Kevin Jones: The New Pollution

Kevin Jones, Associate Professor and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department, has a solo exhibition at Rudoph Blume Fine Art / ArtScan Gallery in Houston.

Kevin Jones’ work challenges the blind faith in all things scientific as the predominant, contemporary credo. He is baffled by the seeming inability of scientific inquiry to explain the innermost workings of nature. Richard Feynman famously said  “If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part”, so Kevin Jones is ready to help out by suggesting alternative systems.

This exhibition is the second solo show for Jones at ArtScan; the first one titled “Chemtrail” took place in 2012. Jones has exhibited internationally, most recently at the Berlin Science Week and spends time in summer at Akiba Art Lab in Tokyo. His mostly digital based work is done in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, time-based media, or digital prints.  

Show duration: February 24 - March 31, 2018 | 1836 Richmond Avenue | Houston, TX 77098

2018 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture: Darby English

Pope.L, 2008

2018 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture Series presents:

Darby English

Differing, Drawn:  Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings

Monday, February 26, 7pm

Freeman Auditorium
Woldenberg Art Center
Newcomb Art Department
Tulane University

Darby English’s research probes art’s interaction with instituted forms of historical subjectivity and experience. Recent research has focused on artistic and other cultural manifestations of optimism, discomposure, and interculture. More theoretical formulations of English’s work examine the difficulty of studying the foregoing themes as historical objects while having also to negotiate their implications as sources of anxiety about historical change. English is the author of 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007). A new monograph, To Describe a Life: Essays at the Intersection of Art and Race Terror, will be published by Yale University Press this autumn (2018). This book synthesizes material first presented as the Richard D. Cohen Lectures at Harvard University in November 2016. Current projects include a small book on discomposure; monographic essays on the art of Rachel Harrison, Zoe Leonard, and Silke Otto-Knapp; and, a collection volume entitled Among Others: Blackness at MoMA. English also serves as Adjunct Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

For more information, please call 504.865.5327

Photography professor captures hidden world of internet data

AnnieLaurie Erickson, an assistant professor of photography in the Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, captures images of data centers around the world in her ongoing project “Data Shadows.” (Photo by AnnieLaurie Erickson)

Artistically intrigued by the unseen, AnnieLaurie Erickson, an assistant professor of photography in the Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, set out to document one of the mysteries of the internet: where it lives.

In her ongoing project “Data Shadows,” Erickson captures images of data centers around the world. Next month she will display work from the project in “Into the Digital Mesh,” opening March 3 at the Galveston Arts Center, during FotoFest 2018, a biennial photography event in Houston.

Erickson said during the last four years she has tracked unmarked locations of the world’s largest data centers, properties of notoriously secretive companies like Google, Apple and Facebook. Then she began “building an archive that looks at the stuff that comprises the physical apparatus of the internet and digital surveillance, and that houses our data. How our data is used affects our daily lives, yet we are not allowed access to it.”

The work includes complex and sometimes startling imagery of massive cooling towers, solar farms and miles of cable. The large tech companies did not grant her access to their private property, she said, so she photographed from the outside, sometimes outside a barbed-wire fence. Once, while standing on public property in Oklahoma, she attracted the attention of Google security personnel, local police and state police all at once, a situation she described as “intense.”

Some of the smaller data centers, like the one operated by Tulane University, allowed her to photograph inside. One of the features of Erickson’s exhibit is interactive eyetracking software. As a viewer looks at an image through the eyetracker, a recording of their eyes' path of vision appears on screens elsewhere in the exhibit.

“There’s a voyeuristic relationship in the gallery where other viewers can see more than the singular viewer who’s creating the eye trails,” Erickson said. “It kind of mimics the experience that we have as we live our lives on the internet.”


[Tulane New Wave  | February 14, 2018 3:00 PM  |  Faith Dawson  fdawson@tulane.edu]

Alumna Establishes Visiting Studio Artist Endowed Fund

Katherine (Kathy) Steinmayer McLean (NC ’53

As a student in Newcomb College Katherine (Kathy) Steinmayer McLean (NC ’53) pursued her dream of majoring in art in the Newcomb Art Department. The daughter of a Tulane geology professor, Reinhard Steinmayer, she studied ceramics under world renowned Newcomb pottery artist, Sadie Irvine. In 2005, in honor of her father, she established the Reinhard A. Steinmayer Endowed Scholarship, which aids students studying earth and environmental sciences. That same year, she created the J. Michael McLean Endowed Scholarship—an award for student-athletes—to recognize her late husband who had been a graduate of Tulane (A&S ‘52) and captain of the football team.

Although now living in Houston, McLean never forgot the lessons she learned in the Newcomb Art Department or the impact it had on her life. Recently, to allow others to have the outstanding education she experienced, she has added to her generosity by establishing the Katherine Steinmayer McLean Visiting Studio Artist Endowed Fund. The gift will support visiting artists who come to Tulane and provide funds for such activities as special topics classes, workshops, lectures, artistic residencies and exhibitions. “There are so many smart and talented young people at Tulane,” says McLean. “I wanted to give them an opportunity to experience artistic experimentation and to meet visiting artists from other areas who will teach them new techniques.”

In addition to making a current-use gift establishing the visiting artist fund, she has also provided a generous bequest in her will for the same purpose. “I just feel that Tulane is a wonderful place, and I know that this gift will really make a difference to students who are following their dreams to study art,” she says. “It makes me so happy to do it.”

[Why We Give, School of Liberal Arts newsletter, February 2018]