Abstracts for the Annual SECAC Meeting in Sarasota, Florida October 8th-11th, 2014 Conference Chair, Jeff Schwartz, Ringling College of Art and Design J. Bradley Adams, Berry College A Priori A Priori is a 20 X 20 presentation that functions as a discrete work. It starts with a proposition that expands into a sequence of incarnations realized in the form of drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, and installations. Said sequences are informed simultaneously by the capricious and the predictable, chance and the formulated, the generative coupled with the predetermined. The images that comprise a priori utilize abstraction while falling under the rubric of gardens. What is represented, rather than a mimetic translation of place, is the story that unfolds through a series of suppositions, a priori. Ann Albritton, Ringling College of Art + Design Modernism into Contemporary: Sonia Delaunay's Influence on Clothes and Art Sonia Delaunay’s body of work fits the modernist paradigm in which she and Robert Delaunay were participants, and, in addition, foreshadowed art of the late 20th and 21st centuries in a mix of painting, fashion, and design. But Sonia Delaunay’s work with fashion and textile design caused this artist to be overlooked for much of the 20th century. She often spoke about art and life being intertwined and related this to her Russian/Ukrainian background. Beginning in 1909, and throughout her long career, Sonia Delaunay moved back and forth between arts and crafts. Partly because of this, and of the need to support the family with fabric and clothing design, until the feminist and postmodern periods of art history and even into the 21st century, she was relegated to the periphery. Her husband, Robert Delaunay, was seen as the innovative artist. This paper shows that despite earlier exclusionary modernist ideals, Sonia Delaunay’s work with textiles and clothing continues to influence art and fashion today—principally because of the wide-ranging experimentation in her oeuvre. Lisa Alembik, Georgia Perimeter College Fabricating Memory and Solace Alembik’s artwork focuses on the weight of passion and loss, and how such gravity can be embodied by place. She is interested in, and lives, the prolonged effects of Diaspora. Interweaving history, memory, fiction and place, especially spaces where the everydayness of life happens, she processes the ridiculousness and beauty of melancholy. Through drawing and painting, Alembik develops spaces of refuge and waiting. Initially she merged architectural sites into one, Roman ruins with a destroyed Iraqi apartment building, a Bialystok synagogue with a Belgian church. She focused on places that spoke of private ritual along with the upheaval of war. Memories are embedded in their limbs and hearts, the floor, walls, beneath layers of paint. Currently for resource material Alembik turns towards the BBC's Wallander and Downton Abbey. She takes screen shots of interiors that speak to her, and they often become her shelter. She imagines the rooms to be where her family and their progeny also lived and thrived, had they survived. Through sensations of various media Alembik layers memory and absurdity to try to get closer, closer to the everyday lives of loved ones that she never knew, and to herself. James Alexander, The University of Alabama in Birmingham The Master of Fine Arts: Degree or Description Over the past 50 years there has been a proliferation of MFA programs at universities in the United States. At the same time, often in response to legal issues, there has been a decline in the number of apprenticeships available to young artists seeking to become “masters” of their chosen artistic discipline. Has the academic MFA degree program replaced the traditional master/apprentice relationship and, if so, what are the consequences? Do these programs produce “masters” of the fine arts or just graduate students who have fulfilled the academic requirements? Do these academic programs offer a different perspective on pathways to a successful career as an artist or is the MFA degree primarily only necessary in seeking an academic position? Since large MFA programs often employ graduate students to teach undergraduate foundation level courses, are they educating artists or art teachers and what is the impact of an MFA program on undergraduate education? What is the relationship between the degree and a successful career as an artist? Bryan Alexis, University of Arkansas at Fort Smith Building the Responsive Designer What is the weirdest thing you have designed? Graphic designers are being called on, more and more, to stretch the boundaries of traditional methods and technologies to meet creative demands that fall far outside the usual scope of a “typical” design job. This paper delves into the results of a survey of working designers on the strangest pieces they’ve created and what type of instruction or classroom experiences prepared them the most for the task. Kent Anderson Butler, Azusa Pacific University Performance Art and the Body as Visual