The Hands of War and Civil Disobedience

featuring
Marione Ingram, Civil Rights Activist and Writer
Ricardo Domingez, UC San Diego Visual Arts AssociateProfessor

When: Friday, 24 May 2013, 4PM

Location: Seuss Room, Geisel Library, UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, California 92093

The UC San Diego Center for the Humanities Living Archives Research Group presents Marione Ingram, civil rights activist and author of The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope from a Survivor of the Holocaust and Ricardo Domingez, UC San Diego Visual Arts Professor and co-founder of Electronic Civil Disturbance Theater in a presentation of their work and a discussion concerning speech and activism in the Modern West and the Global Era.

http://humctr.ucsd.edu/livingarchives/

Copies of Ingram’s book will be available for cash sale.
Review of the Hands of War: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/hands-war-tale-endurance-and-hope…
Interview with Ricardo Dominguez: http://www.reclamationsjournal.org/blog/?ha_exhibit=interview-with-ricar…

Related Link:

Associate Professor Ricardo Dominguez
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/ricardo-dominguez

Catherine Czacki
Curated by Elizabeth Miller

When: May 23 – June 17, 2013

Opening Reception on Thursday, May 23rd, 7-9PM

Location: Structural and Materials Engineering Bldg (SME) #406, UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, California 92093

Catherine Czacki and Elizabeth Miller are Ph.D. students in UC San Diego’s Visual Arts Program in Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

“The objects stand in for other things catachrestically. They denote their material or abstract themselves by mimicking other things, always closed to epistemological certainty. They cannot speak our language, in our perceptions they can only repeat the name we give them.” – Catherine Czacki

The Discursive and Curatorial Practice (DCP) Initiative presents a series of interventions featuring the PhD in Art Practice students at the UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts. The DCP Initiative is a space designed for critical dialogue and experimentation in curatorial and discursive practices, with workshops for research into art practice, the aesthetics of materialization, and the cognitive and pedagogical potential of aesthetics.

Participating Artists:
Catherine Czacki
Kristin Gallerneaux
Jaekyung Jung
Alex Kershaw
Katrin Pesch
Tim Ridlen

Organized by Lara Bullock, Sascha Crasnow, and Elizabeth Miller

For more information about this event click here.

Am I Drawing Now?

Drawing Ecology Gestures, Diagrams and Itineraries of Urbanization

featuring
UCSD Visual Arts Professor Teddy Cruz

When: Thursday May 23rd, 4PM

Location: Structural and Materials Engineering building (SME) #202, UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, California 92093

The Experimental Drawing Studio presents a talk with Visual Arts Faculty, Teddy Cruz, who will discuss his drawing practice with host and MFA Candidate, Emily Grenader. .

Am I Drawing Now? is a series of lectures, conversations, performances and exhibitions that seek to illuminate drawing as a cross disciplinary activity. Our series continues this winter with lectures and workshops that take place in the Experimental Drawing Studio, part of the Visual Arts Department at University of California San Diego. All events are free and open to the public, located in Structural and Materials Engineering Building – room 202.

Experimental Drawing Studio provides open space for an intersection of disciplines that engage the practice of drawing in its expansive range of forms. Artists, engineers, architects, writers, designers, animators and media practitioners will have a clean and unencumbered space to specifically explore the role of drawing in their research. The studio will be used for exploratory drawing research and practice. This includes, for example, large scale or collaborative drawing projects, workshops and conferences on drawing, independent, collaborative and mentored projects between faculty and MFA and PhD Practice students and advanced undergraduates for the preparation for an exhibition, the scope of a proposed project, design and lay out of a graphic book, or focused research and teaching for an academic quarter.

Experimental Drawing Studio is led by Associate Professor of Visual Arts Amy Adler in consultation with Professor of Visual Arts Jennifer Pastor and graduate students Josh Tonies (Managing Director), Allison Spence and Nichole Speciale, Emily Grenader, Matteo Orsini and undergraduates Max Karnig and Vanessa Martinez.

http://www.experimentaldrawingstudio.com/

Professor Teddy Cruz
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/teddy-cruz
http://estudioteddycruz.com/

For more information about this event click here.

