Mentor Descriptions 2015-2016

A.K. Burns Mark Dion David Humphrey Michael Joo Ralph Lemon Josiah McElheny Marilyn Minter Matthew Ritchie Rona Yefman

NOTE TO STUDENTS

All students are assigned two mentors. You will work with each of your mentors for one week each semester throughout your 2 years.

We provide the following descriptions from the mentors, a mentor info session at orientation, and advising sessions with Shelly and Matthew on Friday, September 4 to help you make informed choices.

Your mentor preferences are due Tues, Sept 8 @ 9am. Please email your top 4 choices to Alex: [email protected]

Please note we do our best to meet your requests but this is not always possible, which is why it is essential to send us four choices.

If we do not receive your preferences by Tuesday Sept 8 you will not have top priority when we make the allocations. We can’t delay the allocation process as the first mentor group is meeting in September.

A.K. Burns

Using video, , installation, performance and writing I see the body is a site of contentious negotiation; I take very little for granted. My medium shifts along with my interests and socio-political concerns. And I’d like to bring the group into conversation with how an practice can remain fluid, multifaceted and embrace failures. Let us use this time to take a step backwards from your production, your thesis and your potential mastery. I’d like us to delve into process, the tangible space between life, practice, labor and particular convictions. With a focus on experimentation and the experiential we will observe, query, read, discuss and eat together. I will visit your studios and you will visit mine. We will remain within the five boroughs and primarily seek experiences off campus. I am open to having unfiltered conversations on practical issues like economy and longevity in the art world, examining options in and outside those structures. Most importantly, we do not create in a vacuum and this week gives us an opportunity to delve into external influence, the ways exchange and interaction have a particular value on our solitary work. The week may include diverse fields of interest such as a listening party, watching films, movement exercises with a dancer, a conversation with a theoretical physicist, reading out loud and visiting a foundry.

A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. From 2008 to 2012, she was a founding member and core organizer of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), an artists activist group that advocates for fair economic practices within the . In 2012, W.A.G.E. became a 501c3 non-profit and she is currently president of to the Board of Directors. In 2010, Community Action Center (CAC), a feature length socio-sexual video created in collaboration with A.L. Steiner, was first exhibited at Taxter & Spengemann, NY. The work has screened internationally at venues such as The Tate Modern, UK; The Museum of , NY; Göteborgs Konsthall, Sweden; The Andy Warhol Museum, PA; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR, The Kitchen, NY and subsequently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

Burns has shown solo works internationally. Recent exhibitions include a two-person show with Haim Steinbach at The Artists Institute, NY; A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial, International Center of Photography, NY; Drowning and swallowing this text, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, CA and a solo show Ending with a fugue at Callicoon Fine Arts, NY. Burns has works in several public collections including The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA and International Center of Photography, NY.

Burns has been a visiting lecturer in the sculpture department at Cooper Union, NY; held a full-time visiting faculty position in the sculpture + extended media department at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; and is currently part-time faculty in the Graduate Department of Fine Arts at Parsons the New School for Design, as well as a visiting critic at Columbia University School of the Arts. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College. Burns is represented by Callicoon Fine Arts, NY.

Mark Dion

I understand my role as mentor in Columbia's mentor program as having two significant aspects which direct my methodology. The first is a commitment to sharing the resources I have cultivated over the past two and a half decades of working as an artist based in NY. Simply put, my job is to place the most interesting people, places, and ideas at the disposal of my students. Many of these are institutions and individuals I have become entangled with over the years during my own interrogation of the culture of nature. The second aspect which distinguishes my approach to the mentor group is an attempt to maximize the members' opportunities for productively "hanging out". Due to the impoverished opportunities of social space at the University and the over-riding diligence of the students, social time can be minimal in the program. This mentor group strives to keep students out of their studios and off campus in order to facilitate intense student interaction. It is my belief that the greatest future asset of the graduate program experience is the lasting impact of friends and peers. My task is to deepen and strengthen these potentially life long bonds through challenging encounters in and beyond.

