Matthew Day Jackson

Lecture: September 19, 2005 at 3:30pm
1000 W. Broad St, Crit Room 3

Inspired by Russian Constructivism, Jackson is a different kind of Young Pioneer: a sculptor who repurposes frontier symbols for political aims. The Rutgers grad had one grandfather who was a cop and another in the Marines; his background filters into projects like Tomb of the Unknown, based on a tank barrier and made of the wooden particleboard found in prefab homes. “It’s about the people going to war being cast aside,” he says.
- from New York Magazine, March 7, 2005

To view complete article

Matthew Day Jackson biography

Katrin Sigurardottir
Visiting Artist
Lecture: September 22, 2005 at 12:30pm
609 Bowe St, Lecture Room 535

"Katrín Sigurdardóttir´s work repeatedly returns to and circles around the experience of place: experience which is variously presented as elusive, nostalgic, deceptive, simultaneously desired and suspect... For Sigurdardóttir, the desire to wander is entangled in the desire to remember - it is as if wandering is necessary to the process of remebering where one has been. The work is not autobiographical, but the process of memory - and its affect on the experience of place - is a recurrent investigation."
- from "Of Landmarks and Birthmarks:the work of Katrín Sigurdardóttir" by Eva Heisler.
n.paradoxa, Vol. 15. London 2005.

Visit the artists website

Ragna Robertsdottir
Visiting Artist
Lecture: September 23, 2006 at 12:30pm
Fishbowl, 1000 W. Broad St, 3rd floor

"Ragna Robertsdottir's lavascapes are formed by atahing lava chips to a section of wall covered with glue: she is an artist who medium is, quite literally, a volcano, an artist who travels to exhbitions carrying a volcano with her in a sack. Look at her works from the sides and they're near-monochroms, but in a way that also suggests vast expanses of lava seen from afar. Move around toward the middle and they open up, loosen, become active, ecer-changing. Swirls and patterns appear, chance and plan, chaos and order. "
- i8 Gallery

Robertsdottir's work will be in view at the Anderson Gallery's exhibition Surface Charge, curated by Gregory Volk and Sabine Russ, opening September 23.

Jennifer  Allora
Visiting Artist
Lecture: October 24, 2005 at 4:00pm
609 Bowe St., Lecture Room 535
Jennifer Allora's visit is co-sponsored by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts


"Philadelphia-born Jennifer Allora and Havana-born Guillermo Calzadilla, who together create poetic and smartly subversive conceptual art that tweaks, needles, and humorously exposes the machinations of power and the assumptions engrained in mainstream western culture. Based in Puerto Rico, their work has been featured at Tate Moders, the Walker Art Center, Galerie Chantal Crousel, and elsewhere."
- from eyeteeth.blogspot.com, for complete article & interview

"Puerto Rican Light: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla" 

"Walker Art Center Calender for Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla"

"Arsenal: Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla"

Kristen Hileman
Visiting Artist
Studio visits: November 15, 2005

“Kristen Hileman is the Assistant Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. During 2004, she organized summer and fall rotations of modern and contemporary works from the museum’s permanent collection for the on-going program Gyroscope. Hileman was an adjunct professor at George Washington University during the academic year 2004-2005, teaching a graduate seminar in contemporary art. She has previously taught art theory and a course on art and politics at the Corcoran College of Art & Design. Before coming to the Hirshhorn, she served as the curator of the Arlington Arts Center, where she organized exhibitions of work by artists from the Mid-Atlantic region.”
-from www.vsarts.org, view complete article

Hirshhorn, Museum and Sculpture Garden

Nathaniel Rackowe
Visiting Artist
Lecture: November 28, 2005 at 12:15 pm
Bowe St. Lecture Room; 609 Bowe St., Room 535
<*Nathaniel Rackowe’s visit is co-sponsored by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Nathaniel Rackowe's installations and kinetic sculptures examine the boundaries of physical space, combining materials such as steel, corrugated plastic, plywood, light sources and video projections. Issues of material, site, modernism and minimalism come together in complex constructions that interact with the architectural context in which they are placed as well with the viewers, whose movements are often dictated by their presence. Rackowe was selected for New Contemporaries during the 2002 Liverpool Biennial and his work has been featured in several venues throughout the UK and the United States.

