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, sculpture, 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 art 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 arts. 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 Modern Art, 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 New York City 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 Pennsylvania 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.