Art Studio Program Lecture Series
Art Studio Program Lecture Series
October 22 : Will Rogan
San Francisco based photographer / sculptor / new media artist.
November 9 : John Welchman
John C. Welchman is Professor of art history in the Visual Arts departmetn at the University of California, San Diego. His books on art include Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity, Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles and Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s; he is co-author of the Dada Surrealist Word Image and Mike Kelley in the Phaidon Contemporary Artist series; and editor of Rethinking Borders. He has written for Artforum, Screen, the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, the Economist and other newspapers and journals. Welchman has also contributed catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Tate, Reina Sophia (Madrid), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the LA County Museum of Art, the Sydney Biennial, Vienna Museum of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) the Ludwig Museum (Budapest) and the Haus der kunst (Munich).
January 7 : Jim Dow
Jim Dow is a Boston photographer noted for his triptych images of baseball stadiums. His interest in those places where people enact their everyday rituals, from the barbershop to the baseball park, has guided the path of his photographic career. Dow is concerned with capturing "human ingenuity and spirit" in endangered regional traditions--a barbershop with a heavy patina of town life covering the walls, the opulent time capsule of an old private New York club, the densely packed display of smoking pipes in an English tobacconist shop--all artifacts of a vanishing era.
January 14 : David Humphrey
New York based painter and 2009 winner of the Prix de Rome.
March 11 : Ron Baron
Ron Baron, a New York sculptor, creates installations in airports and transit centers. Seeming to defy gravity, Ron Baron's sculptures are tall stacks of objects that he has excavated from such stockpiles of Americana as garage sales and flea markets. Mostly a visual ode to the stereotypical American jock, his recent show, "Daddy-Magnetism," was heavy with the testosterone memories of lost youth. Baseball mitts, football helmets, boxing gloves, trophies and various sports paraphernalia are combined with other odds and ends and neatly assembled into impossible towers, often in the shape of elongated ceramic vessels or skyscrapers, that look like the slightest touch will send them crashing to the floor.
April 8 : Marie Thibeault
Celebrated California painter, Marie Thibault is thought to be "one of the strongest painters in the Southland".
Much as the Romantics painted allegorical scenes of decayed civilizations overcome by the forces of nature to express anxiety about mortality, Marie Thibeault invites contemplation of our ecological fate in "Keeping Things Whole," a series of paintings and mixed-medium drawings inspired by photographs of Hurricane Katrina's destruction. Since the late '80s, when she was in the Bay Area painting semi abstract earthquake-shattered landscapes, Thibeault has been fascinated with dramatic dissolutions of urban environments. The landscape cataclysmically rearranged by Katrina extends her investigation of the sublimity of collapsing form and dizzying chaotic spaces.
April 22 : Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton, a Brooklyn video and performance artist, creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny.
Shana Moulton works in video and performance. Moulton studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Moulton has also recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and studied at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Her video work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at The Armory Show Art Fair, New York; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Loop '05 Video Festival, Barcelona; Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin, Paris; Aurora, Edinburgh; Dark Light Festival, Dublin; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen; Canada Gallery, New York; and Bellwether, New York. Moulton currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
May 6 : Owen Smith
Owen Smith is a Bay Area painter / illustrator and New Yorker cover artist. In an aggressive and exaggerated figurative style reminiscent of the social realist movement, Smith depicts thugs, boxers, and fierce women in bold figure compositions. This, his latest collection, depicts the dark side to human relationships, each painting gloriously illuminating the tension between the characters with deep, rich color. Figures snarl at one another, men sulk, women smolder. In one work of art twin gangster brothers from the tough streets of London's West End are depicted in their beloved mother's parlor. Smith so skillfully illustrates the brothers' complex and disturbing relationship through body language and unusual perspective. Smith's paintings show the expectation of violence placed on men in society. Film Noire and pulp fiction illustration also influence his depiction of the strong, sexy, tough women that populate the dark urban landscapes of his pieces. The figures in Smith's work are frozen mid action and the narrative is ambiguous and mysterious. The artist has designed for every big magazine in the country, as well as for the New York City subway System and the San Francisco Opera. He's also designed cover illustrations for the last four New Yorker Fiction issues. Owen Smith is a gem, his paintings are fantastic.