When: May 20-24, 2013, Noon-4PM

Location: Visual Arts Facility Gallery, UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, California 92093

MFA Candidate Allison Spence presents her MFA Thesis Show, Amass. The exhibition features paintings and writing revolving around the research of a nameless, ambiguous motion. The reception will include a performance from the accompanying booklet, A Mass. Spence completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Florida before joining UC San Diego’s MFA program in 2010.

Reception will include a performance from the accompanying booklet, A Mass.

For more information about this event click here.

Location: Atkinson Hall Auditorium, UC San Diego

REGISTER NOW

Click here for a complete conference agenda

Is this the century we begin to build starships?
Why go to the Stars?
Can we?
Should We?

Starship Century is a symposium coordinated by the new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination in collaboration with Gregory and James Benford, presenting ideas from their anthology of science and science fiction.

Scientists address the challenges and opportunities for our long‐term future in space, with possibilities envisioned by: Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, Peter Schwartz, John Cramer and Robert Zubrin.

Science fiction authors Neal Stephenson, Allen Steele, Joe Haldeman, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis and David Brin discuss the implications that these trajectories of exploration might have upon our development as individuals and as a civilization.

For more information about this event click here.

Location: Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, UC Santa Barbara

Admission in FREE.

UCSB Wind Ensemble presents a 20th ANNIVERSARY ALUMNI REUNION CONCERT on SUN., MAY 26 (Memorial Day Weekend) at 1:30 p.m. in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall. Admission is free. All Alumni of the UCSB University Wind Ensemble are invited to attend, bring family and friends, and perform with the current Wind Ensemble!

Paul Bambach is the conductor. Program to include “Tidal Forces” by Michael Markowski, “Euphoria” by John Frantzen, “Moonscape Awakening” by Joni Greene, “Wild Nights!” by Frank Ticheli, and a host of patriotic works including “American Salute” by Morton Gould and others, concluding with “Stars and Stripes” by John Phillip Sousa. Alumni should RSVP to: ucsbwindensemble@gmail.com.

For more information about this event click here.

Related Links:
Facebook.com/UCSB WindEnsemble

photo information: Paul Bambach conducts the UCSB Wind Ensemble in a 20th Reunion Concert on May 26.

Location: Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, UC Santa Barbara

Tickets:
$15/General, $7/Student
To purchase tickets in advance visit: http://www.music.ucsb.edu/
Tickets can also be purchased at the door.

UCSB PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE presents “STARRY NIGHTS” on WED., MAY 22, 7:30 p.m., Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall. Jon Nathan directs “Starry Nights,” a program of music for percussion ensemble about the heavens, planets, stars and gods. Featured are Peter Schulthorpe’s aboriginal myth How the Stars were Made, Michael Burritt’s Doomsday Machine, an ode to Star Treks “planet eater” episode, and the sprawling seven movement work, Aztec Gods, by orchestration legend Gardner Read. There will also be a world premiere work by composition student Chavadith Tantavirojn, “A Starry Night,” featuring music by Gustav Holst from “The Planets.”

For more information about this event click here.

August 8, 2013 Art Works deadline offers another funding opportunity

Washington, DC — The National Endowment for the Arts is committed to advancing arts journalism in the digital age and to funding projects that feature new models for sustaining arts criticism and coverage. Starting in January 2013 with the posting of the 2014 Art Works guidelines, the NEA encouraged organizations to apply for funding to support these kinds of projects. The field responded to that call for applications and four arts journalism grants were included in the Art Works announcement on April 23, 2013.

The NEA began its most recent chapter promoting arts journalism when it partnered with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to create the Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge in July 2011. With the announcement of its three finalists, the Challenge concluded in April 2012. At that time, the NEA reaffirmed its interest by folding support for arts journalism into the Art Works category, primarily through the local arts agencies program.

ARTS JOURNALISM FUNDED PROJECTS
The four projects (two through local arts agencies and two through the media arts discipline) are based on partnerships with public media, using radio and/or television as integral components of new information channels. All four also engage journalism professionals and one features a collaboration with a university journalism program.

