Category: Arts Lecture 2014/15 (Page 1 of 2)
Amjad Faur currently teaches photography and visual arts at The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. He came to Evergreen from the University of Arkansas, where he primarily taught art history and critical theory. His current research involves the overlapping visual languages of colonial Europe in the Middle East and the tropes/signifiers scattered throughout Western art history that harmonize with these expansionist tendencies.
Steven Hendricks was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He moved out west to attend Evergreen. He completed his MFA in Writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then returned to Washington to teach at Evergreen. Hendricks’s work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, Fold: The Reader, The Encyclopedia Project (Vol. 2), Sidebrow, and at XCP (archived at PennSound, 2005). Hendricks is also a practicing bookbinder and letterpress printer. His artists’ book work, Breathing Machine, appears in Lark Books’ anthology 500 Handmade Books: Inspiring Interpretations of a Timeless Form. He has shown artist book works in galleries in Olympia, Portland, and Seattle. His first novel, Little is Left to Tell, was published by Starcherone Books in the Fall of 2014.
Kim Miller received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York City and her MFA from Vermont College. Miller has shown videos, performed live and combinations thereof on national tours and international shows, from China to Milwaukee. Kim was awarded the Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship 2009-10, Artist-in-Residence at Compeung, Doi Saket, Thailand in 2011 & 2012, Artist-in-Residence at Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2013-14 and a Puffin Foundation, Ltd. Grant in 2014.
She has taught in the humanities and design department at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand; the film and graphic design departments in the United States at UW-Milwaukee; and in the foundations, fine art, liberal studies and design departments of Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
Alejandro de Acosta describes his Art Lecture as”a discussion of the work of Argentine poet Antonio Porchia (1885-1968), and his translation of Porchia. Porchia developed and wrote solely in a singular form he called voces (voices). His single book, named, precisely, VOCES, was little known when it appeared, due in part to his distance from literary circles and to its unclassifiable short, aphoristic poetry. Alejandro will discuss Porchia’s poetry and poetics, his finished and unfinished voices, and his approach to sharing them; their influence on subsequent Argentine poets; and the process of his current collaborative translation of them, opening out onto a larger set of ideas about language and translation, poetic forms and how they are circulated and made public.”
Alejandro was born in Buenos Aires in 1972, and grew up in Caracas, Madison (Wisconsin) and Cleveland (Ohio). Tertiary education in Amherst, MA (Hampshire College, bachelor’s degree) and Binghamton, NY (doctorate at Binghamton University). A onetime participant in the zine and mail art milieu, in Austin, Alejandro founded mufa::poema, a micropress that freely distributed a dozen poetry and prose chapbooks. Long standing interest in sound art and poetry reading led to a two-year radio and podcast project, “Sector Phy,” on KPWR-FM, as well as numerous audio performances under the moniker JANO (THING) SELECTOR.
Back in Binghamton, study of the history of Western philosophy and contemporary continental thought brought Alejandro to write a dissertation on Spinozan themes, not without a discussion of exhortatory graffiti. These studies subsequently displaced themselves in the direction of, first, Latin American philosophy, and second, an articulation of (for lack of a better word) anarchist ideas in various genres of prose. An outcome of this second trajectory, informed by continued engagement with poetry and poetics, are his two recent collections of critical and experimental essays: The Impossible, Patience (Ardent Press, 2014) and How to Live Now or Never (Repartee/LBC Books, 2014).
For many years, Alejandro taught philosophy and poetry at Southwestern University (Georgetown, TX), as well as in popular education settings. Readings, lectures, and presentations in Albany, Austin, Berkeley, Denver, Morelia, Portland, Seattle and elsewhere. With Joshua Beckman, Alejandro has translated the poetry of Jorge Carrera Andrade (Micrograms, Wave Books, 2011) and Carlos Oquendo de Amat (Five Meters of Poems, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Most recently, Alejandro translated Fabian Luduena’s H.P. Lovecraft: The Disjunction in Being (Schism Press, 2015). Two current projects are an anthology of writing by and about Antonio Porchia and The Ponge Stone, a manuscript of translations, essays, and letters emerging from the study of Francis Ponge’s Pour un Malherbe. Alejandro’s ongoing research is in U.S. and Latin American poetry, and, still, philosophy. Alejandro de Acosta currently lives in Olympia, WA.
Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and author of several popular books about contemporary art. Her recent writing explores the vanguard intersection between art and environmentalism, including TO LIFE! Eco Art In Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press). Weintraub’s previous books on eco-art include the series, Avant-Guardians: Textlets in Art and Ecology (2007). Weintraub established Artnow Publications in order to apply environmental responsibility to the books’ material production. She is also the author of In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society. Weintraub served as the Director of the Bard College museum where she curated over sixty exhibitions. She was the Henry Luce Professor of Emerging arts at Oberlin College. Her current book projects include Art-is-an Environmental Health Clinic (author) and In The Making: Creative Options For Contemporary Architecture (editor).
