ART REVIEW

A regular sort of marsh, stuffed like a St. Anthony’s day turkey with aluminum, garbled sludge, and feathers. The studio stood shyly among the pines. Birds hung from the rafters on the porch, all kinds. A woodpecker with its wings drawn back presided over a table of magic sand candles. A kingfisher eyed the fire from his rosary nest across the room while two finches huddled in the scraps of a baseball glove. The flames dried his wings, whispering over colored sand. It was delightful. Caterpillars ranged over melted sheets of plastic. We toasted them with mugs, coffee sediment cemented to the bottom.

Acadian music leaked from the radio. It was so off-tune it might have been the city distorted by the marsh, all of its sounds, whatever that meant. Either way it was a fascinating sort of noise, unpredictable and alive like an eerie Morandi or the eyes in a portrait of Jeanne. He compared the sound to art, then to his own work, a comparison as garbled and fleetingly sublime as anything. I was in no mood. He said painting was like this, like transmuting noise into Acadian folk fables about the Lusitania. We moved on. I moved on.

He worked in the vanitas tradition, he insisted, not still-life. But either way an ars moriendi, mining vitality in decay, fishing out constants from subjects whose chests sunk by the hour. Though their bodies faded their feathers retained such color I suspected plasticine or tar. They outshone the rainbow sand on the table, mixed as it was with ash.

He fleshed out the rest of the canvas with marsh salvage. Only the birds were constant, in his painting as well as in the tradition. A dead thrush’s wings break almost by the weight of their own feathers, separating quickly even in the sluggish currents of the marsh, but they persist across the centuries and not the powder horns or ivory radios which surround them in the paintings and in the dunes.

But if Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes; vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas, I asked him, why such precision, such delicate colors, such care? For that too has remained constant, the pursuit of aesthetic perfection even in a tradition which aggressively renounces the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, if it would ever even concede the possibility of such perfection. But something perfect, he said, exhausts all its possibilities, and since there is nothing left for it to be it shines forth only in its inadequacies and limitations. So be it.

He wanted to say, with Wallace Stevens

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations….
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

and from this affirm the vanity of thought, act, and desire, condemning the entire complex of the soul for its lack of reasonable heating or adequate shelter. There were neither illusions in his work nor anywhere to escape. We returned to the dock after looking at his paintings. Piers sloped to the west, light died on the water. Fireflies settled sometimes three to a can. We watched.

Andrew Graham (MFA '06) in Exhibition at David Weinberg Gallery, Opening June 5

Andrew Graham,
Serenity, 2009





Alum Andrew Graham (MFA '06) will exhibit work in a show titled Golden Ratio at David Weinberg Gallery in Chicago.

Opening Reception: June 5, 2009
Exhibition Dates: June 5 to July 11, 2009


For more information: http://www.davidweinberggallery.com/

TONIGHT!!!!! PENN MFA THESIS EXHIBITION OPENING....WHO'S EXCITED!?

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MFA THESIS EXHIBITION
ICEBOX PROJECT SPACE-CRANE ARTS BUILDING


Please join us for the opening reception: Saturday, May 16th from 6-9pm

Exhibition Dates: May 16- June 4, 2009

The Artists: Kim Brickley, Edward L. Carey, Jessica Clauser, Jaimeson Daley, Jennifer Ruiz Copeland, Kurt Freyer, Tia-Simone Gardner, Elizabeth Hoy, Tetsugo Hyakutake, Jules Joseph, Kate Kaman, Antonio McAfee, Jessa McFarlane, Nicolas McMahon, Aaron Metté, Evi Numen, Cecelia Post, Jaime Roth, Rebecca Sargent, Peter Schenck, Emilie Selden, Laura Shema, Nicole White, Ricardo Zapata


The ICEBOX Project Space
Crane Arts Building
1400 N. American Street
Philadelphia, PA 19112-3803

Gallery Hours: Thursday-Sunday, 12-6pm or by appointment.


Please visit www.pennmfathesis.com for more information.

For more information about the exhibition or the PennDesign MFA program in general, please call our office at 215-898-8374 or visit our website at www.design.upenn.edu/fine-arts

Kate Kaman (MFA '09) in Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby, Sat. May 16, 12:30pm

Kate Kaman will have a sculpture in the annual Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby in Philadelphia, this Saturday, May 16.

A Kinetic Sculpture is a Human-powered vehicle that also has an artistic theme. Think of parade floats on bicycles, or mummers on hand crank driven pirate ships, or an alien space ship on 2 welded together bikes, think of a giant pink poodle hurdling through space, mud, sand and water. A Kinetic Sculpture Competition is all about fun and ingenuity, making the wackiest, most interesting contraption is the goal- finishing the course or winnning is not. Kinetic Sculpture Competitions have been taking place all over the world since 1969 when a California artist named Hobart Brown made some artistic improvements to his son's tricycle.

The Derby Parade leaves at 12:30pm, the Arts Fest is from 12-5pm with bands and vendors all day.
The award ceremony will be held between 3:30 and 4pm at the Arts Fest.

The Kinetic Sculpture Derby is at the Trenton Avenue Arts Festival on the 2000-2300 blocks of Trenton Avenue in the Kensington Neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA, USA, Planet Earth. The Parade leaves from Trenton and Dauphin.

