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The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts Presents *The Magnificent Seven*

Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009, by Brenda Tucker

The Magnificent Seven (film still), 1960, directed by John Sturges

This September marks the launch of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts’ new program The Magnificent Seven. The seven participating international artists will be Abraham Cruzvillegas, Harrell Fletcher, Ryan Gander, Renata Lucas, Kris Martin, Paulina Olowska, and Tino Sehgal. Over a three-year period they will be integrated into every aspect of the institution’s structure and activities. Each will present a solo exhibition, complete a Capp Street Project artist residency, produce a publication, teach a number of courses as a CCA faculty member, deliver a public lecture, and participate in other aspects of the Wattis’s programming.

The Magnificent Seven is inspired by John Sturges’s 1960 film of the same name, a classic Western in which cowboys band together to defend a Mexican village from bandits. (Its plot is based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film The Seven Samurai.) All seven artists participating in The Magnificent Seven are individualists, representing an anti-traditional approach to visual art and culture at large. They are outcasts, misfits, revolutionaries, figures outside the established frames of society. By evoking the iconic film genre of the Western—specifically its depictions of militant groups of cowboys fighting on the side of the disenfranchised—this Wattis Institute project speaks about the mythical American struggle between outsiders and society, rugged individuals and the forces of civilization that want to tame them.

With The Magnificent Seven, the Wattis Institute also aims to deepen its relationship with California College of the Arts’ academic life, as the artists will be participating in a wide range of programs and teaching in many different disciplines and departments. This unique project represents a different kind of institutional commitment—one that is nurturing, encouraging, supportive, and long-term—enabling each artist to make a profound and meaningful impact within the CCA community. A catalog will be published upon the project’s completion to summarize the experience and analyze the new information gleaned about the broader relationship between exhibition spaces and educational structures.

Scheduled appearances of The Magnificent Seven:

Abraham Cruzvillegas, fall 2009
Renata Lucas, spring 2010
Paulina Olowska, fall 2010
Kris Martin, spring 2011
Harrell Fletcher, fall 2011
Ryan Gander, spring 2012
Tino Sehgal, 2009–2012

Visit www.wattis.org and www.cca.edu/calendar for current information concerning exhibitions, programs, and events related to The Magnificent Seven (subsequent press releases will also be issued to announce specific upcoming public events).

The first public event associated with The Magnificent Seven will be by Abraham Cruzvillegas, the fall 2009 Capp Street Project artist in residence. He and several MFA students will spend the semester collaboratively investigating need and scarcity in relation to object making as well as the politics of improvising with found materials. Their starting point will be a contest to transform discarded and found materials into bicycles, go-karts, and other vehicles. The vehicles will be on view in the main building on CCA’s San Francisco campus November 15–29, and a race will be staged in front of the main building on Saturday, November 21, at 2 p.m.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN ARTISTS
Abraham Cruzvillegas (Mexico) is noted for his ability to transform everyday objects such as found scrap wood and weathered buoys into elegant sculptural compositions. He will launch the program in fall 2009.

Renata Lucas (Brazil) provokes the possibility of new subjective and collective engagement with our built environment through a critical interpretation of how that environment determines actions, behaviors, and social relationships, and by extension society’s dependency on prescribed definitions of space, property, and order.

Paulina Olowska (Poland) brings a politically and culturally nostalgic, ironic artistic style to her collages, performances, paintings, and neons.

Kris Martin (Belgium) has a poetic conceptual practice that centers on the fragility of the human condition and a life lived close to death. His work are infused with poignant simplicity, humor, and grace.

Harrell Fletcher (United States) has spent more than a decade working collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects, conceived to challenge traditional definitions of art world and artwork.

Ryan Gander (Great Britain) creates highly conceptual, lyrical artworks that appear upon first glance to concern prosaic historical facts and events but which actually incorporate numerous fictional and semifictional elements.

Tino Sehgal (Germany) creates artworks that are not material objects, but rather situations, in which one or several people carry out his instructions to create an experience. Sehgal will participate in The Magnificent Seven exhibition program with a rotating presentation of new artworks, some of which have been conceived for a particular situation of the gallery. Each new exhibition in The Magnificent Seven will feature a work by Sehgal.

About the CCA Wattis Institute
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts was established in 1998 in San Francisco at California College of the Arts. It serves as a forum for the presentation and discussion of international contemporary art and curatorial practice. Through groundbreaking exhibitions, the Capp Street Project residency program, lectures, symposia, and publications, the Wattis Institute has become one of the leading art institutions in the United States and an active site for contemporary culture in the Bay Area. For more information about the Wattis Institute, visit www.wattis.org.

About California College of the Arts
Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (CCA) is noted for the interdisciplinarity and breadth of its programs. It offers studies in 20 undergraduate and seven graduate majors in the areas of fine arts, architecture, design, and writing. The college offers bachelor of architecture, bachelor of arts, bachelor of fine arts, master of architecture, master of arts, master of fine arts, and master of business administration degrees. With campuses in San Francisco and Oakland, CCA currently enrolls 1,740 full-time students. Noted alumni include the painters Nathan Oliveira and Raymond Saunders; the ceramicists Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Peter Voulkos; the filmmaker Wayne Wang; the conceptual artists David Ireland and Dennis Oppenheim; and the designers Lucille Tenazas and Michael Vanderbyl. For more information about CCA, visit www.cca.edu.

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