Visual Arts Briefs

The new SVA Theatre has quickly become a go-to venue for red-carpet movie premieres in the city, and now it’s also a prime destination for international film festivals. The theater is set to welcome the 11th New York Turkish Film Festival (NYTFF). Taking place December 2 – 5 at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, the NYTFF will showcase some of the best contemporary films coming out of Turkey, including Atalay Taşdiken’s Mommo: The Bogeyman, based on the true story of two siblings in the authentic landscapes of Çavuş village in central Turkey; and Özcan Alper’s psychological drama Autumn, which presents an unlikely affair between a former political activist, just released from prison, and a Georgian prostitute in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region. The festival is being presented at SVA in conjunction with the exhibition “Octet: Codes and Context in Recent Art,” on view at the Visual Arts Gallery through Wednesday, December 23. More information is available at newyorkturkishfilmfestival.com.

As the Turkish fest winds down, the 24th Israel Film Festival (IFF) will also be gearing up at the SVA Theatre. Taking place in New York City December 3 – 13, the theater will be one of the IFF’s primary venues, including an opening night gala on Saturday, December 5. The opening event will include a screening of A Matter of Size, director Erez Tadmor’s lighthearted comedy about a group of overweight Israelis who start a sumo-wrestling club. For information about the festival and the opening night event, visit ny.israelfilmfestival.com.

• Alumnus Phoebe Washburn (MFA 2002 Fine Arts) was profiled in the November issue of ARTnews. Washburn creates site-specific installations by recontextualizing found objects, such as plywood and plastic crates. The article examines some of Washburn’s recent exhibitions, like her installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 Biennial, as well as some earlier shows, including the solo exhibition she landed with gallerist Zach Feuer soon after graduation from SVA. Click here to read the article online.
• Milton Glaser, acting chairman at SVA, and Debbie Millman, chair of the MPS Branding Department, weighed in on the redesign of the New York license plate for City Room, a New York Times blog. Click here to read Glaser and Millman’s comments about the retro-inspired design.
• Type A, an artistic duo formed by alumnus Adam Ames (MFA 1997 Photography and Related Media) and Andrew Bordwin, was the subject a feature in the current issue of Art in America. Through their video, photography and performance pieces, Type A explores different aspects of male competition. The two artists recently completed a project for the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, and earlier this fall, their installation Ruled, consisting of a dense formation of suspended plumb bobs, was on view at Goff + Rosenthal gallery in New York.

Image: Photo of November 2009 ARTnews.

SVA, in partnership with Giraldi Media, recently announced the winners of the inaugural Out of Hand International Festival (OOHIF), which showcased digital content created by students worldwide and intended for playback on mobile and handheld devices. The $5,000 grand prize was awarded to Guilherme Maueler, a student at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. The second-place prize, a one-month summer creative residency with housing at SVA, was awarded to BFA Film, Video and Animation Department student Ross Bollinger. The winning animations, which use both hand-drawn technique and motion graphics, can be viewed online at www.outofhandfestival.com.

The OOHIF received more than 1,200 submissions from aspiring artists, designers, filmmakers and creative thinkers worldwide. The jurors included MPS Live Action Short Film Department Chair Bob Giraldi, MFA Interaction Design Department Chair Liz Danzico, Cut&Paste’s John Fiorelli, humorist Ze Frank, author Joshua Klein, and PC Magazine’s Jamie Lendino. Submissions for the 2010 festival are currently being accepted at the OOHIF Web site.

