Visual Arts Briefs

Recent alumni from the MFA Fine Arts Department are coordinating a series of exhibitions and events under the banner “A New Currency.” Stage one launches today at an ad hoc gallery space at 55 Delancey Street, where 31 alumni artists will show work curated by faculty member Dan Cameron. The exhibition will run from May 29 – June 28; on Wednesday, June 10 at 6pm, there will be a panel discussion around the central theme of “A New Currency”: applying new, creative methods to the task of rethinking art’s relationship to systems of exchange. Panelists include Cameron, alumnus Kate Gilmore (MFA 2002 Fine Arts), and faculty member Amy Smith-Stewart.

The second phase involves the project’s Web site, anewcurrency.com, developed by Gregg Louis (MFA 2009 Fine Arts). The site and its blog will serve as the clearing-house for information on the exhibition, including streaming video and an image feed on Flickr, in addition to planned offshoots within the U.S. and internationally. And stage three follows from the site: Participating artists will contact their friends and colleagues in other cities, encouraging them to develop their own exhibition, using the same title. The results from this stage will be exhibited later this summer at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor. For the most up-to-date information on all “A New Currency” projects, including a list of the participating artists, visit anewcurrency.com.

Image: Rebecca Goyette, Anything for Max, 2009.

Fresh off her wins at the recent Dusty Film and Animation Festival, Ana Maria Hermida (BFA 2009 Film and Video) will be screening her film El Elefante Rojo on Friday, May 29, 9pm, at Red Bull Space, 40 Thompson Street. Earning the awards for Outstanding Achievement in Film and Outstanding Achievement in Directing, Hermida’s film is about a young girl who grows up in a brothel in Colombia and receives her first client on the night of her 15th birthday. “During times of tragedy life tends to get blurry, making the things you love lose their ability to make you happy,” said Hermida. “Winning these awards was very reassuring, and knowing that other people understand my work has helped me get my life back in focus.” The screening is free and open to the public, but an RSVP to iamredham@gmail.com is required.

Hermida has already received media attention for her film, including a recent article in Tempo Espresso, a blog for the New York Post. Also, she and Jake Armstrong (BFA 2009 Animation), winner for Outstanding Achievement in Traditional Animation for his film The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!, appeared on the NBC show Sunday Today in New York following the awards.

Click here to see the complete list of winners of Dusty Film and Animation Festival on the SVA News page.

Image: (top) El Elefante Rojo, written and directed by Ana Maria Hermida; (bottom) actor Kevin Kline presenting Hermida with an award, photo by Michelle Labriola.

Last weekend, the New York Photo Festival (NYPH) showcased the work of highly regarded contemporary photographers and curators, including several SVA alumni. Recent graduate Adriana Teresa Hernandez (BFA 2007 Photography) curated an exhibition at the Latin American Pavilion entitled “Tu/Mi Placer.” The exhibition featured a collaboration between photographer Luiz Gonzalez Palma and writer Graciela de Oliveira, with images and text reflecting on gender violence. “My main role as a curator was to make their reflection, the dialogue between them, as transparent to the viewer as possible,” Hernandez told the Briefs. Hernandez is co-founder and president of FotoVisura, the pavilion’s sponsor, and creative director of Visura Magazine; an article about Hernandez and the exhibition recently appeared in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Dia.

Other alumni from the BFA Photography Department also participated in the festival: Ernesto Bazan’s (BFA 1982 Photography) book Cuba won the NY Photo Award in the Photographic Book category, and Devon Ward (BFA 2008 Photography) exhibited his work as part of the Tierney Fellowship Show (Ward received a Tierney Fellowship in 2008 to encourage a new body of photographic work within a year of graduation). The department’s magazine, Dear Dave, was also a media sponsor for the festival.

Image: Devon Ward, Barnacles, Mojave, 2008

• Illustrator and alumnus Sam Weber (MFA 2005 Illustration as Visual Essay) is the subject of a feature in the May/June issue of Communication Arts. Weber, whose work combines hand drawing and computer technology, recently created illustrations for the 2009 season of Toronto’s Soulpepper Theater Company.
• Starlog.com recently featured an article about animator Alex Kupershmidt (BFA 1982 Film and Video), best known for his animation of the Stitch character in Disney’s 2002 Lilo and Stitch. Kupershmidt talks about his work at Disney and more recent movies, including Meet the Robinsons and Bolt.
• The May issue of Sculpture magazine features artist Justin Randolph Thompson, focusing on his large-scale sculpture Palm. This piece was created while Thompson was participating in the Sculpture, Installation and New Media Art Residency Program in 2006 through the Division of Continuing Education.

Image: Pages from “Sam Weber,” May/June 2009 issue of Communication Arts

The June issue of Print magazine features an interview with Liz Danzico, chair of the MFA Interaction Design Department, by MFA Design Department Co-Chair Steven Heller. In the article, Danzico discusses the MFA Interaction Design Department, which the two co-founded: “This program is meant to create bridges to the business and design worlds, to give students a platform to begin this dialogue immediately.” Danzico also identifies emerging trends in the field and advises potential students of the importance of studying relationships between people in addition to the relationships between people and the products and services they use.

While the inaugural class will not begin coursework until the fall, the department is offering summer intensive courses through the Division of Continuing Education intended for incoming students, design professionals and anyone interested in the field of interaction design. Registration is currently open for the four-week courses that begin in July: Elements of Communication Design, Practice of Interaction Design and Practical Programming for Design.

