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AVT 301 Visual Voices Colloquium (1)
Instructor: Harold Linton Section 001, Harris
Art Bldg, Room 2010 1 credit, Fall 2014
Phone: (703) 993-4615 TR 7:20 p.m. – 8:45 pm
E-mail: (See Speaker Schedule)
“The contemporary artist today is part theorist, performer, producer, installer, writer, entertainer, and shaman creating in material, media, text, and time all of which take shape in real, simulated, and virtual worlds. The characteristics of contemporary art practice change the way we think about the visual arts, which influences what we do in educational settings.” – Graeme Sullivan Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts.
Course Description:
Visual Voices Colloquium is the Professional Lecture Series of the School of Art and represents a window into the professional world of art and design. Speakers are chosen with faculty guidance to represent leading and emerging talented practitioners in the disciplines of our curriculum as well as artists whose work lies beyond the subject areas of our program offerings.
The purpose of the course and the program is to broaden our students’ exposure and vocabulary to professional work being created today and to simultaneously provide an opportunity for our students to interact with speakers either in small groups before and following our lectures in order that they may have an opportunity to exchange ideas and pose questions to our guest speakers.
Discourse:
Visual Voices Colloquium is offered each semester throughout the academic year and is equal to 1 credit hour per semester. The schedule of speakers for the Spring 2014 semester is included below with this syllabus. A poster has also been created and will be made available to our students for display that includes the speaker schedule for this Spring Semester 2014.
Attendance and Course Requirements: [VERY IMPORTANT]
Attendance: Full attendance is required for the course. Attendance cards will be available at the front doors of the Harris Theater 15 minutes prior to the lecture. They are completed with printed Name and G number and handed back to the monitors at the conclusion of the lecture.
Students are advised that late attendance at lectures by any amount is unacceptable and equal to an absence in the course. For each absence in the course, the attendance portion of your grade will be reduced by 10%. Students are also advised that no other student may sign-in for you or in place of your own signature on the roll card(s). We accept only one card per student at the conclusion of the lecture(s). Class is scheduled to begin at 7:20 p.m. and lectures commence at 7:30 p.m. sharp! Doors close at 7:30 p.m.!
Paper Presentation: [VERY IMPORTANT]
In addition to attendance, you are required to submit a minimum of a 1,000-word paper on the Visual Voices program artist of your choice. The paper should focus on the artist’s work and also their presentation lecture to our audience at GMU. You may wish to write on any of the artists including the last speaker. Name and G number on top of first page.
Paper Due Date: [VERY IMPORTANT]
Papers (HARDCOPY ONLY) will be accepted throughout the Fall 2014 semester up until and no later than Friday, December 5, 2014 before 5:00 p.m. in the Art Design Building, School of Art office, Room 2050.
Papers will not be accepted beyond this date/time (December 5, 2014 at 5:00 p.m.) for any reason! Late papers receive 0% or no credit. Only hardcopy papers are acceptable – no electronic copies via email are acceptable!
Grading: 50% Full Attendance at all lectures
50% Final Paper
Visual Voices / Professional Lecture Series / Fall 2014
Visual Voices is a yearlong series of lectures by professional artists, art historians and other art professionals that enriches the School of Art curriculum. Visual Voices lectures are held on Thursday evenings from 7:20- 9:00 p.m. in Harris Theater.
The fall schedule includes five lectures:
FALL 2014
August 28, 2014 Grad Students Praxis Here and Now: Studio Praxis
September 4 Ron Graziani “E(ART)H History””
September 18, 2014 Dale Culleton “Improvising a Living Beyond the Studio”
October 16, 2014 Carmon Colangelo “Psychogeographies: Jack Kerouac, Sputnik & Disney World”
October 23, 2014 Ann Fessler “A Girl Like Her”
BR I EF BI O G R APH I ES | VI SU AL VO I C ES | FALL 2 0 1 4
Graduate Students
“Here and Now: Praxis in the Mason Studios”
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Anne Smith | Jay Hendrick | Sarah Irvin | Patrick Sargent
Jay Hendrick
Jay Hendrick was raised in Abilene, TX. A place he refers to as the, Buckle of the Bible belt. Hendrick received a Bachelors of Applied Studies in 2011 and a Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2012 at Abilene Christian University. Hendrick studied at the School of Visual arts in 2013. He is currently working on an MFA at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. His work has been shown in US and Japan. He was featured in New American Paintings in 2013.