For more information visit http://www.kinetickensington.org/

Kate's Studio: http://www.katekaman.com/

Tetsugo Hyakutake (MFA '09) Invited to PHotoEspaña 2009, June 3 - July 26

Tetsugo Hyakutake

PHotoEspaña 2009 is a festival of photography and visual arts that will take place from June 3 to July 26 in Madrid, Lisbon, and Cuenca. The event will include 72 exhibitions spread across 60 exhibition spaces, with 248 artists from 40 countries participating.

As part of the festival, Tetsugo has been invited to participate in Descubrimienos PHE Madrid, which is PHotoEspaña's portfolio review that gives photographers the opportunity to show their work to renowned curators, gallery owners, critics, editors, and publishers specializing in photography. He will also be exhibiting in a group show in Madrid.

For more information:

http://www.phe.es/festival/
http://www.phedigital.com/
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=29909

See Tetsugo's work at:
http://www.tetsugohyakutake.com/

East West South North Exhibition, Opening Thurs. May 21, 4 - 6pm

East West South North

Work from the The Howard A. Silverstein and Patricia Bleznak Silverstein Photography Studio Abroad: Beijing/China/2009.

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 21, 4 - 6pm
Exhibition Dates: May 21 - June 26

Participants: Matthew Thomas Cianfrani, Jessica Marie Clauser, Tasha Doremus, Jesse Harding, Elizabeth Hoy, Tetsugo Hyakutake, Nsenga A. Knight, Gabriel Martinez, Antonio McAfee, Nicholas Salvatore, Julie Saecker Schneider, Larry Shprintz, Kira Simon- Kennedy, Leigh Van Duzer, Arthur Vierkant

The Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery
University of Pennsylvania
200 South 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

215-573-5134

www.undergradfinearts.org

Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm

Jamal Cyrus (MFA '08) solo show at The Kitchen reviewed by Karen Rosenberg in the NY Times Art section!

JAMAL CYRUS

‘Winners Have Yet to Be Announced’

The Kitchen (through Saturday)

An artist collaborative eases the pressure of developing new ideas, but it can also be a crutch. As a member of Otabenga Jones & Associates, a Houston group of young African-American artists who base their fictional movements and identities on 1960s radicals, Jamal Cyrus has shown at the Whitney and the Menil Collection. His own voice, as seen in his first New York solo show, is still being developed.

The crux of the show is an untitled video, inspired by Palmer Hayden’s Social Realist canvas “The Janitor Who Paints,” that takes the form of surveillance footage. It shows a maintenance worker engaged in a performative drawing with his broom and a pile of graphite dust. Mr. Hayden’s heroic subject, who works on his art in the off hours as his adoring wife, baby and cat look on, becomes a moodier, more elusive figure in Mr. Cyrus’s portrayal. He circles the room, spreading the dust into a galactic swirl and then erasing it with crosswise strokes.

In several seemingly unrelated sculptures, Mr. Cyrus modifies musical instruments. In “New Ghosts,” he plasters a drum kit into a gallery wall; in “Conga Bomba,” he fashions trumpet brass into an ax blade. “Piece of the Sargasso Sea,” another drum kit, is festooned with coral, seaweed, incense sticks and a graphic pattern of black-and-white safety tape. These works owe a lot to David Hammons’s sardonic street art and to Jim Lambie’s punk-rock assemblages.

A cryptic set of graphite-dust drawings (bearing no resemblance to the janitor’s) round out the show. They seem to reproduce blacked-out documents, with an ironic-poetic twist: the streaky graphite makes precision and control impossible.

Mr. Cyrus needs to clarify his intentions and distance himself from his idols (Mr. Hammons in particular). Indulging his material attraction to graphite dust, in the drawings and video, is a start. KAREN ROSENBERG

See the article online: www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/arts/design/

See the gallery website: www.thekitchen.org/

Judith Shea (MFA Senior Critic) in Global Books Exhibit, Aix-en-Provence, France, Opening May 7

Global Books: Exposition des Les Livres d'Artistes de Gervais Jassaud (Collectif Generation)

Cite du Livre

Aix-en-Provence
France

Exhibition Dates: May 7 - June 20

Artist/poet collaborative books published by Gervais Jassaud, Director, Collectif Generation, Paris and Frejus, France

Includes Haibun 1990, by John Ashbury, with painted etchings by Judith Shea.

Cite du Livre
8, Rue Allumettes
13090 Aix en Provence, France
+33 4 42 27 11 86
http://www.fondationsaintjohnperse.fr/

Judith Shea (MFA Senior Critic) in Exhibit at National Academy Museum, NY, Opening July 8

Reconfiguring the Body in American Art 1820-2009

The National Academy Museum

Exhibition Dates: July 8 - November 15

"Reconfiguring the Body in American Art 1820-2009 examines the critical role the figure has played in art of the United States over the past 200 years. Installed chronologically and thematically, the exhibition will illustrate how the body has been central to the artist from formal portraiture, genre painting, and modernist devises of deconstructing the figure. A section of contemporary work by younger artists will show how the figure continues to be relevant for artists today."

