(L to R) Instructors Adele Bass, David Luce and Everard Williams, Jr. were among the recipients of this year's Samsung Faculty Enrichment Grant Awards. Photo: Steven A. Heller / Art Center College of Design.
Yesterday, Art Center President Lorne Buchman and the Faculty Council announced the recipients of this year’s Samsung Faculty Enrichment Grant awards: Dewey Ambrosino, Adele Bass, Marcie Begleiter, Gabrielle Jennings, David Luce and Everard Williams, Jr.
In his announcment, Buchman said the reviewing panel of jurors were particularly impressed by the scholarly nature of the proposals and the spirit of creative inquiry that inspired them. The proposals ranged from a collaborative art installation in Vietnam exploring light and sound phenomena to a series of on-site interviews with family and colleagues who knew the German-born 20th-century American artist Eva Hesse.
“The research projects submitted by these six individuals are noteworthy and wide-ranging and will surely benefit the entire Art Center community,” said Buchman.
Head past the jump for descriptions of the projects.
Summary of 2011 Samsung Faculty Enrichment Grant awardees/projects
Dewey Ambrosino
CYOPS Vietnam
$5000 / Personal Project
Cymantic Operations in Vietnam is a collaborative project between Dewey, an American born artist, and Vietnamese born artist Tam Van Tran that is to be realized at an installation at Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam in 2012. The exhibition is a new collaborative installation for Sàn Art where Dewey and Tam Van Tran, who both have experience with the materials and formal elements, will engage in an experimental approach based on their dialogue about the potential for contributing to the growing interest in contemporary art in Vietnam. The installation will be an immersion of the viewer in sound and light phenomena, an opportunity to consider the slogans on the CYOPS clay posters in a multitude of ways. Dewey and Tran’s intent is to transmute the violent and coercive devices used by their two countries in the past into a positive and nonviolent practice in the present.
Adele Bass
International Conference 2011/Double paper presentation
$5000 / Research/Discovery
Adele’s grant supports her attendance at the ICSDC: International Conference on Sustainable Design and Construction Engineering in Paris to present two papers that have been accepted for inclusion in the conference and journal. Design Semantics: Even hybrid motorcycles need to make noise, explores the need for sound in high tech products prompted by a study of people’s emotional responses to the presence or absence of sound in their vehicles, like the soundless Prius. Tracing the evolution of the Automobile: Factors influencing the development of aesthetics in Automobiles from 1885 to the present, defines seven distinct eras of change in the development of the automotive design aesthetic. This conference provides an opportunity to present new ideas based on research and discuss product innovation from an interdisciplinary point of view at an international level.
Marcie Begleiter
Tracing the rope: Researching the public and private life of Eva Hesse
$2500/ Research/Discovery
Marcie will conduct a series of on-site interviews with family and colleagues who knew Eva Hesse, a German-born American artist. The project will include interviews with Helen Hesse Charash and Tom Doyle, the sister and ex-husband of the artist, as well as a visit to the Jewish Museum in Manhattan to study the journals of William Hesse, Eva’s father. Marcie’s inquiry will focus on topics that have not been deeply covered in currently available writings about this important 20th century artist. This work will feed back into her ongoing personal writing projects that deal with narrative, image-making, and the changing role of artists in contemporary culture.
Gabrielle Jennings
Moderately and Melodiously
$5000 / Personal project
Gabrielle will produce a public art event, the first of three inspired by novels from French writer and film director Marguerite Duras. This visual art project will portray a young girl’s piano lesson of Bach’s Minuet, a classic work often taught to beginning students. Her project will incorporate dance, theater and music and will be videotaped for a resulting audio/visual art installation. The series of events will seek to engage viewers as active participants in the art experience. Gabrielle hopes to involve participants from outside the art world in the making of the work, to expose underrepresented communities to the idea that art can be something other than a painting on a wall.
David Luce
Reality is the Unknown
$2500 / Research/Discovery
David plans to research Hans Hoffman’s famous claim that the great Old Master painters incorporated 20th century painting concepts into their work. He will attend a one-week painting symposium in Chicago. He will then explore, through experimental representational painting, how to radically combine modernist ideas of painting with representational work–how to make representational work look contemporary, specific and unexpected. His project will result in a series of lectures, comparison slides, a set of paintings that will fully articulate the research findings for his own artwork and will allow him to explore new studio classroom curriculum.
Everard Williams, Jr.
Redcaps: Photographs of African Americans who work for the railroad
$5000 / Personal project
The Redcap project is a photographic portrait series that captures the continuing legacy of African Americans who work on the railroad. The work will record the individuals who work the railways and the collection will serve others as a historical document. Images will be donated to the railroad museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Everard intends to delve deeply into the development, research and execution of this personal project to focus on the personal vision and commitment to the craft of photography in ways that he likewise encourages his students.
