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Event at SMITHS on March 19th.
Survivalist Tupperware-style Party at SMITHS
Saturday, March 19th, 12:30 to 4PM
Oakland-based artist Sarah Filley explores the fallacy of lone survival, so popular in contemporary culture, as operating on the tension between paranoia and preparedness. This tension underscores the real need for community discussions and participatory urbanism. Survive This! is a body of work that came out of research which charts the aesthetics of survivalist gear on a bell curve: the Do-It-Yourself “woodsy isolationist” defines one extreme, and ultra-militaristic executive gadgets define another. At the top of the curve lies populist/yuppie R.E.I. activity-based day kits. Filley has created something for the rest of us, and maybe for all of us together.
As the host of a Survivalist Tupperware-style Party she acts as friendly ambassador creating awareness of our interdependence and local resources. The discussion that starts with the kits serves as a platform for examining fears, ideas, practical tips, and resources in a climate of Code-Orange Level Alert Status.
Get a jump-start with ElkTech’s Survive This! Kit. Respond to this email to order a “Single” ($80 plus tax) or a “Household” (2-person, $160 plus tax) Kit. Both are designed with over 40 items researched by the Preparedness Division of ElkTech. Bonus lifestyle (dog, adult, baby, toddler) options personalize your kit.
Bring your favorite survival snacks!
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Also, we invite you to contribute homemade preserves to the SMITHS Community Root Cellar, started by Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell. We want your jams, honey, pickles, sauces, vinegars, beer, kraut, beets, and more, along with your stories about food, labor, family, land, economy, and love.
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Sarah Filley's art practice blends apocalyptic boosterism with night visions and research. As a 'positive deviant' she uses humor to 'stimulate creative thinking and practical innovation.' She acts as a bridge between public, private to bend technology in the service of wonder. Themes of preparedness and paranoia, extension and prosthesis (erotic, spiritual, ecological) are expressed through participation, performance, and collaboration.
Currently she is co-founder and co-director of Wonderarium, a collaborative project with Yvette Molina which is a series of large-scale public art and community engagement projects proposed for Lake Merritt and the greater Bay Area collaborative region. Using spontaneous hands-on activities Wonderarium combines science and art to engage the community in collaboration with civic, civilian, corporate, and institutional strategic partners.
During her studies at Lawrence University Filley studied abroad at Kuvaitaedakatemia in Helsinki, Finland and at Art University in Tallinn, Estonia as a guest artist. Since graduating in 1995 from the Sculpture program at California College of the Arts, she has shown nationally, including programming at Exploratorium, California Academy of Sciences, Seattle Museum Gallery, Kala Art Institute, and Krowswork gallery. She has also presented her work at Subtle Technologies Symposium in Toronto in 2004 and at the Knowledge Hacking Art/Science panel at U.C. Berkeley in 2010 with Wonderarium.
For more info, please visit www.elktech.com and for the collaborative project visit www.thewonderarium.com
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Solo Show Opening at MCA Denver on February 4th.
Allison Smith: Piece Work
On view from February 4, 2011 through May 29, 2011
Opening Friday, February 4, 2011
6-8PM Members Preview
8-10PM Public Opening
In the exhibition Piece Work, Oakland-based artist Allison Smith will present sculptures and works on paper that refer to different American decorative arts and craft traditions, creating a space for both contemplation and activity. Included in the exhibition is a large-scale braided rug, begun by the artist and completed by visitors working on-site in the gallery. Many of the works on view recall those craft traditions born in the cultures of wartime such as cloth gas masks and the rug itself which, much like a quilting bee, invites its producers to share stories about war and its effects while making the work. In addition to this installation, the exhibition features a suite of programs inviting local artists, craftsmen and visitors to create work in the museum. This element of the exhibition extends the work begun at SMITHS, an Oakland-based store run by the artist in the tradition of general stores as intimate public spaces of exchange. The gatherings she will host at MCA Denver will similarly engage visitors in conversations about the craft traditions that characterize the wartime environment. Through participation and discussion, this exhibition offers a different means for engaging with history and drawing out our present day understanding of the war experience.
Allison Smith: Piece Work will be on view in Natasha’s Gallery and the Vicki & Kent Logan Promenade from February 4, 2011 through May 29, 2011. The opening celebration will be held February 4, 2011. This exhibition is curated by MCA Denver Associate Curator Nora Burnett Abrams. There will be several programs held in conjunction with the exhibition. For more information, please visit www.mcadenver.org.
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Group Show Opening at the Atlanta Contemporary on January 7th.
Embodying: Joe Biel, James Gobel, Stephen Schofield, Allison Smith, Richard T. Walker
Jan 07 - Mar 20, 2011
The participating artists in Embodying have been influenced by issues of identity and community, literature, pop culture, and encounters with nature. They each offer unique male bodies that exist in a variety of scales and materials, and examine distinct narratives.
Joe Biel renders precise figures in graphite on paper, documenting ”performers” in banal or bizarre situations. His focus on clothing, objects, and gestures, set within spare or non-existent contexts, gives his work a distinctly existential mood.
Biel lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received an MFA in Painting from the University of Michigan and is currently on the faculty at California State University Fullerton. His work has been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally at L.A. Louver, Roberts & Tilton, Acuna-Hansen Gallery, and Angles Gallery, in Los Angeles; Goff & Rosenthal Gallery, New York; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle; and Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin. He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2003 and 2008.
James Gobel’s bearish men are depicted in ”paintings” constructed with felt, yarn, rhinestones, and acrylic. They address qualities of gay self-awareness and style, exemplifying signifiers that gay men use to identify each other through fashion choices, facial hair, and attitude.
Gobel lives and works in San Francisco, CA. He has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions at Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco; Steve Turner Contemporary, Hayworth Gallery, and Hammer Museum, UCLA in Los Angeles; Kravets|Wehby, New York; and The Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno. His group exhibitions include Underground Pop at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Pattern ID at Akron Art Museum, Ohio; and Boys of Summer at moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago.
Stephen Schofield’s patchwork figures are mapped from the male body and then tailored out of remnant clothing. Soaked in sugar water and then inflated, these larger-than-life-sized bodies stiffen to become taut skins whose physical presence combine qualities of spirit and matter.
Schofield lives and works in Montreal, Canada. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at galleries and museums including Pari Nadimi Gallery, The Power Plant, and Toronto Sculpture Garden, in Toronto; Galerie Joyce Yahouda and Galerie Christiane Chassay, in Montreal; Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax; and Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Alberta. His group exhibitions include Empty Dress at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, FL; The Presence of Touch at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Toward a New Vision, John Weber Gallery, New York.
Allison Smith’s assemblage, A Good Haul, is inspired by an episode in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Smith brings together found and fabricated items based on Mark Twain’s textual descriptions and her own travels up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Chicago during the summer of 2010.
Smith lives and works in San Francisco, CA. She received a BA in psychology from The New School for Social Research, a BFA in sculpture from Parsons The New School For Design, New York, and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT. She has exhibited her work at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; The Mattress Factory and Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Saatchi Gallery, London.
Richard T. Walker’s videos and photographs show the artist as an isolated romantic, confronting the beauty and vastness of nature. Armed with cameras and musical instruments, he creates and documents improvisational attempts of being and belonging.
Walker is a British artist currently living and working in San Francisco, CA. He received an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005. In 2010 he had solo shows at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis; Àngels Barcelona, Spain; and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica. His group exhibitions include Don Quixote, Witte de With, Rotterdam; Romantic Damage, De Appel, Amsterdam; Beyond The Country, The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland; Terminus, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong; and Meditators, at the National Museum in Warsaw. He has been selected for the 2011 Bay Area Now 6 triennial at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
Embodying is supported through Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue with lead support by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Embodying has been developed in partnership with the Artadia Exhibitions Exchange program in an effort to present works by the recipients of Artadia Awards at arts venues around the United States. The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is featuring three 2009 grantees from San Francisco (Gobel, Smith, and Walker) in this exhibition, along with two other artists. This summer, we will present another four Artadia artists in a thematic exhibition exploring concepts of display and space.
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Event at SMITHS on January 22nd.
ALISON PEBWORTH at SMITHS
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Saturday, January 22nd, 4:30-7pm
Beautiful Possibility Show & Tell
With Elixir Tasting
4:30 Alison/Allison Collaborative Cocktails
6:00 Presentation and Elixir Tasting
Alison Pebworth, back from a five-month tour with the Beautiful Possibility Project, will be sharing stories, images and other ephemera collected from her journey across the Northern United States and Southern Canada. Beautiful Possibility is a Traveling Exhibition and Research Project created in the spirit of a 19th Century traveling show that explores American History and Culture through direct interactions with diverse regional audiences. The Show & Tell will be presented in conjunction with an Elixir Tasting made from ingredients collected from her travels.
Map, Tour Venues, Exhibition Images and Travel Journal for the Beautiful Possibility Project may be viewed at www.beautifulpossibilitytour.com
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Alison has been making “street side” projects locally and nationally since 2004 under the rubric of the Roadside Show & Tell, a series of interactive roadside attractions and related projects created in the spirit of the 19th century American traveling show. In 2006, she traveled cross-country for eight months developing Looking for Lost America, a research project of the Roadside Show and Tell. This trip was the inspiration for Beautiful Possibility, her current traveling exhibition and research project that took her on a five-month tour across the northern United States and southern Canada in 2010. The Center for Cultural Innovation has supported the Beautiful Possibility project through a Planning Grant (2007), Implementation Grant (2008) and Artistic Innovation Grant (2010). Southern Exposure in San Francisco launched Beautiful Possibility with an exhibition and catalog in Spring 2010. The tour accompanied eight solo exhibitions in 2010, including OPEN Space in Victoria, BC and The Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City, SD.