A Brief and Select Outline of the Activities of Mark Dion’s Mentor Group

New York City Experiences: Tours of historic homes and sites including: The Dykeman Farmhouse Lower East Side Tenement Museum The Merchant House The Jumelle Mansion Walking tour with NYC archeologist Diane Wall and visit to NYC Archeology Laboratory

Backroom Tours of: The American Museum of Natural History with curators and department heads of: Department of Anthropology Department of Ichthyology Department of Exhibitions

Curator Tours of NYC Museums Including: The Police Museum The City Reliquary Queens Museum of Art Department of American Art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art The South Street Seaport Museum The Hispanic Society The Studio Museum of Harlem The International Center for Photography The Sex Museum

Curator Tours and Behind the scenes visits with the Wildlife Conservation Society including: The curator of birds Architects and designers of exhibitions Various keepers Animal Behaviorists and trainers from the New York Aquarium The Coral Propagation Laboratory Animal Health Laboratories

Visits with Directors and Curators of Public Arts Organizations including: Creative Time The Public Art Fund NYC percent for Art Program Socrates Sculpture Park

Studio Visits with artists including: Alexis Rockman Josiah McElheny Bob Braine Jason Simon and Moyra Davey, organizers of the one-minute film festival Natalie Jermijenko

Visits to: The Temple of the Free Masons The Office of the New York City Coroner The Center for Visual Studios The Architectural Offices of James Carpenter Assoc. and the offices of Weiss/Manfredi

Special Session with Nils Norman which included a hike around the perimeter of Manhattan and a walking tour of Central Park based on Robert Smithson’s Central Park essay

Trips Further Afield

Philadelphia field trip including visits to: The Mutter Museum The Fabric Workshop and Museum The Grand Freemason Temple Bartram’s Gardens The Wagner Institute of Free Science The American Philosophical Society Historic operating room of Philadelphia Hospital The Duchamp Collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art Eastern State Penitentiary

Washington D.C. filed trip including: Curated Tours of the Smithsonian Institution including: The American Art Museum The Hirshorn Museum The Holocaust Museum

Field Trip to Mildred’s Lane in for the production of a garden and an outdoor dining space in an abandoned stone quarry

Trip to New Haven to meet with Yale Sculpture grads and visit: The P.T. Barnum Museum The Peabody Museum of Natural History Art Space

Mark Dion is an American artist who metamorphoses into an ecologist, biochemist, detective, and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments, and museum caches of the great historical naturalists-following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco- inspired journeys to the tropics. Dion crosses Darwin, Disney, and Hitchcock in work ranging from hundreds of photographic "specimens" documenting all the insect life in a single meter of meadow, to the meticulous gathering and labeling of the rubbish tossed out over hundreds of years from a sixteenth- century Italian castle. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes, which combine taxidermic animals, lab equipment, and artifacts-like walk-through wunderkammers, life-sized cabinets of curiosity. The artist is creating a permanent garden in Britain, an orchard of fruits facing extinction planted in the form of a tree of life-a sculptural gene pool for the future.

David Humphrey

Artworks have many ways of addressing us. During mentor week we will look at the variety of rhetorics, solicitations and modes of address issuing from work made by the participating artists in order to engage those works dynamically and productively. These conversations will be cultivated to maximize each work’s speculative dimension, its capacity to create new necessities and reveal previously unnoticed patterns and assumptions. The question of how artworks work should be answered differently by each generation within evolving socio-historic and intersubjective contexts. We will, as a group, develop field trips, research adventures, guest appearances and readings from the themes and preoccupations that emerge from these conversations about everyone’s work.

David Humphrey is a New York artist who has been showing his and sculpture internationally since the 1980’s. Blind Handshake, an anthology of his art writing, was published in 2010 and includes a variety of reviews, essays and curatorial statements. Humphrey has won the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and a variety of grants including an NEA and the New York State Council for the Arts. Humphrey has done numerous solo exhibitions in New York, at the McKee Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins and co and is currently represented by Fredericks & Freiser, where he will have a solo exhibition in October 2014.. He received his BFA from MICA and an MA from NYU.