Rackowe's website
Rackowe at Bischoff/Weiss
"THIS IS ULL"

Paul Lewis
Visiting Artist
Lecture: January 23, 2006 at 4:15 pm
**NEW VENUE LOCATION**
Room Commonwealth B
University Student Commons
907 Floyd Ave.

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL) is an architecture and research partnership founded in 1993 by Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis, located in New York City. LTL is dedicated to exploring the inventive possibilities of architecture through a close examination of the conventional and the overlooked. The firm actively pursues a diverse range of work, maintaining a creative dialogue between built projects and speculative investigations, exploring the intersections between theory and practice. LTL's work ranges from large scale building projects, fabrication, and full-scale prototyping, to theoretical projects, museum installations, and exhibition design.

http://www.ltlwork.net/
http://collections.sfmoma.org/OBJ103327.htm
http://archrecord.construction.com/biennale2004/1_ltl.asp

Ester Partegas
Visiting Artist
Exhibition: Fixed and Hazardous Objects March 9 - April 6
Gallery Talk: March 9, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Opening Reception: March 9 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
School of the Arts Gallery
1000 W. Broad St., 1st floor

This exhibition is made possible in part by the generous support of Drs. Paul and Sara Monroe.

“Partegas’ overarching theme is how surging commercialization—an overabundance of goods, and an obsession with acquiring, using, and then heedlessly discarding the remnants of those goods⎯ influences so much of our world, including architecture, our orientation to nature, the public spaces we share or pass through, and ultimately our innermost psyches. Operating across a broad spectrum of mediums, including sculptures, installations, murals, paintings, and photographs, Partegas focuses on some of the most familiar, and resolutely banal, features of urban, public spaces—an urban décor that’s chock full of coercive ideologies and that increasingly looks alarmingly similar, from city to city, county to country. Subverting and transforming an ultra-designed and relentlessly marketed contemporary milieu, Partegas offers her own wildcard designs that don’t present fixed messages, but instead ask probing questions of who we are, where we are going, what constitutes our values and desires.” - Gregory Volk

http://www.esterpartegas.com/

Robert Craig
Visiting Artist
Wood Bending Demonstration
Thursday, April 6, 2006 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Fine Arts Building Woodshop
1000 W. Broad, 1st floor

This demonstration is free and open to everyone.

Robert Craig is the Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He has had numerous exhibitions across the country and his work is included in several public and private collections throughout the Midwest and Florida.

Jerry Saltz
Visiting Critic
Lecture: October 4, 2006 at 4:30 pm
University Student Commons Theater; 907 Floyd Ave.
Jerry Saltz's lecture is co-sponsored by the VCUarts Anderson Gallery, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the VCUarts Department of Painting and Printmaking and the VCUarts Department of Sculpture + Extended Media.

From Seeing Out Loud by Jerry Saltz: “The best critics look for the same things in contemporary criticism that they look for in contemporary art. But they also have an eye. Having an eye in criticism is as important as having an ear in music. It means discerning the original from the derivative, the inspired from the smart, the remarkable from the common, and not looking at art in narrow, academic, or ‘objective’ ways. It means engaging uncertainty and contingency, suspending disbelief, and trying to create a place for doubt, unpredictability, curiosity, and openness. Dishearteningly, many critics have ideas but no eye. They rarely work outside their comfort zone, are always trying to reign art in, turn it into a seminar or a clique, or write cerebral, unreadable texts on mediocre work. There’s nothing wrong with writing about weak art as long as you acknowledge the work’s shortcomings. Seeing as much art as you can is how you learn to see. Listening very carefully to how you see, gauging the levels of perception, perplexity, conjecture, emotional and intellectual response, and psychic effect, is how you learn to see better.” Jerry Saltz is the Senior Art Critic for the Village Voice and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times. In 2000 he was the sole Advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial.

http://www.geoffreyyoung.com/thefigures/seeingoutloud.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/art/0551,saltz,71107,13.html

Richard Torchia
Visiting Artist
Lecture: Monday, October 9, 2006 at 3:00 pm
University Student Commons, Richmond Salons; 907 Floyd Ave.