The National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY
212-369-4880
http://www.nationalacademy.org/

Judith Shea (MFA Senior Critic) in Dress Codes Exhibit, Katonah Museum, NY, Opening July 12

DRESS CODES: Clothing as Metaphor in Contemporary Art

Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY

Exhibition Dates: July 12 - October 4

"Toward the end of the 20th century, many artists seized upon the idea and form of clothing as a subject for their work. Clothing today can be a metaphor for larger issues such as feminist concerns, racial stereotyping, current events, and the violence of war.

The 40 works in DRESS CODES: Clothing as Metaphor in Contemporary Art highlights contemporary artists' interest in the body, while also offering personal, social, cultural, political, and ethnic critiques."

Includes: Louise Bourgeous, Do-Ho Suh, Willie Cole, E.V. Day, Oliver Herring, Beverly Semmes, Judith Shea, Jean Shin, Yinka Shonibare and Andrea Zittel, among others.

Katonah Museum of Art
134 Jay Street - Route 22
Katonah, NY 10536
(914) 232-9555

MFA Thesis Show ... Opening Sat. May 16!

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MFA THESIS EXHIBITION
ICEBOX PROJECT SPACE-CRANE ARTS BUILDING


Opening reception: Saturday, May 16th from 6-9pm
Exhibition Dates: May 16- June 4, 2009



The Artists: Kim Brickley, Edward L. Carey, Jessica Clauser, Jennifer Ruiz Copeland, Kurt Freyer, Tia-Simone Gardner, Elizabeth Hoy, Tetsugo Hyakutake, Jules Joseph, Kate Kaman, Antonio McAfee, Jessa McFarlane, Nicolas McMahon, Aaron Metté, Evi Numen, Cecelia Post, Jaime Roth, Rebecca Sargent, Peter Schenck, Emilie Selden, Laura Shema, Nicole White, Ricardo Zapata




The ICEBOX Project Space
Crane Arts Building
1400 N. American Street
Philadelphia, PA 19112-3803

Gallery Hours: Thursday-Sunday, 12-6pm or by appointment.

www.pennmfathesis.com

www.design.upenn.edu/fine-arts

ART REVIEW: 11 th S t ree t

Nothing yet. None of it will disclose itself in a series. Or if it did the terms are still discrete, not even a shadow between them. And after all this waiting. As for the painting, mauve dunes, power lines above a black road, silver where the night wears thin, sinuous little else. What next? More sculptures, more installations. Discontinuous to the end.

The month of April, a tunnel on 11th street, a nearby gallery. No way to bring them together.

Beneath the streets they pass, back and forth on bikes. Lights dangle from the cement roof. Silver to the tungsten coil like to the seams of the grass, gone by the moon. They pass back and forth. A state-sanctioned tunnel where the invisible collect their thoughts. Too weak to cast a shadow, the light merely vibrates, creating a field like to the empyrean. But this is underground. Water unravels like a tapestry, coiling in ripples on the ground.

There is a wind outside the tunnel, moving past the city. So much space. There will only be more.

The motives were less clear at the gallery. They created a landscape from parts of Scotland and England, a deer to wander in the twilight. The forest only shimmered. Green, blue, and gray, then antlers poached the frame. A luminescent deer strays in a phosphorescent forest. He’s still there, grazing.

Waves wash on the shore. Paul Klee disembarks. He has been at sea. He finds the tunnel, sees the deer. They displace his dreams of ghostly pyramids, shimmering fish, haunted fathers and the tables they set. He starts from the tunnel like a doe. He walks west, soon to join the Theatre of Oklahoma.

Who else will bring us together? He sets the table. Just walking through the desert, dream-figures, dream-fathers. Moses in the desert figures every pilgrimage. Still nothing but himself, he nonetheless embodies all that is to come. There was never anything but wandering.

The paintings, the film, and the installation figure something as well. They must. We have no idea what it is. This is the best place to be. Paul Klee takes it with him to his tomb. Another artist walks up a mountain, arranging stones in a line behind him, Nazca-like.

Only a dream-father can unite the disparate. We walk with him, and he with us. At last the paintings come together. A series, however unsatisfying. Still it is unstable, impossible to deduce anything solid. Art-prophets wander the desert. They might scatter the tribe, or unite the remnant. Max Ernst picks through the glacial scree, seeking in stone the marks of a different sculpture.

Such a topic is old, everyone’s favorite: no father to bring us together, forgotten in the desert, discontinuous, without future or memory, alas! we say, quietly rejoicing in our penance, its marvelous open-endedness. If the wailing was sincere we would have our tablet. Instead we have a philosopher’s stone. Passing it back and forth through memory.

http://www.pluralmedium.com/QE_JC_small.mov

PennDesign MFA Thesis website up and running!

Thanks to Ricardo Zapata (MFA '09), the website for the Class '09 Thesis exhibition is online, and it is a beaut! Check out the website for info on our upcoming exhibition at the ICEBOX Space in the Crane Arts Building in Philly and at Michael Steinberg Fine Art in NYC.

You will find images of everyone's work, our artist statements, and contact info.

We will be posting more updates here as soon as our final crits are over this weekend.

In the meantime, go see the website: www.pennmfathesis.com

Hunter Stabler (MFA '06) in group exhibition in Berlin! Opening Wed., April 29th. 7-10PM.

