Visual Arts Briefs

Creating the “Tony Bennett: Portrait of An Artist” exhibition was a natural progression for photographers Josh Cheuse (BFA 1988 Photography) and Kelsey Bennett (Pre-College Program participant), granddaughter of Mr. Bennett. On view at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in SoHo, 124 Prince Street, until Sunday, October 9, the show documents the recording process of Tony Bennett’s new album DUETS II (RPM/Columbia Records) and features images of the legendary singer with the likes of k.d. lang, Amy Winehouse, Willie Nelson and Lady Gaga. All of the photos were taken by Kelsey Bennett and Cheuse, who began photographing bands when he was 16 years old and has worked for such publications as SPIN, Rolling Stone and Time Out. Kelsey Bennett has also been taking photos since she was an adolescent, and has since had the opportunity to intern for Danielle Levitt and Annie Leibovitz. The younger Bennett shared some thoughts about the exhibition and her photography via email with the Briefs recently.

How did the idea for this exhibition come about, and why did you decide to do it now?
My grandfather’s record DUETS II was released the same day as the gallery opening. As well as portraying Tony’s life as an artist, we also wanted to capture him with his DUETS partners to celebrate the record.

How did you team up with Josh?
In addition to being a photographer, Josh is also the art director at Sony. He designed the layout of the record. Throughout the years, Josh has become a close family friend.

How did your time at SVA contribute to your development as a photographer?
Being at SVA helped me use my sense of exploration to find what inspires me on the streets of New York. There used to be a punk club on Saint Marks Place called Coney Island High. I would go there every weekend. When I was at SVA, the club closed. I walked downtown and talked my way into the place. The guy originally wasn’t going to let me in but was swayed by the fact that I was shooting for school. Everything was left as I had remembered. I photographed the stage and the murals on the wall. I gained access into a place I never thought I’d see again. I still have those shots.

How does your photographic style differ from other photographers?
I am more concept driven. When I’m shooting, I keep an idea in my head that I want to later portray through the photograph. Josh loves to work with natural light. He waits for the light to create something beautiful, and he captures it. He has an incredible shot of my father and grandfather [Tony Bennett] on the roof of Capitol Records.

What do you want viewers to take away from this exhibition?
My grandfather is 85, and he has been working and living as an artist for most of his life and traveling the world to bring people his art. As well as being a singer, he paints and has just taken up sculpting. I want viewers to come away from the exhibit feeling inspired by how my grandfather has actively dedicated his life to his passion.

Images: Photo of Tony Bennett and Kelsey Bennett by Kyle Dean Reinford. Courtesy of Kelsey Bennett.

Photographer and MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department faculty member Elinor Carucci explores the complexity of familial intimacy in her new show “Born.” For this series of photos, Carucci turns her lens on her children, and the results are at once unsettling, poignant, and beautiful. On view at Sasha Wolf Gallery, 548 West 28 Street, through November 5.

BFA Fine Arts Department faculty member Melissa Meyer presents “New Paintings and Watercolors”—10 paintings and two watercolors, to be exact. These latest works showcase Meyer’s mastery of color control, and reflect the artist’s desire to be in a constant state of invigoration and renewal. On view at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., 514 West 25 Street, through October 29.

Division of Continuing Education faculty member Charles Yoder turns to nature in his new show “Still Waters and Shadows.” Inspired by a moonlit winter’s night, this collection of paintings represents Yoder’s transition from “abstract painter” to “realist painter.” On view at the Narthex Gallery at Saint Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Avenue at 54 Street, September 30 through November 20.

Image: Bath, 2006, by Elinor Carucci. Courtesy of Sasha Wolf Gallery.

One in a series of dispatches from SVA’s 2011 Arts Abroad programs.

The Art History in Southern France program is based in the lively cultural hub of Avignon, a town on the lush shores of the Rhone River famous for its medieval walls. Avignon is also the ideal jumping off point to explore Provence’s cultural landmarks, so on a day when much of Avignon observed a long weekend for the Christian holiday of Pentecost (a reminder to visitors of the succession of popes who took up residence here in the 14th century), the students struck out for Aix-en-Provence.

