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.

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.

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