Pebworth had a solo exhibition of drawings at Michael Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco (2010), and was included in “Go West”, curated by Jill Dawsey for the Salt Lake Art Center (2010.) Other awards include an Alternative Exposure Grant, Southern Exposure (2007) and a Cultural Equity Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission (2007).
Alison has held artist residencies at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, DeYoung and Legion of Honor Museums (2003), The Vermont Studio Center (2006) and The Ucross Foundation in Wyoming (2006). Her work may be viewed at www.roadsideshowandtell.com, www.alisonpebworth.com and www.beautifulpossibilitytour.com
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NEW! In an effort to sustain ourselves, SMITHS will now be offering for sale a selection of limited edition artist multiples generated from or inspired by former events.
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Artist Talk at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco on November 17th.
Allison Smith: Huckleberry Finn Small Talk
Wednesday, November 17, 2010, 7–8 pm
Wattis Institute, San Francisco campus
Please join us for a Small Talk with CCA Assistant Professor in Fine Arts Allison Smith at the Wattis Institute. All are welcome to attend these free lectures, which take place every Wednesday at 7 p.m. during the run of the exhibition Huckleberry Finn. Small Talks connect the artistic practices and research concerns of CCA faculty with the themes of the exhibition and Mark Twain's novel. Smith will discuss her new commission for Huckleberry Finn entitled A Good Haul (2010).
Allison Smith's diverse practice investigates the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment and the role of craft in the construction of national identity. She produces performative sculptures and public events that provoke new forms of popular militancy by encouraging participants to "take history into their own hands."
She currently runs the project SMITHS out of her storefront studio in Oakland, where she lives with her partner, writer/curator Christina Linden.
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Event at SMITHS on October 16th.
Community Root Cellar at SMITHS
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Saturday, October 16th, 2 - 5PM
After a nice long summer break, we are opening this season at SMITHS with a "putting up" party and PICKLE IT workshop hosted by Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves.
Ted and Susanne are starting a community root cellar at SMITHS, wherein your homemade jams, honey, pickles, sauces, vinegars, beer, kraut, beets, and more are collected along with your stories about food, labor, family, land, economy, and love. We will be serving these up at public events throughout the year and we hope this will be the beginning of an annual event for replenishing the pantry.
At this workshop, Susanne and Ted will teach the basics of pickling. Bring your own vegetables (or fruits) and learn how to make them last into the winter. We recommend bringing things like beans, carrots, cucumbers, onions, zucchini and beets. Make sure they are fresh and firm. The Grand Lake Farmer's Market takes place on Saturday 9AM - 2PM, so a stop there at some point earlier in the day might make sense! You may also want to bring your own chopping knife and cutting board. We will provide jars, spices and fresh herbs.
We'll also provide some light refreshments but would appreciate any bread or cheeses (etc.) you want to bring along as well. If you have homemade preserves to donate to the root cellar, jars should be sealed and preserved so that they do not need to be refrigerated.
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Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves create social art projects that investigate the overlay of urban and rural systems upon the lives of specific communities. They ask questions about the nature of people and place as seen through social economy, history and local ecology. The collaboration began with a two and a half year public project (2004-2007), Temescal Amity Works, which facilitated and documented the exchange of backyard produce, conversation, and collective biography within the Temescal Neighborhood of Oakland, CA.
In addition to their collaborative practice, they are both professors at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Ted was the founder of the CCA's MFA Area for Social Practice, and continues to be one of the lead professors for the central workshop within that curriculum.
They have received a Creative Work Fund grant from the Elise and Walter Haas Foundation, a Visual Arts grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, as well as support from the Oakland Office of Cultural Affairs and California College of the Arts.
For more about their projects, visit http://fieldfaring.org/
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Creative Work Fund Grant 2010
Creative Work Fund Grant, Visual Arts 2010
Allison Smith (Oakland) collaborating with Southern Exposure (San Francisco)
“Allison Smith is recruiting 50 artists to collaborate with her and with Southern Exposure to create “The Cries of San Francisco,” a temporary public art project, series of events, exhibition, and publication that takes as its inspiration early San Francisco street merchants who would hawk their wares with melodic songs and calls. Participating artists will create peddler identities and cries, as well as items to hawk. The key public presentation will take place over the course of one day along Market Street between the Embarcadero and the Civic Center. Participants will reenact life on the street, demonstrating notions of alternative micro-economics—literally carrying your self-made business on your back—along with soapbox speech-making, performance, and sculptural drag. Southern Exposure will serve as the home base where artists will gather, work, and present additional performances and an exhibition.
Southern Exposure is a 36 year-old nonprofit, visual arts organization dedicated to presenting diverse, innovative, contemporary art, arts education, and related programs and events in an accessible environment. It offers artists the opportunity to experiment, exposes them to new audiences, and engages them in meaningful conversation with other artists and the public. Allison Smith’s diverse artistic practice investigates the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment and the role of craft in the construction of national identity.”
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Group Show Opening at the Wattis in San Francisco on September 28th.
"Huckleberry Finn" (Group Show)
“Huckleberry Finn is the third show in a trilogy of Wattis Institute exhibitions that are based on canonical American novels. In 2008, The Wizard of Oz revealed layers of political symbolism and escapism, while in 2009, Moby-Dick delved into the seemingly futile struggle between good and evil. In 2010, Huckleberry Finn will look at Mark Twain's investigation of racial tensions in America through an international lens. All three stories have major themes related to exploration and (self)discovery, and the corresponding exhibitions function as metaphorical journeys through which the audience experiences various notions of America's reality, both contemporary and historic. Established and emerging contemporary artists from around the world are invited to address the key themes of the books and the historical moments in which they were written. Many of the artists create new commissions specifically for the shows.
This investigation of America and its realities through the lens of literature by means of artworks, artifacts, and historical documents is unique to the Wattis Institute. Huckleberry Finn will encompass a wide range of works, including painting, sculpture, film, video, drawing, and photography.”
Artists include:
Edgar Arceneaux
Ruth-Marion Baruch
Romare Bearden
Elizabeth Catlett
Claude Clark
Abraham Cruzvillegas
Jamal Cyrus
Emory Douglas
Geoffrey Farmer
Simon Fujiwara
Ellen Gallagher
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Rodney Graham
David Hammons
Clementine Hunter
Edward W. Kemble
Dorothea Lange
Tim Lee
Henry Lewis
Glenn Ligon
Pare Lorentz
Jason Meadows
Kristen Morgin
Thomas Nast
Kirsten Pieroth
Horace Pippin
Betye Saar
Yinka Shonibare MBE
Allison Smith
Alec Soth
William Desmond Taylor
Hank Willis Thomas
Kara Walker
Andy Warhol
"Through the lens of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this exhibition addresses issues of racism, the violent history of slavery, and struggles for equality. The first floor provides an introduction to the novel through ephemera such as first editions, reviews from the book's initial publication, photographs of Mark Twain, and the 1920s silent film adaptation. Historical artifacts and artworks generate a portrait of the American South and African-American life under slavery. The second floor is entirely devoted to newly commissioned and contemporary artwork that reflects upon themes from the book. The resulting narrative provides viewers with a sense of the book's history, a portrait of the time it was written, and contemporary reflections on the controversial work.
2010 marks the 125th anniversary of the first publishing of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain's passing. Since 1885 when the novel was first released, it has been consistently censored in libraries and schools for its repeated use of racial slurs and its arguably ambiguous depiction of Jim, an African-American slave. While it is counted as one of the most important works of American literature, it still tops the banned book list in America, revealing that its underlying issues of intolerance, racism, and struggles for equality are not things of the past, but still vividly alive in our society. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not a relic, but a living reminder of the problems of racism that still riddle our society.
The Wizard of Oz, Moby-Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn all conjure up romantic nostalgia for the American dream, where freedom and adventure perpetually lie on the horizon. Taken at face value, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn chronicles the epic adventure of a boy Huck and his loyal friend Jim as they raft down the Mississippi river. They meet rapscallions, narrowly dodge family feuds, and deepen their burgeoning friendship, all while helping Jim reach freedom. Looking further into the narrative, it is a portrait of the time and an intimate look at a young boy's self-education. While many have charged Twain with racism because of his repeated use of racial slurs in the novel, this reading is an oversimplification. Though slavery had been abolished when Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published, Jim Crow laws were an ongoing and violent form of oppression. Twain's portrait of the South in the 1830s details the hypocrisy of racism that continued through his time and ours."
Sept. 28–Dec. 11, 2010
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
Kent and Vicki Logan Galleries
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street
San Francisco CA 94107
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Solo Show Opening at Haines Gallery in San Francisco on September 9th.
"Allison Smith: Pitcher Collection" (Solo Show)
"Haines Gallery is pleased to present “Allison Smith: Pitcher Collection,” a series of over one hundred new works on paper in which images of quotidian objects are meticulously cut out of context and serially collaged onto sheets of handmade paper. As the exhibition’s title suggests, Smith offers a playful confusion between image and object, proposing pictures of material culture as both physical material and subject of study.
Objects that are emblematic, if not iconic, of colonial-era American craft, including stoneware jugs, painted chests, and canopy beds, largely populate this visual lexicon. Each evincing an arresting, undeniable presence, either alone, in pairs, or in charged relation to others, the objects pictured exhibit an uncanny anthropomorphism that verges on the erotic.