Subversive crafts, resurgent regionalism & fake folklore..

Kunstraum Richard Sorge presents part II of the international group show:

Strich & Faden - Heimat, Volkskunst und Travestie

Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 29, 7-10PM
with live band Heatsick & Austin

Exhibition Dates: May 1 - 29, 2009

Closing Reception: May 29, 3 - 7 pm

In 2008, Kunstraum Richard Sorge initiated an ongoing series of large international subversive Arts & Crafts and Neotrad exhibitions, the second of which will take place this May. Titled Strich & Faden, the exhibition project offers subversive travesties of craft and folklore and works that thematize Heimat (heritage), gender & identity in innovative or humorous ways.

The folksy German expression "nach Strich und Faden" means to do something thoroughly, with great artistry and precision, or according to the rules of an art or craft. In contemporary language the term has gained connotations of trickery, deceit and travesty.

Travesty is a device present in many works in this show, either as an artistic attitude, or as a subject matter. The participating artists use it to subvert both the traditions of Art & Crafts and our expectations of art.

This new edition of Strich und Faden presents outstanding representatives of the thriving US-american confrontational Arts & Crafts scene - some of which are shown in Germany (or Europe) for the first time - and presents them alongside their (Eastern) European colleagues. Strich und Faden II goes beyond ironic crafting however, also incorporating conceptual and neo-traditional works.

"Genius papercutting artist Hunter Stabler (USA) will attend the opening,
as well as a number of his fabulous German colleagues."- note from Hunter

Participating Artists

Peeter Allik - EST
Walter Bruno Brix - DE
Ulrich Diezmann - DE
Rinaldo Hopf - DE
Severija Incirauskaite-Kriauneviciene - LT
Garth Johnson - USA
Ai Kijima - USA
Charles Krafft - USA
Nava Lubelski - USA
Natasza Niedziolka - DE
David Rios Ferreira - USA
Schalalala Strickzirkel - DE
Johanna Schweizer - NL
Hunter Stabler - USA
Sztuka Fabryka - BE
Tulip Enterprises - DE
Georg Weise - DE

Curated and organized by Hans Booy & Paulus Fugers

Kunstraum Richard Sorge
Old Brewery
Landsberger Allee 54
10249 Berlin

Jiwon Lee, Heather Ramsdale, & Leigh Van Duzer in Exhibition at Rebekah Templeton... Opening Thurs. May 14 6-9pm

Bubble 'n Squeak

Rebekah Templeton Gallery

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 14th, 6-9pm
Exhibition Dates: May 14-June 20, 2009

Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Bubble and Squeak, a group exhibition highlighting the work of first year Master of Fine Arts students Fritz Horstman, Jennifer Jones-O’Neil, Jiwon Lee, Heather Ramsdale and Leigh Van Duzer, some of the Mid-Atlantic region’s most promising emerging artists. The title references a classic English dish that is made from leftovers and scraps.

Fritz Horstman uses discarded shipping crates to form a dialogue about the human perception of nature. By cutting out a hole, in which the viewer is enticed to place their head, Horstman illuminates an interior space full of images of stars. Using elements of camera obscura, Horstman envelopes the viewer in a private world of light and image.

Jennifer Jones-O’Neil is a photographer exploring ideas of abstraction, flattening and altering by using color fields that are created analogously and digitally. Infused with elements of the absurd, Jones-O’Neil’s photographs highlight the alienation we can experience from consistently being bombarded with mass amounts of information.

Jiwon Lee’s carbon paper drawings jumble multiple images together to create a mass of circumstances and marks. Lee’s fragments are mashed together giving the drawing the power to create something new and unpredictable in the mind of the viewer and outside the complete control of the artist.

Using common construction materials, Heather Ramsdale’s work challenges our notions of our private spaces. Ramsdale inverts the organization of domesticity by reorganizing the materials we encounter during everyday life, exposing the space within structures.

Leigh Van Duzer’s photographs detail an interior space rich with narrative and engorged with structural decay. Her photographs deal with the detritus of human activity. Van Duzer’s recent series involves photographing a bankrupt video store as a ‘container of history’.

Rebekah Templeton Gallery
173 W. Girard Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19123
267-519-3884
info@rebekahtempleton.com
www.rebekahtempleton.com

See more of Leigh's work at www.leighvanduzer.com

Jamie Diamond (MFA '08) Open Studio at LMCC May 1-3... Opening Reception Fri. May 1, 6-8pm

LMCC Open Studio Weekend
May 1-3, 2009
Reception: Friday, May 1 6-8pm

Studios Open
Saturday, May 2, 12–6pm
Sunday, May 3, 1–6pm



Two Locations
120 Broadway, 29th Floor
77 Water Street, 10th Floor

All events are free and open to the public.
RSVP is required for all events. RSVP here: http://www.lmcc.net/openstudios

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council will open its two Workspace studio locations in the Financial District to the public for one weekend only, with an opening reception, open hours, and a reading. Workspace is LMCC's 9-month studio residency serving emerging visual artists and writers working in all media from painting to video, sculpture to photography, poetry to playwriting in unique spaces generously donated by the downtown real estate community. Meet this year’s 21 visual artists and 8 writers in their studio spaces and see the work they have been making while in residence. Changing what it means to 'work' in the Financial District, the program serves artists and writers working in all media from painting to video, sculpture to photography, poetry to playwriting in unique spaces generously donated by the downtown real estate community.

