Thursday, November 14, 2019

Aaron Collier: Revival

Newcomb Art Department Professor Aaron Collier opened a two-person exhibition entitled "Revival" on October 24 at Octavia Art Gallery in Houston, TX. The exhibition runs through November 30.

“The “Everything You Need to Know” website that intends to prepare visitors to Palatine Hill in Rome offers the following caution: “Without a guide or guidebook, it can be difficult to make sense of the ruins of the Palatine… you don’t want to be one of those tourists who wanders aimlessly around the hill, with no idea of what they’re looking at.”

In September of 2017, Collier found himself to be just exactly that, a tourist without the benefit of a guide. It was the challenge of making sense of Palatine’s excavations and ruins, with their innumerable fragments, pieces, and remains, the profound inability to explain away or see through every layer, the overwhelming sense of bewilderment and mystery, that inspired the series Of Rocks and Ruins.

With these works, Collier implements several modes of image making towards squaring with the central questions that drive his research: “What to do with a small and incomplete knowledge of a vast, complex, and multivalent world? How are images, which are inherently shards or snippets of information, able to convey this inability to know in full?”.
Artwork: Fact and Spirit, 2018, Flashe on canvas, 38 x 38.”

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Remembering Kendall Shaw (1924-2019)

In honor of Veterans Day, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art highlighted the work of World War II veteran and Tulane alumnus, Kendall Shaw.
Kendall Shaw, Sunship, for John Coltrane,

Shaw was born in New Orleans in 1924. He served in the U. S. Navy as a radioman on an SPB Dauntless dive-bomber searching for German submarines off the mid-Atlantic coast during the second world war. The experience he gained during his service to country at a time of war informed his work for the rest of his life.
Shaw studied painting in New Orleans with George Rickey, Ida Kohlmeyer and Mark Rothko. In New York he studied with Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis and O. Louis Guglielmi. He held faculty teaching positions at Columbia University Architecture School, Hunter College, Lehman College, The Brooklyn Museum School and Parsons School of Design. Shaw was one of the founding members of a group of artists that came to be called the Pattern and Decoration Movement in the 1970s for their use of repeating geometric patterns inspired by craft traditions from both Western and non-Western cultures.
Born in the final years of the Greatest Generation, Shaw devoted his life to art after his formative experience of military service during WWII. Kendall Shaw died peacefully in his home in Brooklyn, New York on October 18, 2019. He leaves a legacy of innovation and excellence in American Art, and remains one of the most important artists to the mission, history and trajectory of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
WWII Veteran Kendall Shaw, Sunship, for John Coltrane, 1982, Acrylic and mirrors on canvas, Gift of the artist, Ogden Musuem of Southern Art

Monday, November 4, 2019

New Course Spring 2020: Art and Science of Delta Clay

New Course Spring 2020: Art and Science of Delta Clay
This 3 credit studio art course examines the nature of the clay New Orleans is built on, from the perspective of geologic sedimentation, an urban living environment and as a material for ceramic art. We will dig clay from four sites in the city, process it in the studio and use it as the material for original ceramic artworks. Working individually and in small groups students will develop new pieces that explore issues of identity, change and risk in the New Orleans region.

Guest speakers from the Earth Science dept. will present current research on the processes of sedimentation and land building, as well as the challenges of sea level rise, subsidence and climate change on this unique delta. As a studio arts course it will cover the chemical makeup and application of clays and emphasize creative thinking and the development of skills and original works. No prerequisite is required.

Professor Jeremy Jernegan: jjernaga@tulane.edu

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

New Courses Spring 2020: Asian Art

Dr. Fan Zhang will be teaching three new courses in Spring 2020.
Dragon and Lotus: Chinese Visual and Material Culture
Art of Death: Funerary Art and Ritual in Ancient China This course guides the students to explore the complexity concerning the art of death in ancient China from the Bronze Age to the Medieval Period. We will examine the evolving structure of the burial architecture, scrutinize mural paintings covering the burial chambers, and analyze the funeral goods that create mimesis of the living world for the dead. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this course inquiries into the social dimension of mortuary art and explore the intersection between art history, history and archaeology.