It was in Aix – so named for the waters of the many underground springs that supply numerous Roman fountains in the city’s historic center – that legendary painter Paul Cézanne was born, and his traces are everywhere. Led by guide Laurence Minard-Amalou and instructor Tom Huhn (chair, BFA Visual and Critical Studies Department), the group visited the elegant Musée Granet, which holds 9 of the artist’s paintings. It was at the museum that Cézanne got his start, copying paintings from the collection. Next stop: the site of the former hat shop owned by his father, and a fountain which served the town’s residents before indoor plumbing arrived in the 19th century, featuring a bronze portrait of Cézanne by fellow artist Jean Renoir. The group took in Aix’s cathedral, whose construction spanned a millennium following the 5th century, located not far from the university where Cézanne had once studied law.

The last stop of the day was the artist’s studio, which narrowly escaped the wrecking ball in the 1950s but today remains largely intact as Cézanne left it when he died in 1906. The light-filled work space on the top floor contains his pewter pots, local earthenware and other props seen in the still lifes – along with a special cutout in the wall for getting oversized canvases in and out. From there it’s a short (but steep) walk to the hillside where the artist often painted the Mont Sainte Victoire, the rocky plateau that juts out from the otherwise hilly landscape. Many of the students were struck by the fact that the artist had died on this same trail. Others just enjoyed the view of the mountain that he made so famous.

Images: (top) a street marker in Aix-en-Provence; (middle); Cézanne’s studio, now off limits to photography; (bottom) taking in the artist’s favorite views of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

One in a series of posts on the summer 2011 Arts Abroad programs, this dispatch reports on the Masters Workshop: Design History, Theory and Practice in Venice and Rome, led by MFA Design Department Co-chair Lita Talarico and BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department faculty member Louise Fili.

The capstone project of the Venice leg of the Masters Workshop in Design History, Theory and Practice is to design a guidebook to one aspect of the city’s visual culture, and for the occasion the Fondazione Claudio Buziol opened its doors to SVA. One of the satellite exhibition venues for the 54th Biennale di Venezia, the Fondazione is housed an 18th-century palazzo located in the Dorsoduro neighborhood that was recently renovated and re-opened after 100 years. It is here that students set up an impromptu studio and meet with faculty member Louise Fili to discuss their progress and chart a course around Venice in search of just the right type specimen, photograph or other visual artifact.

The Fondazione offers views of the Grand Canal and the landmark Santa Maria della Salute that would challenge even the most seasoned designer’s focus, and yet there is a continual buzz of activity as students work on logos, page layouts and type specimens. “You’re going to an SVA workshop, so you expect a certain level of intensity,” explained Brynley Farr, a designer from Columbia, South Carolina. “We’re all perfectionists, so we’re not going to stop until we get it done.”

Another student, New York-based designer Rahviance Robinson, said that working side by side with other designers had made her aware of old habits and opened her up to new ways of doing things. “I came in to the program with the mindset of ‘What do I have to unlearn?’ I completely unplugged from everything at home, because I wanted to take this time to really focus on my craft.”

Just a sampling of the projects reveals the designers’ wide range of experiences and interests, from an exploration of the color red around Venice and study of “flow” inspired by the canals to a series of dingbats based on Venetian architecture.

Images: (top) the Fondazione Claudio Buziol; (middle) the view onto the Grand Canal; (bottom) the impromptu studio for the Masters Workshop.

One in a series of posts on the summer 2011 Arts Abroad programs, this dispatch reports on the Masters Workshop: Design History, Theory and Practice in Venice and Rome, led by MFA Design Department Co-chair Lita Talarico and BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department faculty member Louise Fili.

Venice at 6am is a place where the pigeons outnumber tourists on the street – except today, perhaps. The group got up early for a trip to Mantua, which is two hours by car from Venice. The route crosses industrial parks, rail yards and then long stretches of cornfields and vineyards dotted by ochre farm houses. On arrival, Mantua’s Medieval and Renaissance artistic treasures are announced by the dramatic skyline of the historic downtown, which is visible as you approach by car.

Although Mantua may be best known for the sprawling complex called the Palazzo Ducale, where Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna’s frescoes are on view, the SVA group made the journey for a rare workshop at Corraini, the publishing house run by Maurizio and Marzia Corraini with their son Pietro. For nearly four decades the Corrainis have worked with legendary artists like Bruno Munari and other designers, illustrators and architects on books that have been called “impossible” to produce. Fortunately for readers everywhere, this has rarely been the case. “We are beloved and hated by printers,” says Marzia.