Richard Torchia is director of Arcadia University Art Gallery, a venue housed in late-19th century power station on a suburban campus in Glenside, Pennsylvania, 30-miles north of Philadelphia. Since assuming his position there in 1997, he has presented one-person exhibitions and projects by artists such as Dave Allen, Olafur Eliasson, Amy Hauft, William Larson, Donald Moffett, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Kay Rosen, and Beat Streuli. Torchia is particularly interested in the generative contexts of group exhibitions. Working with a range of regional and international talent, and frequently collaborating with co-curators, Torchia has developed thematic shows addressing issues such as the re-emergence of photorealist painting; the sited gesture; imperceptible installation; the performative figure; the childhood drawings of contemporary artists; and the ocean, atmosphere, and cosmos as subjects for recent art. Prior to his tenure at Arcadia, he was the inaugural curator of the Levy Gallery at Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia. In addition to ongoing independent curatorial, publishing, and editing efforts, since 1996, Torchia has been an adjunct professor on the graduate faculty the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Since 1990 he has maintained an active artistic practice employing live projections generated by the camera obscura.

http://gargoyle.arcadia.edu/gallery/contactus.html
http://www.business-services.upenn.edu/arboretum/torchia2.html
http://www.pewarts.org/94/Torchia/index.html
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n6_v31/ai_14376721

Dario Robleto

Visiting Artist
Lecture: Monday, October 30, 2006 at 3pm
University Student Commons Theater
907 Floyd Ave

Dario Robleto is an artist living and working in San Antonio, Texas.

"At this stage of our culture it is a given that our world is presented to us in a fragmented, chopped up way. It's in the air. You can see it in people's eyes. What has not been offered at this point is a way to creatively maneuver in our world. DJ culture has changed all that. The rich and beautiful legacy of hip-hop/DJ culture and electronic/sample-based music is a flat-out rejection of all pessimistic strains of postmodernism. The worlds of aesthetics and art-making strategy will only benefit from this revolution in thought. Dj culture/sampling implies one very simple but powerful idea. The idea that even if all we have is the wreckage of the past, so what- we are still going to make something out of it."
-from I Love Rock and Roll (Except the Music) by Dario Robleto

Bard faculty profile
Artist profile for Praz-Delavallde Gallery, Paris

Anthony Bronza

Visiting Artist
Demo: Monday, October 16, 2006 at 1pm
Sculpture Woodshop
1000 W. Broad, 1st floor

"Anthony Bronza, furniture maker, is as renown for his efficient, graceful designs as for his technicl artistry. His work marries high standards of craftsmanship with a passion for eco-friendly materials. Employing traditional and Japanese joinery techniques, as well as machining skills and handiwork, Bronza imbules his furniture with the inherend qualities of each piece of wood."
-from Bronza's website

Read the rest of Bronza's philosophy statement

Sina Najafi

Lecture: November 13, 2006 at 3:00 pm
University Student Commons Theater, 907 Floyd Ave.

Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet Magazine. As described on the publication’s own website (http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/), “C abinet is an award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words ‘art,’ ‘culture,’ and sometimes even ‘magazine.’ Like the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities to which its name alludes, Cabinet is as interested in the margins of culture as its center. Presenting wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary content in each issue through the varied formats of regular columns, essays, interviews, and special artist projects, Cabinet 's hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet 's omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous models of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine for the intellectually curious reader of the future.” Najafi has taught at The Cooper Union School of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, and Stockholm University. He has also been a visiting lecturer at Columbia University, the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Tyler School of Art, Hampshire College, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tate Modern in London.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/
http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/web_exclusives/more/more_24.html
http://www.cooper.edu/art/bio_najafi.html

 

Jennifer Pastor
Visiting Artist

Lecture: Mon, November 20, 2006 at 2:30 pm
University Student Commons Theater
907 Floyd Ave

From Jennifer Pastor- Woman Sculptor by David A. Greene (Art Forum; September, 1996): “Jennifer Pastor's sculpture inspires a giddy silence, the same gravid hush that occurs when we first catch sight of something truly strange. In nature and in life, such spectacles come ready-made: solar eclipses, concept cars, pedestrians struck by speeding cabs. In art, the strange and the new and our need for them have long been examined and formulaically deployed. But Pastor sidesteps the institutionalized strangeness of art for the strange institution of artifice: her work takes as its subject the realm of the reverently unreal, where nature's serendipity is frozen and a novelty is achieved that is fundamentally different from the usual artworld kind.” Jennifer Pastor’s exhibitions include venues such as Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n1_v35/ai_18749511
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_10_41/ai_103989791
http://www.cca.edu/about/press/2005/monuments

Nina Katchadourian
Visiting Artist

Lecture: Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 4pm
University Student Commons, Commonwealth B; 907 Floyd Ave.