Michael Joo

I think of our mentor week time together as an opportunity to begin a dialogue both inside and out of the studio. I see it as an extension of studio practice, a concentrated time in which to share the resources and numerous dialogues I have begun or am beginning with individuals, organizations and processes that surround my own art making investigations. We will primarily remain in the city and use it as a base for exploring these resources in both art related and other contexts, and guest speakers and field trips will also be used to look into alternative processes for making. I consider our interaction and dynamic as a group integral to the experience, but I would also like to get some familiarity with each other individually through your work, and we will find ourselves in both your studios as well as mine. My own practice is material and process based, and while I have waited for elk to lick salt off my body and walked the length of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, taxidermying mosquitoes or building a DIY rapid prototyping machine is not out of the question.

Michael Joo is a New York based artist. He uses sculpture, performance and installation in his work, as well as a combination of scientific language and complex structures that exemplify and parody the potential of form. Joo received his BFA from Washington University in 1989, followed by an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 1991. His artwork is included in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; Denver Art Museum; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Joo has shown extensively in exhibitions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale, 1993 and 2001; Serpentine Gallery, London, 1994 and 2006; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Johannesburg Biennial, 1995; Whitney Biennial, New York, 2000; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Bohen Foundation New York, 2005; Rodin Gallery, Seoul, 2006; Denver Art Museum, 2006 and the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2006, where he was co-recipient of the Grand Prize for his installation, “Bodhi Obfuscatus”. Joo represented South Korea (along with Doho Suh) in the Venice Biennale in 2001. In 2003, Joo had a survey exhibition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with accompanying catalog. A monograph of his work was published by Other Criteria in 2007. Joo recently opened a two person exhibition at Haunch of Venison Gallery in Berlin, and installed a new sculpture in the Palazzo Franchetti for the Venice Biennale, 2011. Upcoming exhibitions include the IVAM, Spain, and the new Asia Society building in Hong Kong. He teaches at Columbia University and Bard College MFA programs, and lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Ralph Lemon

NEW MENTOR! PERSONAL STATEMENT COMING SOON!

Ralph Lemon is a director, choreographer, writer, visual artist and curator, and the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. His most recent works include the innovative dance/film project Four Walls (2012), and How Can You Stay in The House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (2008-2010), a work with live performance, film and visual art that toured across the U.S. The immersive visual art installation, Meditation, which was part of How Can You Stay…, was purchased for the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center in 2012. In January 2011, a re-imagined section of How Can You Stay… was performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. Mr. Lemon curated the fall 2012 performance series Some sweet day at MoMA, and the acclaimed 2010 performance series I Get Lost at Danspace Project in NYC.

Mr. Lemon’s visual art work was shown in a group exhibit When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South at the Studio Museum of Harlem (summer 2014). His solo visual art exhibitions include: 1856 Cessna Road at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, NYC (2007) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); and Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, NYC (2000). His group exhibitions include: When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination & the American South, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. Mr. Lemon’s book,Come home Charley Patton, the final in a series documenting The Geography Trilogy, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press.

In 2012, Mr. Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards; he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is recipient of two "Bessie" Awards (1986, 2005); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2004, 2009); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2004 Bellagio Study Center Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award.

Mr. Lemon has been an IDA Fellow at (2009); artist-in- residence at Temple University (2005-06); Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater & Dance at Princeton University (2002); and Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre (1996-2000). For the fall 2011 semester he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University, School of Art, Sculpture Department. Currently he is the 2013-14 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where he has curated a series of “performance essays,” titled Value Talks.

Josiah McElheny

I am excited by the potential of research as material for artworks, but also in how found-knowledge might end up back in the world at large. The idea that artists can cook up crackpot-radical versions of exhibitions, historical accounts, critical viewpoints or institutional practices and yet end up augmenting, if not subtly upending, the course of the art-culture- complex…or that one might stumble passionately into someone else’s long standing traditions and invite them into this little club in which amateur insights can turn out to be wonderfully wrong… these possibilities might offer a good reason to get up in the morning. I would hope to share some of my experience of research as it has combined with making things, as well as some of my projects involving fields of inquiry for which I am not qualified. I guess my belief is that we should all be revisionist- traditionalists, of some sort.