Sister Spit began in San Francisco in the 1990s as a weekly, girls-only open mic that was an alternative to the misogyny-soaked poetry open mics popular around the city (and the nation) at that time. Inspired by two-bit punk bands who managed to go on the road without hardly knowing how to play their instruments, Sister Spit became the first all-girl poetry roadshow at the end of the 90s, and toured regularly with such folks as Eileen Myles, Marci Blackman, Beth Lisick, and Nomy Lamm. The tour was revived as Sister Spit: The Next Generation in 2007, and has toured the United States annually since, with authors and performers such as Chinaka Hodge, Dorothy Allison, Lenelle Moise, Justin Vivian Bond, and many others. In this next incarnation, out of respect to the changing gender landscape of our queer and literary communities, Sister Spit welcomes artists of all genders, so long as they mesh with the tour’s historic vibe of feminism, queerness, humor, and provocation.
In addition to the authors of Sister Spit Book’s two most recent publications, Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man, and Rad American Women A-Z, the tour incorporates artists and activists with wide-ranging audiences, styles and voices. Furthermore, the Sister Spit Tour invites local guest writers to add to the lineup.
I am an artist-researcher, educator, poet, and activist. I’m an immigrant from Taiwan—a contested spit of land with a long history of colonization. As the mother of two beautiful human beings, I struggle to pass on ancestral knowledge that I hang onto, by a very thin thread, worn thin by the mandate to assimilate. I’m learning to listen for the thread that resists the loud clamoring of a fossil-fuel dependent culture of capitalism, globalization, and neo-liberalism. Our world has been fractured and broken; I believe the stories of our ancestors, stories of young and old, from the wildly diverse corners of the world, need to be gathered together to restore cultures of care and love. I do the work of listening to and gathering stories in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, where I am the Program Director, and at the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living in Rhode Island. Though I currently live in Rhode Island, my soul migrates from shore to shore at regular intervals, touching down in rural Vermont, suburban Chicago, and coastal Port Townsend.
Ju-Pong Lin collects stories from her neighbors, makes art on her couch, in galleries and in theaters. Laundry, bread, and everyday stories are the seedlings for Ju-Pong’s interdisciplinary, socially engaged videos, participatory installations and performances. She received her MFA in Intermedia from The University of Iowa, and has shown her work nationally (Women in the Director’s Chair, Walker Museum of Art, and New York’s Mix festival.) She has taught media arts on the faculty of The Evergreen State College, and is currently the Program Director of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Ju-Pong lives in Rhode Island and parents two children, who school her in the practice of love and compassion every day.
As an artist, Ju-Pong fuses story circle, video, needlecraft, and community organizing to advocate for grassroots sustainability education and climate justice, in solidarity with indigenous movements to reclaim space.
“Bruce Conner’s Atomic Sublime Cinema”
San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner made his first experimental film, A MOVIE, in 1958, at the height of national anxiety about the atomic threat. Over the following decades, his films continued to address the cultural and political fallout of the Cold War. This talk examines Conner’s filmic output over two and a half decades, from his pioneering works of “found footage” montage, to his participation in psychedelic expanded cinema performance, to his more intimate portraits of female friends and later interest in music video. It argues that these works are expressions of the “atomic sublime,” an aesthetic that captures the paradoxical experience of “terrible beauty” that is generated by witnessing an atomic explosion. By attending closely to the historical and cultural context of Conner’s apocalyptic cinema, this talk proposes a reconsideration of postwar American art’s engagement with the aesthetics of “the sublime.”
Johanna Gosse is an art historian specializing in the postwar American avant-garde, with an emphasis on experimental film and media practices. She earned her PhD in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College in 2014 with a dissertation on the experimental films of San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Camera Obscura, MIRAJ: Moving Image Review & Art Journal, Radical History Review, The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, various exhibition catalogues, and Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, an edited collection forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2015. You can read more about past work and current projects at: www.johannagosse.com.
Small shifts in what is familiar amplify human presence and speak to the intricacies of social relations in MK Guth’s work. Her videos depart from everyday scenarios into the site of fiction as an entry point to more complicated issues of identity and self and her sculptural installations often act as visual containers for audience interaction.
M.K. Guth is a visual artist working in video, photography, sculpture, performance, and interactive based exchange projects. In 2012, Marylhurst University released the first Monograph on Guth’s work. The NY Times, Flash Art, ArtForum on line 500 words, Art News, Art in America, and Sculpture magazine are just a few of the periodicals where Guth’s work has been discussed. She is a recipient of a Bonnie Bronson Award, a Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award through the Seattle Art Museum and an Award of Merit from the Bellevue Art Museum.
She has exhibited with numerous galleries and institutions including, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, Boise Art Museum, The Melbourne International Arts Festival, Australia, Nottdance Festival, Nottingham, England, Swiss Institute, NYC, Gallery-Pfeister, Copenhagen, Franklin Parrasch Gallery NYC, Betty Moody Houston TX, White Columns, NYC, The Art Production Fund (NYC / Las Vegas), Yerba Buena, in San Francisco and the Henry Art Museum. Guth is a member and the originator of RED SHOE DELIVERY SERVICE, a collaborative interactive video/performance project. (with Molly Dilworth and Cris Moss) www.redshoedeliveryservice.com MK Guth is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland Oregon and is an Associate Professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.