Unique gifts aplenty at campus holiday sale

If your holiday gift list is looking a little lackluster, you can find a variety of locally crafted, vibrant artwork — ranging from photography to jewelry — at the annual Newcomb Art Department Holiday Studio Sale.

Laura Richens, curator of the Carroll Gallery in the Newcomb Art Department, organizes the annual event, which exclusively features works created by faculty members, students and alumni.

“The objects that you find at this event are things that you can’t get anywhere else,” she said. “Ceramics students, glass students and printmakers get together to create many of the products on sale.”

Shoppers can browse the eclectic selection of ceramic goods, paintings, sculptures and hand-blown glass ornaments — a popular choice for patrons looking for crowd-pleasing presents.

“The glass students have been hand-blowing hundreds of ornaments since October in preparation for this event. Each piece is truly one of a kind,” said Richens.

The event’s proceeds benefit the Newcomb Art Department, funding classroom equipment and the cost of travel for students heading to academic conferences.

Held on the Tulane University uptown campus, the sale takes place in the Woldenberg Art Center’s department conference room (Room 204) and drawing studio (Room 214).

Following a special preview night open to alumni and friends of Newcomb Art Department on Thursday, Dec. 14, from 6 to 8 p.m., the shopping event will be open to the public on Friday, Dec. 15, and on Saturday, Dec. 16, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

 [article by Mary Cross, photo by Kaori Maeyama, originally published in the New Wave]

Alumni News: Michel Varisco (MFA 1994)

“Turning: prayer wheels for the Mississippi River” Artist Rendering

The unveiling dedication of artist Michel Varisco's public art installation, “Turning (prayer wheels for the Mississippi River)” will take place on site, the Lafitte Greenway entrance at Bayou St. John and Jefferson Davis Parkway, on Saturday November 18th, 2:30 - 4:30pm.

Commissioned by the Arts Council of New Orleans, the City of New Orleans, and featured in the Prospect.4 Biennial, “Turning” elegantly blends social and environmental activism with interactive sculpture, where the history of the land itself is an integral component of the piece.

“Turning” consists of three, 9 foot, stainless steel, interactive “prayer wheels”, individually cut with iconography of the Mississippi River from three distinct periods of the riverʼs history, (the wild era, colonial plantation era, and petrochemical era), based on the mapping in Kate Orffʼs seminal book, “Petrochemical America”. Each cylinder is rooted in a hand-made mosaic base that depicts the land building patterns created from deposits of the riverʼs sediment over 7000 years, informed by the Fisk maps of 1944. At night, the prayer wheels will emit pulses of dim blue light via solar power, and visitors may spin each wheel to intensify the emanations. The path that weaves through the installation echoes the riverʼs serpentine curvature, while the indigenous gardens surrounding the site were planted by Varisco and a team of devoted community volunteers.

Tulane Contemporary.4 exhibition to open in Carroll Gallery

Please join us to celebrate work by the faculty of the Newcomb Art Department and to explore the MFA Open Studios.  

Tulane Contemporary.4 is an official Prospect.New Orleans Satellite Exhibition, featuring work by: 

Anthony Baab
Teresa A. Cole
Aaron Collier
William DePauw
AnnieLaurie Erickson
Ronna S. Harris
Jeremy Jernegan
Kevin H. Jones
Gene Koss
Anne Nelson
Christian Stock
Jonathan Traviesa

Exhibition reception: Thursday, Nov. 16, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
MFA Open studios: 6:30 pm
Exhibition dates: Nov. 16, 2017 - Feb. 9, 2018

for more information, please contact Laura Richens: 
lrichens@tulane.edu

Penny Siopis: Artist Talk

The Newcomb Art Department presents P.4 artist Penny Siopis for an artist talk on Tuesday November 14 at 6pm in Stone Auditorium. This talk is supported by the Sandra Garrard Fund for Recent Trends in Contemporary Art.

Penny Siopis is currently an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Siopis received an MFA (1976) and an Honorary Doctorate (2017) from Rhodes University, Grahamstown. She works in painting, film/video, photography and installation. Her work since the early 1980s has covered different foci but her interest in what she calls the 'poetics of vulnerability' characterises all her explorations, from her earlier engagements with history, memory and migration to her later concerns with shame, violence and sexuality.