A good start would be to for us all to look at your work together, not as critique, nor to examine its influences, but as the possible record of, and product of, research of all kinds. Field trip visits to my studio, various research compatriots, research locales and some historical object collections, would be rounded out by some brief readings and discussion of ideas around inquiry. We’d stay in New York and try not to use the internet (except as necessary).

Josiah McElheny, who works in sculpture, performance, film, and various written forms, is best known for his use of glass with other materials. In 2012 and 2013, his work was the subject of two major survey exhibitions, Some Pictures of the Infinite at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts and Towards a Light Club at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, . He has written for such publications as Artforum and Cabinet, and is a contributing editor to Bomb Magazine. Book projects include a “translation”, The Light Club published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010 and Interiors, a reader co-edited by Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke and McElheny that was published by CCS Bard and Sternberg Press in 2012. In 2006 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Since 2001, he has been a Senior Critic in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art. This fall, his (hopefully) comedic performance project The Club for Modern Fashions will be ongoing at the Arts Club of Chicago.

Marilyn Minter

NEW MENTOR! PERSONAL STATEMENT COMING SOON!

Marilyn Minter (born 1948) is an American artist currently living and working in New York City.

Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and raised in Florida in an upper middle class household. Her father was an alcoholic, compulsive gambler, and occasional boxing promoter while her mom was a drug addict. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida Minter took some photographs of her mother which drew the attention of visiting instructor Diane Arbus.

Minter moved to New York City in 1976, after finishing an MFA at Syracuse University. She became involved in the nightclub scene in Manhattan of the late 70’s and early 80’s, which included abusing drugs and alcohol. At the time she also had a job teaching in a Catholic boy’s school. In 1985 she cleaned up her act and began working in art again.

In 1989 Minter created a series of works based on images from hardcore pornography. She received much criticism for this from feminists who saw it as an expression of the victimization and objectification of women, rather than a statement on the absurdity of such images.

In 2005 Minter had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which focused on her recent works - hyperrealistic close-ups of glamourous images, including makeup-laden lips, eyes, and toes. In March 2006 Minter took out ad space on four billboards in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The billboards presented photographs of high heels kicking around in dirty water, and stayed up in Chelsea for a month. Minter also had a spot in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

In 2007, her first retrospective monograph was published, and she had shows in Sweden, the U.K., Spain, and France. A series of photographs she took of Pamela Anderson, commissioned by the art quarterly Parkett, were later featured on the cover of Zoetrope: All-Story.

Matthew Ritchie

The Difference Equation

I offer an investigation of systems and process; a kind of analysis of what we can (and cannot) predict about the world. During the week we will collectively examine and define historical and emerging models of priority, causality, experiment, change, discontinuity and difference both within the art world and without. In a way, we will be trying to invent a vocabulary to make educated guesses about what choosing to be an artist will mean in the 21st century. We will try to carefully distinguish between the performance of knowledge, the ecstasy of experience and the presentation of information. What viable forms for art practice might be in the 21st century will be closely examined, together with the real meaning and purpose of 'difference' in individual studio art practice. Specific attention will be paid to the of progress, thermodynamics and information entropy, how cultural narratives are determined and expressed through visual narratives and architectural structures, the incipient end of the machine society and the narcissism of catastrophe theory. Using analogical comparison and diagrammatic relations to examine and question dimensional isomorphism between , sculpture and time-based work will be a sub-theme in 2012- 13. Throughout, the priority will be to develop and understand a shared model for analyzing differences and similarities. One clear aim is to encourage a strong peer group investment in building and inventing shared languages.

Using this perspective, we will conduct rigorous reviews of individual studio practices, including assisted practice and interventions (as needed), requiring vigorous and consistent participation by every member of the group. Students will be expected to evolve, develop and present informed models and analogies for their own practice over the two year period.

