KATE GILMORE - Thurs. Sept 16 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

In her recent video at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Kate Gilmore punches and kicks through a sculptural structure using sheer muscle power and desperate determination, while wearing high-heels and feminine polka-dot dress. Born in Washington D.C., Gilmore has been the recipient of numerous international awards, including the Rome Prize from the American Academy, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, The LMCC Workspace Residency, New York Foundation for The Arts Fellowship, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program. Her work has been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions at the Public Art Fund in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, PS1/MoMA, the Kitchen, the Getty Museum, Haifa Museum of Art, MAK Museum in Vienna, Istanbul Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and more. Gilmore’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications including: The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Guardian, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Flash Art, Village Voice, Chicago Tribune, Art in America, Time Out/NewYork, Art Papers, and Artforum.

RICHARD PELL - Tues. Sept 21 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Richard Pell is an artist working at the intersections of science, engineering and culture.  He is the founder of the Center for PostNatural History, an outreach center dedicated to the collection and exposition of genetically engineered life-forms. The Center has been awarded a Rockefeller New Media fellowship, a Creative Capital fellowship, a Smithsonian research fellowship and is currently in residence at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon.

Pell is a founding member of the highly acclaimed art and engineering collective, the Institute for Applied Autonomy. IAA projects have been exhibited in art and engineering contexts such as the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Mass MoCA, Ars Electronica, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Hackers On Planet Earth and the International Conference On Robotics And Automation. IAA projects have been presented with an Award of Distinction and two Honorable Mentions at the Prix-Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and were selected for RES Magazine’s “10 Best New Artists of 2005”. Currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pell graduated with a BFA from CMU in 1999 and received his MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2003.

DZINE - Thurs. Sept 30 / 5pm, McConomy Auditorium

Kraus Visiting Professor of Art (Spring 2011)

Puerto Rican artist Dzine (born Carlos Rojon) creates work that is an ongoing response to popular culture through use of baroque elements, post-conceptual methods, romanticism, craft making, and appropriation. Often dissected and consistently engaging, his work examines culture through a lens of spirituality, beauty, desire, and identity.  A mixture of sculpture, painting, and installation, Dzine’s work resides in an kaleidoscopic and meticulous world. Collaborating with select fabricators, he creates ornate bike sculptures that boast a mixture of custom painting, engraving, 24 karat gold plating, video/audio components, and a range of embellishments.  Each custom part is carefully selected for its utility as well as its beauty, resulting in a sculptural form that is a rigorous example of technical and artistic ingenuity.  Dzine’s final presentations romp within a rich middle ground between the more refined aesthetics of contemporary art and the seediness of street culture. By musing on the sculptural, traditional, and inventive forms employed throughout Chicano Low-rider motorcycles, Dzine's uses his investigation of kustom kulture as a platform to examine his own identify and relationship with this lifestyle and set of aesthetics.

JER THORP - Tues. Oct 5 / 5pm, McConomy Auditorium

sponsored by the STUDIO for creative inquiry

Jer Thorp is an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada. A former geneticist, his digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art. Recently, his work has been featured by The New York Times Developer Network, The Guardian, BusinessWeek and the CBC. Thorp’s award-winning software-based work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Australia, and all over the web. Thorp is an instructor in Langara College’s Electronic Media Design Program, and a frequent guest lecturer at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University. In his previous life as a Flash developer and designer, Thorp produced work for a broad base of clients including Honda, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, FOX, and the LA Kings. blprnt.com, Thorp’s unique collection of organic Flash experiments and generative artworks, has won numerous awards and has been featured in many art and design publications, both online and in print. Thorp is a contributing editor for Wired UK and is currently artist-in-residence at Columbia University’s EdLab.