Solo exhibitions include Penny Siopis: Films, Erg Gallery, Brussels (2016); Incarnations, ICA Indian Ocean, Mauritius (2016); Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2014) and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2015); Red: The iconography of colour in the work of Penny Siopis, KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009), and Three Essays on Shame, Freud Museum, London (2005).

Notable group shows include P.4 The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, New Orleans, Louisiana (2017); South Africa: The art of a nation, British Museum, London (2016); Boundary Objects, Kunsthaus Dresden (2015); After Eden/Après Eden - The Walther Collection, La Maison Rouge, Paris (2015); Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Prism: Drawing from 1990-2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Appropriated Landscapes, Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany (2011); PEEKABOO - Current South Africa, Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010); Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body, Hood Museum, New Hampshire; Davis Museum, Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the San Diego Museum of Art, California (2008), as well as the biennales of Taipei (2016), Venice (South African Pavilion 2013, and 2003), Sydney (2010), Johannesburg (1995 and 1997), Gwangju (1997) and Havana (1994 and 1997).

Kevin H. Jones: Protecting Things That Are Doubted

Kevin H. Jones is included in the exhibition Appealing to the Populous at Humboldt Universität in Berlin, Germany. The exhibition opened Nov 1st and coincides with Berlin Science Week .  Appealing to the Populous brings together over twenty international artists exploring various issues related to evolutionary biology.

Kevin’s work "Protecting Things That Are Doubted" includes three sensors that monitor and guard a copy of Charles Darwin’s, On the Origin of Species. Such care to monitor and preserve what is considered one of the most important scientific books ever published must be taken, especially in a divided world of evolutionary doubt, ignorance, and controversy. Exhibition visitors will observe real time measurements of the forces exerted within the book’s environment.

http://www.berlinscienceweek.com/programme/artscience-exhibition-on-evolutionary-biology-appealing-to-the-populous

"A Tale of Many Cities: The Serapeion at Ephesus and Politics in the Roman Empire"

Please join Tulane's Newcomb Art Department and Department of Classical Studies for a lecture by Alexander Sokolicek, "A Tale of Many Cities: The Serapeion at Ephesus and Politics in the Roman Empire," on Tuesday, November 7, at 6:15 pm, 102 Jones Hall.

The so-called Serapeion is one of the best-preserved and most distinguished temples at Ephesus, the capital of the Roman province of Asia. Travelers of the 18th century discovered its remains and misleadingly identified it with a temple of the Roman Emperor Claudius. Ever since, the building has been given many names, but its actual purpose has never been convincingly explained. Recently, a multidisciplinary team re-studied the temple area, offering a promising new possibility of interpretation, which will be discussed in the light of Egyptian religion, economy, and global politics in the Roman Empire.
 
Alexander Sokolicek is Senior Research Scientist at the Austrian Archeological Institute OeAI and Director of the OeAI bureau in Rome. Sokolicek received his PhD from the University of Vienna. He was the field director 2012-2015 of the joint excavations of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and the University of Oxford at Aphrodisias (Turkey) and the project manager 2007-2011 of the excavation of the Magnesian Gate of Ephesos. His research interests focus on urban layouts and fortifications as expressions of social and political identity.

New course: Troy: Beyond the Myth

CLAS-2811: Troy: Beyond the Myth
Prof. Emilia Oddo, Dept. of Classical Studies

The Trojan War, famous heroes against each other, astute decoys, tragic deaths, plotting, intrigue, and the gods in the midst of it. All these stories were celebrated in the poetry of Homer, forever remembered as one of the pillars of Greek literature, and were represented on pots and temples. Was it all fiction? Or did something really happen between the city of Troy and the ancient Greek world? Come and find out what archaeologists have discovered, who were the real Agamemnon and Menelaus, and how Homer saved the day.

New course: The Orléans Collection

The Orléans Collection:
Early modern collecting, the art market and the first museums
Spring 2018. M 3:30- 5:45        Professor Stephanie Porras and Vanessa Schmid, NOMA