One strain of Katchadourian’s work is oriented toward “nature” as concept, construct, and site, and investigates our assumptions, needs, cravings, dependency, and resistance associated with this term. She has also worked with maps and with translation as both methods and subject matter. Her work exists across many different media, includes photography, sculpture, sound, and video, and often comes about thought the process of observing and responding to ordinary situations in everyday life. She is represented by Sara Meltzer gallery in New York and Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space and SculptureCenter. In January 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland featured a solo show of works made in Finland, and in June 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs opened a 10-year survey of her work with a forthcoming monograph.

http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/
http://www.cclarkgallery.com/dynamic/artist.asp?ArtistID=16&Count=0
http://www.sarameltzergallery.com/

Lynne Cooke
Visiting Curator

**NEW LECTURE DAY AND TIME!!**

Lecture: Tuesday, April 17 2007 at 4:00 pm
University Student Commons Theater
907 Floyd Ave

Lynne Cooke’s visit is co-sponsored by the School of the Arts Dean’s Office
and the Department of Painting & Printmaking

Lynne Cooke will be lecturing on Richard Serra’s outdoor work and discussing her upcoming book, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years. Cooke is the curator of the Dia Art Foundation in New York. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of London, and has taught and lectured regularly at the University College London, Syracuse University, Yale University, and Columbia University. She was a co-curator of the Venice Biennale in 1986, the Carnegie International in 1991, and was artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney in 1996. In addition to the Dia Center for the Arts, she has curated exhibitions at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Whitechapel Art Gallery and Hayward Gallery, London; Third Eye Center, Glasgow; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and elsewhere. She has written widely about contemporary art in exhibition catalogues and in Artforum, Artscribe, and Parkett, among other magazines.
(from http://sites.cca.edu/curatingarchive/archives/000181.html)

http://homepage.mac.com/allanmcnyc/mit/www/cooketexts.html/
http://www.bard.edu/academics/faculty/faculty.php?action=details&id=217

Josiah McElheny
Visiting Artist

Lecture: Monday, April 2, 2007 at 4:00 pm
University Student Commons Theater
907 Floyd Ave

Josiah McElheny was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1966, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and apprenticed with master glassblowers Ronald Wilkins, Jan-Erik Ritzman, Sven-Ake Caarlson, and Lino Tagliapietra. McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. Whether recreating miraculous glass objects pictured in Renaissance paintings or modernized versions of nonextant glassware from documentary photographs, or extrapolating stories about the daily lives of ancient peoples through the remnants of their glass household possessions, Josiah McElheny’s work takes as its subject the object, idea, and social nexus of glass. Influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, McElheny’s work often takes the form of ‘historical fiction’—which he offers to the viewer to believe or not. Part of McElheny’s fascination with storytelling is that glassmaking is part of an oral tradition handed down generation to generation, artisan to artisan. In "Total Reflective Abstraction" (2003-04), the mirrored works themselves refract the artist’s self-reflexive examination. Looking at a reflective object becomes a metaphor for the act of reflecting on an idea. Sculptural models of Modernist ideals, these totally reflective environments are both elegant seductions as well as parables of the vices of utopian aspirations. Recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995) and the 15th Rakow Commission from the Corning Museum of Glass, McElheny has had one-person exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela. His work has been exhibited at SITE Santa Fe and the Whitney Biennial (2000) [and most recently he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for the next 5 years]. (from http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mcelheny/index.html)

http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.2070789/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_id={472A3EE9-E6E2-40A7-9A6C-3B1CE16FDCB4}&notoc=1

http://www.artnews.info/gallery.php?i=177&exi=2695

http://www.andrearosengallery.com/artists/josiah-mcelheny/

http://www.donaldyoung.com/mcelheny/josiah_mcelheny_index.html

http://www.albrightknox.org/acquisitions/acq_2003/McElheny.html

Ann Agee
Artist in Residence

Boxing in the Kitchen April 13-28, 2007
Gallery Talk: Friday, April 13 at 4:30 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, April 13 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
School of the Arts Gallery; 1000 W. Broad St., 1st floor