As Pietro explained, a Corraini publication typically begins with the artist, who is invited to treat the pages of the book like a gallery. (The Corrainis started out in business creating catalogs for gallery exhibitions, and today their space in Mantua includes a light-filled gallery next to the bookstore.) Because the Corrainis are as invested in the process of creating a given book as they are in producing and distributing it, practicalities like paper and binding are not imposed on their authors but worked out through a three-way dialogue with the printer.

After leading the group through the studio and archives, Pietro gave a brief lecture about the importance of art taking viewers “inside the work,” paraphrasing Munari’s observation that “You don’t read the book, you don’t see the book, you play the book.” Showing Munari’s 1956 classic children’s book Nella buia notte, Pietro then challenged the students to create a 16-page book of their own illustrating a journey of some kind. After three hours of intensive designing, printing, trimming, punching, stapling and stitching, they presented their books to the Corrainis. “Bravi!” said Marzia, “e sono tutti diversi.” Pietro translated, “Well done, and they’re all different,” but his mother’s smile said it all.

A gallery of photos from various SVA Arts Abroad programs can be found on Facebook.

Images: (top) entering Mantua; (middle) Pietro Corriani leads the SVA workshop at the Corriani gallery; (bottom) Rolando Monterosso, Mantova, artist’s book.

One in a series of dispatches about the 2011 summer Arts Abroad programs, this one catching up with faculty member Peter Hristoff and students for the last week of The Artist’s Journal. A gallery of photos can be found on Facebook.

The Brancacci Chapel is one of Florence’s most self-contained masterpieces, and its history makes it an especially appropriate site for a visit by an educational group. Commissioned to create a series of frescoes by the wealthy silk merchant Pietro Brancacci in the 15th century, the painter Masolino hired Masaccio to work with him and was then called to Rome, leaving his assistant to complete the chapel. Today the site’s renown owes mostly to Masaccio’s highly naturalistic, expressive images. “Never had bodies appeared so heavy,” says the narrator of the educational film screened for visitors about the artist’s masterful treatment of the scene of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

The Chapel’s administration requires visitors to arrive well in advance of the 15 short minutes allotted to each group, so the courtyard outside the chapel was the site for a fast-drawing exercise that had students create portraits of one another in 2 minutes. In the less than an hour, each person had filled their notebooks with a gallery of faces.

Following a stop for lunch at Florence’s lively indoor central market (where a panini and glass of wine go for just $5), it was on to Fiesole, a short and breathtaking bus ride up above the city. If hillside villas and olive trees stands and views taking in the whole of Florence weren’t inspiration enough, Hristoff led the group to the site of a 1st-century B.C. Roman amphitheater, where students drew the scene on top of the sketches they had made in Istanbul the week before. Like the bountiful archeological sites in the area that have filled Fiesole’s Museum of Etruscan Art, the students’ work would be a layered record of their travels through Europe.

Images: (top) drawing at the Brancacci Chapel in Florence; (middle and bottom) taking in the Roman Amphitheater in Fiesole.

The first in a series of reports on the 2011 summer Arts Abroad programs.

It’s almost impossible to imagine Leonardo da Vinci’s legacy without the notebooks he left behind, but his is just the most famous example of the importance that journaling has had for artists going back centuries. Connecting with this tradition in da Vinci’s native Italy was one of the goals of The Artist’s Journal, a new Arts Abroad program set in two world-renowned cultural capitals: Istanbul and Florence. The Briefs caught up with faculty member Peter Hristoff and his students as they were just beginning to discover the Italian city’s cultural riches.

The Museo di San Marco is a 15th-century monastery where the monk’s cells were decorated with masterful frescoes by Fra Angelico and his assistants. As captured in the students’ notebooks, the paintings dominate their austere surroundings with vivid color and engrossing compositions. If ever confinement seemed enlightened, it is here. As no photography of the interiors is permitted, the students’ drawings were the only tangible record of their visit.

The next day the group headed to the Specola, the natural history museum of the University of Florence that was established in the 18th century to house the wealth of scientific collections of the Medici, long Florence’s “first family.” In addition to taxidermy specimens from seemingly every corner of the world, the museum holds a world-renowned collection of wax anatomical models from the period when research on cadavers was punishable by death.