I will probably arrange one or two guest speakers and we will visit some exhibitions or off-site locations (depending on what develops in our conversation),. The group has conducted field research at art fairs, ‘ennial marathons, galleries, and museums using complex self-generated survey techniques but the semester will be largely an on-site discussion group - with the location each day to be determined by our intentions.

Matthew Ritchie’s installations of paintings, texts, wall drawings, light boxes, and projections are investigations of the idea of information; explored through science, architecture, history and the dynamics of culture. His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including the Whitney Biennial, the Sao Paulo Bienal, the Sydney Biennale, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Seville Biennale and the Havana Bienal. In 2008 he created ‘the Morning Line’ system; a large scale, innovative, traveling interactive, public architectural structure designed in collaboration with musicians, architects, physicists and engineers to explore the possibility of a total information environment. The Morning Line is currently being exhibited in Vienna. In 2009, he collaborated with noted physicist Lisa Randall and composer Hector Parra to create ‘Hypermusic’, a projective opera that premiered at the Centre Pompidou and toured several European capitals. 'Hypermusic' was most recently performed at the Guggenheim Museum in 2010. He also co-wrote and directed 'The Long Count' with Aaron & Bryce Dessner, a multimedia song cycle that premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009, traveled to Holland in 2011 and the Barbican Center in London UK in 2012.

Rona Yefman

I love to go to places where I’ve never been before. I consider it to be one of my favorite things to do in order to increase tension, observation and allow the art process to flourish. During Mentor Week we will meet each day as an unexpected, raw adventure, with the goal of opening up to new experiences and exposing ourselves to a larger community within the city. Most of the time we will meet a wide range of artists and see shows and sites in New York. We will visit the ‘alternative’ scene in the East village, the cutting edge underground, see and hear about different ways of making art, film, photography and performance, from the perspective of a range of ages, experiences and genders. we will also experiment with sound and live broadcasting and more. The themes we will focus upon will be those of Process, Life Experiences, Relationships With Subjects, Moving Between Fiction and Documentary, Autobiography, Gender, Real People, Fictional Characters, Rebels, Outsiders, Diaries, Scrap Books, Intimacy, Personal and Social History, Community, Freedom and more. One of the main rolls for a mentor, I believe, is to develop a one-on-one relationship with each student, in order to be accessible to and supportive of each individual process. For the fall semester, I will encourage the group to start working on a personal artist book or zine. We will do studio visits and meet with artists and professionals that relate to it. Through this experience together I hope to share my enthusiasm, resources and things that I find inspiring, which I hope will meet with your own interests and practice.

Rona Yefman is a New York City-based artist working in Photography, Video and Installation. Her work explores issues of identity through range of human experiences by collaborating with individuals who have formed a radical persona that inscribe the iconic and the absurd of our time. She received her MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 2009. Her recent N.Y.C solo shows were held at Derek Eller Gallery, 2012, The Sculpture Center, 2011 and Participant Inc, 2010. Those shows have been reviewed in Art Forum, Frieze, Art in America, Modern Painters and Bomb Magazine. Recent group exhibitions include; Callicoon Gallery, NY, La Mep Museum, Paris, The Jewish Museum, NY, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY, The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, NC, The Neuberger Museum, NY, MOCA Cleveland OH, Kunsthala Wein, Austria, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Museum Marco Vigo, Spain. Awards include, The Lotos Club Award, The Rema Hort Mann Scholarship, Gerard Levy Prize for a young photographer by the Israel Museum, and The Ingeborg Bachmann Scholarship Established by Anselm for The Wolf Foundation. This year Rona’s first Artist Book, Let it Bleed (1996-2010) is going to be publish by Little Big Man Books, she is curetting a photography exhibition at the new downtown gallery of the Camera Club of New York And being part of Radio Al Cabira, a free online radio station established in 2012 by group of artists in N.Y, with the goal of disseminate ideas, political actions, sound collages, silence, meditation, readings, historical material, and anything else that consider to be relevant to air — among friends.