1. Community Television of Southern California (aka KCET)
Burbank, CA
Grant Amount: $75,000

To support Artbound, a transmedia arts journalism initiative exploring Southern California’s cultural landscape. Every day more than 50 arts journalists, covering 11 Southern California counties, will contribute blogs to the KCET website where the most read and shared will become the subject of a short documentary film and potentially packaged into one-hour television episodes. Previous Artboundsegments range from an interview with Frank Gehry to a piece about a laundromat doubling as an art gallery.

2. KQED
San Francisco, CA
Grant Amount: $50,000

To support the production of a free mobile and tablet application to provide audiences with information about the Bay Area arts scene. Designed for both iOS and Android operating systems, the app will aggregate KQED-produced arts content and coverage, along with content produced by partner organizations and user engagement opportunities.

3. Macon Arts Alliance
Macon, GA
Grant Amount: $40,000

To support ArtMatters: Engaging the Community through Embedded Arts Journalists. In partnership with the journalism program at Mercer University and with Georgia Public Broadcasting, seasoned arts journalists will instruct college students on arts journalism and the students will create stories for local news outlets. Project activity also will include a series of arts criticism symposia conducted for the community.

4. Regional Cultural and Performing Arts Development Commission (aka Regional Arts Commission)
St. Louis, MO
Grant Amount: $40,000

To support the creation of Art Fusion, a series of arts commentary segments for St. Louis media outlets. Designed to increase critical commentary and review of arts in the media, the commission will partner with the region’s public television station, Nine Network (KETC-TV), to develop interviews with arts critics, journalists, and educators. The interviews will be broadcast on local media outlets including Nine Network, the St. Louis Beacon, an original-content online newspaper, and the new Radio Arts Foundation cultural radio station, which will also broadcast and link to the commentary segments online.

FUNDING DEADLINE
Arts and cultural organizations will have another opportunity to apply for funding to support arts journalism projects with the August 8, 2013 Art Works deadline. Projects that address the engagement outcome under Art Works including services to the field, audience development, and innovative uses of new models and technology are eligible under the following disciplines:
Dance
Folk and Traditional Arts
Literature
Local Arts Agencies
Media Arts
Museums
Music
Opera
Presenting and Multidisciplinary Works
Theater and Musical Theater
Visual Arts

For more information, go to the Apply for a Grant section of the NEA website.

Annette Bening will return to the Geffen Playhouse next season in a new production consisting of monologues by the American dramatist Ruth Draper. The company said the new production, which doesn’t yet have a title, will be part of the 2013-14 season and is set to run April 8 to May 18, 2014, with an official opening on April 16.

Bening is expected to perform a selection of monologues written by Draper, a noted American actress and stage monologist. Bening previously appeared at the Geffen in “The Female of the Species” by Joanna Murray-Smith in 2010 and in Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in 1999.

Draper often assumed different characters during her solo shows, many of which were humorous or satirical in nature. She debuted in 1920 and continued to perform around the world until her death in 1956.

Draper wrote close to 40 stage monologues during her career. “The Italian Lesson,” one of her most famous works, depicts a wealthy society matron going about planning a dinner party. “Doctors and Diets” depicts four women lunching at a restaurant and discussing their diets.

Solo performers such as Lily Tomlin and the late Spalding Gray have often been compared to Draper.

No director has been announced for the show.

The Geffen’s 2013-14 season, the majority of which was announced last month, will also include new and recent plays by Donald Margulies and Gina Gionfriddo, as well as a revival of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” directed by William Friedkin.

In July, Bening will appear in the movie “Girl Most Likely,” opposite Kristen Wiig.

After more than a year-long search, the Hammer Museum has hired Connie Butler, currently the chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as its chief curator.

She is leaving that position by July 1 in order to assume her L.A. post mid-month.

Around the same time, Aram Moshayedi, 31, known for his work with the alternative art spaces REDCAT and LAX Art, will join the museum as a curator in a newly created position.

Butler, 50, is a well-known and well-liked figure in the art world, admired for championing artists who are not art-market darlings — and sometimes unfamiliar even to avid museum-goers.

She made her name in L.A. as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art from 1996 to 2006, organizing exhibitions like “WACK!,” a groundbreaking survey of feminist art. Upon her departure for New York, art critic Doug Harvey called her the “most authentically intellectual curatorial voice” at MOCA.