Ann Agee’s installation, Boxing in the Kitchen, was first presented at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City in the fall of 2005. From the gallery’s website (http://www.ppowgallery.com/exhibitions/2005agee/pr.html):
“The new work of Ann Agee continues to explore the temporal realities of her own life through ceramics. In...Boxing in the Kitchen, Agee applies the classical dessert figurine in her depiction of adults engaging in play. She includes herself, family and friends among a cast of characters who dress in a carnvalesque array of costumes, masks and everyday attire. Agee’s interest lays in the way one sheds their self-identity when dressed in costume and is consumed in imagination. She pinpoints the moments when one deviates beyond the accepted codes of adult behavior, often finding enlightenment through silly and absurd actions. Each hand-carved figure is involved in a world of existential fantasy where one can morph into a papier-mâché Cyclops or simply sport a pair of boxing gloves for an aerobics workout and become a momentary Cassius Clay.

Agee’s terra cotta sculptures are reminiscent of Franz Anton Bustelli’s classical dessert figurines popular in the 18th Century. Bustelli’s figurines, which depict the characters of the Italian Comedy, would have been placed around long tables displaying the dessert course. Agee’s characters are familiar in style and technique to Bustelli’s, but are updated in contemporary garb. Each one of Agee’s vignettes dance around and between pink coral-like sculptures as the Harlequin or Columbine would have been placed around various cakes and custards. Agee’s objects and figurines are arranged on meticulously painted paper further accentuating the artist’s sheer delight is using classical decorative arts techniques in an autobiographical 21st century diorama.

Ann Agee is the recipient of several National Endowment of the Arts grants as well as the Tiffany Foundation Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, Design Award. Agee has been included in numerous museum and gallery one person, group and public art projects.
”


http://www.ppowgallery.com/exhibitions/2005agee/pr.html

http://www.renabranstengallery.com/agee.html

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_7_90/ai_88582383

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n3_v83/ai_16821936

http://www.aber.ac.uk/ceramics/makers/annagee.htm

Ulrik Heltoft
Visiting Artist

Lecture; Monday March 19, 2007 at 12:15 pm
1000 W. Broad, 1st floor Crit Room 3

Ulrik Heltoft’s work uses video, photography, projections, and objects that typically deal with subtle, ignored details and coincidences, presented in an absolute and simple, yet abstract universe. He is represented by Kirkoff Gallery in Copenhagen and exhibits regularly in New York City.

http://www.kirkhoff.dk/art/artists/ulrik_heltoft/

Rosamond Purcell
Visiting Artist
lecture: "THINGS is where it’s at"
Thursday, September 13, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Oliver Hall, 1001 W. Main, Room 1031

“By the time she became intrigued (even obsessed) with the etching of Olaus Worm's 17th-century natural-history cabinet in the mid-1980s, Rosamond Purcell was already a photographer of note. She had created a fascinating body of large-format photographs with the Polaroid Corporation's experimental 20-by-24-inch camera, and she had embarked on several collaborative projects with the renowned paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The etching of Worm's room turned her already intense passion for collecting (she grew up with collector parents) in a new direction: She wanted to recreate it in three dimensions. Purcell contemplated every aspect of the engraving, imagining herself in it, studying the strange and rare objects, and, over the last two years in particular, systematically planning what would have to be found, created, and concocted to replicate both the letter and spirit of that room. …The exhibition "Two Rooms" is the apotheosis of Purcell's 20-year preoccupation. It recreates on site and in exact scale Olaus Worm's naturalist cabinet, adjacent to the reconstructed deconstruction of her own studio. The intersection of these two rooms, separated by time but joined by sensibility, determination, and vision, provides a magical and scintillating journey into the mind of a singular and gifted artist. Life and art are one for Purcell. She is an original and poignant thinker. She makes us marvel, contemplate, and see anew.”
from http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i26/26b01901.htm