CORNELIA HESSE-HONNEGGER - Tues. Oct 19 / 5pm, Kresge

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger is a scientific illustrator and artist who has  worked as an illustrator for the Natural History Museum at the University of Zurich for over 25 years. Her drawings, an interface between art and science, pay witness to a beautiful but endangered nature. Since the catastrophe of the Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown in 1986, she has collected, studied and painted morphologically disturbed insects that she collects from areas that have been contaminated by nuclear radiation. Her works have been exhibited in art and science museums the world over, including: The Chelsea Museum, The London Science Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Milan Triennale. Her works have also been featured in the April 2010 issue of Wired magazine and have been collected in her extraordinary book "Heteroptera The Beautiful and the Other or Images of a Mutating World."

JEAN SHIN - Tues. Oct 26 / 5pm, Kresge

Jeff C. Pan Visiting Artist

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Jean Shin currently lives and works in New York City. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute. Within the last decade, Shin has become nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community.  For each project, she amasses vast collections of a particular object—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community.  These objects then become the materials for her conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations.  Distinguished by her meticulous, labor-intensive process, and her engagement of community, Shin’s arresting installations reflect individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society. She has received numerous awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures (2008), has widely exhibited her work in major museums, and has been featured in numerous publications, including Frieze Art, Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, and The New York Times.

DORYUN CHONG  - Tues. Nov 9 / 5pm, Kresge

Orville M. Winsand Lecture for Critical Studies in Art

Doryun Chong is the recipient of the first Independent Voice Curatorial Award (2010) from Independent Curators International (ICI), and was recently appointed Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York in June 2009. At MoMA, he organized the installation of Ernesto Neto's early sculpture 'Navedenga' (1998) and Bruce Nauman’s recent work, 'Days' (2009), both in the Museum collection. He’s currently organizing a solo exhibition of Berlin-based artist Henrik Olesen, which will open in February 2011, as part of MoMA’s Projects series. From 2003-2009, Chong was a curator in the Visual Arts Department at the Walker Art Center and organized a number of exhibitions, including "House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective" (2005), "Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis (2008), and Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider" (2009) — all of which were the first US retrospectives for these artists. He also organized group exhibitions including "Brave New Worlds" (2007), co-organized "Brinkmanship: Park Chan-Kyong and Sean Snyder" (2010) at REDCAT in Los Angeles, and was a co-curator of the 2006 Busan Biennale in South Korea. He has contributed to publications such as Afterall and ArtAsiaPacific, is a regular columnist for the bilingual Japanese-English web journal Art iT, and also recently contributed to the Fourth Auckland Triennale exhibition catalogue (2010).

NICOLA LOPEZ - Tues. Nov 16 / 5pm, Kresge

co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh

Born in Santa Fe, NM, Nicola López currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Through her work in printmaking, drawing and installation, López describes and reconfigures our contemporary—primarily urban—landscape. Her interest in describing “place” stems both from traveling, studying, and working in other countries, including Mexico, Peru, and Morocco, and from her undergraduate studies as an anthropology major at Columbia University. López attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture and received her MFA in visual arts from Columbia University, and an MFA Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, and the Denver Art Museum. Her work has also been the subject of solo shows at galleries throughout the US and was most recently featured in a show called Nicola López: Urban Transformations at both The Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI and this past winter at the Mesaros Galleries at West Virginia University.

GUILLERMO GOMEZ PENA - Wed. Dec 1 / 5pm, Kresge

co-sponsored by the Center for Arts in Society and ArtUp

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist/writer and the director of the art collective La Pocha Nostra. He was born in Mexico City, he came to the US in 1978. Since then he has been exploring cross-cultural issues through performance, multilingual poetry, journalism, video, radio, and installation art. His performance work and 8 books have contributed to debates on cultural diversity, identity, and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over seven hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT).

TREVOR PAGLEN - Thurs. Jan 28 / 5pm, McConomy Auditorium

Co-presented by the Contestational Cartographies Symposium (Jan. 28-30) organized by the Miller Gallery and STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, in connection with “Experimental Geography” on view at the Miller Gallery through January 31, 2010.

