Tag Archives: Graduate Art

Critical Faculties: Meet Art Center’s 2014 Faculty Enrichment Grant recipients

"January, Julia F. Parker, Yosemite Visitors Center" Photo by Jonas Kulikauskas.

“January, Julia F. Parker, Yosemite Visitors Center”
Photo by Jonas Kulikauskas.

Providing a top notch education in art and design requires an intricate ecosystem comprised of state of the art facilities, a driven and talented student body and, perhaps most of all, a broad body of skilled faculty members committed to engaging students and their own creative and professional practices in equal measure.

It’s no accident that Art Center’s faculty is comprised of working artists and designers, many of whom are game changing iconoclasts and leading innovators in their fields. In addition to being steeped in the most up-to-date best practices in any given field, Art Center’s faculty members offer incentive to students to continue pursuing their creative dreams.

But maintaining dual careers requires a surplus of passion and resources, both temporal and financial. To that end, Art Center’s Faculty Council has has marshaled funds to help out with the latter in the form of its annual Faculty Enrichment Grant program, which distributes up to $40,000 to faculty members actively pursuing projects “related to creative or professional development.”

Last month, the Council announced the seven recipients of its 2014 Faculty Enrichment Grants. Each will receive an award of up to $5000 to support their work outside of the classroom. The Dotted Line reached out to each of the seven recipients to learn more about their award winning projects. Here’s what we learned:

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Of fellowships and new (adjunct) faculty: Checking in with Grad Art chair Diana Thater

Thater applied for the CCF fellowship with this work entitled Chernobyl, 2011

Thater applied for the CCF fellowship with this work entitled Chernobyl, 2011

For over two decades, Grad Art chair Diana Thater’s groundbreaking film, video and installation work exploring the tension between humans and the natural world has been widely discussed and admired. But the spotlight on Thater’s role as a leader in the global art world seems to have gotten even brighter over the past few months. In April, she named chair of the Art Center department from which she graduated in 1990 and where she’s taught for many years. In June, Thater was honored in a major gala by the Orange County Museum of Art. And earlier this month, she was awarded a 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship.

Additionally, Thater has already begun placing her creative stamp on Grad Art by making some exciting additions to its adjunct faculty roster. She announced an impressive lineup of new fall adjunct faculty, including Philippe Vergne, director of MOCA, and Bennett Simpson, senior curator at MOCA and artist Harry Dodge. Her adjunct faculty additions for the spring are equally exciting: Getty Scholar and curator for the National Gallery in Washington Lynne Cooke, artist and Getty Scholar Tacita Dean and curator Charlotte Cotton.

To honor Thater’s accomplishments and better understand the ideas informing her creative practice, we’ve included the artist’s statement that compelled the foundation to grant her the award. Consider this a behind-the-scenes snapshot of what it takes to be a successful working artist.

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August 2014 Alumni Notes

Jennifer Steinkamp's Murmurfication

Jennifer Steinkamp’s Murmuration

Summer 2014 has yielded a bounty of freshly produced works, events and ideas by Art Center alumni. And look for future editions of this dispatch to be equally flush, given July’s bumper crop of kickstarter campaigns. Read on to learn more…and get in on the fun(ding).

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Artworld luminaries and Art Center alums pay tribute to Mike Kelley’s legacy as an educator

Of all the ways Mike Kelley has been celebrated for his pivotal contributions to contemporary art, since his death on January 31, 2012, his impact as an educator may be the most significant aspect of his legacy to go relatively unexamined, if not unsung. Kelley was a faculty member of Art Center’s Graduate Art Department from 1992 to 2007. And during his time teaching at Art Center, Kelley mentored such monumental talents as video artist Diana Thater (who now chairs the department from which she graduated), multimedia artist Pae White, installation artist Jennifer Steinkamp and Fine Art faculty member Jean Rasenberger.