Vocabulary The visual vocabulary that Anderson Butler uses as an artist is an active tool of communication between himself, the work he creates and the viewer’s experience of his work. He has always felt that one of the best ways that he communicates with people is through the art that he creates. The visual vocabulary create in his work is a journey through Anderson Butler’s life. It is developed through his experiences in life, his worldview and an expression of the important things in his life. Anderson Butler’s visual vocabulary is built upon layers and those layers are manifested into the art he creates. The out come of this process is creating work that others can connect with and create something that connects with them. Pamela Anneser, Plymouth State University Trend Identification in the Graphic Design Workplace “Staying on the cutting edge of graphic design means spotting trends early and using them to produce contemporary original work….” The role of a graphic designer has changed dramatically over the last five years and continues to change, and it is Anneser’s job as a graphic designer educator not only to be aware of these changes but also to prepare her students for the changing workplace. Some of these new visual trends include 3D printing, use of video, interactive design, and infographics. In her research Anneser is putting together a curriculum that addresses these trends, including courses that address traditional design theory and principles and print design, but also allow students to explore the business of design through branding, game design, interactive graphics, web design, etc. Lauren Applebaum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Epistolary Tools in the Electronic Age: Louis C. Tiffany’s “Etched Metal and Glass” Desk Set This paper investigates the visual and material residue of electronic communication systems in the “Etched Metal and Glass” desk set of the American craftsman and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany. Initially produced in 1898, Tiffany’s ornate group of epistolary tools draws on organic systems in nature through “grapevine” and “pine bough” patterns, which are acid etched in bronze, overlaying a sheath of green Favrile glass. These tools collectively mediate the creative act of handwritten correspondence for the letter-writer both by managing the flow of incoming and outgoing mail, and by arousing a sense of imaginative departure through their decorative natural flourishes. Yet these flourishes also evoke the overwhelming apparatus of cable that, by the 1890s, obscured the avenues of New York City, where Tiffany lived and worked. Applebaum explores the tangling of epistolary and electronic systems embedded in the objects of the desk set by questioning not only their iconography and iridescent materiality, but also their serialized production and user engagement. Created during a period of major expansion for service providers like American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), Tiffany’s desk set fails to fully naturalize the rapid proliferation of electronic systems of discourse that were transforming communication on a global scale. Sarah Archino, Editor, AndOr (&/); Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art The AndOr Project: A Test Site for Networked Collaboration This paper addresses the practical experience of a collaborative network in AndOr (&/), a digital curatorial project. The structure of the network is intrinsic to this enterprise, necessarily shaped by and oriented around the relationship between its three founding editors, the invited contributors, and its audience. AndOr is a self-conscious and investigatory work exploring the nature of digitality, where contributors experiment with the internet as a medium and a site, while studying how their interactions and those of their users affect and create new content and context. The site-specific artworks and featured writing expose and exploit the digital medium, exploring new territory for art history and art production. More than an online exhibition project, AndOr is a speculation that brings together art and writing in a non-linear, non-authorial manner, allowing the “user” to navigate content on equivalent terms. In this way, AndOr is shifting the network from a system based on the creators of content to one that includes the active viewer as participant. It aims not only to study the function of the network in contemporary art and art history, but to demonstrate an active artist-art historian network engaged in the process of producing new work. Maize Arendsee, Florida State University Medusa, from Ovid to Cixous to “Once Upon A Time” Medusa is a case study for the evolution of mythic memes and a minefield of adapting ancient stories. She is at once a rape victim betrayed by her sisters (the inciting incident of her legend is being raped by Poseidon, then being punished for it by Athena), a sexual deviant, a physical monstrosity, a wicked woman who kills any man who looks upon her, and a symbol of wisdom and literature.