TREVOR PAGLEN is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer whose work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. Paglen is the author of three books: Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson; Melville House, 2006), the first book to systematically describe the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program; I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Melville House, 2007), an examination of the visual culture of “black” military programs; and Blank Spots on a Map (Dutton/Penguin, 2009). In spring 2010, Aperture will publish a book of his visual work, which has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Wired, Newsweek, Modern Painters, Aperture, Artforum, and recently in Art Papers. During the Contestational Cartographies Symposium, Paglen will take the audience on a road trip through the world of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and more – through a landscape that military and intelligence insiders call the “black world”. From “nonexistent” Air Force and CIA installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan to a collection of even more obscure “black sites” startlingly close to home, he will show how the black world’s internal contradictions give rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to consider this contemporary moment.

KIM BECK - Tues. Feb 2 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

KIM BECK makes drawings, prints, paintings and installations that survey the peripheral spaces of architecture and landscape. Her work urges a reconsideration of the built environment – the peculiar street signs, gas station banners, overgrown weeded lots, and self-storage buildings — bringing the banal and everyday into focus. Beck has exhibited widely – at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. She is currently developing a project for the High Line in New York City. A recent participant in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, she has held other residencies at Yaddo, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Cité Internationale des Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and VCCA, and received awards and fellowships from ARS Electronica, the Pollock-Krasner, Thomas J. Watson and Heinz Foundations. Her artist’s book, A Field Guide to Weeds, was published through the Printed Matter Emerging Artist Publishing Program and is in its second edition. Beck received her BA from Brandeis University, MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently Associate Professor in the School of Art.

PAUL RAMIREZ JONAS - Thurs. Sept 30 / 5pm, Kresge Theatre

PAUL RAMIREZ JONAS creates as he speaks. Considering himself merely a reader, he treats pre-exisiting texts (a diary, an old photograph, a footpath, etc…) as a score, where the act of “reading” can take the form of a performance, sculpture, photograph, or video. These are simply re-enactments, according to Ramirez Jonas, who believes he has more in common with the public than with the author of the original work. Inviting viewers to join him in reading, he acts as a contact point between artwork and its public. Jonas’ work has been exhbiited at Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, Roger Bjorkholmen Galleri in Stockholm, Postmasters Gallery and Jack Tilton Gallery in New York, and included in numerous group shows such as: “The End” as Exit Art, New York; “Moving Pictures” at Real Art Ways, Connecticut; and “Always New Always Familiar” at IASPIS Gallery, Sweden.

DANIEL BOZHKOV - Tues. March 2 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

DANIEL BOZHKOV employs variety of media, from fresco to performance and video, and works with professionals across many fields, using different strategies to activate public space. He enters the worlds of genetic science, department mega-stores, and world-famous tourist-sites as an intruder/visitor who also functions as a producer of new strains of meaning into seemingly closed systems. Bozhkov is a recipient of a 2007 Chuck Close Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, and of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation, Art Matters, and Artslink. He has shown at: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NYC; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio; Arthouse at Jones Center in Austin, Texas; Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, Georgia; Skulpturenpark Berlin Zentrum, Berlin, Germany; Ikon Gallery, Burmingham, UK; OK Centrum fur Gegenwart Kunst, Linz, Austria and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, Turkey. International exhibitions include the 6th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2007, 9th Istanbul Biennale in Turkey in 2005, the 1st Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art in Russia in 2005, and the 9th Baltic Triennale in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2005. Bozhkov was a 2009 artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum of Art, New York. He is a Lecturer at Columbia University and Yale University, and is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York City.

