The Wesleyan Connection

(Photos by Cora Lautze ‘11)

In early October, the White House press office announced that the President Obama and his family had chosen 45 art works borrowed from several Washington museums to decorate various White House walls, including the text painting Black Like Me No. 2 by Glenn Ligon ’82, which is on loan from the Hirshhorn Musuem.

In an article in the Washington Post about the Obamas’ selection of art works, Blake Gopnik described Ligon as “one of the best one of the best African American artists working today, and also one of the smartest and toughest. His loaner work is a tall white canvas covered from top to bottom with the repeated phrase ‘All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,’ a quote from the 1961 book the picture’s named after, Black Like Me, in which the white journalist John Howard Griffin made himself look black and reported on the troubles that befell him. Just as Griffin disappeared into blackness, and into the obliterations of American racism, so Ligon’s stenciled text disappears into an ever thicker mess of black pigment as it descends the canvas, until at the bottom it’s close to illegible.”

The Obamas’ choices include mostly modern contemporary paintings and sculptures by well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, and Edward Ruscha in addition to pieces by lesser-known artists such as Edward Corbett, who worked in Washington in the 1960s, and Alma Thomas, a 1960s-1970s African American abstract painter. Works by other African Americans and Native Americans are also on view as well as bronze dancers by Edgar Degas and still life paintings from the 1950s by Italian artist Giorgio Morandi.

Nadja Aksamija, assistant professor of art history, received a grant for $13,500 from the Kress Foundation for her research on “Sala Bologna at the Vatican.” Her grant, which was awarded May 1, spans for one and a half years.

Brooklyn, N.Y. native Angus McCullough ’10 envisions the thriving community living on Bronx’s Grand Concourse connected with a web of speakers, microphones, projectors and cameras.

As one of seven finalists in the Intersections: Grand Concourse Beyond 100 urban planning project, McCullough designed an audio-visual nervous system for the Grand Concourse, using nodes to weave the long, thin boulevard into a tight-knit web of interaction. His project, titled “Live Wired,” landed him a $1,000 cash stipend to further develop his proposal for inclusion in the exhibition Intersections: Grand Concourse at 100 — Future at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, opening Nov. 1, 2009.

“The residents of the concourse are the focus of my design, and provide the content for this virtual infrastructure,” McCullough explains. “They share information with each other and govern when and how to use this nervous system, which is there for the sole purpose of connecting them to one another. My hope is that the residents use these systems to systems to reach out to each other, cultivating chance interactions between individuals who might otherwise never meet.”

Designed as a wide, tree-lined thoroughfare with carriage drives, bridle paths and sunken cross-streets, the Grand Concourse was conceived in 1870 by engineer Louis Risse as a means to connect Manhattan to the parks of the Northern Bronx. Today, the Grand Concourse hosts the largest collection of Art Deco and Art Moderne style buildings in America.

McCullough’s plan involves the installation of interactive nodes to connect disparate spaces along the four-mile-long Concourse: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) mutual intercom connections (m.i.c.), would allow riders waiting at subway or bus stops to talk to each other, find out how crowded the bus or train will be, when it will arrive or to pass the time. Similarly, the Bodega Broadcast Network, installed near delis and grocery stores, would turn the concourse into a giant speaker system.

“The broadcast network relies on the (more…)

Patrick Dowdey, curator at the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, adjunct assistant professor of anthropology, and adjunct assistant professor of East Asian Studies, is a co-curator of Pearl of the Snowlands: Buddhist Printing at the Derge Parkhang, an exhibit of original prints from Tibetan Buddhists.

The exhibit will be held from Sept. 11 to Dec. 5 at The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College in Chicago.  The prints from the Derge Parkhang are still created from hand-carved woodblocks, as they have been for over 300 years.

Dowdey will participate in a Nov. 21 panel discussion about the prints he helped retrieve from the monastery.

For more information, visit the Derge Parkhang website.

Now through Dec. 20, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. presents Consider the Lobster, the first major survey of New York-based artist Rachel Harrison ’89. Named after an essay by the late David Foster Wallace, this exhibition encompasses more than 10 years of large-scale installations by Harrison, all of which will be reconfigured for the CCS Bard galleries, as well as a number of the autonomous sculptural and photographic works for which she is best known.

In addition to Rachel Harrison’s work in the CCS Bard Galleries, six artists, including Nayland Blake, Tom Burr, Harry Dodge, Alix Lambert, Allen Ruppersberg and Andrea Zittel, have collaborated with Harrison to re-install works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.

In a recent review of the exhibition in The New York Times, Holland Cotter wrote: “Ms. Harrison … is often called a sculptor, which is accurate. But she is also, and simultaneously, a painter, photographer, video maker, collagist and installation artist. She has the databank brain of a historian, the magpie instincts of a collector and a curator’s exacting eye. Her work is figurative and abstract, casually piled on and highly deliberated, zany and chilly. ”

Consider the Lobster is a collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where the exhibition will be on view from April 27 through June 20, 2010.
For more information, visit http://www.bard.edu/ccs/ or call 845-758-7598.

Recent sculptures by Melissa Stern ’80 will be shown with work by four other artists at the Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery Open House in Kent, Conn. from May 23 through July 5. The opening is from 4 to 6 p.m. on May 23.

Stern’s work reflects both non-Western and outsider art influences. Her drawings, collages, and figurative sculptures are characterized by their richly drawn and deeply layered surfaces. She uses a wide range of materials from encaustic to clay, pastel to steel.

“All of my pieces share a thematic thread,” Stern says. “Childlike and goofy my figures live in a dream world, cower in relationships or stand tall in the face of adversity. They are at once dark and funny, expressive of the absurd world around them. Gender, relationships and broader social dynamics are subtly intertwined. The personal is the political.”

Stern, of New York, N.Y., considers herself a handyman cobbling together drawings and sculptures from elements found, borrowed and imagined.

The Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday and by appointment. For more information call 860-927-3129. Its address is 10 North Main Street.

Kennedy spoke to students in Professor of Art David Schorr’s classes. Schorr is pictured at left.

The Green Street Arts Center is launching the Green Street Community Mural Project, an 18 month-long art program that will culminate in a large public mural, to be installed in the spring of 2009 on the corner of Main and Green Streets in the North End of Middletown.

Led by mural artist Marela Zacarias, the project’s participants are a diverse group of Middletown children, their families, professional artists, Wesleyan students, and other community members. A core group of students in Green Street’s Afterschool Program will work with the artists on the project regularly.

The primary goal of the Green Street Community Mural Project will be obvious to every driver and pedestrian who passes Green Street.

“This mural will brighten Main Street with the colorful art of our students,” says Zacarias. “It will also help to raise awareness of the wonderful activities that the Green Arts Center offers for the Middletown community.”

The Green Street Community Mural Project is funded by a $10,000 grant (more…)