Graduate Studies Events
Hold'n it Down
Josh Short in Collaboration with Joel Dean Stockdill
September 1–October 6, 2010
PLAySPACE, San Francisco campus
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Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 1, 2010, 5-7 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Contact playspace@cca.edu for more info
Josh Short, a self-proclaimed “maximist”, has built up a wild and rollicking installation in PLAySPACE for the gallery’s 2010/11 inaugural exhibition. Hold’n it Down features a motorcycle crafted out of cardboard, a pirate radio station, and a fortress replete with rat hunting device, a drawbridge–even a LA-Z Boy fashioned into a (non-functioning) toilet. Stronghold, a two-story structure created for the space, represents the survivalist culture that is at the heart of all of Short’s work: how limited means forces creative thinking and, ultimately, solutions. All of the components of Stronghold were found on the streets and in dumpsters and were repurposed by Short and his collaborator Joel Dean Stockdill. There was no direct currency exchange; the goal is to keep this aspect of their creative practice as minimal as possible.
In light of our generation’s recent economic crisis, it isn’t difficult to imagine (or even to personally reference) employing alternative means to support our lifestyles. Sure, these harsh realities can feel hellish at times, but there’s fun to be had. In the visionary, post-apocalyptic universe that Short has created, the detritus of our culture becomes the material for something else. Stronghold offers a kind of second-hand utopia–a respite that’s still rough around the edges. His work is highly interactive, often mechanized and made of cardboard. While Short’s work is tied to the grunge of garage culture, and ideas of American masculine creativity, in Hold’n it Down the boys club is split open and turned on its head for everyone to enjoy.
Josh Short received his MFA from UC Davis in 2009, and was a 2010 Headlands Center for the Arts resident. His next solo exhibition will be held at San Francisco’s Soap Gallery in Spring 2011.
ShareCategories: Curatorial Practice Fine Arts Graduate Studies PLAySPACE Gallery Public Calendar
THIS MEANS WAR
Works by Hannah Ireland (MFA '10), Justin Limoges, Matt Momchilov, AMTK, Steffani Jemison.
Thursday, September 2, 2010, 6–9 pm
Justin Limoges
Unspeakable Projects
735 Tehama Street
San Francisco 94103
http://www.unspeakableprojects.com
Opening Night Party + Group Show
Live music by JETSKIIS
One venerable arts institution organized its recent programming around the concept of Bridging the Gap–a notion that conceives of art as social problem-solving and of the artist as progressive civic savior. Amen to that. But what happens if instead of bridging the gap we flip the bird? Is there a productive trouble-making in picking a fight? Whose side are you on, anyway? THIS MEANS WAR explores the spirit of confrontation in the work of five emerging artists across a range of media.
Hannah Ireland‘s site-specific installation explores the act of claiming physical and visual space—and what happens when we vie for the same contested ground.
Justin Limoges’ ink drawings and linocuts represent objects, if not at outright war, then held in precarious détentes. Filled with tipping points, standoffs and dubious instructions—like how to kill your nemesis—the works on paper teeter between humor and open aggression.
Matt Momchilov documents contemporary subcultures, from urban warehouse parties to fetish conventions, and their exuberant and sometimes violent ends. Rendered in a photo-realistic style that evokes tabloid snapshots, his series of oil paintings celebrates spontaneous moments of bad behavior.
AMTK are a collaborative duo creating large-format paintings in a process that’s equal parts diplomacy and sabotage. Overwriting traditional portraiture with tribal motifs and alien figures, they produce dense vistas of subjects aiming cool judgement at the viewer.
Steffani Jemison’s found-image installation pits pop culture against high art in a diptych of near life-sized light boxes. A call to arms and also to the party.
Categories: Fine Arts Graduate Studies
The Marvelous Museum
A Project by Mark Dion
September 10–11, 2010, 5 pm
photo: David Maisel
Oakland Museum of California
Curated by OMCA Senior Curator of Art René de Guzman (CCA Faculty).
The exhibition continues through March 6, 2011.
Admission is $12 general; $9 seniors and students with valid ID, $6 youth ages 9-17, and free for children 8 and under, and members.
OMCA is at the corner of 10th Street and Oak Street. The accessibility ramp is located at the new 1000 Oak Street main entrance.
OMCA offers onsite underground parking and is conveniently located one block from the Lake Merritt BART station.
For more information, visit www.museumca.org.
For his latest project, conceptual artist Mark Dion has embarked on an unprecedented expedition through the Oakland Museum of California's art, history, and natural science collections to create multiple site-specific installations and interventions throughout its art galleries, drawing upon the overlooked orphans, curiosities, and treasures from the collections.
The Marvelous Museum includes objects that date back to OMCA's predecessor institutions and, while they often lie outside of OMCA's California focus, still tell a rich and interesting story of how museum collections are assembled over time and how curators and museum visitors engage in an often invisible and silent dialog about the nature of art, history and science.