DAVID FAMILIAN - Tues. March 23 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

DAVID FAMILIAN has worked at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, a media arts space at U.C. Irvine, since 2005. As the Center’s Artistic Director, he oversees programs and directs artist projects. He also curates exhibitions, most recently “Computational Poetics,” “Live” and “Constant World: The Art of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy,” a large-scale installation project by Shieh Chen Huang, and “Nam June Paik: Video Alchemy.” The current exhibition at the Beall is “Emergence: Art and Artificial Life,” co-curated with Simon Penny. He is currently working on artists’ projects with Director of CMU’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Golan Levin, as well as artists Chico MacMurtrie and Gail Wight. Familian received his BFA in Photography from California Institute of the Arts in 1979, and an MA and MFA from UCLA in 1986. Although he began his career as a photographer, since 1990 new media has become integral to his own artwork and his curatorial practice.

JANINE ANTONI - Tues. April 27 / 5pm @ Kresge Theatre

JANINE ANTONI was born in Freeport, Bahamas, and received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. In 1998, she won both a MacArthur Fellowship and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting and Sculpture Grant followed by a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999. Antoni’s work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture, transforming everyday activities such as eating, bathing, and sleeping into ways of making art. Her primary tool for making sculpture has always been her own body, whether chiseling cubes of lard and chocolate with her teeth, or using brainwave signals recorded from her dreams as a pattern for weaving a blanket. Antoni has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad at venues including Luhring Augustine gallery in New York, The Wadsworth Athenaeum, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and The Aldrich Museum. Her work was included in the 1993 Venice Biennial, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial, the 1997 Istanbul Biennial, the 2000 Kwangju Biennial in Korea, SITE Santa Fe in 2002 and at Prospect.1: A Biennial for New Orleans 2008.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

Contestational Cartographies Symposium

January 28-30, 2010

More info

Organized by the CMU Miller Gallery and STUDIO for Creative Inquiry,, in connection with “Experimental Geography” on view at the Miller Gallery through January 31, 2010.

Maps represent, maps reveal, maps entice, maps distort. They selectively omit, they unwittingly exaggerate, and they even make outright lies. Though maps strive to project authority and objectivity, they cannot help but embed the biases, blind-spots and idiosyncrasies of their human authors. As our lives are played out in increasingly networked realms, we have become carto-literate as never before; we read maps produced by governments and corporate interests, yes, but also collaboratively author maps online, inscribing new representations of ourselves and our priorities. Contestational Cartographies introduces the thoughts of leading “experimental geographers,” who employ mapping techniques in new modes of critical practice and cultural research, and in so doing, help us “read between the lines” of the world around us.

wats:ON? Festival / Adventures in Virtuality

March 17-20, 2010

More info

“Adventures in Virtuality,” will examine states of virtuality by bringing together artists and designers who work in both analog and digital modes. As an alternative to lectures, Wats:On invites both emerging and recognized artists to demonstrate and install their work as well as present workshops and discussions throughout the College of Fine Arts. Sponsored by The Jill Watson Family Foundation, the festival offers the campus community and general public a chance to engage with leading interdisciplinary artists.

ANN HAMILTON - Tues. Sept 8 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

2009 Robert Lepper Distinguished Lecture in Creative Inquiry

ANN HAMILTON Is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of lost collective voices, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, Hamilton’s site responsive environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Her public sculpture projects include permanent commissions in collaboration with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh and artist Michael Mercil for Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh, PA and Teardrop Park in Battery Park City, New York, NY. Her public commissions also include permanent works for the Seattle Central Library and the San Francisco Public Library. Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. Among her many honors, she has been a recipient of the Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowshio, United states Artists Fellowship, and was chosen to represent the United States at the 48th Venice Biennial in 2002. Two books published on her work include “Ann Hamilton”, a comprehensive monograph of her work todate and “Anne Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects”, both authored by Joan Simon. Presently, Hamilton is a Professor of Art at Ohio State University.

AYANAH MOOR - Tues. Sept 15 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

AYANAH MOOR is a visual artist whose work addresses contemporary popular culture through an interrogation of gender identity and vernacular aesthetics. Her print media, video and performance projects explore subject matter ranging from hip hop culture and politics, to black talk and women’s football. Moor is intrigued by the complexities of representation and employs appropriation and re-contextualization of popular themes to create dialogue and generate new meaning. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ice Box Project Space, Van Brunt Gallery, Jewett Art Center-Wellesley College, John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, The Print Center, A+D 11th Street Gallery at Columbia College Chicago, Forja ArteContemporáneo, and Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. Her work has been addressed in publications such as: “Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism” (Indiana University Press); “Black Women, Gender and Families” (University of Illinois Press); “Critical Inquiry” (University of Chicago Press); “Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip Hop Feminism Anthology” (Parker Publishing); and “Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip Hop Generation” (Cleis Press). Moor completed her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA at Tyler School of Art-Temple University. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

JIM TRAINOR - Tues. Sept 29 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

JIM TRAINOR has been making animated films since he was thirteen. Since that time his medium has changed little. His preferred technique is black magic marker on typing paper. “The Fetishist” (1997), a portrait of a serial killer, took him eleven years to make and is highly unpleasant, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. A series of films about animals – “The Bats”, “The Moschops”, “The Magic Kingdom”, and “Harmony” – followed, and have been widely screened, sometimes under the collective title “The Animals and Their Limitations”. “The Magic Kingdom” was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2000 Trainor was hired as a professor of art at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now lodged happily. He is currently at work on a new series of films, “Nascent Humanity”, of which “The Presentation Theme” has just been completed (2008). He is now at work on “The Ugliest Woman in the World” (estimated completion date: 2011), the story of a peripatetic culture-heroine whose hideous skin disease turns out be merely starchy foodstuffs clinging to her skin. Beyond filmmaking, his passions include looking closely at birds and insects and reading forgotten anthropology books of the 1920s. He is rumored to be the world’s foremost authority on headhunting.

SUSANNE SLAVICK - Tues. Oct 6 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

SUSANNE SLAVICK is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon, and previous Head of School from 2001-6. She graduated with a BFA from Yale University in 1978, studied at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and went on to earn an MFA at Tyler School of Art. Her work in paitning and 2D media explores aspects of paradox, attraction to and dread of absolutes, and the confrontation between and intersection of conflicting realities, such as: relationships between male and female, material and ethereal, sacred and secular, nature and artifice, the known and unknown, and the destroyer and the destroyed. Slavick has exhibited in museums and galleries in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis as well Europe and Asia. Her paintings have been recognized through an artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and four awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and recently honored as the 2008 “Artist of the Year” by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts where she premiered “R&R(&R),” an ongoing series of works on paper that convert our military expression for “rest and recuperation” to images of “revelation, regret, and restoration.” These and new works will be featured in a 2010 solo exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.

STEPHANIE SMITH - Thurs. Oct 9 / 5pm @ Kresge Theatre

In conjunction with the “29 Chains to the Moon” exhibition at the Miller Gallery. Lecture preceded by a workshop at 3pm in the gallery.

STEPHANIE SMITH is a designer and entrepreneur whose projects span the worlds of architecture, art, technology, and culture. Her research into the social practices of fringe and nomadic societies tielded a movement she calls “Wanna Start a Commune?”, and include diagrams for creating modern Cul-de-Sac Communes, portable kiosks for non-monetary exchange and meet-ups, and most recently an online platform for creating as many communes as your life demands, WeCommune. Smith is also the founder of Ecoshack, a design experiment that began in Joshua Tree, CA, and is now an LA-based design studio inspired by the ad hoc, indigenous and archetypal typoligies typically found at the fringes of society and culture. In 2008 the Whitney Museum identified Smith as the designer/entrepreneur most actively taking the ideas of Buckminster Fuller into the 21st century. This fall she’ll be in the Fuller-themed exhibition “29 Chains to the Moon: Artists’ Schemes for a Fantastic Future” at the Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University through December 6, 2009.

