New course: Decolonizing the Camera

This Fall the Newcomb Art Department is offering a new course ARST 3011: DECOLONIZING THE CAMERA, taught by visiting assistant professor Shabez Jamal.

In this course students will examine their own visual practice through the framework of decolonization. Through this process, students will engage with topics of race, representation, and power, while they build a visual practice that takes into account the complicated colonial legacy of photography. We will investigate the ways in which the camera has historically been used as a weapon of violence against those deemed as the Other. By approaching photography in such a way, students will gain a better understanding of how the camera works in racial time, which will result in a more informed and intentional practice of art-making. Throughout the course, students will engage in critiques, readings, and visual analyses that will support the cultivation of language to directly address the formation of otherness in image-making. Simultaneously students will be looking at contemporary lens-based artists who are working to correct this legacy from behind the camera in order to leverage the medium of photography as a tool of liberation. Students will employ these contemporary techniques to develop their own artistic practice.

Shabez Jamal is an interdisciplinary artist based in New Orleans, LA. His work, rooted in still portraiture, experimental video, and performance, interrogates physical, political, and social-economical space by using queerness, not as a means of speaking about sexuality, but as a catalyst to challenge varying power relations. Often turning the lens on himself, Jamal utilizes self-portraiture as a means of radically redefining the parameters of racial and sexual identity. 

M/W 3- 5:50pm, 204 Woldenberg Art Center

2021 Faculty Awards | SLA Dean's Office

Outstanding Faculty Research Award

Elizabeth Hill Boone

Since 1994, Elizabeth has served as the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art. Author of six monographs, co-author of another two books, and editor or co-editor of fourteen other volumes, her work has been influential not only in art history, but in the related fields of history, anthropology and literary theory. In 2018, she was named the College Art Association’s Distinguished Scholar, the first Latin Americanist art historian to receive this honor since its founding in 2001. She was also the first Latin Americanist to hold the Andrew Mellon Professorship at the National Gallery of Art in 2006-8. In 2010 she was Professor invitée at the École Pratique de Hautes Etudes, at the Sorbonne. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Mexicana de la Historia and recipient of the government of Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to Aztec scholarship. Her latest monograph book, Descendants of Aztec Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2021), is the first synthetic analysis of the pictorial encyclopedias of Aztec culture created in the decades after the Spanish conquest. After 27 years at Tulane, Elizabeth is retiring at the end of this academic year. Her career at Tulane University has been extraordinary, to say the least, and we can think of no better tribute than to offer her the Research Award.

The April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Sean Fader

Since his arrival at Tulane in 2018, Sean has helped to rewrite curriculum in the photo area, separating darkroom and digital practices; he has also overhauled the digital and darkroom spaces, enhancing usability and access. His courses are always overenrolled and his teaching evaluations are superlative. Here are some examples of his student evaluations: “Sean is extremely supportive and knowledgeable about what he teaches. He makes material exciting, engaging, and relevant.“, and “He is Thanos with all the infinity stones.”

Art Chair Stephanie Porras says, “I would particularly like to praise Sean for making adjustments to his teaching this year – not only folding in the switch to hybrid teaching, but also readjusting all his syllabi to center BIPOC scholars and artists. By overhauling his syllabi in this way, Sean modelled what it means to decenter and question the artistic canon. He shared resources with other faculty in the department and encouraged all of us to revisit the readings and artists we use to teach the history, theory and practice of art.”

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.

AnnieLaurie Erickson: Data & Art of the City

AnnieLaurie Erickson, Assistant Professor of Photography, is currently participating in two group exhibitions.  Data: BIG/-driven/Visualized, at Northern Illinois University Museum in Chicago is on  view through May 17, 2019. User Agreement (at left), a pigment print on habotai silk, incorporates the text from all of the Google user agreements since this practice began in 1999.  Art of the City: Postmodern to Post-Katrina, presented by The Helis Foundation, is on view at the Historic New Orleans Collection Seignouret-Brulatour Building, 520 Royal Street, from April 6, 2019 to October 6, 2019. The exhibition was curated by alumna Jan Gilbert (MFA, 1982).

New faculty: Sean Fader

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Sean Fader to the faculty as Professor of Practice in Photography.

Fader’s practice looks at the photographic event as the site of performance.  He is interested in how these images are created, disseminated, and digested in digital public spaces. 

Fader earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), New York University Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), Hunter College, Hampshire College, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET).

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]

Panel Discussion at Loyola

Gary Metz: Encountering the Landscape and a Photographic Tradition

Wednesday, October 18, 2017, 6:30 p.m., Miller 114, Loyola University

PANELISTS

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, MFA, Gary Metz curator, Fordham University, New York, NY
Joseph Lawton, MFA, Gary Metz curator, Fordham University, New York, NY

Russell Lord, PhD, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, New Orleans Museum of Art
Benjamin Benus, PhD, Assistant Professor of Art History, Loyola University New Orleans
AnnieLaurie Erickson, MFA, Assistant Professor of Photography, Tulane University        

Presented in conjunction with the current exhibition: Gary Metz: Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint

Collins C. Diboll Art Gallery, Loyola University New Orleans

September 25-December 15, 2017