For more information about LMCC: http://lmcc.net/art/residencies/workspace/2008/openstudioweekend.html

See more of Jamie's work at www.jamiegdiamond.com

Micah Danges (MFA Photo Technician) in Group Exhibition at Gershman Y... Opening Thurs. April 23 6-8pm

Invented: (un)Realities, In Two Parts.

Vox Populi Gallery at the Gershman Y

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 23rd, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: Part 1 - April 23-June 6, 2009





The two-part exhibition Invented: (un)Realities, In Two Parts,
examines the duality of constructed landscapes and fabricated
architectural environments. The work selected for this exhibition
demonstrates the investigation into ‘artificial’ places and spaces,
which are found in the modification of the natural world or human
constructed/architectural surroundings. The artists in this
exhibition, in order to better suit their mission, rebuild, piece
together or manipulate these established constructs. These fictitious
environments, literally and figuratively, reflect our own experiences
and human interactions between real and illusionary surroundings.

The artists presented in Part 1 are particularly interested in
imaginary landscapes, constructing objects of flora and fauna and
creating images that depict an illusion between interior/exterior
spaces through installations, paintings and photography/video.

Artists Kate Stewart, Amy Adams, Kara Crombie, Micah Danges and Eva
Wylie all use the natural world (and the departure from the natural
world) as the genesis of their work.

Organized by Vox member and UArts Faculty, Julianna Foster
and Vox Member, Josh Rickards

Gershman Y
Borowsky Gallery
401 South Broad St.
Philadelphia, PA 19147
https://www.gershmany.org/
http://www.voxpopuligallery.org/

http://micahdanges.org/

LECTURE: Terry Winters, Painter. Friday April 24th at 5pm...Meyerson Hall, B3.

GRADUATE FINE ARTS LECTURE

TERRY WINTERS, painter

Friday, April 24th at 5:00pm

MEYERSON HALL, Room B3
University of Pennsylvania
210 S. 34th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Lecture Open to the Public

Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1949, Terry Winters attended the High School of Art & Design in New York and continued formal training at the Pratt Institute, receiving a BFA in 1971. His early paintings are influenced by minimalist, monochromatic paintings, like those of Brice Marden. Winters' love of drawing led him to introduce schematic references to astronomical, biological and architectural structures as the subject matter of his paintings. He began exhibiting work in 1977, and by the early 1980s his ideas had developed into loose grids of organic shapes beside lushly painted fields.
His has been included in numerous Whitney Biennials of 1985, 1987 and has held solo shows at the Tate Gallery in London and the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. His work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art as well as with many international museums. Bill Goldston invited Winters to print at the Universal Limited Art Editions studio in 1982. Mr Winters lives and works in New York and Geneva, Switzerland.

See more of Terry Winter's work here: http://www.matthewmarks.com/

Caelum: MFA Sculpture Seminar Exhibit Opens at the Rotunda, Fri. April 24 6-9pm

Caelum: Work in Response to The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and the Rotunda's Sanctuary Space

Work by Students in the MFA Sculpture Seminar: Chris Lawrence, Kyle LoPinto, Evi Numen, Maria Rajewski, Heather Ramsdale, Jacolby Satterwhite, Christie Whisman.

Color Organ by Sonic Measures

April 17-23, 2009
Reception: Friday April 24, 6-9pm

The Rotunda
4014 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA
www.therotunda.org

Terry Adkins is Awarded the Rome Prize! Congratulations!

Sculpture Professor Terry Adkins has been awarded the prestigious 2009 Rome Prize in visual arts. Terry is among 25 visual artists and scholars who will spend a year working at the American Academy in Rome.

Terry's proposed project, Flumen Orationis, Latin for River of Speech, will highlight African influence in Rome. Three early popes came from North Africa. “In my work, I try to pick historically transformative figures who are little known,” Adkins said. “In Rome, I want to bring to light their presence there and revisit their legacy. “

The American Academy in Rome was established in 1894. The Rome Prize is awarded to artists and scholars through a national competition. Rome Prize fellowships are designed for emerging artists and for scholars in the early or middle stages of their careers. Fellowship winners come to Rome to refine and expand their own professional, artistic or scholarly aptitudes, drawing on their colleagues' erudition and experience, as well as on the inestimable resources of the Italian capital, Europe and the Mediterranean. The Academy's Rome Prize winners, the core of a residential community of up to 100 people at any given time, are at the center of a multi-disciplinary environment, where artists and scholars are encouraged to work collegially within and across disciplines.

