Visiting Critics - Fall 2015
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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | MFA VISUAL ARTS VISITING CRITICS - FALL 2015 Hilton Als Gina Beavers Carol Becker Sonya Clark Liz Deschenes Corrine Fitzpatrick Josephine Halvorson Marc Handelman Kira Lynn Harris Tom Kalin Ruba Katrib Leigh Ledare Emily Liebert Sarah Oppenheimer Clifford Owens John Pilson Lucy Raven Aki Sasamoto Lynne Tillman Nat Trotman Andrea Zittel Hilton Als Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in October, 1994, and a theatre critic in 2002. He began contributing to the magazine in 1989, writing pieces for The Talk of the Town. Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at- large at Vibe. He has also written articles for The Nation and collaborated on film scripts for “Swoon” and “Looking for Langston.” Als edited the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition entitled “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” which ran from November, 1994, to March, 1995. His first book, “The Women,” a meditation on gender, race, and personal identity, was published in 1996. His most recent book, “White Girls,” discusses various narratives around race and gender. In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for Creative Writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. In 2009, Als worked with the performer Justin Bond on “Cold Water,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and videos by performers, at La MaMa Gallery. In COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | MFA VISUAL ARTS 2010, he co-curated “Self-Consciousness” at the Veneklasen Werner Gallery in Berlin, and published “Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis,” his second book. Als has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City. http://www.hiltonals.com/ http://bombmagazine.org/article/2028/hilton-als http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/review/white-girls-by-hilton- als.html Gina Beavers Gina Beavers is an artist based in New York known for her sculptural paintings that respond to images from social media. She currently has a solo exhibition, The Re-Animator, on view at Clifton Benevento in New York. Beavers has had recent solo exhibitions at Retrospective in Hudson, NY, James Fuentes in New York City, and Nudashank in Baltimore, Maryland. Beavers received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000) and her BA from the University of Virginia (1996). From Artforum.com: "Gina Beavers’s latest paintings (all works 2014) preserve Oldenburg’s morbid obscenity, taking up the genre of the still life in its French inflection as nature morte. Derived from images posted on social media platforms, their subjects a “smokey eye” tutorial, junky nail art, a smile girded by braces conflate the animate and the inanimate, figuring flesh as something lifeless and flaccid" http://cliftonbenevento.com/artists/artists-gina-beavers-images/#1 http://momaps1.org/studio-visit/artist/gina-beavers http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1042891/gina-beavers-hits- pause-on-the-everyday-world-of-oversharing Carol Becker From the Columbia University website: Carol Becker is Dean of Faculty and Professor of the Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts. She earned her B.A. in English literature from State University of New York at Buffalo and her PhD in English and American literature from the University of California, San Diego. With research interests that range from feminist theory, American cultural history, the education of artists, art and social responsibility, to South African art and politics, she has published numerous articles and books on cultural criticism including: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (translated into seven languages); The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art and Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production. She lectures extensively in the U.S. and abroad and is the recipient of numerous awards. She also is a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Role of Art in Society for the World Economic Forum. Her book The Invisible Drama, was reissued in paperback in 2014. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/here-comes- the-sun/ COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | MFA VISUAL ARTS https://agenda.weforum.org/2013/08/follow-the-artists-to-the-future-of- our-cities/ Sonya Clark The comb is an ancient object loaded with meaning and intimately connected to human history. Striking a careful balance between exploiting its formal attributes and recognizing its significance to culture and identity, Sonya Clark’s work helps us to see the comb in a new way, plumbing her interest in hairstyling and its accoutrements as expressions of cultural heritage, racial identity, gender politics and multiple definitions of beauty. Clark’s personal connection to the comb began like that of nearly every young girl, squirming on a chair while an adult armed with a comb and good intentions attempted to bring order to the disorder on her head. In the pieces chosen for Manuf®actured – Stacked, 7-Layer Tangle, and her Untitled wall piece – she has confronted the fine toothed combs of her childhood and made them her raw material, embracing what had once been an adversarial relationship. Employing hundreds of mass-produced black fine toothed combs, Clark explored the myriad ways in which combs could fit together to create a wide variety of sculptural forms. Linking this unconventional raw material to her past artistic production and self-definition as a textile artist led Clark to develop a series of wall installations, further pushing the two-dimensional properties of the comb. The result is a series of pieces that function aesthetically and psychologically as textiles. Here, each comb's set of teeth performs the conceptual role of the warp and weft of the woven textile. By consciously choosing a manufactured plastic comb as her “fiber,” she shakes the very notions of what a textile can be. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/02/sonya-clark-confederate- flag_n_7488316.html http://sonyaclark.com/ Liz Deschenes Liz Deschenes’s photographic oeuvre deals with the conditions of photography and its components, with perception and the correlation to other artistic media, and with the architecture within which her works are shown. Her works allow a self-referential look at the medium, liberated of its functions, taking its own conditions as its theme. For some years now, Deschenes has been working almost exclusively with photograms – pictures created without a camera, using a technique as old as photography itself. Traditionally, it has served to capture silhouettes: objects are placed on photosensitive paper and the paper is then exposed. Deschenes does without these external references: her works are made by exposing photographic paper for several hours, out of doors, mostly at night, before fixing it and treating it with toners. Depending on the choice of photographic chemicals and how they are used, this creates surfaces that are black, white, silver or golden, glossy or matte. The results are also influenced by external factors including temperature and humidity. The chemicals leave streaks and spots, and there are hand- and fingerprints from the artist’s handling of the material. http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2012Biennial/LizDeschenes COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | MFA VISUAL ARTS http://miguelabreugallery.com/LizDeschenes.html Corrine Fitzpatrick From the Arts Writers Grants Program: "Corrine Fitzpatrick’s forthcoming writing includes an essay on contemporary art’s flirtation with contemporary poetry, an interview with choreographer Beth Gill on the distinct yet overlapping forms of labor that working-class artists perform, an article about the interdisciplinary MFA program at Bard college for artforum.com, an essay to accompany Marley Freeman’s abstract paintings for a new publication, and an interview with Brazilian artist Luísa Nóbrega on her long-duration performance work. Corrine Fitzpatrick is an arts writer and poet. She writes about under- recognized New York-based artists whose practices range from the plastic arts and photography to less categorizable performances and installations. She gravitates toward feminists, queers, and politically-informed artists connected by work that subverts and creates alternatives to the power structures of the art world." http://www.bookforum.com/review/12295 http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/11/poetry/poetry-by-corrine- fitzpatrick Josephine Halvorson Josephine Halvorson's practice engages objects that are often overlooked and reveal traces of human activity, such as tools, writing, and fragments. Working directly from life and often in a single session, Halvorson's practice allows for a prolonged closeness and shared experience with an object. The patience of perception in her work reflects this collaboration between her, her materials and an object, in which a painting becomes a record of the artist's conversation with the world, and a material testament to the object in time. Halvorson lives and works out of Brooklyn, New York. She teaches painting at Yale University, Princeton University, and The Cooper Union. http://www.josephinehalvorson.com/ http://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/index.php?v=artist&artist=4ec3e18461b50 Marc Handelman Marc Handelman is an artist who works in painting, as well as across media including film/video, installation and book arts. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in Art History, and was a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship at Yale Norfolk. He received his MFA from Columbia University. He was a recent recipient of the Steeprock Arts Residency and the Awards for Artists from Printed Matter in 2011. Marc Handelman has exhibited extensively throughout the United States as well as internationally. Marc Handelman was appointed Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Mason Gross School of Art in the Fall of 2012.