Dragon and Lotus: Chinese Visual and Material Culture This course, focusing the visual and material culture of China from the prehistoric to the medieval period, is to interrogate the dynamics between art, politics, and rituals. Each week we will examine selected masterpieces in decorated pottery, engraved jade, cast bronze, stone sculpture, woven textile, gold and silver. We will investigate the production, circulation, transmission, and reception of the artworks to reconstruct the social life of things against its historical background. Lastly, we will highlight three of the most prominent motifs in Chinese art—animals, flowers, and human forms—as case studies to illustrate how similar patterns were interpreted via different mediums, used in different contexts, and articulated different social relations throughout the Chinese history.

Monks and Merchants: East Asian Art after 1100 introduces students to the visual and material culture of China, Korea, and Japan from the medieval period to the present. Among the topics discussed in class are: art and imperial patronage, art and cultural identity, transmission of Buddhist art, garden and urban designs, etc. Special attention will be given to the transcultural exchange among China, Korea, and Japan and the encounter between the East and the West.

CAA Conversations Podcast features AnnieLaurie Erickson

CAA News Today


 
The weekly CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in each week as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.

This week, Danielle Wyckoff and AnnieLaurie Erickson discuss professional practices.
Danielle Wyckoff is an assistant professor at the Kendall College for Art and Design at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
AnnieLaurie Erickson is an associate professor of photography and co-director of Studio Art Graduate Studies at Tulane University.

CAA podcasts are on iTunes. Click here to subscribe.


Monday, October 21, 2019

Pace Gallery celebrates Lynda Benglis (BFA '64) with a mini-retrospective

Lynda Benglis' Eat Meat
Lynda Benglis' Eat Meat, on view at Pace Gallery in Palo Alto. Photo by Brian Buckley/courtesy Pace Gallery.

Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, Newcomb Art alumna Lynda Benglis' pioneering work sets her apart as one of the first women with the "moxie" to work with industrial materials in a bold way. Read more at Palo Alto Online.

New Course Spring 2020: Art & Activism

Art & Activism
from AnnieLaurie Erickson, Associate Professor of Photography:

NEW ART/SERVICE LEARNING COURSE - SPRING 2020
Art & Activism: Rights of Nature
ARST 3040 Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-3:20pm

Explore art making as a tool for change. The discussion of text and visual material will be supplemented by visits with local activists and field trips to artist studios and exhibitions. The service learning component of the course imvolves working with an artist/activist community partner on social or environmental projects.

For more information: email professor AnnieLaurie Erickson: aerickso@tulane.edu

Call for Entries: Undergraduate Juried Art Exhibition 2019

Call for Entries: Undergraduate Juried Art Exhibition 2019
from Laura Richens, Curator of the Carroll Gallery 

CALL FOR ENTRIES: UNDERGRADUATE JURIED EXHIBITION 2019
  • Works are due on Monday October 28, 9am - 3pm in the Carroll Gallery
  • Juror:  Dr. Benjamin Benus, Professor of Art History, Loyola University, New Orleans
  • Works in all media encouraged
  • Maximum 5 works per student
  • Cash prizes awarded
  • Works do not need to be framed to be juried, but if accepted, must be made suitable for presentation  
  • Open to any Tulane undergradaute working towards a degree
  • ONLINE ENTRY FORM:  Located on “exhibitions” page of the Carroll Gallery website, direct link here: https://forms.gle/WHPyqhk8DwkmggvL9 
Exhibition dates:  November 6-22, 2019
Reception: Thursday, November 7, 5:30-7:30 pm

Questions? email lrichens@tulane.edu

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Uncommon Exchanges: Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Jordan Karubian

Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Jordan Karubian

Uncommon Exchanges: Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Jordan Karubian