In the above video, inspired by Kelley’s MOCA retrospective, these artists examine the ways in which Kelley influenced the kind of artists they’ve become, the work they create and, perhaps most importantly, how they go about crafting and sustaining a life as an exhibiting artist. Kelley has often been credited with helping raise the clout and visibility of LA’s art scene when his career took off and he declined to follow the well-worn path previous west coast supernova artists had followed to New York. As one of the first internationally acclaimed artists to root himself in Los Angeles, Kelley was, in essence, laying the groundwork for his students and their contemporaries to do the same.

If these artists’ upwardly-tilting career paths are any indication, Kelley’s impact on his students, his city and his creative discipline only gets deeper as time goes on.

Outgoing Grad Art chair Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe on teaching, beauty and art’s unlikely logic

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

After logging 11 years as Chair of Art Center’s Graduate Art department, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe handed over the reigns to incoming co-chairs Diana Thater and Jason Smith. Gilbert-Rolfe has spent a total of 28 years on Art Center’s faculty, and will migrate into a full-time teaching position in 2015 after a sabbatical during which he’ll dedicate himself to one of the many writing projects vying for his attention (see Q & A below for details).

Throughout his tenure with the college, Gilbert-Rolfe has had a hand in educating an impressive array of art world luminaries, including Lynn Aldrich, Lisa Anne Auerbach, David Bailey, Olivia Booth, Mason Cooley, Aaron Curry, Kevin Hanley, Nate Hylden, Melissa Kretschmer, Sharon Lockhart, T. Kelly Mason, Rebecca Norton, Steve Roden, Sterling Ruby, Frances Stark, Jennifer Steinkamp, Alexis Marguerite Teplin, Diana Thater, Pae White, Jennifer West and T.J. Wilcox. At the same time, he has distinguished himself as a formidable writer and critical thinker, best known for probing philosophical and aesthetic ideas around beauty and other issues informing the way we interact with art.

Gilbert-Rolfe makes clear in his candid and enlightening responses to our questions below that he will continue to build upon this legacy as an educator and critic.

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Change Makers: Alumni Q&A with video artist Filip Kwiatkowski on capturing the undefinable

 

Working Title (I Am Not Your Father), 2013, by Filip Kwiatkowski. HD video projection with sound

Working Title (I Am Not Your Father), 2013, by Filip Kwiatkowski. HD video projection with sound

Warsaw-born video artist Filip Kwiatkowski (Grad Art, MFA 2013), who earned his BFA in film and television at the Tisch School of the Arts, came to Art Center after a successful career as a freelance photographer in New York. Shortly after completing his MFA in Art Center’s Graduate Art program, Kwiatkowski was awarded a fellowship at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, where he had studied as a participant in an Art Center exchange program. In his work today, Kwiatkowski continues to explore issues that fueled his graduate film project: how media interfaces transform personal narratives, shape behavior and create “a circumstance in which the relation between private, public, work and personal time are increasingly hard to separate.”

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Spring fever: Grad Art alum Alexis Marguerite Teplin melds performance, painting and a passion for ballet in Stravinsky-themed Zürich exhibition

Alexis Marguerite Teplin

Elas, 2012, oil on linen by Alexis Marguerite Teplin (courtesy Mary Mary Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland)

Graduate Art alumna Alexis Marguerite Teplin’s practice is noted for a theatricality based in seduction, artificiality and cultural signification–themes that harken back to Igor Stravinsky’s scandalous 1913 ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), culminating in the “sacrificial dance” of a young girl.

Fitting, then, that California-born, London-based Teplin is among the artists invited by the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, housed in a former brewery in Zürich, to create new work that addresses the ballet, its context and its history for Sacre 101—An Exhibition Based on The Rite of Spring.

In Teplin’s live performance piece P and C, taking place at the museum next Thursday, April 24, features the sound and movement of two actors (and of Teplin herself) performing in a burlesque manner in front of one of her large-scale paintings, wearing brightly colored costumes she designed. The artist was inspired by Natalia Goncharova, an avant-garde costume and set designer for Ballets Russes, the company that originally performed The Rite of Spring a century ago. P and C is Teplin’s second performance work; her first, The Party, was commissioned by London’s Serpentine Gallery.

On view through May 11, the Sacre 101 exhibition presents contemporary works alongside a selection of Sacre documentation, much of which is being shown in a museum context for the first time.