PAT OLESZKO - Tues. Oct 20 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

Kraus Visiting Professor of Art, Spring 2010

PAT OLESZKO makes a spectacle of herself and doesn’t mind if you laugh. Known as the Ms Tricks of Dis Guise, she has a large body of work which includes many Unnatural Acts. Utilizing elaborate costumes and props, she has created lithe performantzes, films and installations that a-dress trees, knees, breasts, butts, elephants and fingers. There have been notorious spatial events with the cast-off thousands. She has worked from the popular art forms of the street, party, parade and burlesque house to the Museum of Modern Art, from Sesame Street Magazine to Ms, Playboy, and Artforum. A much decorated artist both literally and figuratively, she has been amply rewarded for her diverse efforts pumping irony and disparately trying to bring home the beacon. The truth squirts.

PAOLO PEDERCINI  - Tues. Nov 3 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

New Visiting Faculty in Electronic & Time-Based Media

PAOLO PEDERCINI has produced quirky online games since 2003 addressing various social issues such as globalization, labor issues, religion and sexuality. His project “molleindustria” (Italian for soft industry) tries to tap the expressive and persuasive potential of the medium by turning upside-down well established genres and cliches. Exploiting the viral diffusion of contents on the net, his games reached millions of players without relying on commercial distribution channels and big budget productions. Paolo characterizes his project as a response to mainstream pop culture. Molleindustria’s intervention is not the only anomaly in the video gaming field. A new generation of developers is emerging at the margins of the industry. Defying big companies, independent game designers are flooding the Internet with provocative and experimental titles. The common perception of video games is changing as people are starting to realize that games can be expressive, meaningful and inspiring. Pedercini, who graduated with an MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009, will join the School of Art faculty in Fall 2009 as the new Assistant Professor of Art specializing in Electronic and Time-Based Media.

XU BING - Tues. Nov 10 / 5pm @ McConomy Auditorium

Co-sponsired by SUNY Buffalo

XU BING works in a wide range of media, creating installations that question the idea of communicating meaning through language, domonstrating how both meanings and written words can be easily manipulated. Among numerous awards. he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1999 for “originality, creativity, self-direction, and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy”. in addition to “Persistence/Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing”, a multidisciplinary study of the landmark work “Book from the Sky” published by Princeton University Press in 2006, in 2009 Bernard Quritch of London published “Tianshu: Passage in the Making of a Book”, the most thorough analysis of this work to date. Bing was born and raised in Beijing, China, and enrolled in the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1977, where he studied printmaking and received an MFA in 1987. In 1990 he set up residence in the U.S. Recently, in January 2008, he was appointed the new Vice President of CAFA. 

CLAIRE BISHOP - Tues. Nov 17 / 5pm @McConomy Auditorium

2009 Orville M. Winsand Lecture for Critical Studies in Art

CLAIRE BISHOP is an art historian and critic based at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art, London, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Essex. Publications by her include: “Installation Art: A Critical History” (Tate, 2005), “Participation” (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2006), and two influential essays – “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (October, 2004) and “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” (Artforum, 2006). In 2008 she co-curated with Mark Sladen “Double Agent” at the ICA, London, and recently published a related book on socially-engaged art and spectatorship.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

ART21: Season 5 Screenings

More info

EPISODE 2: FANTASY - October 2, 12noon-2pm, the FRAME Gallery
EPISODE 4: SYSTEMS - October 14, 7-9pm, Waffleshop

Mobile Art && Code Symposium

Nov. 6-8, 2009

More info/register

Mobile Art && Code: Mobile Telephony and Interactive Arts will focus on the aesthetic and tactical potentials of mobile, networked and locative media. The 3-day event will feature practical, arts-oriented programming workshops for popular mobile platforms (such as the iPhone, Android, PBX systems, and SMS hacking) along with an all-day series of lecture presentations that contextualizes these technologies in a variety of contemporary artistic and critical practices.