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.