This work represents an attempt by Smith to "process” ideas, taking stock of and making visible a subjective inventory of images that she has used as studio reference material for many years, from former museum picture archives, auction catalogs, how-to books on colonial craft, and interior decorating magazines. Indeed, there are pictures of pitchers and many other objects that are containers for latent metaphors and meanings. In addition to the pre-modern crafts, embedded in the works are obscure references to decorative arts and design history, the Arts & Crafts Movement, the studio craft movement, and to modern and contemporary art as well.
Since 2005, Allison Smith has been making sculptures, many of which are monumental versions of 19th Century toys, that serve as provocative centerpieces and post-event artifacts of large-scale gatherings such as military encampments, parades, craft fairs, and other public convocations in which hundreds of participants are encouraged to “take history into their own hands.” Her series of events called “The Muster” was inspired by American Civil War battle reenactments and was organized around the question, “What are you fighting for?” In her project called “Notion Nanny,” she took on the role of an itinerant apprentice, learning traditional skills, from blacksmithing to lace-making, and tracing the Arts & Crafts Movement from its origins in England’s Lake District all the way to the Bay Area, culminating in a MATRIX Series exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2007.
Smith has exhibited her work widely in the U.S. and abroad. In 2008, she joined the Sculpture and Graduate Fine Arts faculty at California College of the Arts. Last year she was named one of the top San Francisco Artadia Award winners, and received an Alternative Exposure grant from Southern Exposure, a Headlands Center for the Arts residency, and most recently, a Creative Work Fund grant. She is currently working on a publication to document a yearlong project with SFMOMA, as well as upcoming shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and Southern Exposure, both opening in the spring of 2011. This is her first exhibition at Haines Gallery."
September 9 - October 30, 2010
Haines Gallery
49 Geary Street
Fifth Floor
San Francisco, CA 94108
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Group Show Opening at ICA Portland, Maine on September 1st.
"Mind-bending with the Mundane" (Group Show)
"Mind-bending with the Mudane is an exhibition occasioned by the fact that marriage equality remains a civil rights question in Maine, among other places. Three independent artists and one husband and husband team present the mundane realities of private lives for public examination in this exhibition curated by Adriane Herman, Associate Professor of Printmaking and Digital Imaging at Maine College of Art.
The exhibition will feature a wide variety of media such as photography, performance, performance residue, engravings, bureaucratic documents and installation. Miller & Shellabarger chart their lives in specific and mundane detail, documenting their ongoing joint presence in the world largely because their relationship is socially invisible at best, and renders them subject to discrimination or violence at worst. Andrew Raftery places contemporary life on display with old master authority in engravings depicting real estate open houses. Allison Smith reminds us that revolutionaries fighting for causes they find worthy can be bolstered by a resting place to proclaim and reflect upon their beliefs. Alix Lambert highlights the often fleeting nature of marriage by documenting the four weddings and divorces she undertook in six months, one of which took place in a drive-through Vegas wedding chapel.
Miller & Shellabarger: Husband and husband artist team Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger’s performances and artist books document the bittersweet rhythms of human relationships. Their performance work, always enacted in public and always together, focuses on simple materials and actions pushed to almost Sisyphean extremes: shifting between moments of togetherness and separation, protection and pain, visibility and invisibility and spaces private and public. Their work functions in a manner that is both autobiographical and metaphorical, and speaks to the common experience of human interaction as well as the specific experiences of queer relationships. Miller & Shellabarger have performed at the Hyde Park art Center in Chicago, IL, the Lakeview Performance Festival and Western Exhibitions, Chicago. They were the 2008 recipients of an Artadia Chicago Award and the 2007 recipients of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.
Alix Lambert: The sheer convenience of wedding and divorcing was the starting point for Lambert’s Wedding Project, an art piece in which she married and divorced three men and one woman in the space of six months. Two weddings took place in the New York City courthouse, one at a drive through in Vegas, and another in Hungary. While Lambert insists there are important distinctions between weddings and marriages, ceremonies and commitments, her experiment suggests that for better or for worse, getting hitched and unhitched in America can resemble a trip to a fast food drive-through. Alix Lambert's feature length documentary The Mark of Cain was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and aired on Nightline. She has produced additional segments of Nightline as well as 7 segments for the PBS series, LIFE 360. She wrote Episode 6, season 3 of Deadwood: “A Rich Find.” Lambert has exhibited her work to international critical acclaim, including venues such as the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Kwangju Biennnale.[…]
Allison Smith makes connections between the Civil War and current events to reflect the ambivalence between mainstream and counter-cultural values in the art world, feminist and queer communities, and the nation at large. Using analogies such as the “Red State/Blue State” cultural divide in relation to The Blue and The Grey, or the notion of Secession versus Union, Smith’s work discusses instances of queer mustering—the riots at New York’s Stonewall Inn and other quasi-militaristic displays of force such as Queer Nation, the Gay Pride Parade and the Rainbow flag. Commenting on how the Bush Administration’s musterings of fear and panic around the issue of same-sex civil union effectively swayed the vote in the 2004 elections, Smith recalls the culture wars and campaigns for freedom of expression in the 80s and 90s. Allison Smith has exhibited her work in numerous international venues, including recent exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; University of California Berkeley Art Museum MATRIX series and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.”
September 1 - October 17, 2010
Institute of Contemporary Art
Maine College of Art
522 Congress Street
Portland, ME 04101
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Public Lecture with Josiah McElheny at Mildred's Lane in Beach Lake, PA on July 24th.
Town & Country
Session 2.10
July 5 – July 25, 2010
This session's focuses on the complex relationship between the city and the countryside by investigating the place the rural world occupies in the projections, fantasies, economy, and antagonism of the cosmopolitan set. This dialectic is responsible for a cultural production as diverse as the invention of Adirondack style, the formation of 60's communes. "Urban Cowboy" and the new urban garden movement.
Town & Country is a session that will 'celebrate, examine, parody and understand the inherent contradictions in our new attempts at Bohemian life and the attend history of these attempts.'* We will be making a deep study of Henry David Thoreau and the Transcendentalist Movement as Fellows of this session will collaboratively fold into every aspect of an upcoming project for Boston's Tufts University Art Center Exhibition, MILDRED'S LANE: RENOVATING WALDEN, (September 9-November 14, 2010) and with exchanging field trips to and from "HUMANUFACTORY", a project with J. Morgan Puett at The Queens Museum of Art in New York.
The goal of this session is to critique and move beyond the cultural illusions which promote the city and the country as disconnected realms of experience. Reading seminars will include Thoreau's "Walden", Also, reading Raymond Williams' "The Country and the City", and Alexander Wilson's "The Culture of Nature".
more TBA
Additionally, during this session, we will participate in the infamous One Minute Film Festival at Moyra Davey and Jason Simon's Barn just down river (July 10, 2010).
* Josiah McElheny,"The Museum on the Conflict between Cosmopolitan and Pastoral Life And the Conflict between Industry and Nature": a proposal for Mildred's Lane.
Featured speakers, visiting artists, seminar leaders, field trips and other guests include:
Jeffrey Jenkins, Richard Klein, Judy Fox, Amy Schlegel, David Wood, Petra Lange-Berndt, Josiah McElheny, Allison Smith, J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion
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Public Lecture at Headlands in Sausalito, California on August 11th.
6PM Headlands Center for the Arts
944 Fort Barry
Sausalito, CA 94965
ph (415) 331-2787
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ARTS & SKILLS Service at the Veterans Building, SF Civic Center, on May 29th, 2010.
Visit ARTS & SKILLS Service, a project by the artist Allison Smith that re-stages a World War II-era collaboration between the American Red Cross and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Saturday, May 29th, of Memorial Day Weekend at the original location of SFMOMA, the War Memorial Veterans Building at SF City Hall, 401 Van Ness Avenue at McAllister Street, Room 207, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
“Here in San Francisco over fifteen hundred men a month are being sent out from our three military hospitals with a new weapon in their hands: a skill or craft with which to fight discouragement or boredom…” -- Sophie Morris Kent, 1944
On the occasion of SFMOMA's anniversary exhibition 75 Years of Looking Forward, Allison Smith was commissioned to research and reenact self-selected episodes in the history of the Museum's public programs. What began as an artist residency has evolved into a series of interactive installations, public conversations, hands-on workshops and other exchanges in which Smith brings Bay Area makers, veterans, art students, and art therapists together in dialogue through forms of making and doing.
In ARTS & SKILLS Service, Smith enlists a volunteer corps of artists and craftspeople to teach hands-on workshops to military service members and veterans, in order to engage in the healing process through creative skill-shares.
Things to Make / Things to Do…
Ceramic cups and sprig molds - Ehren Tool
Crochet - Erin Comparri, Rachel Myers
Digital video & blogs - Patrick Gillespie
Hand-sewn produce bags - .Kate Ruddle
Interviewing & recording for radio - The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson, Nikki Silva)
Kintsugi ceramic repair - Brad Menninga, Zarouhie Abdalian
Knitting - Karin Fetherston
Mending on a treadle sewing machine - Michael Swaine
Millinery - Michelle Lewis-King
Model Rocketry - Nathaniel Taylor
Natural dyes & scents - Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Shoko Yamamura
No-Sew Blankets - Allen Meyer, Ian Carter
Origami - Lilah Beldner
Patchwork flags & collaborative quilt-making - Roderick Kirakofe, Angie Wilson
Patchwork quilting - Laurel Shackelford
Weaving - Robin Johnston
Woodcarving - Erich Richter
Woodworking - Martin Sweet
Wrap dolls - Rae Fleagle, Erendira Lopez, Michael Noble
Writing & wreath-making - Karen Van Dine
And others!