Newcomb Art Museum

October 15 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

 
In partnership with A Studio in the Woods, The ByWater Institute at Tulane University, and The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (Nola Gulf South), Newcomb Art Museum’s interdisciplinary conversation series “Uncommon Exchanges” invites the New Orleans community to interact with diverse experts from Tulane and the Gulf South region. Using the current exhibitions “Flint is Family” and “The American Dream Denied” as a catalyst, Pippin Frisbie-Calder, FATHOM Resident Artist at A Studio in the Woods and Jordan Karubian, Phd, Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Tulane will engage in a unique conversation bridging their different disciplines and expertise to workshop new kinds of questions and establish commonalities.

alumniFree and open to the public, this event takes place inside the museum’s galleries.

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Looters: Itinerant Images of West African Architecture

Looters: Itinerant Images of West African Architecture
The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design is pleased to announce the fall 2019 exhibition Looters: Itinerant Images of West African Architecture. This exhibition used light projection and sculpture to reveal hidden images of West African architecture in the background of European prints, drawings, and photographs from the 18th through early 20th centuries. Alongside projected images, sculptures and prints by contemporary artists respond to the hidden archive. Looters is particularly relevant for audiences in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, with its latent legacies of West African architecture. Looters is organized by art historian Adrian Anagnost and artists Manol Gueorguiev and Abdi Farah.
Looters focuses on architectural images from three West African sites with historical ties to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: the city-state of Ouidah, the city of Abomey in the Dahomey kingdom (in present-day Benin), and Benin City (in present-day Nigeria). Much of these sites’ historical architecture is destroyed, and in many cases, only images recorded by European visitors remain. Looters seeks to recover a hidden and perhaps unreliable archive of this architecture, found in the backgrounds of prints and photographs in which Europeans staged their versions of colonial encounters. This 2019 presentation of Looters in New Orleans also commemorates the 300th anniversary of what is thought to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans directly from West Africa to New Orleans in 1719, likely including one or more ships from Ouidah (present-day Benin). 
Looters will hold an exhibition reception from 4:00 to 6:00 PM on Friday, November 15th, and visitors are encouraged to visit the Ashé Cultural Arts Center’s Exploring the Diaspora: The Benin Republic, later that same evening. 
Looters will also feature a children’s art activity inspired by Dahomey carved wood designs on Saturday, November 16th, from 10:30 AM to 1:00 PM. 
Looters is funded in part by the Platforms Fund, a collaborative re-granting effort of Antenna and Ashé Cultural Arts Center with support by the Andy Warhol Foundation, and hosted by The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design. Special thanks to Francine Stock of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University.

Thursday, September 12, 2019

Artist's Talk: Andrea Fraser

Prospect New Orleans in collaboration with the Newcomb Art Department and the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund present:
Artist’s Talk by Andrea Fraser
Monday, September 16
6:00 pm
Freeman Auditorium (Rm. 205, Woldenberg Art Center)
Tulane University


Andrea Fraser performed Not just the few of us for the opening of Prospect.3: Notes for Now Not just the few of us is an interpretation of one public confrontation with racist systems in contemporary New Orleans: a 1991 City Council hearing regarding the official desegregation of the unofficially self-segregated Mardi Gras krewes. For Prospect.3 Fraser also installed Um Monumento as Fantasias Descartadas in the Newcomb Art Gallery. 


Andrea Fraser is an artist whose work investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural institutions, fields, and groups. She is Professor, Interdisciplinary Studio Area Head, and Chair of the UCLA Department of Art. Retrospectives of her work have been presented by the Museum Ludwig Cologne (2013), the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2015), the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona and MUAC UNAM Mexico City (both 2016). Her most recent book, 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018)—co-published by the CCA Wattis Institute, Westreich/Wagner Publications, and MIT Press—documents the political contributions of the board members of over 125 major US art organizations in the 2016 election cycle and its aftermath, examining the intersection of cultural philanthropy and political finance in the age of plutocracy. She serves on the boards W.A.G.E, Grex (the West Coast Affiliate of the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and on the Artist Council of the Hammer Museum.

