The Wesleyan Connection

View the talents of the seniors in the Art Studio Program of Wesleyan’s Department of Art and Art History. “Senior Thesis Exhibitions 2013” runs March 26-April 21 in the Zilkha Gallery.

The show, features drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, mixed media and architecture.

“We’re all so proud of our senior majors. The four weeks of rotating Senior Thesis Exhibitions are a wonderful opportunity for the broader Wesleyan community to experience their remarkable work,” said Tula Telfair, professor of art.

Allison Kalt, Tiffany Unno, Ilyana Schwartz, Anna Shimshak and Christina You will display their artwork from March 26-31.

Piers Gelly, Zoe Albert, Ally Bernstein, Ryu Hirahata, Charles Ellis and Nichola Kokkinis will display their work April 2-7. A reception will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. April 3 in the gallery.

Melissa Arroyo, Christian Lalonde, Emily Schubert, Kerry Klemmer, Ethan Cohen and Marissa Napolitano will display their artwork April 9-14. A reception will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. April 10.

Alahna Watson, Adam Forbes, Caitlin Palmer, Arin Dineen, Jessica Wilson and Kevin Brisco will display their work April 16-21. A reception will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. April 17.

In addition, each student in the show was invited to select a single work from their Senior Thesis Exhibition for a year-end showcase held April 30 through May 25. A reception will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. May 25 in the gallery.

The public is invited and the exhibition is free of charge.

The “Senior Thesis Exhibitions 2013″ runs March 26-April 21 in the Zilkha Gallery.

Ilyana Schwartz’s “Figures.”

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“Innovations: Intersection of Art and Science” is co-hosted by the Center for the Arts and the Hughes Program in the Life Sciences and curated by choreographer Liz Lerman.

Starting on Feb. 28, Wesleyan will bring together teams of artists and scientists to share approaches, skills and outcomes of their research at the intersection of art and science.

The symposium, titled “Innovations: Intersection of Art and Science,” is part of the Creative Campus Initiative at the Center for the Arts.

“The goal of this experimental program is to elevate the arts as a means of teaching, learning and knowing through co-teaching opportunities for artists and non-artists, as well as commissioning new works by artists who are invited to work with faculty and students across disciplines in their creation process,” said Pamela Tatge, director of the Center for the Arts.

“Innovations: Intersection of Art and Science” is co-hosted by the Center for the Arts and the Hughes Program in the Life Sciences and curated by choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker Liz Lerman. Lerman is the founding artist director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

Speakers include Katja Kolcio, associate professor of dance, associate professor of environmental studies at Wesleyan; Leila Kinney, executive director of the Arts Initiatives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Marda Kirn, founding director of EcoArts Connections; and Richard Prum, professor of ornithology and director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale University. (more…)

In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Friends of the Davison Art Center presented “The Big Draw: Middletown,” on April 22. The event celebrated drawing with workshops for people of all skill levels, from beginners to accomplished artists.

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Wesleyan’s Center for East Asian Studies is hosting an exhibit titled “Provincial Elegance” April 4 through May 27 in the Mansfield Freeman Gallery. The exhibit features Chinese antiques donated in honor of Houghton “Buck” Freeman ‘43 and his wife, Doreen. Patrick Dowdey, curator of the Freeman Gallery, spoke about the individual antiques during the show’s opening April 4.

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Tula Telfair's oil on canvas, "Built Exclusively for Delight," (2011) was one of 15 paintings featured in Telfair's Out of Sight: Imaginary Landscapes exhibit.

Professor of Art Tula Telfair’s latest exhibition, Out of Sight: Imaginary Landscapes, opened at the Forum Gallery in New York, N.Y. on Jan. 5 to a packed crowd. The 15 large panoptic paintings shown in the exhibition, which ran through Feb. 11, depict majestic mountainous landscapes dominated by dramatic skies that reflect a broad range of locations and weather patterns.

As with Telfair’s past work, her landscapes are derived from memory and imagination. Telfair, director of Wesleyan’s Arts Studio Program, finds it fascinating when people tell her they can identify a particular location, since none actually exist.

“Since I have no idea when I begin what the final image will be, it feels like I’m exploring new territory when I start a painting, and that’s very exciting. Because I can easily copy images, I tended to lose interest in the process when I worked from observation,” she explains. But by painting from her imagination and memory, she is challenged intellectually, technically and emotionally. “Successfully painting an image that was not observed, but that viewers are convinced exists, is gratifying.”

Telfair works on many canvases simultaneously. She begins by mixing colors for the skies and starts painting each one intuitively. (more…)

Joshua Borenstein '97 (Hartford Courant photo)

The Hartford Courant reports that Joshua Borenstein ’97  has been the named the Long Wharf Theatre’s managing director after a national search. He will oversee a $5 million budget and a staff of 64 full-time employees.

Borenstein held the job of interim managing director for the past six months and previously worked at the theater from 2003 to 2007 in several positions, most recently as associate managing director. For the last two years, he was project manager with the arts research firm, AMS in Fairfield.