At this gathering, we will share the research, resources, ideas, and questions occasioned thus far by Smith’s ARTS & SKILLS Service, and we welcome your contributions and participation.
Remarks at noon and 6 p.m. by artist Allison Smith and art therapist Suellen Semekoski.
Free and open to the public.
Drop-in arts & skills activities all day.
Refreshments served, or bring a picnic.
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Events at SMITHS/SFMOMA April 29th - May 1st.
SMITHS: Arts & Skills Service
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On Ammunition and Ornament: Trench Art, Flower Arranging, Swords to Plowshares
Thursday, April 29, 7-8:30pm at SFMOMA
Historian Jane Kimball on Trench Art
Koret Visitor Education Center, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco
Free with museum admission or CCA I.D. card. (Thursday nights at SFMOMA are half price.)
Friday, April 30, 11-5pm at SFMOMA
11am-1:30pm CCA "Extreme Sculpture" students present work in the Charles Schwab Room, SFMOMA
2-5pm CCA "Craft Lab" students present work in the Koret Visitor Education Center, SFMOMA
Free with museum admission or CCA I.D. card.
Saturday, May 1, May Day, 4-9pm at SMITHS
4-6pm Trench Art Polishing, Flower Arranging, and Ornamental Wheat Weaving with Allison Smith and Nan Rohan
6pm Communal Meal * Please bring a dish to share; RSVP to smithsgeneral@gmail.com appreciated.
7pm Tia Christopher of Swords to Plowshares on "SHOUT! Art by Women Veterans"
SMITHS, 356 24th Street, Oakland
Free and open to the public.
This Thursday night at SFMOMA, we are very excited to host leading trench art scholar Jane Kimball, whose seminal book "Trench Art: An Illustrated History" highlights her research into a dazzling array of exquisite objects made by soldiers from battlefield debris such as expended bombshells, shrapnel, and other war materiel. On Friday, Allison Smith's California College of the Arts classes "Extreme Sculpture" and "Craft Lab" culminate at SFMOMA as students present their work in response to semester-long investigations into a variety of wartime craft traditions. On Saturday at SMITHS, Allison Smith shares her own trench art collection of some 35 artillery shells that were transformed into flower vases by soldiers during World War I. Afternoon activities include polishing the vases and filling them with fresh flower arrangements, in homage to nearly forty years of flower arranging programs hosted by SFMOMA from the 1930s onward. Berkeley-based wheat weaver Nan Rohan demonstrates ornamental strawcraft, an ancient tradition performed by prisoners-of-war in the Napoleonic era. We will enjoy a communal meal together, and cap off the evening with Tia Christopher discussing art being made by soldiers today, and in particular her work with women veterans through Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco organization that has been supporting all aspects of veterans’ lives since 1974. Learn more about them at www.swords-to-plowshares.org.
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SAVE THE DATE! Saturday, May 29, 11-7pm
Allison Smith's residency at SFMOMA will culminate with an active re-staging of the WWII-era Red Cross Arts & Skills Service at the museum's original location, the War Memorial Veterans Building at San Francisco City Hall.
To participate or volunteer, please write to smithsgeneral@gmail.com.
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About SMITHS:
SMITHS is a project inspired by the history of general stores as intimate public spaces of exchange. From tinsmiths to tunesmiths, Allison Smith invites various makers to her downtown Oakland storefront to share their skills and stories. These lively gatherings engage participants in conversations about the rich social and political histories embedded within various craft traditions.
Participants in SMITHS include students at California College of the Arts, through the graduate seminar "Craft Lab" and the undergraduate course "Extreme Sculpture," part of ENGAGE at CCA, a project-based learning initiative.
Support for SMITHS is provided by Southern Exposure's Alternative Exposure Grant.
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Directions to SMITHS:
Allison SMITH's studio is located in the Uptown section of Oakland at 356 24th Street between Webster and Valdez Streets, directly across from Creative Growth.
By BART - Take BART to the 19th Street Oakland stop. Go up Broadway to 24th Street. Turn right on 24th Street and go 1 1/2 blocks east to 356 24th Street.
By Car from San Francisco - Take the Bay Bridge, and then follow signs to 580 east - Downtown Oakland. Take the exit for I-980 (Downtown Oakland and Airport). Take the first exit for 27th Street. At the end of the ramp turn left onto 27th Street. Proceed to Broadway and turn right. Turn left on 24th Street and proceed 1 1/2 blocks east to 356 24th Street.
By car from 580 East towards Oakland - Take the Harrison exit, and then turn left on Harrison. Proceed to the major intersection and take a soft right onto 24th Street. Proceed two blocks west to 356 24th Street.
Parking is available at meters nearby, in 2-hour residential parking spots and at several pay lots in the blocks that surround SMITHS.
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Other News: An exhibition of Jane Kimball's trench art collection
THE THINGS THEY CARRIED: WORLD WAR II TRENCH ART
Oceanside Museum of Art (near San Diego) Parker Gallery, March 27 - June 4, 2010
FREE Reception May 1, 2010
In the wake of World War II extraordinary works of art were created from metal and scrap detritus that carry with them both meaning and memory. The Things They Carried: World War II Trench Art is an exhibition that offers something tangible to the investigation of the human spirit during times of war. Expended artillery shell casing, bullets, shrapnel, ship, tank and aircraft parts are transformed into emotionally charged souvenirs. Objects such as delicately engraved artillery-shell casings; ashtrays, jewelry, sugar scoops, model planes and personalized cigarette cases and lighters tell of life and death experiences with tactile immediacy. For many serving on the war front, objects were created during stays in the hospital, prisoner camps, or in the trenches, recording their experiences with artful craftsmanship. The Things They Carried: World War II Trench Art opens in the Parker Gallery March 27th and will be on view through June 4, 2010. A Free reception for the exhibition will be on May 1st from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. Refreshments will be provided. This exhibition is sponsored by the Oceanside Public Library and the National Endowment for the Arts.
A bullet or bomb carries no such other meaning than hurt, death and total destruction. Yet, patiently tooled, crafted, carefully engraved and thoughtfully expressed Trench Art reveals the personal and historical experiences of WWII with the things they carried. The term Trench Art originated in France during the early years of World War I when soldiers in the trenches began transforming weapons of destruction into healing forms of art. The term has since been expanded to include objects collected from the battlefield by troops or non-combatants, handcrafted pieces created by troops or civilians from battlefield detritus, handcrafted pieces made by prisoners of war, handcrafts made by wounded troops, post-war souvenirs made by ex-troops and civilians, and "trench art style" manufactures war souvenirs.
Like most folk art, trench art is largely anonymous; artists may not have considered their work important enough to sign. Most World War II trench art comes from North Africa, East Asia, Europe and Hawaii.
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Artist-led Exhibition Walk-through at LACMA on April 24th.
I will be leading a special tour of the "American Stories" Exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Saturday, April 24th at 8pm.
American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915
February 28–May 23, 2010
From the colonial period to the present, Americans have been inventing characters and plots, settings and situations to give meaning to our everyday lives. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 includes seventy-five paintings, from before the Revolution to the start of World War I, that tell these stories in scenes of family life and courting, work and leisure, comic mishaps and disasters. These daily experiences were all subject to the artist’s searching and revealing eye and many of the works on view are famous images known to almost every American. Major artists such as Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, John Singleton Copley and George Caleb Bingham, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, are included in this important survey, the first of its kind in over thirty years.
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Pop-Up Magazine, A Live Event in San Francisco on April 16th.
I will be a presenter at Pop-Up Magazine, speaking about Trench Art in the Object section of the magazine.
"Pop-Up Magazine is the world’s first live magazine, created for a stage, a screen, and a live audience. Nothing will arrive in your mailbox; no content will go online. An issue exists for one night, in one place.
Pop-Up showcases the country’s most interesting writers, documentary filmmakers, photographers, and radio producers, together, on stage, sharing short moments of unseen, unheard work. Books, films, journalism, photography, and radio documentaries in progress. Obsessions and digressions. Outtakes, arguments, and live interviews.
Each evening of Pop-Up unfolds like a magazine. Short reviews, dispatches, and provocations anchor the front, longer features follow in the back. Our theme is no theme. Pop-Up seeks to explore the varied world around us, through stories and ideas. Science, music, politics, art, business, food, literature, design, nature—all in a 75 minute show.
Then we move to the lobby bar, and invite audience and contributors to stick around late. A Q&A is more fun with drinks in hand."
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Events at SMITHS/SFMOMA March 25th - 27th.
SMITHS: Arts & Skills Service
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On the Front Lines: Quaker Guns, Razzle Dazzle, Camo Blankets, and Love Armor
Thursday, March 25, 7-8:30pm
In conversation: Sanjit Sethi, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Allison Smith
Koret Visitor Education Center, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco
$6 or free with student I.D.
Friday, March 26, 11am-5pm
Blanket Making Workshop with Allison Smith*
Charles Schwab Room, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco
Located off the main lobby of the museum, Free.
Saturday, March 27, 1-9pm
11-5pm Blanket Making Workshop with Allison Smith*
6pm Communal Meal**
7pm War Stories
SMITHS, 356 24th Street, Oakland
Free and open to the public.