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

New faculty: Fan Zhang, Asian Art

Fan Zhang
The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Fan Zhang to the faculty as Professor of Practice, Asian Art.

Prof. Zhang specializes in the art and material culture of early medieval China (3rd–6th century CE) and the cultural interactions among East Asia, Central Asia, and Northeastern Asia through and beyond the Silk Road network. Adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, her research probes into issues around identity, migration, and hybridity in the ancient world. Her current book project, Cultural Encounters: Ethnic Complexity and Material Expressions in the Fifth-century Pingcheng, draws attention to the funerary art of Pingcheng, the capital city of the Northern Wei Dynasty, and explores how artworks function as effective vehicles for individuals to articulate one’s identities in a multi-ethnic society. Fan Zhang has conducted archaeological fieldwork in both China and Central Asia. She also participated in research and curatorial programs in several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Korea, and the Sichuan Museum.

Friday, August 23, 2019

MENTORS exhibition in the Carroll Gallery

MENTORS exhibition in the Carroll Gallery
Please join us for the opening reception for MENTORS, an exhibition of work by the full studio art faculty of the Newcomb Art Department, Wednesday 8/28 5:30-7:30pm. 

The exhibition is on view August 21-September 25 at the Carroll Gallery, hours M-F 9-4.

Friday, August 2, 2019

Alumni News: Abdi Farah, Kristi Knipe, and Cora Lautze at the CAC

Cora Lautze, Work Promotes Confidence
Cora Lautze, Work Promotes Confidence
The Contemporary Art Center's 2019 Open Call Exhibition Identity Measures opens on Saturday August 3rd, Hancock Whitney White Linen Night, and features the work of three recent alumni of Tulane's Studio Art graduate program:  Abdi Farah (MFA, Painting, 2018), Kristina Knipe (MFA Photography, 2016), and Cora Lautze (MFA, Printmaking, 2019).

Identity Measures is predicated on the understanding that identity is shaped by a variety of historical, racial, gendered, socioeconomic, geographical, physical, and ideological experiences through time. By opening up a dialogue about difference through the language of contemporary visual art, this exhibition claims that one’s structural location in the world matters to the articulation of personal and collective identity—a process that poses itself as a dynamic site of agency, creativity, resistance, visibility, ambiguity, and belonging.

The exhibtion is organized by guest curator, Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, an art historian, critic, curator, and educator based in Washington, DC, where she serves as a Professorial Lecturer in Global Modern and Contemporary Art History at American University. 

Opening reception: Saturday, August 3, 5:30pm - 9:30 pm, at the CAC.
Admission will be FREE and open to the public.

Monday, July 22, 2019

Alumni News: Marjorie Rawle

Marjorie Rawle, a 2019 M.A. graduate, has joined the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, MA, as a Terrana Curatorial Fellow through summer 2020. The Terrana Curatorial Fellowship, a 13-month, full-time appointment for a recent M.A./Ph.D. graduate in museum studies/art history, is designed to launch emerging curators into substantial museum careers by providing an immersive educational experience. 

Marjorie completed her M.A. thesis on the creative relationship between AbEx painter Grace Hartigan and New York school poet Frank O'Hara, and she completed a graduate internship at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Alumni News: Adriana Obiols-Roca

2019 Art History M.A. graduate Adriana Obiols-Roca was recently awarded the Stone Center for Latin American Studies' Donald Robertson Prize for best paper in the Humanities by a Latin American Studies Graduate Student. This award honors Donald Robertson, a professor of Art History at Tulane for more than 25 years and a pioneer in the field of Latin American art history. He authored the groundbreaking Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools, and motivated a generation of budding Art Historians and Ethnohistorians.