Via Lewandowsky

Visiting Artist

lecture: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 6:00 pm
609 Bowe Street, Room 535


This Berlin artist was born and educated in Dresden East Germany where he studied Scenography. Lewandowsky was a member of the artists’ group “Auto-Perforation Artists.” He works in sculpture, installation, film, painting, and graphic art. He is a self-described conceptualist, and as such, none of his works hang together stylistically, rather they all ask difficult questions in an ongoing conversation - each in non-matching garb – often about the nature of a divided consciousness or country. His work was highlighted this summer in Gregory Volk and Sabine Russ’ heralded exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in NYC.

http://www.vialewandowsky.de/
http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibit.php
http://www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de/site/EN/03-Collections/05-Contemporary-Art/02-Via-Lewandowsky/lewandowsky.php

Mary LeClere

Visiting Lecturer
lecture: Thursday, November 8, 2007
             at 12:00 pm
VCU Student Commons Theater
907 Floyd Ave.

LeClère is the Associate Director of the Glassel School of Art Core Program, at the Fine Arts Museum of Houston, a residency program for artists and writers. Their website describes the program as one and two year residencies to exceptional visual artists and art scholars recently out of school who have not yet fully developed professional careers. The Core Program encourages intensive and innovative studio practice as well as the elaboration of an intellectual framework through which to understand that practice. LeClère is currently a PhD. candidate in art history at the University of Virginia. She has written extensively about artists for multiple settings and venues.

http://www.core.mfah.org/perimeter.asp

Ivan Day

Visiting Lecturer and Culinary Scholar
Lecture: Monday, November 12, 2007
              at 12:00 pm
VCU Student Commons
907 Floyd Ave.
Virginia Rooms A-B-C-D

This lecture is sponsored by the VCU Departments of Sculpture + Extended Media and Art History:

The Edible Edifice - from the medieval period to the early twentieth century, food was frequently used as an artistic medium to create edible sculpture for the tables of the rich and powerful. A papal dinner in seventeenth-century Rome for instance, was not complete without a table centrepiece made of sugar which depicted scenes from Christ's Passion, executed by pupils of Bernini in a lively Baroque style. Full scale architectural structures, such as pavilions and palaces were constructed every year in the Piazza Reale in Naples for the annual coccagna festival. These huge edifices, made of cakes, hams and parmesan cheeses, were used as sets for open air operatic performances before they were ransacked by the poor of the city. In this illustrated lecture, British food historian Ivan Day discusses the history and development of edible art of this kind from the period of the early Florentine Renaissance to the rise of modernity.

http://www.historicfood.com/portal.htm
feed://www.artisan-food.com/DotNetNuke/readin/newsviewsfromthekitchen/tabid/210/rssid/4/Default.aspx

Johnston Foster

Visiting Artist in Residence
Exhibition: What the Flock?!
January 16 – February 6, 2008

Opening Reception and Gallery Talk: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 11:00 am
School of the Arts Gallery;
1000 W. Broad St., 1st floor

Johnston Foster's sculptures can best be described as rough hewn assemblages that have a hunter/gatherer and alchemist approach to object making. Through exhaustive scavenging and recycling Foster creates sculpture installations that reuse, recycle and redefine found objects into new creations that create entirely different forms. Using a spontaneous and intuitive working method, Foster's sculptures are at once immediate and detailed. The imagery and subject matter used in the sculptures are inspired by urban myths, pop culture, and the increasing disillusionment and uncertainty of our modern consumer based world. Feeling less of a critic and more of an active participant, Foster uses his sculptures to navigate the confusion, absurdity, and beauty surrounding him.

The exhibition at FAB Gallery will include two works. The title piece of the show, “What the Flock?!” is a swarm of over 90 seagulls suspended from the gallery ceiling in various stages of explosion. Inspired by the urban myth/ prank involving alka-seltzer and the possibility of explosion after bird ingestion, this installation puts the viewer in the perspective of the person guilty of doing such a heinous act. The second sculpture titled “Mob Deep” consists of over fifty half sized figures joined together in a violent mob. Carrying torches and brandishing weapons this angry mob are collectively joined for an unknown violent purpose, placing the viewer as the target of the oncoming aggression.