On Thursday evening, Sanjit Sethi will discuss examples of undeniable creativity within the military sphere, from Civil War "quaker guns" to World War I "razzle dazzle" camouflage, presenting us with an opportunity to explore connections between the military industrial complex and the artistic avant-garde. Julia Bryan-Wilson will discuss wartime textiles and "love armor" (knitted blankets, Afghan war rugs, tank cosies and more) including contemporary projects by artists Liz Collins, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Cat Mazza, Allison Smith and others. Allison will join Sanjit and Julia in conversation, and then on Friday and Saturday, SMITHS will host a blanket making workshop that engages with contemporary practices of blanket-giving to deployed U.S. troops and wounded veterans as well as to members of local communities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
* Sewing skills are not necessary. Some materials will be provided. Please bring your personal sewing kit, if you have one, any fabric to donate and your own blanket projects to share.
** All are welcome. Please bring a dish of food to share with others at the communal meal. (Please RSVP to smithsgeneral@gmail.com)
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Biographies:
Born in Rochester, New York, Sanjit Sethi has done a residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, as well as earned a master of science in advanced visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Visual Arts Program in 2002. His work consistently deals with issues of nomadism, identity, the residue of labor, memory, and movement in the urban sphere—all of which involve various disparate social and geographic communities. Having completed a Fulbright Fellowship in India on the Building Nomads Project, Sanjit continued his strong focus on interdisciplinary collaboration while director of the MFA Program at the Memphis College of Art. His dedication to diverse forms of artistic practice extends in his position as CCA's chair of Community Arts Program, and Co-Director of CCA's Center for Art and Public Life. Sanjit's current work includes a collaborative project titled, Urban Defibrillation, the Gypsy Bridge Project, and the Kuni Wada Bakery.
Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies and Assistant Professor of contemporary art history at the University of California, Irvine, where she has worked since 2007. After receiving her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2004, she taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Getty Foundation and the O'Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism. She was an inaugural winner of the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in the Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art US, Art Journal, Bookforum, Cabinet, Camera Obscura, Grey Room, Frieze, Modern Painters, October, and Oxford Art Journal. Her current project examines the feminist, queer, and activist potential of handmade, craft-based art since 1970, and an article on this subject, "Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond's Floorpieces," recently appeared in the Journal of Modern Craft.
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Directions to SMITHS:
Allison SMITH's studio is located in the Uptown section of Oakland at 356 24th Street between Webster and Valdez Streets, directly across from Creative Growth.
By BART - Take BART to the 19th Street Oakland stop. Go up Broadway to 24th Street. Turn right on 24th Street and go 1 1/2 blocks east to 356 24th Street.
By Car from San Francisco - Take the Bay Bridge, and then follow signs to 580 east - Downtown Oakland. Take the exit for I-980 (Downtown Oakland and Airport). Take the first exit for 27th Street. At the end of the ramp turn left onto 27th Street. Proceed to Broadway and turn right. Turn left on 24th Street and proceed 1 1/2 blocks east to 356 24th Street.
By car from 580 East towards Oakland - Take the Harrison exit, and then turn left on Harrison. Proceed to the major intersection and take a soft right onto 24th Street. Proceed two blocks west to 356 24th Street.
Parking is available at meters nearby, in 2-hour residential parking spots and at several pay lots in the blocks that surround SMITHS.
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Participants in SMITHS include students at California College of the Arts, through the graduate seminar Craft Lab and the undergraduate course Extreme Sculpture, part of ENGAGE at CCA, a project-based learning initiative.
Support for SMITHS is provided by Southern Exposure's Alternative Exposure Grant.
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UPCOMING SMITHS: Arts & Skills Service Events (SAVE THE DATES)
On Ammunition and Ornament
Thursday, April 29, 7pm at SFMOMA with Jane Kimball
Friday, April 30, 11-5pm at SFMOMA
Saturday, May 1, 1-9pm at SMITHS
Project Culmination
Memorial Day Weekend at the War Memorial Veterans Building, San Francisco City Hall
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Image: From Barbara Brackman's Material Culture Blog at http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/
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Needle Work catalog released.
Allison Smith: Needle Work. With an essay by Wendy Vogel and interviews with Allison Smith and Lauren Adams. St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2010. 64 pp., soft. LCCN 2009942917. ISBN 978-0-936316-30-7. Distributed by University of Chicago Press.
Contemporary artist Allison Smith’s diverse creative practice critically engages with popular forms of historical reenactment through a variety of mediums, including sculpture, textiles, ceramics, and photography. Focusing on the handmade and performative aspects of “living history” and material culture, Smith restages, refigures, and replays the role of traditional crafts in large-scale installations that reconsider the construction of collective memory and identity.
For the core of Allison Smith: Needle Work, the artist created contemporary revisions of European and American gas masks dating from World War I and beyond. Conceiving these early, relatively simply made objects as remnants of an as-yet-unwritten history of needlework, Smith recreates and reenacts the notion of “authentic reproductions” using art supplies found at local fabric and craft retail stores. From there she explored a range of related masklike forms in which the ghoulish and the foolish, the horrific and the playful intertwine, drawing into question essential notions of camouflage and masquerade. The project also includes staged photographic portraits of the remade masks being worn, held, or positioned as props, and a set of silk parachutes printed with a pattern of research images the artist collected of early masks, further referencing the material culture of war.
This color illustrated exhibition catalog includes an essay by Wendy Vogel in which she considers Smith’s project in relation to key notions put forth by Peter Sloterdijk in his Terror from the Air. The volume also features interviews with the artist about her creative practice and with exhibition curator Lauren Adams, assistant professor of art at the Washington University Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
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Panel Discussion at CCA on March 1st.
Unruly Work: Queer Art and Activism
MONDAY 3/1, 7pm at CCA
Speakers: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Juana Maria Rodriguez and Allison Smith
Introductions: Tina Takemoto
Moderator: Julian Carter
California College of the Arts
San Francisco campus
Graduate Center Room GC4
184 Hooper St. San Francisco, CA 94107-2247
Monday, March 1, 2010
7-9pm
Craft has long been associated with alternative lifestyles, economies, and modes of sociability. This panel considers the unruly aspects of labor practice embodied in craftwork. Panelists will discuss how this work can be subversively reinscribed as art practice and political intervention to challenge histories of colonialism, racism, gender oppression, and exploitation.
Julia Bryan-Wilson's "Queer Handmaking/Queer Worldmaking" looks at how textile handicraft--including sewing, knitting, braiding, and costume design--from 1970 until today might be understood within a queer rubric.
Juana Maria Rodriguez discusses the work of Cuban born artist Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez, whose laboriously hand crafted film and video interventions tear at the idea of archive as collective memory.
Allison Smith presents "Needle Work," a new body of work that emerges from a series of early cloth gas masks photographed in military history museums and found on the Internet.
Co-sponsored by Critical Studies, Visual Studies, Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies, Graduate Program in Fine Arts, and The Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts, Queer Conversations in Culture and the Arts and The Queer Cultural Center.
Speakers
Juana Maria Rodriguez
Juana Maria Rodriguez is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU 2003) and has published numerous articles related to her research interests in sexuality studies, queer activism in a transnational context, critical race theory, technology and media arts, and Latino and Caribbean studies. She holds a B.A. in Liberal Studies from San Francisco State University, an MA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, she was faculty at Bryn Mawr College and UC Davis, where she served as Director of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group. She is currently working on a book manuscript about imagining queer interventions into everyday life.
Julia Bryan-Wilson
Julia Bryan-Wilson is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of California at Irvine. Her research focuses on the intersection of art and politics since the 1960s; she has published on topics such as the visual culture of the nuclear age, the impact of AIDS on contemporary art, and the professionalization of institutional critique. In her 2009 book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, she explores the politicization of artistic labor in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly within the Art Workers' Coalition and the New York Art Strike. Through case studies of Carl Andre, Lucy Lippard, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, this book investigates how artists and writers embraced a polemical identification of themselves as workers in relation to the social movements of the New Left.
As a frequent contributor to Artforum, she is especially committed to feminist, queer, and collaborative art, and has written on Sadie Benning, Carrie Moyer, and Sharon Hayes, among others. Her writing has also appeared in Art Bulletin, Art Journal, ArtUS, Bookforum, Cabinet, Camera Obscura, Frieze, Modern Painters, the Journal of Modern Craft, Oxford Art Journal, and Technology & Culture. Her current project examines queer craft and debates about the politics of handmade art since 1970.
Allison Smith
Allison Smith is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at California College of the Arts. Smith's diverse practice investigates the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment, or living history, using it as a means of addressing the relationship between American history, social activism, craft, and queer identity. Smith uses history as an aesthetic palette to produce performative sculptures and public events that provoke new forms of popular militancy by encouraging participants to "take history into their own hands." Many of her works play with tradition by transforming commemorative forms of sculpture into monumental children's toys: hundreds of wooden rifles, life-size costumed porcelain dolls, a hobbyhorse, and a series of donkey pull-toys, for example.
Smith has exhibited her work at numerous venues including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Arario Gallery, South Korea; Studio Voltaire, London; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and many others.
Julian Carter
Julian Carter is a queer theorist and historian who chairs the Program in Critical Studies at CCA. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1890-1940 (Duke 2007), and of a number of articles addressing the mass-cultural formation and circulation of norms and normativity. His work on the history of sex education is widely taught, and his original research on the boundaries of modern lesbian identity earned a citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Current research seeks to forge connections between trans, dance, and disability studies through an investigation of transition that foregrounds physical movement.
About QCCA - Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts brings together locally and nationally renowned artists, writers, filmmakers, and scholars for a series of conversations to discuss a broad range of LGBTQI topics in the humanities and the arts.