Sarah Irvin
Sarah Irvin graduated from the University of Georgia with a BFA in Painting and Drawing in 2008. In 2009, she attended VCU’s Summer Studio Program. In the years following, Irvin worked as a Middle School Art Teacher, a Gallery Assistant, a Printmaking Instructor, and for Capital One’s Corporate Art Program. She has participated in exhibits across the country and has had solo exhibitions at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, The Kennedy‐Douglass Center for the Arts, the H. Scott November Gallery, and the Page Bond Gallery. Her work is included in the collections of the Federal Reserve Bank, Capital One, The University of Richmond, Old Dominion Electric Cooperative, Western Kentucky University and the Try-Me Urban Restoration Project. Irvin recently participated in the CulturalDC Fellowship with Flashpoint Gallery.
Anne Smith
Anne Smith grew up in Upstate New York. She later earned a B.A. in Studio Art from Williams College and is a current MFA student at George Mason University. Her Master's thesis show, in November, will feature her work in drawing, printmaking and sculpture. In addition to her studio practice, she enjoys learning about and making furniture, which she has studied at the Penland School of Crafts.
Patrick Sargent
Born in Detroit and raised in Southeast Michigan, I left the ailing car industry for the military at age 17. After twenty years of service, I retired from the military in 2002, at the same time our nation and those I served with went to war. Also in 2002, I completed my first degree at George Mason University in political science. My degree requirements included a basic fine arts class, it was supposed to be one of those courses that would round out and complete my educational experiences. Instead, and rather amazingly, it became the beginning of another journey. That course introduced me to the centuries old traditions of printmaking and papermaking. Since then I’ve earned a BFA in printmaking at George Mason University (2012), and I am currently in their MFA program where I am continuing to explore papermaking and printmaking processes, and, by extension, its emphasis on collaboration -- between artists, communities, and audiences.
Ron Graziani
“E(ART)H History”
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Ron Graziani is an Associate Professor in the School of Art at East Carolina University.
Education includes a Ph.D Art History/Critical theory, University of California at Los Angeles M.A. Art Criticism, State University of New York at Stony Brook, B.A. Art history, University of California at Los Angeles
Art History PhilosophyThe Art History and Appreciation Program at ECU offers courses in a broad range of areas that are
representative of world history, from the earliest artistic activities to the present. Taught by a faculty
of experienced teachers and published scholars, These courses lay a foundation in cultural awareness
and in critical thinking for art history as well as other majors who are pursuing careers in teaching,
museum work, studio art or design production, and related fields.
Students learn to think about historical, geographical, social, political, economic, religious,
and other cultural factors and issues that shape the lives of those involved in the making of art
and its reception. Always including a writing intensive element, Art History courses enable students to
improve their verbal and written communication skills. In addition, Art History courses introduce students
to research methodologies of various disciplines that are concerned with visual culture. Successful
students in Art History and Appreciation broaden and deepen their understanding of the contemporary
global world.
Robert Smithson and the American Landscape by Ron Graziani published by the Cambridge University Press, 2004.
This volume comprises a social history of Robert Smithson's earthworks and their critical reception. In his analysis of the artist's personal writings and art works, Ron Graziani demonstrates how the earthworks were part of an aesthetic and civic fault line that ruptured in the 1960s. Moreover, Graziani reveals how Smithson's earthworks formed part of the "new conservationism" in the late 1960s and how it gave material form to the contradictions of a sociological issue, inseparable from its economic legacy.
Dale Culleton
“Improvising a Living Beyond the Studio”
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Dale Culleton trained as a functional and sculptural ceramicist/potter. His interests expanded over time to embrace a robust independent business in the design-related field of materials for architecture and allied design disciplines through his fascination with materials and their intrinsic qualities of beauty and grace when handled carefully and in context with the project at hand.