Explaining the appeal of drawing on location in a place like this, one student said, “Drawing every day puts you in the realm of history. You’re really experiencing the city because you’re visually recording it.” History is everywhere in Florence, but for Hristoff’s students, no camera is needed to capture it.

Images: (top) Cassandra Levine, untitled drawing, 2011; (middle) the Museo di San Marco in Florence; (bottom) drawing at the Specola.

The 2010 census cast new light on New York City’s growing Hispanic population, which rose by 8 percent to make up 29 percent of the total. As the the creative community adapts to the city’s changing ethnic makeup, the Division of Continuing Education at SVA has brought together an accomplished group of Latino artists and designers for a panel discussion on Monday, May 16, entitled Hispanic Professionals in the Arts: Mesa Redonda. Moderated by MTV2’s Desi Sanchez, the panelists include Laura Alejo, art director at HUSH; Rafael Esquer, principal at Alfalfa Studio; illustrator and cartoonist Felipe Galindo (known to many of his fans as Feggo); Jessica Perilla, creative director at JPD Studio; and José Luis Ortiz Téllez, a designer, consultant and educator.

Slated to be the first in a series of lectures and panel discussions, the program will explore some of the visual communication challenges and opportunities in the Hispanic community and how bilingual and bicultural designers and illustrators are responding. Mexican-born Galindo—whose award-winning book series Manhatitlan captures the ongoing convergence of American and Mexican cultures—says, “It was not until college that I realized the enormous cultural legacy in Mexico’s history and, oddly enough, not until I moved to New York that I began to incorporate it in my work.”

Conducted in English, the event takes place Monday, May 16, 6:30 – 8:30pm, 209 East 23rd Street, 3rd-floor amphitheater. Admission is free and open to the public; RSVP by Monday, May 9 to pcrousillat@sva.edu. To get a preview of the discussion, visit the Division of Continuing Education page on Facebook and click on Notes, where there is a series of interviews with the panelists.

Image: Illustration by Felipe Galindo.

In 1966, Donald Lippincott and Roxanne Everett founded Lippincott, Inc., an industrial fabrication shop dedicated exclusively to working with artists to create large-scale sculpture. Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Murray (BFA Fine Arts Department faculty member), Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Claes Oldenburg and many more made some of their most iconic work at Lippincott. As a boy, Donald’s son Jonathan saw the work in progress and recently documented it in the book Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), which he’ll talk about in a public lecture at SVA on Thursday, April 28.

Looking back on the era in an interview with art conservator Richard McCoy, Lippincott says, “It was always so strange to me when I would read certain art books about artists who had worked with my father, and the fabrication process was barely mentioned. They would talk about how an artist came up with an idea for a work and then say quite simply, ‘and then it was sent to a fabricator.’ But we know that there was a lot that happened after the artist came up with the idea, and that the artist was involved in that fabrication process as well.” Read the full interview on the art:21 blog here.

Presented by Reconfiguring Site: New Approaches to Public Art and Architecture, a six-week summer residency for interdisciplinary approaches to public art, the event takes place Thursday, April 28, 6:30pm, at 335 West 16th Street, room 103. Admission is free and open to the public.

Images: (top) Cover of Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); (bottom) A young Jonathan Lippincott (back to camera) and his parents with Claes Oldenburg (center) at Lippincott, Inc., from Large Scale.

Teaching the Action Surf Photography Workshop in Rincon, Puerto Rico as part of the Arts Abroad program at SVA, Art Brewer was recently interviewed by Jake Howard in ESPN’s surfing segment. Described as, “one of the most impactful photographers in surfing…[whose] archives are deep and exhaustive,” Brewer talks about how he began his teaching career with assistance from BFA Photography Department staff member Malcolm Lightner. He goes on to explain the key points he covers in his courses.

Finding inspiration in students’ success, Brewer says, “To me, there is nothing better than seeing someone walking up the beach stoked because they know that they got an amazing photo.”  Brewer also notes the impact of digital photography on the industry, saying his goal is, “to teach photography skills that transcend styles.”

Seasoned surf photographers have another chance to study with Brewer in June when he leads a new Arts Abroad workshop in Nicaragua.