LECTURE: Stanley Lewis, painter. FRIDAY, April 17th at 4:30pm...Morgan Bldg. White Room

STANLEY LEWIS, Painter

Friday, Apr 17th at 4:30pm

WHITE ROOM
Morgan Building
205 s. 34th street, Philadelphia, PA

After receiving a BA from Wesleyan University, Lewis went on to receive a BFA and MFA from Yale and was a Danforth Fellow. Solo exhibitions have included Dartmouth College, NH; the Bowery Gallery, NY and the Dorry Gates Gallery, MO. A major retrospective of his work was shown at the American University Museum, Washington D.C. in 2007. Group shows include the Delaware College of Art and Design; the Commission for Arts and Humanities in Washington D.C., and Swarthmore College, PA. His work is in the collections of the Albrecht Gallery, MO and the University of Indiana among others. Lewis' teaching experience includes The American University in Washington D.C.; Smith College MA, and Parsons School of Design, NY. Awards include both the Altman Prize and a Henry Ward Ranger Fund Purchase Award from the National Academy of Design, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

For more info see: Midwest Paint Group

LECTURE: Alec Soth. Thurs., April 16th at 5:30pm...B-1 Meyerson Hall

(click image for bigger view)

ALEC SOTH, Photographer
Thursday, April 16th at 5:30PM

B-1 Meyerson Hall
210 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Alec Soth’s work is rooted in the distinctly American tradition of ‘on-the-road photography’ developed by Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. From Huckleberry Finn to Easy Rider there seems to be a uniquely American desire to travel and chronicle the adventures that consequently ensue. He has received fellowships from the McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are represented in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Walker Art Center. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial and a career survey at the Jeu de Paume in 2008. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published NIAGARA (Steidl, 2006), Fashion Magazine (Magnum, 2007), and Dog Days, Bogotá (Steidl, 2007). He is represented by the Gagosian Gallery in New York and the Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis.

The University of Pennsylvania's Residency Program is made possible by the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Fund to Support Contemporary Culture and Visual Arts. The Spiegel Fund creates and supports a series of coordinated interdisciplinary courses, programs and events.

NOTE: Admission is free, but tickets are required for this event. Tickets will be available one hour prior to the start of time in the lobby of Meyerson Hall.

http://www.alecsoth.com/

Tetsugo Hyakutake (MFA '09) in group exhibition at Alan Klotz Gallery ... Opening Thurs, April 23 6-8pm

Tetsugo Hyakutake, Limestone Quarry, Tokyo, Japan 2007

Cosa Nostra : (Our Thing)

Opening Reception: Thursday April 23rd, 6 - 8 PM
Exhibition Dates: April 9th - May 2nd 2009

A selection of work by the gallery's artists, plus some invited guests.

The show features work by:

Pavel Banka
Carolyn Marks Blackwood
William Christenberry
Rebecca Cummins
Alyson Denny
Gilbert Fastenaekens
Terri Garland
Tetsugo Hyakutake
Melissa Ann Pinney
Robert Richfield
Charles Schwartz and Bill Westheimer
Aaron Siskind
Andrew Thompson

Alan Klotz Gallery
511 West 25th Street, Suite 701
New York New York 10001
212 741 4764
info@klotzgallery.com
www.klotzgallery.com

Lecture Review: Pasolini

Atmospheres

Fear of an answer, that it crouches in the lecturer’s mouth. The Cinema Studies Colloquium opened only gaps. Every explanation couched itself in these terms. Nothing was settled in locus Pasolini. By moving him to inhospitable plains, in driving the poles further apart, much was accomplished. Turns out there are more than seven hills to roam, more space. Possibly we can all have a mansion here. The winds that are coming are great, the moon the only warmth.

The focus was Teorema, originally a novel. Pasolini turned it into a film with less than a thousand words, a mostly silent drift through bourgeois Milan, centered on a single family. Not much can be done to explain it. The book took these expository steps, even though it precedes the film, and it was abandoned. Can this be said, that a beginning explains its end? Not even Aquinas has an answer.

Teorema the book dissolved into Teorema the film, bringing to the screen a subsistence economy of gaps, cuts, and inexplicable gulfs. The method is reductive, erosive, destructive. Juan Rulfo, in explaining the similar atmosphere of his book Pedro Paroma, said he had to carry the narrative around in his head for years until it was shattered and shuffled enough to fit his sense of its form. But what shattered it? Why was the form different?

In its title the lecture hinted that it might follow Pasolini in his method: “The Obliteration of the Children of the Bourgeoisie in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Vision (Part 1).” Destruction stimulated Pasolini, any violence aimed at generation. Indeed, no “Part 2” is scheduled.

She discussed another film, Porcile, a diptych contrasting a Nazi’s son with a starving cannibal who occasionally assails a victim in a medieval wasteland. The title refers to pork, more specifically capitalist societies which consume, defecate, consume. Such films, even divorced from any theoretical underpinning (any attempts to connect them with sterile Marxist concepts only emphasized this), still speak of irresistible corrosion, of some weight. Who knows what drives it. Medieval cannibalism might not be too far. We can’t account for it any more than we can account for the way books die from exposure. George Oppen, of the poets, forever:

……they feel themselves
The end of a chain

Of lives, single lives
And we know that lives
Are single

And cannot defend
The metaphysic
On which rest

The boundaries
Of our distances.
We want to say

(Of Being Numerous, 26)

Whether or not Marxism is still with us, whether it has acceded to its spectral status or persists as a presence which talks and talks and talks of anything anything anything- (who knows anymore?)- or whether another concept has succeeded it, itself frail and fading, does not seem to matter for Pasolini, the colloquium, or ourselves. What does matter is this visceral sense of some insistent gnawing at the present foundations. It was illumined in the scenes of Teorema which juxtapose the clenched fist of an eerily traumatized beautiful young Milanese girl with small drifting tufts of cottony smoke upon the black sands of Mt. Etna.

