Tonight (Friday, April 4th) from 6 to 8 p.m., the Visual & Critical Studies program is hosting an opening reception for a new exhibition of landscape paintings by VCS student Joseph De Sena. The show is located on the 4th floor at 133 West 21st Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. We hope to see you there.
Tonight at 7 p.m., the Visual & Critical Studies Program will present Freshly Minted, a panel discussion about life after art school moderated by VCS faculty member Peter Hristoff. The SVA Theatre is located at 333 West 23rd Street (between 8th and 9th avenues), and the event is free and open to the public.
You can read more about Freshly Minted below, or at this post from last week.
The VCS Chair Readings series is a monthly mailing of recently published short essays recommended by department chair Tom Huhn. This month, Tom has selected the essay “Obama’s Battalions: The Last White Election?” by Mike Davis, from the January/February 2013 issue of New Left Review. Here are his comments on it:
I’m very happy to recommend this detailed essay by Mike Davis on the most recent US Presidential election. It contains the most extensive analysis I’ve seen thus far on the peculiarities of our most recent election. And it has some rather sweeping implications for the future of the Republican Party. I trust you will learn much from it.
“The Last White Election?” is available for download as a PDF file via this link.
The previous entries in the VCS Chair Readings series are available for download at tomhuhn.com/chair-readings.php
On Thursday, April 4th, the Visual & Critical Studies Program will present Freshly Minted, a panel discussion about life after art school, moderated by VCS faculty member Peter Hristoff. The following text from the SVA event announcement contains information about the panelists and the topics that will be discussed.
This panel discussion, moderated by fine artist and SVA faculty member Peter Hristoff, examines the challenges that post-BFA art-school graduates face. Artists Timothy Bergstrom, Shannon Broder, Sophia Dawson, Elan Jurado, Cassandra Levine, and Kenneth Rivero discuss issues such as: “the MFA dilemma” (whether to pursue an MFA, and when); post-graduation “survival” tactics, including repaying student loans, renting a studio, managing living expenses, and finding the time to make new work; the undergraduate/graduate experience; and strategizing a career. Participants discuss how these concerns affect their artistic practice and give brief presentations on their recent work. Presented by the BFA Visual & Critical Studies Department.
You can also find a little more background information on the event e-vite, shown in the image above (click to see a larger version online).
Freshly Minted will take place at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 4th, 2013 in the SVA Theatre at 333 West 23rd Street (between 8th and 9th avenues). The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the theatre at 212-592-298 or SVATheatre@sva.edu
On Friday, April 5th from 4 to 9 p.m., the MFA Art Practice Department will present the symposium We’re All Videofreex: Changing Media and Social Change from Portapak to Smartphone at the SVA Theatre. The symposium was organized with support from the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media, BFA Fine Arts and BFA Visual & Critical Studies departments.
Here is a description of We’re All Videofreex from the event announcement on the SVA website:
David A. Ross, chair, MFA Art Practice Department, and Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media, reunite members of the pioneering video collective, the Videofreex, for the symposium We’re All Videofreex: Changing Media and Social Change from Portapak to Smartphone. Between 1969 and 1978, the group shot hundreds of hours of real-time video with newly invented portable cameras and founded Lanesville TV, the first pirate TV station. Simon leads a discussion about Subject to Change, the Videofreex production commissioned—and subsequently dropped—by CBS, in the context of the challenges to traditional journalism brought on by the introduction of video and the emerging counterculture. Following a screening of the group’s work and a Q&A, Ross moderates a panel on the Videofreex’s contribution to video-art history and renewed significance at a moment in which the proliferation of personal recording devices and decentralized broadcasting platforms fuel uprisings worldwide.
For more information including a detailed schedule of events in the symposium, visit the event announcement at the link above. You can also learn more and watch footage from the Videofreex at the We’re All Videofreex Tumblr.
[Poster image: David Cort shooting 'Mayday Realtime,' photo courtesy the Videofreex.]
This month, VCS faculty member Peter Hristoff is showing works in two new exhibitions in the New York City area. The first is Sublime Porte: Art and Contemporary Turkey at the Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery/Sun Yat Sen Hall at St. John’s University in Queens. Here’s a little more about it, quoted from the exhibition listing on the St. John’s University website:
St. John’s University is honored to present Sublime Porte: Art and Contemporary Turkey, an exhibition which features a broad range of contemporary works by a select group of emerging and internationally acclaimed artists whose works respond to Turkey’s rich cultural diversity. The exhibition addresses issues of race, gender, sexuality, religion and politics as well as broader arguments concerning art, culture and globalization.
In addition to Peter, Sublime Porte includes works by artists Osman Akan, Burak Arikan, Kezban Batibeki, Nezaket Ekici, Paul Fabozzi, Murat Germen, Gözde İlkin, Michael Marfione, Alex Morel, Arzu Ozkal, Gulay Semercioglu, Orkan Telhan, Elif Uras and Halil Vurucuoglu.. It will be on display from March 14th to May 2nd, 2013. For more information including the gallery address, please visit the link above.
Peter’s work is also currently on display through April 20th at the Hotel Particulier at 6 Grand Street in Manhattan, in the group exhibition DYNASTY, curated by Amy Goldrich, Christopher K. Ho, Omar Lopez-Chahoud, and Sara Reisman. Here’s a little more about this exhibition:
Hotel Particulier is pleased to present DYNASTY, on view from January 31 to April 20, 2013, an exhibition modeled on the cross-generational dynamics of families. The curators created a fictional family: Sara Reisman “married” Christopher K. Ho, and Reisman’s “sister” Amy Goldrich “married” Omar Lopez-Chahoud. Each couple then bequeathed their primary asset – the gallery space itself – to artist-children.