Adriana's award-winning paper, "The Battle of the Whale: Bataillean Aesthetics in El Techo de la Ballena," analyzed the 1960s Venezuelan artistic and literary group El Techo de la Ballena, in relation to the dissident surrealism of French writer Georges Bataille. While El Techo has been the focus of sustained analysis on the part of literary critics, the group’s artistic production has received comparatively less attention. Their artistic production has previously been understood as part of a continuation of postwar gestural abstraction, and as a rejection of the geometric abstract art and modernist architecture that characterized the developmentalist state in 1950s-70s Venezuela. However, Adriana’s paper convincingly argues that El Techo’s practice should not be understood as a belated modernist project, but as quintessentially of its time, as a particularly Venezuelan take on the 1960s neo-avant-garde strategies of entropy, base materiality, and assemblage.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Teresa Cole: Imperfect at Callan Contemporary through July 20


Teresa Cole, Infiltrate 2.0, relief printed Japanese paper with dye and bamboo, 72h x 60w in

 

In Imperfect, her fifth solo exhibition at Callan Contemporary, Teresa Cole brings together patterns from disparate traditions in images of startling complexity and beauty. This body of work—a suite of intaglio etchings, woodcuts, and two installations, Black & White Patchwork and Infiltrate 2.0—stems from research the artist conducted last spring in Seville, Cordova, and Granada, Spain. There, in architectural masterpieces such as the Alhambra palace, she studied and documented intricate patterns adorning tilework, carved wood and plaster, wainscoting, stone flooring, and cut glass. Alternately geometric and arabesque (plant- based/organic), these motifs exemplify Moorish aesthetics, in which only the divine is considered perfect and artisans build small flaws into their designs to signify earthly fallibility. Cole has integrated many of these patterns into her existing lexicon of shapes, combining Old World printmaking techniques with digital photography, laser cutters, and CNC routers. “There’s a tension between these perfect, computer-formed lines and the imperfection of the hand,” she observes. “Those imperfections are evidence of our humanity.”

Cole earned a B.F.A. degree from Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, then continued her studies as a member of Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen, Scotland. Currently she is full professor at Tulane University, where she teaches all aspects of printmaking. She has conducted research and participated in residencies in India, South Africa, Nepal, Belgium, Spain, and throughout the U.S. and has been commissioned to create large-scale public artworks, most recently a sculptural installation at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane. Her works are included in prestigious private, corporate, and institutional collections around the world.

Cole’s prints are densely layered, rich with a translucence and texturality that reward close viewing. Their thematic content is also highly layered, sometimes juxtaposing or overlaying Roman and Arabic scripts—as well as symbols from Asia, Africa, and the Americas—into images of poignant cross-cultural mélange. Technically innovative and pictorially opulent, the artworks posit a fluidity between ornamentation and language, visual seduction and conceptual grounding, and pattern as both decorative and narrative devices. One need not speak foreign tongues or be versed in art history to appreciate these pieces, however, for they communicate directly and subliminally with the viewer’s perception and subconscious. “Maybe it’s possible,” Cole suggests, “to learn about something simply by looking at it.”

by Richard Speer
originally published in Country Roads Magazine

IMPERFECT exhibition dates: June 1st - July 20th, 2019
CALLAN CONTEMPORARY 518 JULIA STREET, NEW ORLEANS, LA 70130

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Alumni news: Shannah Rose named Kress fellow

Shannah Rose (MA, Art History, 2019) was named a 2019 recipient of the Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in Italian at the Middlebury Language Schools. As a Kress Fellow, she will enroll in Middlebury’s intensive 7-week language immersion program held this summer at Mills College in Oakland, California. In fall 2019, Shannah will continue her research in medieval and early modern Italian art history as a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Monday, June 10, 2019