This seminar investigates the formation, organization, display and dispersal of early modern art collections, using the magnificent art collection amassed by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1690-1723) as a paradigmatic example. The Orléans collection will be the subject of a landmark 2018 exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art to celebrate the city’s tri-centennial, curated by Vanessa Schmid, who will co-teach this course with Professor Porras. The seminar will study the formation and organization of early modern European aristocratic collections, most notably Italian aristocratic and merchant collections such as those amassed by the Medici and Gonzaga families; ambitious royal collectors like Rudolph II and Charles I; and French noble collections from the Valois courts onwards. Students will study the social networks of early modern collectors, reading inventories, travellers’ accounts and theoretical texts to analyze why patrons amassed art collections. The seminar also aims to help students develop an understanding of the increasing professionalism of the early modern art market, the rise of specialist art dealers and connoisseurial practices – particularly in the cities of Paris, Amsterdam and London. The sale of the Orléans collection intersected with the foundation of James Christies’ London auction house and the formation of the first public art museums in Europe. Finally, students will analyze and compare the politics of display and various levels of access to different aristocratic collections, with particular focus on the formation of the Western art historical canon, artists’ use of early modern collections, and the origins of the public museum in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Questions?         Email Stephanie Porras (sporras@tulane.edu)

Saffron by Teresa Cole

Thursday evening, October 26, 2017, Teresa Cole, artist and Professor of Art, will present a lecture titled, "Exchange," at the University of Richmond in conjunction with her solo exhibition, "Saffron," a large-scale installation of dyed, printed, and laser-cut Japanese paper that will cover the gallery walls. The exhibition at the Lora Robbins Gallery of Design from Nature, University of Richmond Museums, will be open from October 27 to December 8, 2017.

MFA Artist Talks

Please join the Newcomb Art Department for a series of Artist Talks by current MFA candidates.

Alumni News: Marisa Hershon

Marissa Hershon (BA, Art History, 2003) is happy to announce that the catalog she co-authored, Glass: Masterworks from the Chrysler Museum of Art, is now available on Amazon, with her essays highlighting American and European glass in the museum’s collection. 

Hershon, a Curatorial Assistant in Decorative Arts, Craft, and Design at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston also is pleased to share that the exhibition, The Glamour and Romance of Oscar de la Renta, is on view at The MFAH from October 8, 2017 – January 28, 2018.

New Course: Spring 2018

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.

Environmental Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Approach
A New 360-Degree Course
CIRC 3600 - Spring 2018
Professors Michelle Foa, Tom Sherry, Rich Campanella, and Laura McKinney
 
In this introductory class, we will examine how people in different times and places have viewed their relationship to their environment and how a better understanding of this relationship can help us address current and future environmental challenges.  The course is co-taught by four professors in the Departments of Art History, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Sociology, and a Geographer in the School of Architecture in order to address environmental questions and challenges from a multidisciplinary perspective.  No previous course work in any of these disciplines is required.  The art history portion of the class will explore the history of artists’ engagement with the environment and how their work reflects broader economic, political, and social developments underway.  The part of the course taught by the biologist will analyze the threats to biological diversity arising from climate change and a variety of solutions that humans are devising to address these challenges, while the sociology portion of the class will evaluate the complex connections between nature and social systems.  The section taught by the geographer will consist entirely of field trips to sites throughout the city and region in order to examine the complex environmental past, present, and future of New Orleans.  This course, then, offers students a unique and exciting opportunity to explore our relationship to the environment from a variety of disciplinary points of view.

For more information, please contact Prof. Michelle Foa (mfoa@tulane.edu).

Newcomb Art in the New Wave

Charlie Tatum, left, talks with Maxwell Sandler, right, about his ceramic entry, Delilah, 2016. 
Sandler, a junior majoring in cell and molecular biology with a minor in studio art, was eager to have his piece reviewed by Tatum, editorial and communications manager for Pelican Bomb, an online arts publication, during the opening reception for the 2017 Undergraduate Juried Exhibition in Carroll Gallery.

[photo: Paula Burch-Celentano, Tulane New Wave, October 20, 2017]

Panel Discussion at Loyola

Gary Metz: Encountering the Landscape and a Photographic Tradition

Wednesday, October 18, 2017, 6:30 p.m., Miller 114, Loyola University

PANELISTS

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, MFA, Gary Metz curator, Fordham University, New York, NY
Joseph Lawton, MFA, Gary Metz curator, Fordham University, New York, NY

Russell Lord, PhD, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, New Orleans Museum of Art
Benjamin Benus, PhD, Assistant Professor of Art History, Loyola University New Orleans
AnnieLaurie Erickson, MFA, Assistant Professor of Photography, Tulane University        

Presented in conjunction with the current exhibition: Gary Metz: Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint

Collins C. Diboll Art Gallery, Loyola University New Orleans

September 25-December 15, 2017