Before joining Long Wharf, he worked at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company through Theatre Communications Group’s’ New Generations: Mentoring the Leaders of Tomorrow program.

Borenstein has a master’s of fine arts in theater management from the Yale School of Drama and a bachelor of arts with honors in classical civilization from Wesleyan. He is married to Katherine Hsu Hagmann ’98, an attorney with Bershstein Volfe and McKeon.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts (CFA) $750,000 to support the development of artists’ new work, interdisciplinary collaborations, co-teaching initiatives and arts-based campus-wide projects as well as the planning and partial funding of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP), a new post-graduate professional certificate program for performing arts presenters.

Pamela Tatge (Photo by Bill Burkhart)

“The CFA’s goal is to elevate the place of art, artists and the artistic process at Wesleyan in ways that innovatively strengthen teaching, student learning and art-making,” says Pamela Tatge, director of the Center for the Arts. “The Mellon-funded projects will help to achieve these goals by supporting the creative practice of diverse artists; sponsoring cross-disciplinary exchange and new course development; engaging students in a wide variety of opportunities to make, experience and understand art; and launching the ICPP to enhance professional practice in the presenting field.”

Tatge anticipates that by the end of the grant’s four-year period, powerful new connections will exist between numerous faculty in different departments and between faculty and visiting artists, “so that the arts are more organically integrated into non-arts areas at Wesleyan.”

Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance
The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) brings artists, presenters, academics, and other performing arts professionals together (more…)

Portrait artist Daniel Heyman presented his work titled "Bearing Witness: Stories from the Front Lines" during a gallery talk April 23 in Zilhka Gallery.

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Book artist, fine press printer and publisher Robin Price spoke on "Chance and the Artist's Book (Thank You, John Cage)" March 25 in the Center for the Arts Hall. Her lecture was followed by an opening reception at the Davison Art Center. Price is known for taking artistic risks within the context of the traditional format of the book. Her work embraces chance, serendipity, and randomness, and she thrives on collaboration with a wide range of artists.

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Sasha Rudensky ’01, visiting assistant professor of art, is exhibiting her work in the “31 Women in Art Photography” exhibition at Affirmation Arts in New York City. The exhibit is open until April 10.

John Ravenal '81

John Ravenal ’81 is now president of his professional organization: the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC).

The Sydney and France Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Ravenal has become the fourth president of AAMC since the organization was founded in 2001.

Ravenal joined the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in 1998, and his exhibitions have included Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art; Outer & Inner Space, a history of video art; and Artificial Light, displayed at VCUarts Anderson Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.

In addition, he has recently completed a book on modern and contemporary art at VMFA and is planning a complete redesign of all modern and contemporary galleries, as well as the addition of a sculpture garden, to open this May.

An art history major at Wesleyan, Ravenal earned his M.A. and M.Phil in art history from Columbia University. Prior to his affiliation with the VMFA, Ravenal worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he was associate curator of 20th-century art.

“Our profession is now more important than ever as we maintain the artistic vision of the museums we serve and engage ever broadening audiences,” he says in an AAMC press release.

To learn more about the Association of Art Museum Curators, see http://www.artcurators.org.

Artwork by David Schorr.

David Schorr, professor of art, and Keiji Shinohara, artist-in-residence of art and East Asian studies, are showing their artwork at the DFN Gallery, 64 East 79th Street in New York, N.Y.

Their work is featured in an exhibit titled “Looks Good on Paper,” which runs through March 6.

Schorr has been a faculty member at Wesleyan since 1971 where he has taught printmaking, drawing, typography, book design, graphic design and calligraphy. Fifteen years ago he turned to canvas for a series of paintings about AIDS and early death so he could layer the backgrounds, dissolving the figures in the ether of space to suggest loss and memory.

He is represented by Mary Ryan Gallery in New York City where he shows regularly. In addition has had solo shows in Chicago, Milan, Rome, Naples, Paris, Athens, Toronto, Montreal and Copenhagen. His work has been reproduced extensively in the New York Times, The New Yorker and most significantly The New Republic, for which he has done more than 300 portraits.

His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Fogg Museum (Harvard), The New York Public Library, The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Artwork by Keiji Shinohara.

Shinohara began studying traditional Ukiyo-e techniques at Uesugi Studio, Kyoto, Japan in 1975, and in 1981, he became a Master Printmaker of woodblock printing. He’s had solo shows at the Art Zone, Kaguaoka Gallery in Kyoto, Japan in 2008,  the Tremaine Gallery at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn. and Wesleyan’s Davison Art Center in 2008.

Shinohara’s natural abstractions are printed on rice paper with water-based inks from woodblocks in the Ukiyo-e style – the traditional Japanese printmaking method dating to 600 CE. Keiji Shinohara has been a visiting artist at over 100 venues.

He has received grants from the Japan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and his work is in many public collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and the Library of Congress.