Visual Arts Briefs

Last week, the Humanities and Sciences Department presented Visions of War: The Arts Represent Conflict, its Twenty-Third Annual National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists. Nearly 100 papers were presented at the conference that also comprised three days of performance, films and panel discussions examining representations of conflict and war in art.

This year’s conference widened the scope of the event beyond the scholarly presentations to include several studio programs as co-presenters. Humanities and Sciences sponsored a performance of Jack Gilhooley’s play The Warrior, which examines the mental health of a Persian Gulf War veteran; after the play, faculty member Dr. Camillo Bica hosted a Talk Back session with actor Marietta Elaine Hedges and Readjustment Counselor Mariel Sosa. For the panel discussion Social Change, Conflict and a New Photographic Paradigm, the BFA Photography Department brought together Tim Davis, Tim Hetherington and An-My Lê with moderator Richard Woodward to discuss the effectiveness of photography as a political tool and instrument for social change. The MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department screened Full Disclosure, a documentary by alumnus Brian Palmer (MFA 1990 Photography and Related Media) that chronicles back-to-back deployments by one U.S. Marine combat unit in Iraq. And the BFA Film, Video and Animation Department curated the film series After the Wars and presented a panel discussion, The Scars of War: Healing Through the Arts; moderated by David Berry, the panel featured filmmakers Brian Delate and Ari Folman, author Dr. Edward Tick and retired Colonel Ann Wright.

“Overall, the presentations, the performance, the panels and the films examined many aspects of the arts of war,” says Dr. Maryhelen Hendricks, conference director and co-chair of the Humanities and Sciences Department. “War is a very human activity, and though we say ‘give peace a chance,’ we don’t.”

Images: (top), still from Full Disclosure, ©Brian Palmer; (bottom) The Scars of War panel discussion (photo by Javier de Pablos Velez).

Alumnus Elizabeth Peyton (BFA 1987 Fine Arts) will give a rare public talk when she presents this semester’s Distinguished Alumnus Lecture on Thursday, November 5, 7pm, at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street. The talk is being presented by the The Alumni Society of School of Visual Arts.

Known for her stylized portraits of close friends, pop icons and European royalty, Peyton is often credited with the resurgence of figurative painting in contemporary art. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world and was recently the subject of a mid-career retrospective by the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Image: Elizabeth Peyton, The Age of Innocence, 2007, oil on board.

Last month, several SVA students volunteered their time and creative skills for a project benefiting the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Current students Alexandra Alcantara, Amanda Aliperti, Zach Brunner, Amira Moodie, Amy Kolenut, Olivia Li, Becky Phillips, Fitgi Saint Louis, Jacque Sendgikoski and Alexandra Thiel created masks that will be used as decorative centerpieces at the ADA’s Changing the Face of Diabetes Gala on Thursday, November 5, in New York City.

Below are photos, taken by Residence Hall Director Adam Krumm, of the students working on the masks in SVA’s Monkey Bar Lounge:

As part of the promotional efforts for season four of the cable series Dexter, the Showtime channel commissioned alumni Kyle Baker (1986 Cartooning) and Andres Martinez (MFA 2007 Illustration as Visual Essay) to work on several short animations featuring the show’s title character. Baker and Martinez are both interviewed in a Web video that goes behind the scenes of Dexter: Early Cuts, with each artist describing his approach to creating the illustrations that were animated for the series:

Episodes of Dexter: Early Cuts are screening now at www.sho.com.

Design School Confidential: Extraordinary Class Projects from International Design Schools, Colleges and Institutes, by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico (co-chairs, MFA Design Department): A compendium of 53 design-program class projects from around the world (including SVA, of course) that brings the reader inside the design-education process, from assignment to finished result (Rockport Publishers).

Image: Cover of Design School Confidential: Extraordinary Class Projects from the International Design Schools, Colleges and Institutes (Rockport Publishers) by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico.

As the passing of pop icon Michael Jackson continues to reverberate throughout the culture, a recent work by BFA Visual and Critical Studies Department faculty member Josh Azzarella has gotten swept along with the media tide. Untitled #100 (Fantasia) takes Jackson’s long-form Thriller video and strips out the song, the star, the dancing and every other key element, leaving only the shots of rolling fog, atmospheric scenery and a deserted ticket booth.

The piece is on view at the Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago, October 31 – December 5, and can be viewed online at thefunkof40000years.com; Azzarella discussed the work with the Briefs via e-mail:

Tell me about Untitled #100 (Fantasia).
This piece is part of a body of work started in late 2003 that investigates collective memory, as defined by Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). There is specific focus on how memories are formed or not formed, and are initiated or recalled. Moreover, this practice of interfering with what is considered cemented, canonical documentation touches on issues of authorship and selective memory.

Was this a response to Michael Jackson’s death?
This piece has been in progress since 2007, when I began working on a feature-length film project in which I removed all of the people and events, rendering it a contemplative space constructed of only background and panning shots. As I began working, I found that I needed to understand a few things in terms of camera movement and film replication, so I decided that I needed a smaller project to work on, and that project needed to fit within the scope of my other works.

Is it difficult to begin to approach such well-known imagery from the collective visual culture?
With my previous work at times it has been difficult, and I attribute that difficulty to the sacredness of the images that I deal with. However, with Thriller it wasn’t as difficult, and that lack of difficulty is something I attribute to Michael Jackson still being alive when I started the work. The Thriller video had been remade and/or spoofed so many times; it is an icon of popular culture, and not one that evokes events or memories with which we may not want to be confronted.