Artist Ming Wong at Art Center

“In Italy a location in not just a backdrop, it’s a character, a famous co-star even.” Ming Wong

Ming Wong will speak at Art Center College of Design on the occasion of the debut of his Making Chinatown at REDCAT gallery Tuesday, January 31st at 7:30 pm in the L.A. Times Media Center.

Dominic Eichler, Frieze, September 2010

From the REDCAT press release:

Wong has been recognized internationally for his ambitious performance and video works that engage with the history of world cinema and popular forms of entertainment. Working through the visual styles and tropes of such iconic film directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai and Ingmar Bergman, Wong’s practice considers the means through which subjectivity and geographic location are constructed by motion pictures. Making Chinatown … draws upon Polanski’s iconic film for its use of Los Angeles as a versatile and malleable character.

Shot on location in the Gallery at REDCAT, Wong’s reinterpretation, Making Chinatown, transforms the exhibition space into a studio backlot and examines the original film’s constructions of language, performance and identity. With the artist cast in the roles originally played by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston and Belinda Palmer, key scenes are reenacted in front of printed backdrops that are digitally rendered from film stills and kept intact within the video installation. The wall flats adhere to the conventions of theatrical and filmic staging while taking on qualities of large-scale painting and sculpture.

Ming Wong’s (b. 1971, Singapore) recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Moving Image, Queens, New York, as part of Performa 11; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Singapore Art Museum. He has been included in such notable exhibitions as based in Berlin at Atelierhaus Monbijoupark in Berlin; the 2010 Gwangju and Sydney Biennial; and in 2009 at the Singapore Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale, for which he was awarded a Special Mention. Wong currently lives and works between Berlin and Singapore. For more information, see www.mingwong.org.

Be Part of Pacific Standard Time

Grad Art Faculty Member Seeks Bodies to be Part of Performance Art Event This Sunday

Grad Art core faculty Lita Albuquerque is creating a large scale performance for the Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival and is looking for students, faculty and alumni from the Art Center community to sign up to participate this coming Sunday, January 22nd at noon at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Outlook in Culver City.

Spine of the Earth, Lita Albuquerque, 1980. Ephemeral installation at El Mirage Dry Lake Bed, CA. Lita Albuquerque © Lita Albuquerque Studio, 1980.

As described on the Pacific Standard Time website, Spine of the Earth 2012 is taking place this Sunday and is a recreation of Albuquerque’s 1980 Spine of the Earth, where the artist created a land based work at the bed of the El Mirage Dry Lake. The piece created a giant “geometric pattern over six-hundred feet in diameter” and turned the Earth into a artist’s canvas. In Albuquerque’s recreation twenty two years later, she won’t be painting the earth but will be making a “performative sculpture” that requires at least five hundred people.

As part of the open call to artists, designers and the general public, Albuquerque is looking for students, faculty and alumni from the Art Center community to participate in the performance. Sign up is easy at spineoftheearth2012.com. According to the site, participants will be involved in a very simple walking based movement (choreographed by LA-based choreographers WIFE) and will receive a signed, limited-edition artifact of the performance.

Kyle Fitzpatrick, who blogged about the upcoming event, wrote that he received the following details after signing up to participate:

  • The event is this Sunday between 12PM and 2PM. If you are participating, you need to be on site no later than 8AM.
  • This actually will not be in the desert (phew), but in Baldwin Hills Scene Overlook in Culver City, between Jefferson and La Cienega.
  • All participants will be involved in a very simple walking-based movement that will take place outdoors
  • What will you be wearing? A red jump suit! You should wear dark clothing and “comfortable walking shoes” in neutral colors to go underneath, though. You’ll also be keeping your red jumpsuit, which Lita will be signing as a thank you for participating.
  • Don’t bring your kids: all participants must be 16 and over.
  • Bring food money, as they will have food trucks there for eating. You’ll also be getting free coconut water!

The piece is a part of Pacific Standard Time’s Performance and Public Art Festival, which begins Thursday, January 19, continuing through Saturday, January 29. Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-80 is a collaboration of cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene.