic shapes of his letters, defying the formality of the printed page, and its capacity for endless reproduction, with the deliberate imperfection of the hand. Campuzano dubs his obsession with color and language "abstract journalism." As the sentences dip and dodge through the composition, the act of reading alternately slows or quickens; sometimes lines are reread, sometimes skipped. Regardless of the route taken, the performance of the text becomes central.

Susan Fang focuses on the construction of identity in a contemporary hyperactive society; her work is strongly influenced by comics, cartoons, and material and consumer culture.

Jeffrey Green, Ph.D, Harvard University, J.D. Yale Law School, teaches democratic theory, ancient and modern political philosophy, and contemporary social theory.

COFFEE TALK is a new program featuring a 30-minute tour of the current exhibitions led by a Penn graduate lecturer, followed by coffee on the mezzanine with a faculty member or graduate student generating and moderating an interdisciplinary conversation about ICA’s exhibitions.

For more ICA event information: www.icaphila.org/events/
See Susan's website: www.paperbites.com/index.html

Hunter Stabler (MFA '06) in upcoming group show at Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ; Opening Feb. 8

Hunter Stabler will be in a group show, Cutters, at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ.

Opening Reception: Sunday, Feb. 8th from 2-4pm
Exhibition dates: February 8-June 7th, 2009

Hunterdon Art Museum
7 Lower Center Street
Clinton, NJ 08809

For more information see: www.hunterdonartmuseum.org

Hunter is also taking part in a group show curated by Giant Robot Magazine at the Scion Space in Culver City, Los Angeles, which will open on April 11, 2009.

Hunter is currently at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC doing a three month artist residency.

See Hunter's work at: www.hunterstabler.com

ARTIST LECTURE: Amy Stein, photographer this Thurs., Jan. 22, 5:30pm at 210 S. 34th Street (Meyerson B-3)

(left, Women and Guns series)

AMY STEIN Lecture this Thursday, January 22

5:30 pm

B-3 Meyerson Hall
210 S. 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA

Amy Stein is a photographer and teacher based in New York City. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is featured in many private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Nevada Museum of Art, SMoCA and the West Collection.

In 2006, Amy was a winner of the Saatchi Gallery/Guardian Prize for her Domesticated series. In 2007, she was named one of the top fifteen emerging photographers in the world by American Photo magazine and she won the Critical Mass Book Award. Amy's first book, Domesticated, was released in fall 2008. It won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival.

Amy was raised in Washington, DC, and Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a BSc in Political Science from James Madison University and a MSc in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 2006, Amy received her MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Stein teaches photography at Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Amy is represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco and Pool Gallery in Berlin.

See Amy's work at: www.amysteinphoto.com

Jane Irish to present at ICA's "Whenever Wednesday" event this Wed., Jan. 21 at 6:30pm

Little Notes Concerning the Forming of a Vase
ORGANIZED BY ARTIST JANE IRISH
Whenever Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 6:30pm

Taking a pragmatic yet playfully conceptual approach to craft, artist Jane Irish brings together visiting and local sculptors, scholars, ceramicists, and painters to demonstrate how to make a china vase, step by step: from coming up with a good idea to arranging flowers in the fired, glazed result.

PROGRAM

6:30 Six Surefire Steps to a Great Idea
Appropriation into Re-Mediation

7:00 The Anti Mold and the Plaster Lathe

7:30 Slip Casting Chain Mail

8:00 Spinning the Wet Clay and Pulling Handles

8:15 The Display and Finale

Jane Irish is a Philadelphia-based artist and a self-proclaimed history painter. She received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (1977) and her MFA from Queens College, City University of New York (1980). She has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues such as Sharpe Gallery, New York, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Locks Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art; and the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She's been the recipient of painting fellowships from the Pennslyvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and Yale University. Irish’s work can be found in the public collections of Bryn Mawr College, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (2004 acquisition), Women’s Hall of Fame Seneca Falls, New York and numerous private collections.

Whenever Wednesday at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
The "Whenever Wednesday" is a series of lectures, films, book signings, and other special events taking place on Wednesday evenings throughout the winter. For more information, please visit: www.icaphila.org
Free to members and Penn Card holders, $5 general admission.