Visiting Artist Jim Gaylord meets with Abstraction class

On Tuesday September 29 visiting artist Jim Gaylord of Brooklyn met with Aaron Collier's Intermediate Painting (Abstraction) class which has 18 undergraduates. The students had recently completed a Geometric Abstraction assignment which they reviewed together.  It was a real hit: students were really thankful, and were sharpened by the experience.  Gaylord also offered a public lecture in Stone Auditorium Tuesday night.  His visit with us was generously supported by CELT, the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund, and the Newcomb Art Department.

Emily Hermant exhibition in Chicago

On Saturday October 3, the two-person exhibition Hermant/Butler opens at the Franklin in Chicago, featuring the work of Assistant Professor of Sculpture Emily Hermant and Ben Butler.

In Emily Hermant’s work, a recurring theme is the utilization of slow, hand-making processes to generate ways of representing the rapid movement and proliferation of digital information and communication in contemporary life. For this duo exhibition with Ben Butler at The Franklin, Hermant has created Walled Garden, an installation of hand-rendered wallpaper panels on the interior of the Franklin’s outdoor structure, in which orchestrated ensembles of individually drawn dashes fluctuate in vibrant, toxic color combinations—a distillation of our experience of the hum and blur of rapidly changing technological information.

Artist Lecture: Jim Gaylord

Please join the Newcomb Art Department for a lecture by artist Jim Gaylord on Tuesday, September 29 at 6:30pm in Stone Auditorium, 210 Woldenberg Art Center.

This event is co-sponsored by the Newcomb Art Department,  the Center for Enganged Learning and Technology, The Sandra Gerrard Memorial Fund, and the Perry K. Simmons Endowment.

New faculty: Delia Solomons, Visiting Assistant Professor

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Delia Solomons to the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor of  Modern and Contemporary Global Art.

Prof. Solomons specializes in twentieth-century art of the Americas and Europe. Her research examines intersections of globalization, exhibition practices, visual culture, and politics. Her current project explores the sudden surge in exhibitions of Latin American art across the United States in the 1960s, the years directly following the Cuban Revolution; the project reveals how, as cold-war tensions escalated in the Americas, museums offered privileged spaces to stage both cultural diplomacy and dissent. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Humanities Initiative at New York University, the Institute of Fine Arts, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.

Solomons received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts in 2015. Prior to coming to Tulane, she taught at New York University and the City University of New York. She also co-curated the exhibition Sari Dienes at The Drawing Center in 2014 and has worked on curatorial projects for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Grey Art Gallery.

Solomons offers new courses to Tulane undergraduate and graduate students including Global Catalysts: Artists Respond to Disaster, Revolution, and Liberation , Art and Issues in Latin America After 1945, and Medium Matters in Contemporary Art: Dirt, Paint, Mirrors, and Lights. 

CAC's REVERB: Past, Present and Future

Levee Break Sculpture by Gene Koss, the Maxine and Ford Graham Chair in Fine Arts, is on view at REVERB: Past, Preset, Future, a juried group exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. The exhibition explores the evolution of art and artistic practices in New Orleans and its surrounding region over the last decade since Katrina and will be on display August 1 to November 1, 2015. The show also includes works by faculty Aaron Collier and Adam Mysock, as well as alumnae Anita Cooke, Loren Schwerd, and Sidonie Villere.

New faculty: Leslie Geddes, Visiting Assistant Professor, Art History

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Leslie Geddes to the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor. Leslie Geddes specializes in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture. She received her Ph.D. in the history of art from Princeton University in 2014. Her research has been supported by a grant from the Kluge Foundation, a Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship, and a Readership in Renaissance Studies at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Prof. Geddes’s research focuses on how early modern architects and engineers studied and depicted the natural landscape, specifically attending to the use of drawing in the production of knowledge. Her first book project, Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance Mastery of Nature, analyzes the subject of water in art in conjunction with the practical undertakings of hydraulic engineering. She has recently published two articles, one on Leonardo’s geological studies and another on his drawings of mobile bridges, an ancient military technology. She is also writing an article on Renaissance descriptions of experiments that agitate natural phenomena, such as boiling water or lighting fires.

Prior to coming to Tulane, she was a curatorial research assistant at the Morgan Library & Museum and a bibliographer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Unusual inspirations make fascinating art

Discarded folded paper road maps, recycled food cans and other “found” objects that evoke memories — these are the inspirations for five artists featured in the “Expanded Media” exhibition on view now through Sept. 24 at the Carroll Gallery on the Tulane University uptown campus.

When curator Laura Richens started planning the exhibit at the gallery, which is in the exhibition space of the Newcomb Art Department in the Woldenberg Art Center, she searched for “something visually exciting” and found it in the works by artists Anita Cooke, Sadie Sheldon, Nikki Rosato, Mark Grote and Rontherin Ratliff.

“I want to challenge our students and audience to think outside the parameters of traditional artistic media, and to see that there is a wide range of media that can be used in visual art,” Richens said. 

Carroll Gallery hours are 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. 

[Carol Schlueter, Tulane New Wave, September 14, 2015]