The interventions explore the nature of museums and public presentation, the history and purposes of collections and exhibitions and are intended to create an internal dialog in visitors as they contemplate thematic juxtapositions of art, history, and science. Examples include surprising and intriguing placements such as a large stone coin from the Island of Yap in the Art of the Gold Rush Gallery amid 19th century landscape paintings and daguerreotypes; a taxidermy baby giraffe in the California People Gallery surrounded by figures and portraits by Viola Frey, Dorothea Lange, David Park, Carrie Mae Weems and others; a drawer of police batons and Republican campaign materials in the Counter Culture Gallery, and more.
Mark Dion is known for making art out of fieldwork, incorporating elements of biology, archaeology, ethnography, and the history of science, and applying to his artwork methodologies generally used for pure science. Traveling the world and collaborating with a wide range of scientists, artists, and museums, Dion has excavated ancient and modern artifacts from the banks of the Thames in London, established a marine life laboratory using specimens from New York's Chinatown, and created a contemporary cabinet of curiosities exploring natural and philosophical hierarchies. Dion has a longstanding interest in exploring how ideas about cultural and natural history are visualized and how they circulate in society, in particular through museums.
Categories: Alumni Curatorial Practice Fine Arts Graduate Studies
Mary Gaitskill: Friday Seminar
The Writers Series is presented as part of the MFA Program in Writing
Friday, September 17, 2010, 6–8 pm
Writers’ Studio, San Francisco campus
San Francisco campus map (PDF)
Directions »
Info: Email Teresa Walsh at twalsh@cca.edu or 415.551.9237
Note: Special 6 p.m. start time for this event only
Free and open to the public
About Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill is the author of Because They Wanted To (Simon & Schuster, 1997), which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin (Simon & Schuster,1991). Her novel Veronica (Vintage, 2005) was a National Book Award nominee, as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist for that year. The story "Secretary," from her debut collection Bad Behavior (Vintage, 1989), also a National Book Award finalist, was made into a film of the same name in 2002 with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Gaitskill is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in New York. Her most recent collection of short stories, Don’t Cry (Pantheon, 2009), is now out in paperback.
Categories: Graduate Studies Lecture Series Public Calendar Writers Series Writing Writing and Literature
Monique Truong: Friday Seminar
The Writers Series is presented as part of the MFA Program in Writing
Friday, September 24, 2010, 3:30–5 pm
Writers’ Studio, San Francisco campus
San Francisco campus map (PDF)
Directions »
Info: Email Teresa Walsh at twalsh@cca.edu or 415.551.9237
Free and open to the public
About Monique Truong
Born in Siagon, North Vietnam, in 1968, Monique Truong is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award, a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, an Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and a Seventh Annual Asian American Literary Award. Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010) is her second novel.
In 2003 The Book of Salt was honored as a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction Book, one of the Village Voice‘s 25 Favorite Books, and one of the Miami Herald‘s Top 10 Books, among other citations. Truong was a PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow, a Princeton University Hodder Fellow, and is now a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.
Read the Lambda Literary interview with Monique Truong.
Categories: Graduate Studies Lecture Series Public Calendar Writers Series Writing Writing and Literature
Lecture by Hilary Sample (MOS)
Presented as part of CCA's Architecture Lecture Series
Monday, September 27, 2010, 7–9 pm
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
San Francisco campus map (PDF)
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Info: 415.703.9562 or architecture@cca.edu
Hilary Sample is currently completing her book Sick City: A Global Investigation into Urbanism, Infrastructure, and Disease. She is a principal of the interdisciplinary architecture and design practice MOS, which has grown greatly since its founding in 2003 but continues to operate, she says, around one large table. The firm's approach involves playful experimentation, serious research, and old-fashioned problem-solving. "We engage architecture as an open system of interrelated issues, ranging from architectural typology to digital methodologies, building performance, sustainability, structure, fabrication, materiality, tactility, and use as well as larger social, cultural, and environmental networks."
Sample is on the architecture faculty of Yale University and taught previously at the University of Toronto, Northeastern University, and SUNY Buffalo. Projects designed in her office have been showcased in numerous publications, including Architectural Record, Architect, A+U, Wallpaper, Surface, Space Korea, Mark, AV Proyectos, and the New York Times, and have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The firm's current work includes a villa in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, and the public art installation Afterparty at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York.
Cosponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The 2010–11 Architecture Lecture Series is funded by Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, HDR Architecture, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum Inc., Pfau Long Architecture, ROMA Design Group, Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP, SmithGroup, WRNS Studio, Jensen Architects, Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, BraytonHughes Design Studios, Cass Calder Smith, Fennie + Mehl Architects, GCI Inc., Levy Design Partners, SRG Partnership, and Ryan Associates. Additional support has been provided by BIOS Design Collective and Andrea Cochran.
Categories: Architecture Architecture Lecture Series Graduate Studies Lecture Series Public Calendar
Lecture by Kristee Rosendahl
Presented as part of CCA's Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Tuesday, September 28, 2010, 7–9 pm
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
San Francisco campus map (PDF)
Directions »
Info: 415.703.9505
In 1985 Kristee Rosendahl pioneered the field of user experience as the cofounder of the Apple Human Interface Group and a principal designer in the Apple Multimedia Lab. In the years since, as a VP, director, creative director, art director, designer, and manager, she has designed and delivered products across multiple media platforms and multiple channels in the service of a larger vision of the future of digital interactivity. She has 25 years of experience in product development, user experience, design, and management for innovative new digital products and applications.
Since 2004 Rosendahl has evolved her practice to center on early-stage product development. The highly usable and highly useful products she designs serve both customers and the internal organizations that support them. She holds two U.S. patents for navigating large databases and manipulating information visually.
Generous support for CCA public programs in San Francisco has been provided by Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.
Categories: Design Design MBA Graduate Studies Graduate Studies Lecture Series Lecture Series Public Calendar
Lecture by Edgar Arceneaux
Presented as part of CCA's Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Thursday, September 30, 2010, 7–9 pm
Edgar Arceneaux, Myth, Nature, Man: an Advancement of Evolution (2009) (photo by Lutz Bertram, Berlin)
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
San Francisco campus map (PDF)
Directions »
Info: 415.551.9214
PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED TO SEPTEMBER 30.
Edgar Arceneaux is fascinated by language, and by establishing unexpected connections among words, objects, places, and people. His installations may incorporate not only drawing, sculpture, and film, but also music, conceptual art, and science, juxtaposing representative elements of each and opening up newfound associations, unintended connections, interstitial spaces—in his words, "a different way to construct relationships among things."
Arceneaux was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work. He currently serves as executive director of the Watts House Project, an "ongoing, collaborative artwork in the shape of a neighborhood redevelopment" across from the historic Watts Towers in Los Angeles; he has been working on the WHP since 1996. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Projects in Los Angeles and Berlin; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Albion Gallery, London; and Galerie Kamm, Berlin. He received a BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.
Cosponsored by Graduate Program in Fine Arts and the President's Diversity Steering Group.
Generous support for CCA public programs in San Francisco has been provided by Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.
Categories: Fine Arts Graduate Studies Graduate Studies Lecture Series Lecture Series Public Calendar
Walter Kirn: Friday Seminar
The Writers Series is presented as part of the MFA Program in Writing
Friday, October 1, 2010, 3:30–5 pm
Writers’ Studio, San Francisco campus
San Francisco campus map (PDF)
Directions »
Info: Email Teresa Walsh at twalsh@cca.edu or 415.551.9237
Free and open to the public
Walter Kirn
A 1983 graduate of Princeton University, Walter Kirn has published a collection of short stories and several novels, including Thumbsucker (Anchor, 1999), which was made into a 2005 film featuring Tilda Swinton and Vince D'Onofrio; Up in the Air, a feature film directed by Jason Reitman, starring George Clooney; and Mission to America. He has also written The Unbinding, an internet-only novel that was posted in Slate magazine.
Kirn has reviewed books for New York Magazine and has written for The New York Times Book Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine. He is a contributing editor at Time. Kirn has also served as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC.
In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–9 Vare nonfiction writer in residence at the University of Chicago. He received his BA in English at Princeton University in 1983 and studied English Literature at Oxford University.
Categories: Graduate Studies Lecture Series Public Calendar Writers Series Writing Writing and Literature
Lecture and Reading by Barry Lopez
Presented as part of CCA's Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Thursday, October 7, 2010, 3–4 pm
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
San Francisco campus map (PDF)
Directions »
Info: 415.703.9505
PLEASE NOTE THIS LECTURE TAKES PLACE AT 3 PM
The San Francisco Chronicle has called Barry Lopez "Arguably the nation’s premier nature writer." Lopez is best known as the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award. His other nonfiction books include About This Life and Of Wolves and Men, which was a National Book Award finalist. His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brings a depth of erudition to his work by immersing himself in his surroundings, deftly integrating environmental and humanitarian concerns. In his nonfiction, he often examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape. In his fiction, he frequently addresses issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity.
Once a landscape photographer, Lopez continues to maintain close contact with a diverse community of visual and performing artists. He has received numerous awards and prizes, among them the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Burroughs Medal, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and five National Science Foundation Fellowships. He lives in rural Oregon.
The lecture will be followed by a book signing from 4–5 p.m.
Generous support for CCA public programs in San Francisco has been provided by Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.
Categories: Graduate Studies Graduate Studies Lecture Series Lecture Series Public Calendar Writing Writing and Literature
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