Brazil is getting a double dose of SVA this month, with one department chair just returned from the South American nation and another chair due to fly down soon. MFA Design Department Co-chair Lita Talarico was in Sao Paulo for Brazil Design Week, where a variety of talks, workshops and seminars about global issues in design were presented from November 3 – 6. Talarico gave a keynote address as part of a forum focusing on colleges and universities involved in teaching design. “The theme for the forum was entrepreneurship and how to educate students for the future so that they are prepared for the business side of design,” said Talarico. “I talked about and showed case studies from the book The Design Entrepreneur: Turning Graphic Design into Goods that Sell, which included more than 20 student projects from the MFA Design Department.” She also took some time to visit Rio de Janerio and meet up with several SVA alumni who are living and working there: Renato Alarcao (MFA 2001 Illustration as Visual Essay), Celina Carvalho (MFA 2003 Design), Alexandre Damiano (MFA 1999 Fine Arts), Luiza Novaes (MFA 1994 Photography and Related Media) and Marta Strauch (MFA 1990 Illustration as Visual Essay).

Later this month, MFA Social Documentary Film Department Chair Maro Chermayeff will be in Sao Paulo to attend PIC DOC, a five-day international training program in documentaries that begins Monday, November 30. Chermayeff is one of a select group of industry professionals invited to participate in the week-long conference, sponsored by the Brazilian TV Producers organization to help Brazilian filmmakers increase the competitiveness of their documentary projects in the international marketplace.

Image: Lita Talarico and Luiza Novaes in Rio de Janerio.

Two-thousand and nine has been a good year for alumnus Lynn Shelton (MFA 1995 Photography and Related Media): in January, her feature film Humpday (which follows two straight male friends who dare each other to make an amateur porno film) was one of the darlings of the Sundance Film Festival, winning the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Prize for The Spirit of Independence; when the film opened in theaters over the summer, reviewers piled kudos on the indie comedy.

As the year wraps up, Humpday is being released on DVD, complete with bonus features like deleted scenes and a commentary track from writer/director Shelton (her previous film, My Effortless Brilliance is also just out on DVD). She spoke with the Briefs about writing a screenplay collectively and the benefits of making art under the radar:

How did the story idea for Humpday originate?
I start with a single person, I pitch them a character, a scenario, a very loose storyline. If they’re into it, we start to cast around them. In this case, I wanted to work with Mark Duplass. Each actor is brought in early enough to be heavily involved in the development of their characters. It’s kind of an upside-down model—I find the actors first, which then bleeds into developing the script. All of the actors are credited as script consultants.

Are there key things you learned at SVA that still inform your filmmaking?
I’d always wanted to be an artist, and everyone at SVA took the idea that I was an artist so seriously that I was able to take myself seriously, too. It helped me find my voice, which has been continuing to evolve and grow in the years since, but I got the inner strength there to find my inner voice and follow my instincts.

As someone who makes independent films, how much creative control are you able to retain?
You’d be hard pressed to find a film more independent than Humpday. All I had to do was please myself. That’s where it begins and ends. We had a micro-budget and were limited in various ways, but creative freedom is a beautiful thing.

For the fourth year in a row, the College will be heading to Miami, Florida for the season’s major art fairs. From December 2 – 6, SVA will be hosting booth #48 at Aqua Wynwood, 42 NE 25 Street at North Miami Avenue, featuring work by Yiftach Belsky (MFA 2009 Photography, Video and Related Media), Aaron Boldt (BFA Photography Department student), Brandon Davey (MFA 2009 Fine Arts), Darlin Frometa (BFA 2009 Illustration), Darya Golubina (BFA Fine Arts Department student), Yuhi Hasegawa (MFA 2009 Fine Arts), Gregg Louis (MFA 2009 Fine Arts), LaNola Stone (MPS 2009 Digital Photography) and Ivar Theorin (BFA 2009 Fine Arts). For an updated list of Aqua participants and events, visit aquaartmiami.com.

In addition to the booth at Aqua, SVA is deploying a mobile billboard that will cruise the Wynwood and Miami Beach fair areas on Friday, December 4. If you catch a glimpse, take a photo and send it to dhalm@sva.edu—we’ll include the shots we receive in our digital scrapbook of the 2009 fair.

Image: Yuhi Hasegawa, A Hundred Years in a Moment, 2009.