Also, the department’s monthly Dot Dot Dot lecture series will continue through the summer. Click here to read previous Briefs coverage of the series.

On Friday, May 15, SVA’s class of 2009 was joined by family, friends and other guests for the College’s 34th annual commencement exercises. More than 5,000 audience members gathered at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan as President David Rhodes conferred 806 degrees upon candidates from 16 departments.

Two students took to the podium to represent their fellow graduates. Sean Hannon (BFA 2009 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) talked about the enthusiasm and support this year’s class required in order to stay focused while in the midst of global fiscal troubles, while Joanna Nebrosky (MFA 2009 Illustration as Visual Essay) used a humorous story about her great-uncle Ralph to examine the “creative solitude” needed by today’s artists to nurture their craft and vision.

President Rhodes then addressed the graduating students, speaking of the power of images to clarify the world around us and the Class of 2009’s responsibility to be key players in that process. The president concluded his speech by marking the transitional nature of the day: “Enjoy the last day of your old life. Tomorrow you will begin anew.” Keynote speaker Robert Caro, an eminent political historian best known for his biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, drew parallels between art and politics, noting that, “Art can do for politics what it can do for everything else: throw new light on it.”

Images: (top) Graduation students at Radio City Music Hall; (bottom) keynote speaker Robert Caro. Photos by Joe Sinnott.

The students in SVA’s MFA Computer Art Department regularly fuse the latest technologies with their creative visions. Those visions are on view in “Mediated Realities,” an exhibition of thesis projects from the class of 2009 that is on view at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26 Street, 15th floor, May 26 – June 6; there will be an opening reception on Tuesday, May 26, 6 – 8pm, and a live performance and demonstration of projects on Saturday, May 30, 2pm.

Curated by faculty member Russet Lederman, the show collects nearly 45 projects, including experimental linear video; networked media; video and audio installation; non-narrative and narrative 3D animation; and interactive installation and performance. Using technology to explore the inner self and the outer world, the artists also examine how their relationship to one another and their environment is mediated through technology, questioning social interactions in a media-saturated environment.

More video work from the MFA Computer Art Department will be screened on Tuesday, May 26, 8pm, at Monkey Town, 58 North Third Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The one-night event will feature single-channel and multiple-channel video art works created in faculty member Jarryd Lowder’s New Forms in Video and DVD-Video Authoring courses. Admission is $5 (with a $10 minimum), and reservations are recommended (click here).

Images: (top) Chan-Chia Chang, Pause Replay, 2009; (bottom) Thanawadee Chagasik, Untie Twine, 2009.

Several 2009 graduates from the BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department were among the winners of this year’s One Show College Competition. The annual competition is organized by The One Club, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting excellence in advertising. This year, students were asked to reposition a local condiment company as a high-end specialty food brand. Jeong Jyn Yi and Sara Roderick won a Gold Pencil for their print campaign “From Farm to Home,” and Sung Kwon Ha along with Jeong Jyn Yi, Se Hee Kim and Eunah Kim took home Silver Pencils for their entries in the Print Campaign and Corporate Identity categories, respectively. In addition to the Pencils, 14 other campaigns from SVA received merit awards.

The department also took home six awards in the student division of the 50th Annual CLIO Awards. The six winners were current student Hyojoo Kim, recent graduates Kenji Akiyama, Catherine Eccardt and Julissa Ortiz (BFA 2009 Advertising) and alumni Annie Chiu (BFA 2008 Advertising) and Anna Echiverri (BFA 2008 Advertising), who won a Gold for their campaign, which features a subway bench facing a Victoria’s Secret poster. Click here to read a recent Briefs interview with Chiu and Echiverri.

• Areej Khan’s (MFA 2009 Design) thesis project We the Women was recently featured on NY1 and CNN. Khan graduated from the MFA Design Department on May 15 and was the subject of two recent stories in The New York Times for the project.
• The May 11 issue of New York magazine profiles video artist and alumnus Kate Gilmore (MFA 2002 Fine Arts), highlighting her current group exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, “Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video,” running through January 2010. The current issue of Time Out New York also calls out Gilmore’s work in the exhibition.
• Alumni Alejandra Laviada (MFA 2007 Photography, Video and Related Media) and Daniel Traub (MFA 1998 Photography, Video and Related Media) were featured in The Moment, the blog for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Both Laviada and Traub were among 10 emerging photographers selected for this year’s International Fashion and Photography Festival in Hyeres, France. Additionally, work by Laviada and alumnus Amy Stein (MFA 2006 Photography, Video and Related Media) is included in the online publication Visura Magazine.

These can be stressful times for college students, but it’s also an opportunity for students to find ways to help one another. To help with pressures from exams, jobs or just general stress, mtvU (in partnership with the Jed Foundation) launched a new online resource called Half of Us and has invited current BFA Fine Arts Department student Rebecca Wilson to be a part of the project. “They videotaped me showing the way I would paint to release stress. I created paintings on camera,” says Wilson. “They had me wearing headphones while I painted since music helps relieve stress for me.”

Visitors to halfofus.com can find numerous videos about managing stress from college students (click here to view Wilson’s video, which features her painting in an SVA studio along to the Asher Roth hit La Di Da) and celebrities, along with public service videos depicting common challenges faced by college students and ways they can get help. The site also features pages on specific topics like depression and eating disorders, ways to offer help to stressed friends and a toll-free number to find local resources.

Image: Rebecca Wilson, Spring Rain, 2009.