Visual Arts Briefs

The Humanities and Sciences Department presents its Twenty-Fourth Annual National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, this year titled Green, Greener, Greenest: Romancing Nature Again. The event takes place October 27 – 29 at the Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street, and will feature a keynote address by MFA Design Criticism Department faculty member and MoMA curator Paola Antonelli.

The conference will feature presentations that explore the ways in which art educators, visual artists and writers approach, understand and use nature and green—with topics ranging from the use of nature in traditional landscape painting to the contemporary environmental movement and everything in between. For more information on the conference schedule and registration, contact Humanities and Sciences Department Co-chair Maryhelen Hendricks at 212.592.2625 or mhendricks@sva.edu.

Image: Photo of Paola Antonelli by Robin Holland.

• BFA Fine Arts Department faculty member David Ross appeared on the TV show CBS Sunday Morning. Ross was interviewed in a feature on how the economic downturn has affected the art world. Katie Hopkins, a current student in the BFA Fine Arts Department, was also shown in the segment using digital equipment to construct a metal sculpture.
• A new Division of Continuing Education course at SVA was recently featured on dnainfo.com. Entitled Get on Reality TV, the class teaches students the ins and outs of creating a reality show “character,” from casting to conflicts.
• Humanities and Sciences faculty member Regina Weinreich was mentioned in a Herald Tribune article after she spoke at the Sarasota Film Festival at a screening of a documentary about author William S. Burroughs. Weinreich hosted a program of screenings, lectures and poetry readings about the author at SVA back in October.
• Alumnus and comics artist Phil Jimenez (1991 Cartooning) was included in a New York Times article about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender comics, creators and readers. In a discussion of creating minority characters, Jimenez told the Times, “This is always the unfair truth of any new character created to represent a minority: it’s nearly impossible for them to thrive as characters because they have to ‘represent’ a population whose members do not all behave the same way, see themselves in the same way, dress in the same way, share the same political beliefs.”

Image: Photo of David Ross, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

• Alumnus Jonathan Torgovnik’s (BFA 1996 Photography) photographs of the post-earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti are featured on Anderson Cooper’s blog AC360°. Torgovnik and Cooper, along with with other members of CNN’s crew, were in Haiti reporting on the effects of the earthquake,when Cooper aided a young boy who had been attacked by looters. Click here to view Torgovnik’s photographs of the incident.
• The New York Times recently mentioned Humanities and Sciences Department faculty member Susan Mosakowski in a glowing review of the one-person show “Wild Man.” Mosakowski is one of the creative directors of the Creation Production Company, which is co-presenting the play, at The Wild Project, 195 East Third Street, through Tuesday, January 26.
• The Web site for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph touted a class project by current MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department student James Pomerantz. Pomerantz aggregated essays, images and video about conflict photography to create a Web site on the topic. Pomerantz also blogs about his studies at SVA.

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).

Yesterday’s episode of NPR’s All Things Considered featured an interview with Regina Weinreich, faculty member in the Humanities and Sciences Department, about the 50th anniversary of William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch. Weinreich is hosting a program of screenings, poetry readings and performances related to Naked Lunch on Saturday, October 10, at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, from 3:30 – 8:30pm. You can listen to the radio segment and read the article on the NPR Web site.

We asked SVA students and faculty to send in work they were creating over the summer. Below is one in an occasional series of Summer Session posts.

Faculty member Richard Grayson (BFA FIlm, Video and Animation; Humanities and Sciences; and BFA Photography departments) has his essay “The Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County” included in the new anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009), which was edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn.

Grayson’s piece is a personal tour of several defunct movie theaters in the Florida county, interspersing historical facts about the theaters with memories of the author’s past. The essay was excerpted for the online magazine The Rumpus and is available here. Grayson will also be participating in a Life As We Show It reading event on Monday, August 3, 7pm, at McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street.

Image: Cover of Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, City Lights, 2009.