Her new job as chief curator involves shaping Hammer programs and exhibitions and helping to build its cutting-edge collection, which counts drawings as a primary focus.

“She is an incredibly talented and seasoned curator,” said Hammer Museum Director Ann Philbin, who is announcing the hire to her board and staff today. “She has a deep scholarship in contemporary and modern art and a very strong appetite for the new, and that’s a combination that suits us well.”

Philbin said “Connie decided to move her family back to L.A. before we even interviewed her for this position, so the stars really aligned.”

Butler called Philbin a “very dynamic director” and L.A. “a great art city with a very international and global community of artists and lively institutions.”

“I also think the curatorial landscape right now in Los Angeles is in transition — with the changes at MOCA, the relatively new team at L.A. County Museum and Dan Cameron at Orange County — and I look forward to being a part of that,” Butler said.

Philbin has overseen three different chief curators in the last 10 years. The most recent person to hold the job was Douglas Fogle, who lasted less than two years. Before that, the chief curator was Gary Garrels, who stayed at the museum about three years.

(In a slightly dizzying, small-world sort of parallel, Garrels was chief drawings curator at MoMA in New York until 2005, and his leaving for the Hammer paved the way for Butler’s move to New York the following year. He is now senior curator of paintings and drawings at SFMOMA.)

Last fall Times art critic Christopher Knight called the Hammer’s chief curator position “something of a revolving door.”

Philbin said in response: “I don’t think [the curatorial changes] have been a negative thing for our institution. We are a mid-sized institution that can attract world-class talent, but I don’t expect we will always keep them forever. If I want to have a curator like Gary Garrels for three years for a particular reason like building a collection, I consider myself lucky.”

But this time is different, Philbin said. She has removed some of the administrative duties from the chief curator position, which used to also carry the title of deputy director.

“It is a feasible job and now we’ve figured out a way it could be even better. And I didn’t necessarily expect long-term commitments in the past, but this time I was looking for that — and Connie and I had that conversation,” Philbin said.

One new project that will come under Butler’s purview is the Hammer’s winning proposal for the LA2050 competition, which awarded $100,000 grants to 10 organizations that serve the L.A. area in fields like arts and culture, education and housing.

Last week the Hammer received one of the grants for a proposal to rejuvenate its neighborhood, Westwood, by temporarily populating its empty storefronts with the help of local artists, artisans, musicians and more. “Westwood has become a very sad place, and we hope to breathe some life back into it,” said Philbin.

Butler will also co-curate the Hammer’s “Made in L.A.” biennial along with Michael Ned Holte, a project she initially signed on to do while still at MoMA.

Butler spent the early ’90s in New York, working at one point as a curator for Artists Space (then in Tribeca), where she first met Philbin, who was then leading the Drawing Center nearby in SoHo.

Butler joined the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. as an assistant curator in 1996, and worked her way up to full curator by 2001. Over that period she curated shows on Amy Adler, Jessica Bronson, Lewis Baltz, Kay Rosen and Eric Wesley, and co-curated exhibitions on enigmatic land artist Robert Smithson and absurdist video artist Rodney Graham.

Her most ambitious show, “WACK!,” included the work of 119 artists from 21 countries, and received strong reviews in L.A., where it opened, and New York, where it traveled.

In the drawings department at MoMA, she organized permanent collection shows as well as the mid-career survey of the Dutch-based, South African-born painter Marlene Dumas in 2008 and the MoMA version of a show of Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow that also ran at the Hammer in 2012.

Butler is currently working on another big show for MoMA — the late Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s first North American retrospective. “I’m co-curating it with Luis Perez-Oramas, MoMa’s curator of Latin American art, and it’s a great project that is really close to my heart. We’ve finished the research and are developing the installation and program for it.”

She said she will continue to work on that show as needed from her new position, before it opens at MoMA in May 2014.

Any chance it will come to the Hammer? “We actually haven’t discussed it. It’s a big show and a costly show, so I don’t know,” she said. “But I have a not-small list of projects that I really look forward to bringing to my colleagues there and hopefully gaining their support.”