By such means Pasolini evokes his idea of the “eruption of the sacred,” that something which strains against the dead walls of the Milanese home, which rages within or against the closed fist of the young girl as she lay in bed surrounded by her sated, clinical family. This is familiar, and it hardly accounts for the effect of those drifting clouds, so close to the rare black ground.

What of the film if its ideas are lost? Would it become nothing? What of Teorema the book if Teorema the film is thus? What of Juan Rulfo’s original narrative if Pedro Paroma is thus? Why did they erode, cut? The lecture too worked in this valence.

If Teorema retains value, it will not be by its sources and referents, whether imaginative, societal, conceptual, or biographical. A work is none of these. They fade, and still some substance persists. Every investigation, the lecture included, works wittingly or unwittingly to exclude itself as a possible explanation. Something becomes fixed and evident only when it is wrong. A film, a book, a lecture can fight this, or use it. They float freely, though still bounded. By the end of the colloquium some hideous interval had been cleared, leaving the desert a little north.

Critical thought, taken in this sense, seems but a cutting of the ropes. Marxism excluded itself by exhausting itself. But something substantive still weighs on us, this thing it indicated. It erupts sometimes from Teorema or the rattling of a trolley at night. It floats freely in the smoke-filled air, shadowing the silver ashes, a makeshift balloon in medieval Russia. The lecture demonstrated the value of an erosive method; “rain also is part of the process” (Pound, Canto LXXIV). The film, turning its back on the book, only accumulates treasure. Those who do not seek the world shall gain it. Those who seek the world shall lose it.

LECTURE: Matthew Ritchie, Painter/Installation Artist. Mon. April 13 5:30pm. Meyerson B1

MATTHEW RITCHIE: Painter/Installation Artist

Monday, April 13, 5:30pm

Matthew Ritchie's installations of painting, wall drawings, light boxes, sculpture, and projections are investigations of the idea of information. Explored through science, architecture, history and the dynamics of culture, his works are defined equally by their range and their lyrical visual language.

In 2001, Time magazine listed Ritchie as one of 100 innovators for the new millennium, for exploring "the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought." More omnivorous than omnipotent, encompassing everything from cutting-edge physics, ancient myth, neo-noir short stories and medieval alchemy to climate change, contemporary politics and economic theory, his installations fuse unique narrative forms with our constantly changing factual understanding of our universe. Typically, for his exhibition "We Want To See Some Light" at Portikus, Frankfurt, in 2005, he collaborated with a visual neurologist, an architect, a group of students and a philosopher to examine the physical limits of generated knowledge.

His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide including the Whitney Biennial, the Sao Paulo Bienal and the Sydney Biennial. Solo shows include the Dallas Museum of Art; the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Portikus, Frankfurt and The Fabric Workshop and Museum. A major permanent installation; designed in conversation with Pritzker prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, opened in December 2006 in a new Federal Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.


Meyerson Room B1
University of Pennsylvania
School of Design
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA
215.898.8374
www.design.upenn.edu/fine-arts

MFA Photo Seminar Exhibit Opens in Meyerson Gallery, April 10

Film Still, La Jetee, 1962.

La Jetee: The Response.

Work by students in the MFA Photography Seminar: Edward Carey, Matthew Thomas Cianfrani, Jessica Clauser, Tia-Simone Gardner, Tetsugo Hyakutake, Nsenga Knight, Antonio McAfee, Joe Ovelman.

April 10th - 17th, 2009
Closing Reception Friday April 17, 5:30 - 7:30

Meyerson Gallery
University of Pennsylvania
School of Design
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA
215.898.8374
www.design.upenn.edu/fine-arts

Gallery Hours Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm

Alexi Worth (MFA Senior Critic) awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship...Congratulations!

Model in Shadow, 2008

Alexi Worth, Artist, Brooklyn, New York; Senior Critic, Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania: Painting.

From the Guggenheim press release:
"Edward Hirsch, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced today that in its eighty-fifth annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded 180 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars. The successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. One of the hallmarks of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is the diversity of its Fellows. The ages of this year's Fellows range from twenty-nine to seventy; their residences span the world, from Waipahu, Hawaii, to New York City and from Toronto to Glasgow; and their Fellowship projects will carry them to every continent..."

To learn more about the Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, see their website: http://www.gf.org/news-events/

LECTURE TONIGHT: Jenelle Porter, ICA associate curator...Thurs., April 9th at 6PM...Morgan White Room

The Real World Lecture Series Presents…

JENELLE PORTER: associate curator, Institute of Contemporary Art
THURSDAY, April 9th at 6:00 PM

Jenelle Porter is associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, where she has most recently organized “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay,” “Joshua Mosley: dread,” “Trisha Donnelly,” “Locally Localized Gravity,” and “Gone Formalism,” among others. From 1998-2001 she was curator at Artists Space in New York where she organized over twenty exhibitions, including a re-creation of the seminal 1977 Artists Space exhibition “Pictures.” She was a curatorial fellow at the Walker Art Center (1997-98) and a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994-1997). She has written essays for several catalogues and magazines, and books on artists Trisha Donnelly, Joshua Mosley, Stephen Prina, Matthew Ritchie, and Uri Tzaig.

