Congratulations to doctoral student Alissa de Wit-Paul, who has been awarded the Heldrich-Dvorak Travel Fellowship by the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association for travel to the 36th annual SWPACA conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At the conference, Alissa will present her paper, “1960s Apocalyptic Texts and Rise of Ecological Architecture in New Mexico.”
Month: January 2015
Alumni Activities: Jasmine Burns in the VRA Bulletin
Congratulations to Jasmine Burns (MA ’13), whose article “Visual Materials in the Archive: Determining and Maintaining Value in a Postmodern Climate,” appears in the current Visual Resources Association Bulletin.
Welcome back!
Graduate Activities: Josh Franco at CAA
Photo by Sean Gaulager.
Next month, doctoral candidate Josh Franco will present a paper at the annual conference of the College Art Association in New York. Visit CAA’s website for more information.
Minimalism, rasquachismo: “World Traveling” Two American Aesthetics
This paper examines the co-existence of minimalism and rasquachismo in Marfa, Texas. Both are categorical terms devised by critics and historians. The paper takes them as departure points to unpack observations of sculptural proximity in Marfa: Donald Judd’s untitled (15 works in concrete) (1980 – 1984) and an altar marking an apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They stand less than half a mile apart. As two aesthetic categories often pointed to as distinctly “American,” a closer examination of their vying histories and contact zones particularly near the US – Mexico border is crucial and timely. In the paper, I undertake this examination largely through María Lugones’s notion of “world-traveling,” following a sketch of minimalism’s and rasquachismo’s embattled histories in twentieth century art history. This paper contributes to Chicano/a (art) Studies and postwar art history by taking Marfa as a site for the praxis of “decolonial aestheTics / aestheSis.”
Graduate Activities: Lyno Vuth in Phnom Penh
On January 9 and 10 this year, the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh hosted a conference on “Time, Space,Voice: Phnom Penh’s White Building” co-organized by graduate student Lyno Vuth, who was also a speaker at the event.
Built in 1963 as part of an ambitious cultural and administrative zone designed by Lu Ban Hap and overseen by Vann Molyvann, the White Building is an icon of Cambodian modernist architecture and urban planning. Home now to more than two and a half thousand people, the White Building has become notorious, however, for its dilapidated exterior and for its reputation as a hub for illegal activities. Yet, it is also celebrated as a thriving home for the urban poor that is tight-knit, self-sufficient and enriched by a committed community of artists. Responding to the White Building’s uncertain future, the conference presented new research on the building’s history and discussed its current and future prospects in dialogue with neighbourhood communities. The conference was also timed to coincide with the research residency of architect and urbanist Pen Sereypagna in the White Building, sponsored by Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh, and Parsons The New School For Design, New York City.
Sa Sa Art Projects is Phnom Penh’s only not-for-profit artist-run space dedicated to experimental art practices. It was founded in 2010 by the Cambodian arts collective Stiev Selapak and is located in the vibrant historic apartment complex known as the White Building.
Call for papers, Crossing the Boundaries XXIII: Cut & Paste
CALL FOR PAPERS
Crossing the Boundaries, 2015
Binghamton University
A multidisciplinary, multivocal academic conference with a global geographic and broad temporal reach,
presented by the Art History Graduate Student Union
Keynote Speakers:
Andrés Mario Zervigón, Rutgers University
Kevin Hatch, Binghamton University
The phrase “cut and paste,” in its most fundamental definition, is the process of selecting and combining fragments. Inspired by an established commitment to critical research, this year’s conference aims to explore the assortment of thematic, methodological, and sociopolitical interpretations derived from the traditional concept of extracting and adhering.
The twenty-third annual Crossing The Boundaries Conference, hosted by the Art History Graduate Student Union at Binghamton University, invites submissions from any historical or disciplinary approaches that involve a literal or conceptual appropriation achieved through cutting and pasting.
Potential topics might include (but are not limited to):
- Collage, bricolage, assemblage, montage
- Authorship, plagiarism, imitation
- Censorship and editing
- Fragments / Fragmentation
- Cultural traditions and historical change
- Recontextualization
- Sociopolitcal statements
- Accumulation and composites of found objects
- Invention or production through appropriation
Proposals for individual papers (20 minutes maximum) should be no more than 250 words in length and may be sent by email, with a current graduate level CV, to binghamtonctb@gmail.com (Attn: Proposal). We also welcome proposals for integrated panels. Panel organizers should describe the theme of the panel and send abstracts with names and affiliations of all participants along with current CVs. A panel should consist of no more than three papers, each twenty minutes in length. Deadline for submissions is January 30, 2015. For more information, see our website or follow us on twitter.
Faculty Activities: Frank Chang at Dartmouth College
This month, Department of Art faculty member Frank Chang is featured in the Dartmouth Alumni in the Arts Biennial Exhibition, which opens Saturday, January 10. For more information, see below or contact studio.art.department@dartmouth.edu.
The Dartmouth Studio Art Department, the Hood Museum of Art, and the Hopkins Center for the Arts are pleased to present the second installment of the Dartmouth Alumni in the Arts Biennial Exhibition, which will be on view from January 10th through April 30th, 2015. Co-curated by Studio Art alumni Brice Brown ‘95 and Enrico Riley ‘95, this exhibition brings together an exciting and diverse range of works by 13 Dartmouth graduates: Mark Brosseau ‘98, Frank Chang ‘01, Carrie Fucile ‘99, Laura Grey ‘02, Anna Schuleit Haber MALS ‘05, Gisela Insuaste ‘97, Matthew Jones ‘02, Anna Linzee MacDonald ‘02, Karyn Olivier ‘89, Torin Porter ‘93, Catherine Ross ‘94, Kirsten Stromberg ‘94 and Anna Tsouhlarakis ‘99. Installed in the Nearburg Gallery and Arts Forum in the Black Family Visual Arts Center as well as the Top of the Hop, the works on view showcase the exceptional talents of Dartmouth alumni who have been working professionally in the art world since graduation. The exhibition includes works of art in a wide variety of media, including painting, photography, sculpture, video, book arts, drawing, new media and sound works. There are also three public performances scheduled throughout the course of the exhibition: for the opening reception on January 10th Gisela Insuaste will perform an interactive, process-based live installation; in March, Torin Porter will transform parts of the campus grounds in secretive and unexpected ways; and in April Anna Schuleit Haber will project live, large-scale digital drawings onto the side of a building. Specific dates and locations of the Porter and Schuleit Haber performances will be announced separately once confirmed. “This exhibition speaks to the ongoing commitment of the Studio Art Department to nurture and facilitate the development of Dartmouth students interested in the Arts,” said Brown and Riley. “Bringing together these 13 accomplished alumni gives us a chance to both celebrate the achievements of Dartmouth’s highly active creative community while also showing current Studio Art undergraduates the real possibility of choosing to be a professional artist. ”
Binghamton Art History 