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Events at SMITHS/SFMOMA February 25-27th.
SMITHS: Arts & Skills Service
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On the Homefront: Bandage Rolling, Victory Gardens, and other Tactile “War Efforts”
Thursday, February 25, 7-8:30pm
Roundtable discussion: Allison Smith and Amy Franceschini, artists; Summer Brenner, poet and novelist; Elissa Auther, art historian and independent curator
Koret Visitor Education Center, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco
$6 or free with student I.D.
Friday, February 26, 11am-5pm
Wildcrafting demo: Joshua Muscat and Adriane Bovone
Charles Schwab Room, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco
$6 or free with student I.D.
Saturday, February 27, 1-9pm
11-5pm Mending and Making Do: Allison Smith, Michael Swaine, and Jay Dion, artists *
6pm Communal Meal *
7pm Talk and Book Launch: String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art, by Elissa Auther, art historian and independent curator
SMITHS, 356 24th Street, Oakland
Free and open to the public.
Examining intersections of art-making and war efforts from the “trench art” practices of World War I to the “Arts and Skills Service” program designed by SFMOMA and the Red Cross for World War II GIs, artist Allison Smith hosts making events that reflect on our own military conflicts and how we envision each American’s role in “the war effort.”
In this iteration, we turn to the homefront, examining how the public has been motivated to great acts of individual and communal "making." Thursday night, Summer Brenner discusses her community projects in Richmond that reveal how the Bay Area shifted & served the larger war effort of the 1940s, while Smith discusses her research into the SFMOMA "Arts & Skills Service" program. Amy Franceschini and Elissa Auther respond to these historical accounts and open up an evening-wide discussion of such homefront activities today.
On Friday, western herbal medicine practitioners Joshua Muscat and Adriane Bovone demonstrate how to make a fresh plant tincture, a dried plant tincture, and a salve. They will talk about the plants, the practice of wildcrafting, and its connection to wartime healing. Participants will be able to leave with something they have made.
Saturday, at the SMITHS storefront in Oakland, Allison Smith hosts a day of mending with street tailor Michael Swaine, and artist Jay Dion introduces a generosity project in which he’s made hundreds of porcelain “tin cans,” exchanging them for food donations to the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Later that evening, Elissa Auther discusses her new book, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art.
* Please bring items that need mending, canned goods for donation, and a dish of food to share with others at the communal meal (RSVP to smithsgeneral@gmail.com appreciated.)
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Directions to SMITHS:
SMITHS is located at 356 24th Street between Webster and Valdez Streets near downtown Oakland, directly across from Creative Growth.
By BART - Take BART to the 19th Street Oakland stop. Go up Broadway to 24th Street. Turn right on 24th Street and go 1 1/2 blocks to 356 24th Street.
By Car from San Francisco - Take the Bay Bridge, and then follow signs to 580 east - Downtown Oakland. Take the exit for I-980 (Downtown Oakland and Airport). Take the first exit for 27th Street. At the end of the ramp turn left on to 27th Street. Proceed to Broadway and turn right. Turn left on 24th Street and proceed 1 1/2 blocks to 356 24th Street.
By car from 580 East towards Oakland - Take the Harrison exit, turn left on Harrison. Proceed to the major intersection and take a soft right on 24th Street. Proceed two blocks to 356 24th Street.
Parking is available at meters nearby, in 2-hour residential parking spots and at several pay lots in the blocks that surround SMITHS.
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Participants in SMITHS include students at California College of the Arts, through the graduate seminar Craft Lab and the undergraduate course Extreme Sculpture, part of ENGAGE at CCA, a project-based learning initiative.
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UPCOMING SMITHS: Arts & Skills Service Events (SAVE THE DATES)
On the Front Lines
Thursday, March 25, 7pm at SFMOMA
Friday, March 26, 1-5pm at SFMOMA
Saturday, March 27, 1-5pm at SMITHS
On Ammunition and Ornament
Thursday, April 29, 7pm at SFMOMA
Friday, April 30, 1-5pm at SFMOMA
Saturday, May 1, 1-5pm at SMITHS
Project Culmination
Memorial Day Weekend at the Veteran's War Memorial Building
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Public Lecture at the Kemper Museum in St. Louis on February 8th.
February 8, 2010
6:30 pm Lecture, 7:30 pm Reception
Steinberg Auditorium
"Installation artist Allison Smith, the Sam Fox School's inaugural Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist, will speak as part of the Public Lecture Series. She will discuss her exhibition Needle Work on view at the Kemper Art Museum. Smith is an assistant professor of sculpture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and has exhibited in venues throughout the US and abroad. Reception to follow at the Kemper Art Museum."
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Washington University in St. Louis
Skinker & Forsyth Boulevards
St. Louis, MO 63130
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Exhibition Opening at Bard in upstate New York on February 7th.
Open Score Variations, curated by Dan Mason
Sunday, February 7, 2010 - Sunday, March 21, 2010
Opening Reception: Sunday, February 7, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
CCS Bard Galleries
"Each Spring, second-year CCS Bard graduate students curate exhibitions and projects with leading and emerging contemporary artists in the CCS Bard Galleries. Presented in two groups, these projects focus on diverse concepts and themes and represent an international body of artists working in a variety of media."
"'Open Score Variations' brings together examples of event notation in art from the postwar era to the present. Through an exploration of this distinct form of artistic practice, and its variation as a musical score, contract, or recipe, this exhibition offers an opportunity to consider the ways in which modern and contemporary artists have used language, objects, and images to propose discrete actions and events. In their use of event notation, the artists in this exhibition recalibrate notions of authorship, the autonomy of the work of art, and the nature of artistic reception."
Center for Curatorial Studies
and Art in Contemporary Culture
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson
NY 12504-5000
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Exhibition Opening at the Kemper Museum in St. Louis n February 5th.
ALLISON SMITH: NEEDLE WORK
February 5, 2010 - April 19, 2010
Kemper Art Museum, College of Art Gallery
Free
"Allison Smith is known for creating large-scale installations that critically engage popular forms of historical reenactment, along with crafts and other traditional cultural conventions, to redo, restage, and refigure historical memories. Her work often draws on “living history” museums, battlegrounds, and most recently the Internet to explore gendered conventions of craft, constructions of national identity, and experiences of violence.
Allison Smith: Needle Work centers on Smith's recreation of European and American gas masks from World War I and World War II. Appearing crudely fashioned, from textiles such as canvas and twill tape as opposed to the more familiar industrial black rubber, these early masks — which Smith first encountered while visiting the Musée de l’Armée in Paris — struck her as meticulously, even lovingly, crafted, yet also functionally inadequate to their task. The exhibition also includes staged photographs in which masks are worn, held or otherwise positioned as props, variously evoking survival, cruelty, modesty, camouflage and disguise. Representing another tradition of wartime needlework are four large silk parachutes — printed by Washington University’s Island Press — suspended from the ceiling.
As the inaugural Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Smith developed Needle Work in conjunction with multiple visits in fall 2009 to participate with Washington University faculty member Lauren Adams in her interdisciplinary course “Past Perfect, Present Tense,” which investigated the use of historical research as a strategy within contemporary artistic practice.
Allison Smith: Needle Work is on view from February 5 to April 19, 2010, and is curated by Lauren Adams, assistant professor of painting in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
Exhibition Support
Support for Allison Smith: Needle Work was provided by Bunny and Charles Burson, the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Art Endowment Fund, Washington University’s College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and members of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
Exhibition Catalog
A fully illustrated color catalog will accompany the exhibition. The catalog includes an essay by Wendy Vogel and interviews with the artist and faculty member Lauren Adams."
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Washington University in St. Louis
Skinker & Forsyth Boulevards
One Brookings Drive
Campus Box 1214
St. Louis, MO 63130
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SMITHS at SFMOMA January 15 - 18th.
Saturday
LIVE ART PROGRAM
SMITHS: Fancy Work and Arts & Skills Service
Noon-10 p.m.
Fifth-floor galleries
In honor of the museum’s anniversary, SFMOMA is an outpost for SMITHS, an ongoing project organized by artist Allison Smith. Inspired by the history of general stores as intimate spaces of public exchange, Smith invites an ever-changing repertoire of local makers to her downtown Oakland storefront to share their skills and stories. During the anniversary weekend this gallery features two SMITHS initiatives: an immersive installation titled Fancy Work and a series of participatory programs marking the launch of Smith’s Arts & Skills Service, a project that will continue throughout the spring at SFMOMA and beyond.
Fancy Work looks back to an exuberant early-nineteenth-century decorative arts movement known as American Fancy to trace an alternate lineage for psychedelia, modernist abstraction, and experimental light and sound works. Expect a huge patchwork quilt, an outsized mirror sconce, musical saws, and handheld tinwork lanterns.
1pm: Sumpter Priddy III speaks to his definitive history, American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts 1790-1840, the touchstone study for the Fancy Work installation.
3pm: Media Arts scholar and curator Robin Oppenheimer presents her new research in West Coast light shows of the 1960s and 70s. She is joined in conversation by legendary light show pioneer and artist Bill Ham.
4pm: American Fancies, then, now, and then again: a roundtable conversation with Ham, Oppenheimer, Priddy & artist Allison Smith.
5pm: San Francisco treasure Jackie Jones begins the Fancy Work light show with selections on the musical saw. She’ll be followed by others until 10pm.
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Sunday
LIVE ART PROGRAM
SMITHS: Fancy Work and Arts & Skills Service
Noon-5 p.m.