His firm Blue Cloud Marble, http://bluecloudmarble.com/?page_id=209, covers a wide assortment of projects including public buildingd, residential design, landscape design projects, and other special circumstances where his expertise with marble is especially important to the successful outcome of a design problem or aesthetic result.
Blue Cloud Marble produces tile, counter-tops, garden benches and posts, steps, walls and garden follies with re-purposed stone from an abandoned marble quarry in western Massachusetts.
Blue Cloud Marble is an offshoot of Culleton Art Tile Company. Dale Culleton, a studio potter began experimenting with architectural tile making in the mid 1970s before becoming a builder and site developer. He would often incorporate his tile in building projects.
In 1999 Dale Culleton became involved in cleaning up an abandoned quarry site in western Massachusetts. The site contains a large selection of cast off stone from a marble quarrying operation that spanned 100 years (approx. 1795-1895). He has found a great many uses for the material as evidenced by the images on this site.
Blue Cloud Marble is located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Prices and product information are available upon request .
Carmon Colangelo
“Psychogeographies: Jack Kerouac, Sputnik & Disney World”
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Canadian Born. Lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.
Carmon Colangelo is one of the preeminent artists of his generation-a pioneering printmaker whose work combines surrealism and abstraction with the exploration of art history, science and technology. Carmon Colangelo's work explores ideas about the creation of the universe and man-made changes in the environment-from the Big Bang to the Big Melt. This paradoxical relationship expands on Colangelo's investigation of the biological aspects of evolution and takes a closer look at the physical environment. His imagery presents a playful odyssey that references the meta-narratives of art history and natural history by juxtaposing utopian ideals of modernism with the contingent aesthetics of surrealism and conceptual art. His taxonomy ranges from primitive organisms to bears and rhinoceros to other more bizarre and ambiguous creatures. The animals function in or independently from architectonic forms and urban landscapes, producing a vivid, chimerical vision Colangelo's works push the physical and haptic qualities of the print, using new methods and transformative materials such as wax and iridescent inks.
An enduring feature of Carmon Colangelo's work is the unraveling of free-floating symbols and texts in an aggressive exploitation of wet and dry media. His prints and paintings are marked by neo-primitives forms, which are then tempered by soothing veils of light. He challenges conventional readings, producing disorienting spatial topologies and striking visual poetics. His images may swing from the obsessively personal to the openly topical, allowing disparate formal structures and semiotics to inspire the production of remarkable forms that are somehow freed from the preceding visual context and grammar.
Born in Toronto, Canada, Carmon Colangelo received his M.F.A. from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is one of the foremost figures in the print-drawing world in America and the world. His work has been exhibited widely, from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. to Argentina, Canada, England, Puerto Rico, and Korea. His works are in collections at the National Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. He is the Dean of the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and holds the E. Desmond Lee Professorship for Collaboration in the Arts.
Ann Fessler
“A Girl Like Her”
Thursday, October 23, 2014
For more than 30 years, Ann Fessler’swork has focused on the stories of women and the impact that myths, stereotypes, and mass media images have on their lives and intimate relationships.
Fessler turned to the subject of adoption in 1989 after being approached by a woman who thought Ann might be the daughter she had surrendered for adoption forty years earlier. Though the woman was not her mother, Fessler—an adoptee—was profoundly moved by the experience. The conversation that ensued changed the focus of her work.
Since that time she has produced three films, audio and video installations, and a non-fiction book on adoption. Between 2002-05, Fessler conducted over 100 interviews with women who lost children to adoption during the 28 years that followed WWII, when a perfect storm of circumstances led to an unprecedented number of surrenders.
Her short films on adoption have won top honors at festivals and have been screened internationally. Her book, The Girls Who Went Away (Penguin Press, 2006) was chosen as one of the top 5 non-fiction books of 2006 by the National Book Critics Circle, and was awarded the Ballard Book Prize, given annually to a female author who advances the dialogue about women’s rights. In 2011, her book was chosen by readers of Ms. magazine as one of the top 100 feminist books of all time.