Seven artists comprise the first generation: Sean Fader, Nikki Reisman, Jose Ruiz, Matthew Schrader, and Kristof Wickman (invited by Ho and Reisman), as well as Liz Magic Laser and Ali Banisadr (invited by Goldrich and Lopez-Chahoud). Magic Laser partnered with Becca Albee to collaborate in a single project, while Banisadr invited artists who inspire him: Gregory Crane, Peter Hristoff, Pooneh Maghazehe, Pat Mason, Tom McGrath, Aaron Spangler, and Sandra Vazques De La Horra. Fader opted to collaborate with Naomi Miller, Schrader shared his space with S.G. Schell, and Wickman bequeathed his space with Ethan Greenbaum, Kristen Jensen, Martin Murphy, Steven Rose, Andrew Norman Wilson, Bryan Zanisnik, and his father Dick Wickman.
The exhibition includes performances addressing familial and filial relations, creative influence, and the evolution, growth, distribution, and consumption of ideas and objects over generations and time. Taking place at Hotel Particulier is Mary Mattingly and Greg Lindquist’s midnight dinner based on Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant Food, a gathering spot for a diverse “family” of artists in the ‘70s. Other performances include Sean Fader and Naomi Miller’s blind dating service; Andrew Norman Wilson’s Lie Down Comedy; and Bryan Zanisnik’s piece involving his biological parents.
For more information about this show including event times and locations, visit the DYNASTY page on the Hotel Particulier website.
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One additional note: Peter will be holding another drawing marathon from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on April 20th. You can read a description of it here, and find the course number and registration details here. (You can also find a few images from the spring 2012 drawing marathon here.)
Here’s an announcement I just received from Bret Schneider, Assistant to VCS Department Chair Tom Huhn:
Tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday), from noon-1pm in room 401C artist Haseeb Ahmed will be giving a brief presentation of his work. He’ll be discussing recent research at both MIT and the Jan Van Eyck Academy, as well as current exhibitions.
Feel free to bring your lunch!
We hope to see you there.
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Last week during SVA’s spring break, VCS faculty member Amy Wilson traveled to San Francisco to serve as a guest artist at the California College of the Arts. While she was there, she delivered an artist’s talk to students in the school’s MFA Fine Arts program, and held studio visits with several of them afterward. Amy’s lecture was presented as part of a class designed to prepare students for life after art school. During the talk, she covered her career as a working artist after her graduation from the Yale MFA Sculpture program, the jobs she’s had over the years, exhibitions she’s been in, her gallery, and the current state of the art market in New York and elsewhere.
Here’s a comment from Amy about her visit to CCA:
I always really like going to speak at other schools and meeting a different group of students there. It gives me an interesting perspective on what we’re doing at SVA.
The class I spoke to was specifically designed to give their graduate students “real world” skills for surviving in the art world. Things are quite different for artists in SF than in NYC (for instance, there are more opportunities for grants in SF, but fewer opportunities to show in commercial gallery spaces), so part of the reason why I was there was to report on the things I see as an artist on the East Coast.
While she was at CCA, Amy also spent a little time looking at some of the surrounding area. Here are a few photos that she took while she was there.
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This Tuesday, March 12th, The Visual & Critical Studies program will present the “The Appeal of Tragedy,” a lecture by Paul Schwaber:
Aristotle considered tragedy central to the engaging claim that great verbal art has on us. Nietzsche, Freud and many others have recognized tragedy as opening usefully—enjoyably, distressingly, puzzlingly and safely—to the mysteries and fascinations of persons, families, politics and culture. Closely examining Shakespeare’s tragedies Romeo and Juliet and King Lear, Schwaber will discuss their continuing hold on us and what they may tell us both of art and of ourselves.
Paul Schwaber is Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University and a practicing psychoanalyst. He has published extensively on the relations of imaginative literature and psychoanalysis. He co-edited Of Poetry and Power: Poems Occasioned by the Presidency and by the Death of John F. Kennedy (Basic Books) and is the author of The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses (Yale University Press).
“The Appeal of Tragedy,” will take place at 6 p.m. this Tuesday, March 12th in Room 101C at 133/141 West 21 Street in New York City (between 6th and 7th avenues). The lecture is free and open to the public.
This month’s entry in the VCS Chair Readings series is a selection from the September 2012 issue of the journal Modernism/Modernity. Here are some comments about it from VCS Department Chair Tom Huhn:
I’m very happy to pass on and recommend this illuminating essay by Amy M. Von Lintel, “Wood Engravings, the ‘Marvelous Spread of Illustrated Publications,’ and the History of Art.” Von Lintel explores the prominent role played by wood engravings in the circulation of art historical images in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her essay details how important wood engravings were for the transmission and dissemination of art historical images for both popular as well as academic art history audiences. There’s much to be learned here in regard to the kind and quality of art historical images that were circulating before the widespread adoption of the photograph as the primary medium of reproduction. I trust you will enjoy the essay.
You can download ”Wood Engravings, the ‘Marvelous Spread of Illustrated Publications,’ and the History of Art” via this link.
The previous entries in the VCS Chair Readings series are also all available for download at tomhuhn.com/chair-readings.php