Fifth-floor galleries
SMITHS, a project by artist Allison Smith, continues its residency at SFMOMA and considers the museum’s original location in the War Memorial Veterans Building. In Arts & Skills Service, SMITHS Investigates the museum’s World War II collaboration with the Red Cross program of the same name: a series of arts workshops offered to wounded veterans in military hospitals during World War II. Combining her research on a variety of wartime textile, ceramic, and metalwork traditions, Smith presents skill-sharing events for civilians and soldiers that will reflect upon contemporary conflicts and “the war effort.” Today: quilts and quilters.
Noon-1:30pm: Allison Smith leads crazy-quilting activities for the whole family. Renee Delores plays the musical saw.
2pm: Roderick Kiracofe, quilt historian and author of The American Quilt: A History of Cloth & Comfort 1750-1950, shows off his eccentric quilt collection.
3pm: Noted activist and educator Cleve Jones discusses the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, an initiative he launched here in San Francisco in 1985.
4pm: A round-table conversation with Cleve Jones, Roderick Kiracofe, and Allison Smith
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Monday
LIVE ART PROGRAM
SMITHS: Fancy Work and Arts & Skills Service
Noon-5 p.m.
Fifth-floor galleries
Allison Smiths general store project SMITHS continues its residency at SFMOMA. In this Arts & Skills Service program, SMITHS looks at the role the museum played in recruiting artists to teach in the Red Cross program of the same name, a series of arts workshops offered to wounded veterans in military hospitals during World War II. Today: arts programs for soldiers, then and now.
1pm: Christina Linden, Curatorial Fellow at Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and Allison Smith discuss the WWII Arts & Skills Service collaboration with the Red Cross at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
2pm: The musical saw returns!
3pm: Meg Shiffler, director, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, discusses her research on artists with military backgrounds and artists taking up military themes.
4pm: Meg Shiffler in conversation with artists from her research.
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The program for the SFMOMA anniversary weekend, including the full schedule of speakers and artworks, is now on the SFMOMA website as a downloadable PDF on this page:
http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/anniversary_weekend
And is directly downloadable from this link:
http://www.sfmoma.org/assets/documents/sfmoma_75th_anniversary_celebration_program.pdf
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SPECIAL THANKS to all who helped make the Fancy Work quilt (all 2,500 hand-printed pieces of it): Renée Delores, Ali Naschke-Messing, and Angie Wilson; Alethea Beeker, Allison Beezer, Georgia Carbone, Diana Cassara, Katey Crews, Torreya Cummings, Courtney Dailey, Welly Fletcher, Lydia Greer, Erika Hanson, Jennifer Hennesy, Adrianna Iantorno, Brandon Jones, Helena Keeffe, Michael Kelly, Yoojin Kim, Roderick Kirakofe, Kyo Kodama, Christina Linden, Kate Lorch, Tim Macias, Molly McIntyre, Helena Meryman, Kate Nartker, Noel Nelson, Emily North, Tisa Pickering, Julia Robertson, Sidney Russell, Laurel Shackelford, Kathleen Smith, Sarah Thibault, Karen Van Dyne, and Shoko Yamamura.
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Participants in SMITHS include students at California College of the Arts, through the graduate seminar Craft Lab and the undergraduate course, Extreme Sculpture, part of ENGAGE at CCA, a project-based learning initiative.
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UPCOMING SMITHS: Arts & Skills Service Events (SAVE THE DATES)
On the Homefront, or Rolling Bandages, Care Packages, and other “War Efforts”
Thursday, February 25, 7 p.m. at SFMOMA
Friday, February 26, 1 to 5 p.m. at SFMOMA
Saturday, February 27, 1 to 5 p.m. at SMITHS
On the Front Lines, or Quaker Guns, Camouflage, and Queer Craft
Thursday, March 25, 7 p.m. at SFMOMA
Friday, March 26, 1 to 5 p.m. at SFMOMA
Saturday, March 27, 1 to 5 p.m. at SMITHS
On Ammunition and Ornament
Thursday, April 29, 7 p.m. at SFMOMA
Friday, April 30, 1 to 5 p.m. at SFMOMA
Saturday, May 1, 1 to 5 p.m. at SMITHS
Project Culmination
Memorial Day Weekend at the Veteran's War Memorial Building
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Support for SMITHS is provided by Southern Exposure's Alternative Exposure Grant.
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Book Launch at Donlon Books in London on December 19th.
Home for Lost Ideas
Edited by Catherine Griffiths & Dan Rees
Published by archive books
Book launch Saturday 19th December, 6pm-9pm
(Also launched at Art Basel 40, June 2009)
With contributions from:
Marina Abramovic//Franz Ackermann//Eija-Liisa Ahtila//Allora & Calzadilla//Lauren Aston//Annabelle Balch//John Baldessari//Pascale Berthier//Pierre Bismuth//Juliette Blightman//Blood ‘n’ Feathers//John Bock//Sophie Calle//David Claerbout//Claude Closky//Martin Creed//Nathalie Djurberg//Jason Dodge//Shaun Doyle & Mally Mallinson//Drabble+Sachs, Elin Wikström//Elmgreen & Dragset//Chris Evans//Peter Fend//Peter Finnemore//Blue Firth//Rebecca Fortnum//Ryan Gander//Mario Garcia Torres//Andrew Gaston//Kendell Geers//Liam Gillick//Chris Hammond//Nadia Hebson//Isabell Heimerdinger//Tamara Henderson//Sofia Hultén//Andrew Hunt//Dani Jakob//Christian Jankowski//Koo Jeong-A//Janice Kerbel//Jakob Kolding//Tamás Komoróczky//David Krippendorff//Heimo Lattner//Matthieu Laurette//Sharon Lockhart//Benoît Maire//Tom Marioni//Mark McGowan//Jonathan Meese//Michaela Meise//Matthias Meyer//Simon Dybbroe Møller//Jonathan Monk//Hayley Newman//Nils Norman//Paul O’Kane//Ahmet Ögüt//Simon Patterson//Diego Perrone//Susan Philipsz//Kirsten Pieroth//Steven Pippin//Olivia Plender//Damien Roach//Kirstine Roepstorff//Julian Rosefeldt//Daniel Roth//Anri Sala//Mathew Sawyer//Stefan Schuster//David Shrigley//Allison Smith//Nedko Solakov//Simon Starling//Sue Tompkins//Joep van Liefland//Tris Vonna-Michell//Bedwyr Williams//Jordan Wolfson
Donlon Books
210/Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
http://www.donlonbooks.co.uk
http://www.archivebooks.org
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Book Launch at Berkeley Art Museum on November 6th.
Book Launch: MATRIX/Berkeley: A Changing Exhibition of Contemporary Art
featuring Matt Heckert with Lawrence Rinder, Tom Marioni with Constance M. Lewallen, and Allison Smith with Elizabeth Thomas
November 6, 2009; 7:00 p.m.
History is made by living it. In the case of the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, a defining engagement with the present has led to quite a history—230 projects, 265 artists, 30 years.
MATRIX has changed and evolved but has always remained true to its guiding principles as an exhibition project that challenges conventions, privileges artists and their ideas, and experiments with form and content. In this vein, the new book MATRIX/Berkeley: A Changing Exhibition of Contemporary Art was conceived as a project in its own right, born in a spirit of experimentation and in collaboration with Project Projects, the design partnership of Prem Krishnamurthy and Adam Michaels. As each MATRIX project is conceived differently, our approach in making a book was to delve into the archives, to understand the entirety of the program by investigating the impulses and execution of each exhibition on its own terms. Arrayed loosely, as if spread out on a table, the book’s visual elements—ephemera, installation views, production materials—speak to the process of making each exhibition, in a collaged and anecdotal form that seemed in keeping with the kind of story we wanted to tell about MATRIX. Individually, these visual essays are compelling snapshots of their time, each a condensation of the thoughts and actions of a particular artist; in aggregate, laid side by side, they narrate an arc through thirty years of contemporary art practice. In and around them are newly commissioned interviews, some transcribed from conversations between MATRIX artists and curators past (and, in one case, future) in a series of public programs at the museum in 2008 and 2009; others were produced specifically for this book.
Project Projects is a design studio that merges print, exhibition, and interactive work with independent curatorial and publishing projects. They were named a finalist in the 2009 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards; other awards include I.D. magazine’s 2007 Design Distinction Award, the Art Directors Club Young Guns 5 Award, several Society of Publication Designers merit awards, and the AIGA 365 Award.
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Art Workers at SMITHS on December 6th.
Book Signing: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era
Sunday, December 6th, 5-7PM
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the political turbulence generated by the Vietnam War, an important group of American artists and critics sought to expand the definition of creative labor by identifying themselves as "art workers." In the first book to examine this movement, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period—American artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard—Bryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that "art works." She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the "art worker" identity, including participating in the Art Workers' Coalition—a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rights—and the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics.
Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies and Assistant Professor of contemporary art history at the University of California, Irvine, where she has worked since 2007. After receiving her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2004, she taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Getty Foundation and the O'Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism. She was an inaugural winner of the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in the Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art US, Art Journal, Bookforum, Cabinet, Camera Obscura, Grey Room, Frieze, Modern Painters, October, and Oxford Art Journal. Her current project examines the feminist, queer, and activist potential of handmade, craft-based art since 1970, and an article on this subject, "Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond's Floorpieces," recently appeared in the Journal of Modern Craft.
Please visit:
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10899.php
http://artforum.com/words/id=23989
SMITHS
356 24TH ST
OAKLAND, CA 94612
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Letterpress Broadsides at SMITHS on November 7th.