What does the original Thriller video mean to you?
I remember watching the original as a child, but it doesn’t really hold any personal significance for me. However, its impact on current and popular culture is virtually immeasurable, and that’s what drew me to it.

Images: Josh Azzarella, stills from Untitled #100 (Fantasia), 2007–2009; Courtesy DCKT Contemporary, New York.

Each year, the Art Directors Club (ADC) assembles a choice group of emerging talents for its Young Guns competition and exhibition. The 2009 Young Guns winners have just been announced, and the list includes two current students from the MFA Design Department: Dora Budor and Maja Cule; and four alumni: Lindsay Ballant (BFA 2004 Graphic Design; faculty, BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department), Yoko Furusho (BFA 2008 Illustration), Timothy Goodman (BFA 2007 Graphic Design) and Sam Weber (MFA 2005 Illustration as Visual Essay; faculty, BFA Illustration and Cartooning Department).

Budor and Cule are a design duo from Croatia who are in their first year at SVA. “We have worked together in our own studio for five years in Zagreb, Croatia, mostly for cultural organizations, theater and arts,” they said, via e-mail, “and three months ago we moved to New York to pursue our studies at SVA.” They were selected for the competition’s Self-Employed category based on their studio’s portfolio, which can be viewed here.

All of the winners—in fields ranging from advertising and design to illustration and photography—were unveiled at a gala event on Wednesday, October 21, and the “ADC Young Guns 7” exhibition will be on view at the ADC Gallery, 106 West 29th Street, through Saturday, October 31. For information on this and other Young Guns events, visit adcyoungguns.org.

Images: Dora Budor and Maja Cul, Pecha Kucha Night poster, 2009.

The exhibition “The Wilde Years: Four Decades of Shaping Visual Culture,” now up at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor, celebrates BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department Chair Richard Wilde’s fortieth anniversary at the College. The exhibition has already received some media coverage:

• NY1 covered the exhibition in a segment featuring interviews in the exhibition space with Wilde, exhibition designer Kevin O’Callaghan and participating artist and curatorial committee member Lisa Rettig-Falcone (BFA 1983 Media Arts) . Click here to view the segment.
• Print magazine featured an interview between Wilde and MFA Design Department Co-chair Steven Heller on its Web site. Wilde talks about his teaching philosophy and assignments from his well-regarded Visual Literacy class.
• Flavorwire interviewed “The Wilde Years” participating artist and alumnus Rodrigo Corral (1995 Graphic Design) about some of his iconic works in the show, including book covers for Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff.

Click here to read previous Briefs coverage of “The Wilde Years.”

Image: Photo, by Jeff Eason, from the opening reception for “The Wilde Years” with designer and television host Genevieve Gorder (BFA 1998 Graphic Design) and Richard Wilde.

This week, the MPS Digital Photography Department is opening “Surface Tension,” an exhibition of thesis work from the program’s 2009 graduating class, curated by alumnus and faculty member Dan Halm (MFA 2001 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1994 Illustration). The show has already been getting favorable notices in the press, including pieces in the Daily News, Double Exposure and Visura.

The images in “Surface Tension”—on view at the SVA Gallery, 209 East 23rd Street, October 21 – November 14 (there is an opening reception on Wednesday, October 21, 6 – 8pm)—are an amalgam of responses to national events, private fears, hidden desires and personal epiphanies, taken from bodies of work completed on a digital platform. Department Chair Katrin Eismann spoke to the Briefs about the show:

The students and visual approaches are fairly diverse—how do you stitch them into a coherent show?
The diversity of the show reflects the student body. That group of 16 ranges in age from 22 – 60, comes from 5 continents, and is made up of many different types of photographers—photojournalists, landscape photographers, fine artists, etc. The program brought them together through the emphasis on quality, and there’s no weak work in the show.

You’ve taught all of the students whose work is in the show. Does the work in the show grow directly from work in class?
Some of it does. All of this work was developed in faculty member Amy Stein’s (MFA 2006 Photography, Video and Related Media) Thesis Development course. All of the images went through that class, but there are also specific projects that had already been started in the fall, such as Michaela Dazell’s project, which began in Harvey Stein’s course, The Art of Editorial Photography.

What are some of the aesthetic concerns specific to this work as digital photography?
The importance of not using clichés. There are certain digital image-processing clichés that lead to hyper- or overcooked images. You can spot them a mile away, such as high-dynamic-range imaging, a look where people overprocess so the colors get oversaturated and the images get cartoony and gritty. We don’t have that problem, because we encourage students to create their own look and style. There has to be a balance between concept and implementation using digital technology.

Image: Michaela Dalzell, Finding Love in New york City, 2009.

AIGA, a professional association for designers, presented its annual design conference, Make/Think, this month in Memphis, Tennessee. Among the dozens of speakers, exhibits, screenings and symposia presented from October 8 – 11 were contributions from several members of the SVA faculty: Carin Goldberg and Paul Sahre (BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department); Debbie Millman (MPS Branding Department); Kurt Anderson, Michael Bierut and Julie Lasky (MFA Design Criticism Department); and Jennifer Bove, Liz Danzico and Khoi Vinh (MFA Interaction Design Department).

As to be expected from a conference with so many designers and interactive-media players in attendance, the event was well documented online:

• Read the Make/Think blog, which complies text, photos, video, and Twitter comments covering the entire event.
• View photos of the event from the conference’s Flickr photostream.
• Click here and here to see what attendees of Danzico’s Wisdom of Communities panel were saying about the event on Twitter.
• Watch blogger Alissa Walker’s video from the conference, including interviews with Anderson, Bierut, Danzico and Lasky: