Alumni Happenings
“Free Agency” is a print installation by Boyd Richard (M.A. VCS 2006) made specifically for the setting of Dave’s Bar. The show features limited edition “pochoir” prints created by single layers of color added to paper using stencils and short cropped brushes. The imagery includes mainstream cultural symbols and iconography that has been re-imagined to explore issues of copyright, identity politics, and art criticism.
Asian American Visual Culture: Visiting Artists Panel Discussion: On Thursday March 29, 2012 in B Building, Room B5 on the Oakland campus from noon-2:30 p.m. visiting artists Sita Bhaumik (VCS 2012), Michele Carlson (VCS 2007), and Weston Teruya (VCS 2007) will be presenting their work and participating in a discussion about Asian American visual culture.
VCS alum, Shane Aslan Selzer and Chair of Fine Arts, Ted Purves, editors of What We Want is Free: Structures of Exchange and Social Practice in Recent Art, will be participating in a roundtable discussion with five artists at Parsons, The New School for Design on March 23rd from 6-8pm. The roundtable will focus on exchange structures: How are artists creating service platforms to provoke dialogues? What are the potential benefits and pitfalls for each structure?
Matthew Rana (MA/MFA Alum) has contributed to the latest edition of Paletten Art Journal (#286-297). Paletten is Sweden’s oldest and longest-running art magazine, now in its seventh decade of continuous production. It is published in Swedish four times a year. Initially Paletten concerned itself primarily with local issues but, in the course of time, broadened its aims to include national and international art. Paletten portrays the art scene, presents artists and their work and initiates discussions, almost always as an alternative to mainstream culture.
In the January/February 2012 issue of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Abby Chen (MA VCS, 2011) has published two articles, “The Best of Times: Lam Tung-pang’s Long View Under Scrutiny,” and “A Conversation With Lam Tung-pang.” Both articles focus on Lam Tung-pang, a Hong Kong artist who is acutely aware of the historical trajectory his city is experiencing in its shift from a British colony to its apparent absorption into the People’s Republic of China. And in spite of what appears in this context to be an unpredictable relationship with one’s identity, he suggests the climate for artistic activity has improved.
From December 16, 2011-January 10, 2012, Abby Chen’s (MA VCS, 2011) latest curatorial project, Women, will be on view in Shanghai. Featuring: Eagle Ho/Li Zhe, Gao Ling/Comma, Gao Zhan, He Chengyao, Liang Liting, Lin Minyi, Luo Le, Yang Meiyan, Yang Qing, Stella Zhang, Zhang Xiaojing, 10 Feminists–Shout! Group, with Debut work Moth by Mu Xi. As the debut exhibit for Shanghai EMG, WOMEN我们 is also the official exhibition for the Conference of Global Chinese Women and Visual Representation, organized by University of Michigan and Journalism School of Fudan University, and sponsored By Center for Chinese Studies at University of Michigan.“WOMEN我们 tend to seek and listen to those individual noises that often fade in the backgrounds. What I care about is whether the work can present a new discourse; if the work can help understand today’s gender space, as well as extend the imagination of what’s known as the reality.” – Abby Chen
Michele Carlson (MA VCS, 2007) is one of the six finalists for the ACAC Writing Fellowship based off her insights into contemporary Asian art practices and discourses. The ACAC Writing Fellowship aims to promote and encourage such discourse, particularly around events and exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area. This fellowship will invite the recipient to examine where the intersections lie between artists of Asian descent living and working in the Bay Area, those living and working internationally, and artists of non-Asian descent living in Asia.
David Spalding (MA VCS, 2002) a writer and curator based in Beijing, China, has published a review in Art Agenda on Sterling Ruby’s Vampire at The Pace Gallery. Check out the full review here. Adrienne Skye Roberts (MA VCS 2009) inspired by the national Occupy Movement has created a call to action! She has created a Facebook page, been active in the protest and is calling to the general artistic community to think about what our role is within this movement. If you are a visual or other artist interested in engaging in conversation, action, and/or education around these issues and putting efforts towards building an artist contingent of the 99%, check out the Facebook page or email artistsofthe99percent@gmail.com.
Hank Willis Thomas (MFA/MA in Photography and Visual and Critical Studies, 2004) currently is exhibiting work at the Wattis Institute’s exhibition: More American Photographs. This exhibition reexamines the well-known photography program of the Farm Security Administration, 1935-44, which included artists such as Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott. For More American Photographs, twelve contemporary photographers will be commissioned to travel the United States, documenting its land and people. The resulting images is presented at the Wattis Institute, alongside a number of the original images by the FSA photographers.
Projector located in downtown San Francisco proud to announce its first show on Saturday, October 1, 2011, Rotating Shanghai II: Works by Two Generations of Photography Artists in Shanghai -Curated by Liu Congyun (MA VCS,2009), Curator/Art Critic in Shanghai. The exhibition is featuring twelve renowned Chinese artists, who “have rediscovered photography as a new medium with many possibilities to exhibit the rapid socioeconomic development and urbanization…The show at Projector, the space of Contemporary Dialogue Foundation, presents a considerable amount of work that reveals the transforming trace of the two generations of artists’ attainments in Shanghai.”-Liu Congyun, Shanghai based curator/art critic.
Building Local and Global Communities around Your Brand, Business, and Properties
Guinevere de la Mare (MA VCS, 2008) is Community Manager at Chronicle Books. She launched the publisher’s social media strategy in early 2009 and has been the online voice of the brand ever since. Before honing her craft to 140 characters for @ChronicleBooks, Guinevere worked as a copywriter at Chronicle, a publicist at Rhode Island School of Design, and a market associate at Surface Magazine. She received a BA in Art History from U.C. Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts.
Finding a balance between two passions can be challenging, but Elyse Mallouk (MFA 2010, MA VCS, 2010) built her dual loves into her CCA education. Midway through her first year as an MFA student, she decided to enroll in the dual-degree program with Visual and Critical Studies. Having previously thought of herself as an artist with an interest in writing, she began developing a deeper balance between writing and art. Since she graduated last year, Mallouk has been taking on projects that tread the line between material and written investigations: writing projects that are artworks, and artworks that are heavily text-driven. She is currently working on a three-part project called Landfill with CCA Fine Arts chair Ted Purves. This project aims to generate a nonlinear history of contemporary socially engaged projects through an archive, a journal, and a subscription service. To learn more about Landfill, read the full article here: Elyse Mallouk ”Has a Way with Words…and Art.
Check out the new publication from Nensi Braillo (MA VCS, 2009). Dubrovnik under Siege: Artists’ Interactions with the Old City during the Yugoslav Army Aggression 1991-1992 LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2010 Paperback, 76 pages, $68
Suggestions of a Life Being Lived: A Queer Exploration of Three Public Themes SF Camerawork Publications, 2011 Hardcover, 64 pages, $19.95 Adrienne Skye Roberts (MA VCS, 2009) coedited this presentation of contemporary work that looks at queerness as a set of political alliances and possibilities. Untethered to institutions of sexual or gender normativity and in pursuit of greater freedoms, the work in this book represents queer activism, intentional and imagined communities, self-determinism, and DIY alternative world-making. The work looks outward toward collective and resistant expressions of queer community existing outside of dominant gay and lesbian culture.
