Newcomb Art News

Monday, February 19, 2018

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

Thursday, February 15, 2018

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]

Thursday, February 8, 2018

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]

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Art of the Northern Renaissance

Stephanie Porras, Assistant Professor of Art History at Tulane University, has authored a new book, Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce and Devotion, published by Laurence King.

In this lucid new account Porras charts the fascinating story of art in northern Europe from 1400–1570. Porras explores how artists and patrons from the regions north of the Alps – the Low Countries, France, England, Germany – responded to an era of rapid political, social, economic and religious change, while redefining the status of art.

Porras discusses paintings by artists from Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, as well as also sculpture, architecture, prints, metalwork, embroidery, tapestry and armour.

Each chapter presents works from a 20-year period and focuses on a broad thematic issue, such as the flourishing of the print industry or the mobility of Northern artists and art works. The author traces the influence of aristocratic courts as centres of artistic production and the rise of an urban merchant class, leading to the creation of new consumers and new art products.

This book offers a richly illustrated narrative that allows readers to understand the progression, variety and key conceptual developments of Northern Renaissance art.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Save the dates! Spring 2018 lectures and events @NewcombArt

Monday, January 22, 2018

Decoding the work of Leonardo da Vinci

Walter Isaacson, author of ‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ will discuss how the artist’s works melded disciplines of art, science and engineering at a talk on Tuesday, Jan. 23, at 7 p.m. in Freeman Auditorium on the Tulane University uptown campus. (Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano)

As a biographer, Walter Isaacson illuminates the lives of visionary vanguards within his best-selling works, profiling titans of technology like Steve Jobs and founding fathers like Ben Franklin. On Tuesday, Jan. 23, at 7 p.m., Isaacson will discuss the subject of his latest book—the genius of Leonardo da Vinci—in Freeman Auditorium in the Woldenberg Art Center on the Tulane University uptown campus.

The New Orleans native said that his talk, presented by Newcomb Art Museum, will focus on “what type of place becomes a cradle for creativity and what type of person becomes an imaginative innovator.”

Drawing parallels to Tulane’s values of collaboration and diversity, Isaacson, University Professor at Tulane, will also explore da Vinci’s fearless approach of melding together art, science and engineering disciplines within his iconic works.

“I want to go through his life and works and show how he wove together all of his passionate and playful curiosities,” said Isaacson.

“The diversity of the interests that he found in Renaissance Florence and Milan resembles the diversity of interests that you can find at Tulane and in New Orleans,” he continued. “I think that one of the great things about being in college is that you get to mix the arts with the sciences, the humanities with technology, and that’s what da Vinci did to be creative.”

A former managing editor of TIME, Isaacson is also the former chairman of CNN and the previous president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.–based Aspen Institute.

This spring semester, he is teaching his first course at Tulane, The History of the Digital Revolution: From Ada Lovelace to Mark Zuckerberg.

Isaacson’s lecture will be followed by a Q&A session and refreshments. The event is free and open to the public.

[Tulane New Wave, January 12, 2018 2:15 PM | Mary Cross mcross3@tulane.edu]

Tulane to host two artist talks with Prospect New Orleans

Dark Matter: An Evening with Cauleen Smith, right, and Courtney Bryan, left, a conversation between colleagues who create boundary-pushing art, is one of two artist events presented by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South in partnership with Prospect New Orleans. (Photo from the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South)

The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South has partnered with Prospect New Orleans to offer two evening presentations with nationally acclaimed artists.

Dark Matter: An Evening with Cauleen Smith and Courtney Bryan takes place Thursday, Jan. 25, at 7 p.m. in the Freeman Auditorium of the Woldenberg Art Center at Tulane University. Dark Matter is a conversation between colleagues who will explore technology, Afrofuturism and musicianship, realism and the divine, place and time travel, and the creative process and art of collaboration. Smith and Bryan both create art that pushes the boundaries of prescribed identities, in order to seek transcendence and greater social agency for all.

Smith strives to “undermine the assumptions that people have. Show people that no one — regardless of who they are — is locked into the perceptions of other people.”Smith is an interdisciplinary visual artist and professor at California Institute for the Arts, and her work is currently featured in Prospect.4 at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. Bryan is a pianist, composer and professor of music at Tulane University.

Prospect New Orleans artist Monique Verdin presents Heart and Land: An Evening with Monique Verdin on Wednesday, Jan. 31, at 7 p.m. in the Freeman Auditorium of Woldenberg Art Center. For decades, Verdin has documented the interconnectedness of culture, environment and economics in southeast Louisiana.

“Twenty years ago, I picked up a camera to document my Houma relatives living in the Yakne Chitto, in the heart of the Mississippi River Delta,” said Verdin. “What I've witnessed has been a cycle of heartbreak, from oil waste pits to hurricanes to catastrophic oil spills to rapid land loss due to sea-level rise and subsidence. My intention has always been to share south Louisiana stories and the complex realities of life at the ends of the bayous.”

Verdin will discuss the trajectory of her work from 1998 to 2018.

For more information, contact Regina Cairns at rcairns@tulane.edu or (504) 314-2854.

[Tulane New Wave, January 19, 2018 3:30 PM | Denise Frazier newwave@tulane.edu]