Johnston Foster was born in 1978, South Boston Virginia. He received his BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2001, and his MFA from Hunter College, New York City in 2005. He is represented by Rare Gallery in New York.

http://www.rare-gallery.com/artists.html
http://chelseaartgalleries.com/artists/F/Johnston+Foster.html
http://www.ps1.org/ps1_site/content/view/105/70/

Karin Sander

Visiting Artist

Lecture: Tuesday, January 29, 2008
              at 5:00 pm
VCU Student Commons, Virginia Rooms A-B-C-D
907 Floyd Ave.

“What must a work of mine fulfill? I must be able to work using resources that actually exist, that are already present within the system, and that can turn the system against itself. I must be able to read things from a location, the situation, of a museum or gallery. And the work must both reveal something and also remain mysterious. It must transcend itself and gesture towards something that was not previously visible. In other words, it must render something visible that is already present but that has hitherto escaped perception, that exists in a latent state. If the work provokes amazement and perhaps amusement as well, then it is successful.” K.S.
Sander was educated at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart Germany and the Whitney Independent Studio Program in NYC. She exhibits internationally to much acclaim. She lives in Berlin and teaches in Zurich at the Architecture Academy.

http://www.karinsander.de/index.php?id=e
http://apexart.org/exhibitions/volk.htm
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag99/dec99/sander/sander.shtml

Teresita Fernandez

Visiting Artist

lecture: Tuesday, February 12, 2008
             at 5:30 pm
VCU Grace Harris Hall, Harris Auditorium
1015 Floyd Ave.

This lecture is sponsored by the VCU School of the Arts and the VCU Department of Sculpture + Extended Media.

Teresita Fernández, [MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1992] was born in 1968 in Miami, Florida and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions internationally and abroad at sites including the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Site Santa Fe, New Mexico, Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Italy, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, and the Miami Art Museum. She was also featured in "Outer City, Inner Space: Teresita Fernandez, Stephen Hendee, and Ester Partegas" at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris in 2002.

Fernández is the youngest artist commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum for the recently opened Olympic Sculpture Park, where her work Seattle Cloud Cover allows visitors to walk through a covered skyway while viewing the city’s skyline through tiny holes in multicolored glass. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards both in the U.S. and abroad, including the 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1999 Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, and she has had residencies in Japan, Italy, and at ArtPace in San Antonio. She was commissioned for special projects by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2000, and by the Public Art Fund in 2001.

Her work is included in numerous major private collections as well as the permanent collections of the St. Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Miami Art Museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Sammlung Goetz, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.
Fernández had her first solo exhibition in 1995 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, and regularly exhibits work worldwide.
(from: http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/teresitafernandez/)

http://www.grandarts.com/exhibits/TFernandez.html

http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.1076861/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_id=%7B60C0A041-9CF6-47CA-A9F3-9054CDF7DB40%7D&notoc=1

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_11_91/ai_110963172

Connie Butler

Visiting Curator

Lecture: Wed, February 27, 2008 at 5:00 pm
VCU Student Commons Theater
907 Floyd Ave.

Connie Butler is the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, a position she has held since February of 2006. From 1996-2006, she was Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Butler is the curator of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an international survey of feminist art which opened at MOCA in Los Angeles on March 4, 2007, and which will travel to The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY and The Vancouver Art Gallery.
A selection of Connie Butler’s previous exhibitions at MOCA include Robert Smithson, September 2004, Willem deKooning: Tracing the Figure, 2002, Flight Patterns, 2000, and Afterimage: Drawing through Process, 1999. She is currently working on a monographic exhibition of the South African artist Marlene Dumas, which will be co-organized by MOCA Los Angeles and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Connie Butler completed graduate work in art history at Berkeley in 1987 and, in 1996, did further graduate studies in the PhD program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Butler has taught and lectured extensively and contributed to publications including Art + Text, Parkett and Art Journal.
(from http://www.moca.org/wack/?p=273)

http://www.frieze.com/feature_single.asp?f=1235
http://www.la