• SVA’s Undergraduate Catalog 2010-2011 has been selected as a winner by the 2010 Learning Resources Network (LERN) International Awards in the category of Brochure Design. Michael Walsh, the art director at the Visual Arts Press, will be accepting the award and representing the College at the LERN annual conference in Savannah, Georgia, on Friday, November 20.
• The New York Times Book Review has chosen Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 by Brian Floca (MFA 2001 Illustration as Visual Essay) and Only a Witch Can Fly, illustrated by Taeeun Yoo (MFA 2005 Illustration as Visual Essay) as two of the Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2009. Faculty member Jillian Tamaki (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Department) served as one of the judges for the Times.
• Jake Armstrong (BFA Animation 2009) won the Best Undergraduate Animation award at Ottawa International Animation Festival for his short film The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9. This is the latest in a string of festival wins for Armstrong, who has also taken home prizes at Bornshorts in Denmark, the Coney Island Film Festival, Romania’s Muvi Fest and the Woodstock International Film Festival.

Image: The Undergraduate Catalog 2010-2011; ©Visual Arts Press, Ltd.

Honey Trap, the latest directorial effort from MPS Live Action Short Film Department Chair Bob Giraldi, is having its official premiere this week as part of the 18th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival. The 12-minute short film stars music icon Debbie Harry and, according to the film’s producers, “is a dark story of sex, betrayal and murder that is an exercise in the art of seduction with a passionate and unexpected turn.” Honey Trap was edited by faculty member Patrick Burns, Jr., and can be viewed here:

In addition to Burns and many other industry professionals who have already signed on, Giraldi is continuing to build an impressive list of faculty for the new MPS program’s fall 2010 launch. Rachel Leventhal—an executive producer, writer and creator at Mama Makes Movies—has joined the department to teach screenwriting; and Susi Korda—a producer, story and editing consultant for the documentary Disturbing the Universe: Radical Lawyer William Kunstler—will be teaching courses in editing.

• Limited Edition KAWS Creme de Corps: The “Kiehl’s Since 1851″ lotion label received a temporary redesign from KAWS, aka alumnus Brian Donnelly (BFA 1996 Illustration). The profits from its sale will benefit RxArt, a nonprofit organization that brings contemporary art to hospital patients.
• Movado Artist Series: Alumnus Kenny Scharf (BFA 1981 Fine Arts) was commissioned by Movado to design six limited-edition watches. Each of Scharf’s colorful watches comes in a box designed by the artist.
• Look Both Ways, by Debbie Millman (chair, MPS Branding Department): A collection of illustrated essays on design that was recently featured in New York magazine’s Approval Matrix (HOW books, 2009).
• Graphic Design Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design: A survey on the graphic design field that features a two-page spread about the College, including the MFA Design Department and the SVA subway poster campaign (Rockport, 2009).
• The Teen Vogue Handbook: An Insider’s Guide to Careers in Fashion: This guide for teens interested in the fashion business lists the BFA Photography Department as a key program for fashion photography (Razorbill, 2009).

Image: Limited Edition KAWS Creme de Corps, courtesy of Kiehl’s Since 1851.

Several times each semester, the BFA Film, Video and Animation Department brings in A-list players from Hollywood and independent cinema for intimate Q&A sessions with students. Past guests at the College have included The Sopranos star James Gandolfini, Academy Award-winner Sean Penn and acclaimed writer/director Oliver Stone. On Tuesday, November 10, award-winning actor Josh Brolin joined Department Chair Reeves Lehmann in front of a capacity crowd of students and faculty to discuss his work in the Coen Brothers film No Country For Old Men, his process for creating characters, and how following his turns in No Country and Milk, the industry has adopted the catchphrase “Pulling a Josh Brolin” to describe the situation of an actor defying all odds in landing a top-level role.

Brolin told Lehmann, “Preparation creates opportunity” in the movie industry, and that doing extensive prep-work was especially important in the earlier stages of a director’s career. He took questions from the students in the audience and showcased a sharp sense of humor throughout the event.

Images: Photos by Javier de Pablos Velez.