Ph.D. candidate Patricia Lagarde named a Fulbright-Hays fellow

As a 2019 Fulbright-Hays fellow, Patricia Alexander Lagarde, a doctoral candidate in art history and Latin American studies, will conduct research in Peru for seven months at Chavín de Huántar, a ceremonial center in the Andes mountains that dates to 1200-500 BCE. She will focus on a group of anthropomorphic stone sculptures known as the tenon heads that were installed on the exterior walls of the temple architecture. Her project will explore the variety in style, the assortment in material, and the overall viewer experience of the sculptures. Lagarde will be an affiliate with the Chavín International Research Center (Centro Internacional de Investigación de Chavín) where she will work with archeologists to examine what the sculptures’ roles were in the ceremonial and religious traditions at the time. While only one sculpture is still installed at the site, more than 100 existed, varying in shape and size. This fellowship will support Lagarde’s goal to create a comprehensive catalog of the tenon heads at Chavín de Huántar.  Studying their materiality, Lagarde hopes to gain a greater understanding of the Ancient Andean peoples’ perspective of the natural landscape as animate—she’s interested in how specific stones were chosen, potentially representing specific regions, communities, or ancestors.

Facades: new exhibition in the Carroll Gallery

Please join us for 

FACADES
Organized by Amy Crum and Marjorie Rawle

featuring works by:
Allison Beondé
Jenna DeBoisblanc
Ana Hernandez
Carlie Trosclair

Opening reception: Thursday, June 13, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Exhibition on view June 13 – July 12, 2019

Monday, May 20, 2019

Sean Fader receives grant from Skau Music & Art Fund

The Newcomb College Institute's Skau Music & Art Fund awarded a grant to Professor of Practice Sean Fader to support a documentary photographic art project. Fader's description of the project follows. 

With the assistance of a grant from the Skau Music and Art Fund, I will spend eight weeks this summer crisscrossing the country, driving to all of the locations where queer people were murdered in 1999 and 2000. I will be photographing the locations with a Sony Digital Mavica, the first digital camera that was available at the time, to create a photographic archive of all the recorded queer murders. There is an immediacy to this project: It was exactly 20 years ago that the Matthew Shepard and the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was presented to Congress, expanding the definition of federal hate crime laws to include queer people.  It was eventually signed by President Barack Obama 10 years ago. Additionally, it is exactly 50 years since the Stonewall riots. However, the current administration is changing laws that have protected queer people. The trans ban in the military, the bathroom ban, and the religious rights movement all play a part in institutionalizing queer hate. According to LAMBDA’s Website, “the National Coalition of  Anti-Violence Programs’ ‘Crisis of Hate’ report [states that] 2017 was the deadliest year in recent history for LGBTQ+ people in the United States.” Queer people are still being murdered at horrific rates.

Thursday, May 9, 2019

Adrian Anagnost Awarded ACLS Fellowship


“How can we historicize and globalize contemporary debates about architectural sustainability and ethical placemaking?” asks Adrian Anagnost, a professor of art history in Tulane's Newcomb Art Department. Anagnost's ongoing research on socially engaged work by contemporary artists has led to new questions about projects that aspire to democratic ideals through the use of vernacular architecture—architecture specific to a particular place and time, created by people who are not recognized as architects by professional organizations. “We think of vernacular architecture as rooted in a particular place. It is responsive to its physical environment and to local cultural traditions. In the mid-twentieth century, though, vernacular architecture lay at the heart of global architectural debates,” Anagnost continued. 

This spring, Anagnost was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the American Council on Learned Societies (ACLS) to continue this investigation, focusing on networks of architects and critics spanning Brazil and Italy. During her fellowship, Anagnost will begin research for a second book, expanding upon earlier research centered on ways that Brazilian artists and architects of the 1930s to the 1960s created works that critiqued, upheld, or intervened in urban Brazil’s socio-spatial inequalities. While conducting research for her first book project, Anagnost was drawn to the international circulation of architecture magazines and architecture exhibitions, and particularly noted parallells between Brazil and Italy.

[continue reading: Wilkerson, Emily, "Art History Professor Adrian Anagnost Awarded ACLS Fellowship," Tulane University School of Liberal Arts Newsletter, May 2019]