White Room
Morgan Building
205 S. 34th Street

fine-art@design.upenn.edu
http://www.design.upenn.edu/new/finar/

Interesting new website for art/artist videos launched by the Indianapolis Museum of Art

An article in the New York Times recently introduced a new web resource for art focused media. Artbabble will feature such hard to find material as artist interviews and short profiles of curators and art handlers. This could be a great way for artists to get a behind-the-scenes sense of how arts institutions function. The website opens with links to videos featuring Brice Marden, Maya Lin, and a preview of the 5th Art:21 season.

Here is an excerpt from the article written by Kate Taylor (3/6/2009):

"In the last few years, as museums have tried to take advantage of the Internet to connect with young audiences, they have produced an increasing number of online videos, from artist interviews and time-lapse shots of exhibition installations to short profiles of curators, art handlers, and even museum guards. Most institutions feature these videos on their own Web sites, as well as uploading them to sites like YouTube or blip.tv. But until now, there has been no dedicated place on the Web for art videos...
Maxwell Anderson, the museum's director, said the goal behind ArtBabble, and the museum’s own video production, is to allow visitors to 'experience the life of museums,' whether through employee profiles, studio visits with artists or videos of conservators restoring objects. The advantage of making the new video site a collaborative one was obvious, he said: 'The strength and potency of this as a shared site is much greater than one museum at a time'.”

Here is a link to the NYT article: www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/arts/design/07babb.html

Check out Artbabble: www.artbabble.org

John Moore (MFA Senior Critic) exhibition opening at Arthur Ross Gallery...Wed., April 8th from 4-7pm

A Fine Fall Day, 2008 (detail)

Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Dean of the School of Design
invites you to preview…

John Moore

Thirteen Miles From Paradise

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2009
Gallery talk by the artist at 4.00 pm
Reception to follow from 5.00 – 7.00 pm

Exhibition continues through June 14, 2009

ARTHUR ROSS GALLERY
University of Pennsylvania
220 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA

Opening co-sponsored by the Arthur Ross Gallery and the School of Design

Chris Lawrence (MFA '10) in group exhibition at Crane Arts Center...OPENING Thurs., April 9th 6-9pm

DIVERSE PATHS

Opening Reception: April 9th 6-9pm
Exhibition Dates: April 9 – May 7, 2009 (Wed-Sun:12-5pm)

SEA: Space for Experimental Art
Crane Arts Center
1400 N. American Street
Philadelphia, PA

For more info: www.cranearts.com

MONDAY: Talk with Michael Brenson (MFA Senior Critic) on "The MFA Question"...Morgan Building White Room at 8PM

$K6?: THE MFA QUESTION

with Michael Brenson

MONDAY April 6th at 8pm
White Room, Morgan Building

Informal discussion about art education and that which is The (your) MFA.

Essays available online:

· Thierry De Duve's essay on what art education could/should be
· Essays from the avant garde school in Frankfurt
· Revision Number 6 ADDICTIONS by Dave Hickey from Art in America

You can download the essays in our course folder by logging in with your penn key here: http://www.design.upenn.edu/remoteaccess
Navigate to FNAR and then the “distribution” folder

THIS FRIDAY: Women in Fine Arts Panel Discussion featuring MFA Alumni...Morgan Building White Room 4PM

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Friday, April 3, 4-5:30pm

Morgan Building, White Room

Panel discussion on gender and careers in fine arts with…

Carson Fox, Penn BFA, multi-media, www.carsonfox.com

Jill Sablosky, PennDesign MFA '79, sculptor, www.inliquid.com/artist/sablosky_jill/sablosky.php

Marjorie van Cura, PennDesign MFA '02, painter, www.marjorievancura.com

All PennDesign students--men and women, undergraduate majors and grad students--are welcome. Refreshments and hors d'oeuvres will be served. RSVP if attending to Rachel at rlburk@upenn.edu.

Series sponsored by the Trustees’ Council for Penn Women and organized by Career Services.

LECTURE: John Kindness... THURSDAY Apr. 2nd at 12pm...Morgan Bldg. White Room

GRADUATE FINE ARTS LECTURE

JOHN KINDNESS, Visual Artist

THURSDAY, April 2nd 2009, NOON

WHITE ROOM
MORGAN BUILDING
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
205 S. 34th ST. PHILADELPHIA, PA 19104

John Kindness studied fine art at the old College of Art (now the University of Ulster) and worked as a graphic designer for the BBC before devoting himself full-time to art making in 1986. Since then he has held fellowships in the International Studio Program at PS1 in Queens and the British School in Rome. His exhibition, "Treasures of New York," led to solo exhibitions at the ICA in Philadelphia, the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, the Drawing Room in New York, and Littlejohn Contemporary. His work is collected in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, British Council, Imperial War Museum, National Gallery of Ireland, Ulster Museum, and Victoria and Albert Museum. He lives in London.

Kindness is visiting the University of Pennsylvania for the premier of opera “The Loathly Lady”, libretto written by Penn’s English Professor Wendy Steiner and music by Paul Richards. John Kindness has contributed all of the artwork for the production.

Go to www.phf.upenn.edu for more information on "The Loathly Lady"

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.