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.

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]

Workhouse Arts Center Presents Jeremy Jernegan 'Dwell'

Dwell is a solo exhibition opening on May 1, through June 2, 2019 at Gallery W-8, Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA of work by ceramic sculptor and Tulane University Professor of Art Jeremy Jernegan. The exhibition features a new body of ceramic and stainless steel wall sculptures that address climate change and its effects on oceans and waterways, that Jernegan produced during his residency at the Workhouse over the past 9 months.

Dwell explores our experiences inhabiting a world undergoing cataclysmic climate change and our difficulty grasping the enormous scale and consequences of our plight.  In these new works, Jernegan’s longstanding interest in water imagery and in the amorphousness of marine environments as metaphors for uncertainty and disorientation becomes a meditation on the profound upheaval that will be brought by a radically altered climate environment.

These are technically complex, multi-media works, consisting of large, geometric ceramic tiles made as ceramic mono-prints and enclosed in stainless steel frames.  Incorporating a range of detailed imagery drawn from maritime contexts, these works suggest a sense of physical precarity and transformation through their large scale, unconventional combinations of materials, and protrusion from the wall. This remarkable body of work intertwines the pictorial and the sculptural in an investigation into our relationship to and perceptions of our rapidly changing environment.

[via East City Art]

Student Art Awards 2019

On Thursday April 25th the Newcomb Art Department hosted its annual Student Art Awards ceremony in Stone Auditorium. Kevin H. Jones, Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Chair, presented the Studio Art Awards and Dr. Michael Plante, Associate Professor of Art History, presented the Art History Awards. Following the awards presentation, the celebration moved to the Carroll Gallery for the Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition reception featuring work by Elizabeth Chan, Christopher Gonzalez, Arden Kelley, Alexandra Kugler, and Jordan Tavan.

2019 Student Art Awards 

Outstanding Art History Major: Rada Kuznetsova
The Henry Stern Prize Paper in Art History: Michael Russo
The Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award in Art History: Lou Rambeau
The Marilyn Brown Award for a Senior Honors Scholar in Art History: Sophia Buchanan
The Alberta “Rusty” Collier Memorial Award for 2D Art: Alexandra Kugler
The Alberta “Rusty” Collier Memorial Award for 3D Art: Harleigh Shaw
The Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award in Studio Art: Abigail McDade
The Sandy Chism Award in Painting: Dominic Frost
The Class of 1914 Prize in Art: Erin "Squid" Dixon
Juanita Gonzales Prize in Ceramics: Jordan Tavan