Saturday, November 7th
12PM
Small-scale Letterpress Fair & Print Exchange: All prints welcome!
2PM
Roundtable discussion with Betsy Davids (CCA Professor Emerita), founder of Rebis Press & co-founder of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts; John McBride, publisher of Invisible City & Red Hill Press; Beau Beausoleil, poet, bookseller, & coordinator of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project; and others.
4PM
Refreshments including home-brewed Smith's Beer by Smitty Weygant & Patricia Maloney with Brian Andrew. Important: Bring an empty brown beer bottle!
Image: broadside by Darren De La Pena, part of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project, which was organized to protest & commemorate the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street, the centuries-old center of bookselling in Baghdad, on March 5th 2007. The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition has been organizing readings and other events since April 2007 as fundraisers for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
SMITHS is a project inspired by historic general stores as spaces of intimate public exchange. From tinsmiths to tunesmiths, artist Allison Smith invites various kinds of makers to her downtown Oakland storefront to demonstrate their skills. These public gatherings are paired with congenial and incongruous lectures and discussions that aim to expand notions of crafting community and dialogue. This project is in ongoing development with graduate and undergraduate students at California College of the Arts.
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Upcoming this fall/winter:
December 4-5-6 Revolutionary Ceramics
January 16-17-18 Psychedelic Quilting Bees at SFMOMA
SMITHS
356 24th St.
Oakland, CA 94612
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Exhibition Opening at Oliver Art Center at CCA in Oakland on October 17th.
"Reflections of Me and My World: Exchange and Response"
Oliver Art Center
Art Esteem / Center for Art & Public Life
California College of the Arts
5212 Broadway
Oakland, CA 94618
"We, at ArtEsteem, believe that community based partnerships are the strongest alliances we can make. This exhibition has allowed hundreds of Oakland's families to discover a rich arts institution they never knew existed, as well as bring CCA's practicing artists community into Oakland's public schools.
"ArtEsteem is a during and after school art program. We offer professional development, visual art, fashion design and cultural arts to over 20 schools in Oakland and Berkeley. ArtEsteem uses a social justice curriculum, known as Self As Super Hero, in all of our classrooms. Each year we hold a cumulative exhibition to showcase student work from the past year, which this year manifested in [this project pairing Art Esteem students with CCA Faculty at] the Oliver Art Gallery at CCA."
--Naema Ray, Exhibition Coordinator, ArtEsteem
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Beekeeping at SMITHS on Saturday, October 3rd.
2PM J. Morgan Puett & Mark Thompson in conversation
6PM Candlelit Potluck Dinner (Please RSVP) with "Sonic B" sound installation by Max Goldfarb
8PM Screening of Richard Knox Robinson's award-winning film "The Beekeepers" & Bay Area debut of Mark Thompson's recently completed film "Immersion," which has been in the making for over thirty years.
SMITHS
356 24th St.
Oakland, CA 94612
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Exhibition Opening at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle on October 3rd.
The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art
OCTOBER 3, 2009 - JANUARY 3, 2010
Frye Art Museum
704 Terry Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98104
On First Hill near Downtown Seattle.
Winner of the 2008 Best Thematic Museum Show award from the International Association of Art Critics USA.
The Old, Weird America considers a widespread resurgence of folk themes in recent art from the United States. By giving visual form to archetypal stories and characters from the time of European settlement through the 1960s, the artists featured in the exhibition both participate in and reflect upon folklore’s fraught role in the quest for roots, values, and authenticity. Featuring a wide range of media—sculpture, drawing, photography, and video—The Old, Weird America includes artwork by Jeremy Blake, Sam Durant, Barnaby Furnas, Matthew Day Jackson, Brad Kahlhamer, Margaret Kilgallen, Dario Robleto, Allison Smith, Kara Walker, and Charlie White, among others. The exhibition is accompanied by a 162-page fully illustrated catalogue.
The Old, Weird America was organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
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Becoming Commons Event at Headlands in Sausalito on September 24th.
Becoming Commons: J. Morgan Puett with Brian Conley, Erin Elder & Allison Smith
Date: 9/24/2009 (Thursday)
Time: 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: Mess Hall
Ticket Info: $20 ($15 for members)
For guests not joining us for dinner, admission is free.
Becoming Commons is a clustering/ swarming/ gathering of people entangled in the complexities of everyday living and working together. Looking to historical models of communes, collectives, homesteads, experimental outposts, and other forms of collective barn raising, participants are invited to share their stories and ideas in an intimate exchange at the Headlands Center for the Arts. This town hall-style program is collaboratively conceived by interdisciplinary artist co-founder of Mildred's Lane , J. Morgan Puett (AIR '09), artist Allison Smith (SMITHS), curator Erin Elder and artist Brian Conley. These collaborators invite the public to join them for an evening of conversation. This is the first in a series of conversations that will continue in 2010.
DINNER AT HEADLANDS
The public is invited to join the Headlands community for a delicious dinner in the Mess Hall at 6PM in conjunction with all public programs. Dinners are prepared by Headlands’ Chef Keith Mercovich, whose meals demonstrate a commitment to innovative and locally sourced cuisine. Dinner is $20 per person ($15 for Headlands Members). Reservations are required three business days prior to an event. Please email info@headlands.org or visit www.headlands.org to make a reservation for dinner or RSVP to a public program.
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Indigo Dying at SMITHS on September 12th.
10AM - 2PM
All are welcome! Wear dark clothing and bring something to dye.
SMITHS
356 24th St.
Oakland, CA 94612
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Artist Talk at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson on August 16th.
I will be giving an artist talk at the Vermont Studio Center's Lowe Lecture Hall on Main Street in Johnson, Vermont on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.
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Artist Talk at Mildred's Lane in Beach Lake on August 13th.
I will be giving an artist talk in the barn at Mildred's Lane in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. as part of the current session entitled "Retail 21st Century."
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Blog for the Journal of Modern Craft online.
Recently the the Journal of Modern Craft invited me to be a guest blogger in response to their question "Traditional craft: manufactured nostalgia or grass-roots resistance?" My recent post Native Funk & Flash ponders the San Francisco Bay Area's historic brand of crafty counterculture alongside a recent flurry of relational queer craft projects.
My work was featured in JMC's last issue 2.1 by Julia Bryan-Wilson in her text "Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond's Floorpieces" and is discussed in the current issue 2.2 in Jennifer Mikulay's "Acts of Association: Allison Smith's Craft as Civic Practice".
Also in print, the "Politics of Craft" conversation I had with Julia Bryan-Wilson, Liz Collins, Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Cat Mazza that was originally published in the February 2008 issue of Modern Painters has been anthologized in Choosing Craft: The Artist's Viewpoint and will be published in Glenn Adamson's forthcoming The Craft Reader.
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Exhibition Opening at Harris Lieberman in New York on June 26th.
No Bees, No Blueberries
June 26 - July 30, 2009
Opening: Friday, June 26, 6 - 9PM
Harris Lieberman Gallery
89 Vandam Street, New York City
212-206-1290
John Baldessari, Andrea Blum, Douglas Boatwright, Kim Seob Boninsegni, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Heman Chong, Martha Colburn, Ann Craven, Das Institut (Kerstin Braetsch & Adele Roeder), Nikolas Gambaroff, Nicolás Guagnini, Guyton/Walker, Karl Haendel, Gareth James (with Roe Ethridge), i-cabin, Haley Mellin, Olivier Mosset, Steven Parrino, Luciano Perna, Allen Ruppersberg, SALOON (with Debo Eilers, Jane Jo, Jason Loebs, Charles Mayton, Blake Rayne, Georgia Sagri, Thomas Torres Cordova, Viola Yesiltac), Karin Schneider, Peter Simensky (with Charlotte Beckett, Patty Chang, Jennifer Cohen, Rachel Foullon, James Hyde, The Invisible Glove, Daniel Lefcourt, Michael Mahalchick, Ohad Meromi, Carter Mull, Adam Putnam, Allison Smith, Meredyth Sparks, Jane Virga)
Curated by Sarina Basta and Tyler Coburn
Harris Lieberman is pleased to present No Bees, No Blueberries, an exhibition of work from over forty multigenerational artists.
No Bees, No Blueberries takes its title from a playful observation, made by artist Andrea Blum, linking the low yield of blueberries last summer to a decline in the bee population. Over the centuries, various communities have attempted to explain the cyclical disappearance and rehabilitation of bees by the preoccupying issues of the times, from the recent concern with global climate change and the predominance of synthetic insecticides, in the 1960s, to a 19th century theory of the "low moral fiber" of the insects themselves.
Bees occupy many a human metaphor, as well as everyday expressions like "the bee's knees" and "busy bee," reminding us of the productive and socialized energies inside and outside the hive. The insect attracts champions and critics alike: Einstein promoted the bee's foundational role in the life-chain, given that pollination effects one-third of human and animal food supply; Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, indicted the "worker bee" mindlessly toiling away within a vast enterprise; and recent theories address the insect as an agent of transmission, dissemination, replication and reproduction, cross-pollinating plants and flowers in a generative, promiscuous, and sexually hybrid manner.
In the midst of an economic moment that increasingly draws focus to the top-down frailty of the art world, No Bees, No Blueberries investigates the artist, her resilience, her capacity for self-organization and the flexibility of her communities. Many of the exhibiting artists pair formal pursuits with meditations on social structures. Among them, Peter Simensky, Nikolas Gambaroff and SALOON employ sub-curated artworks and performances that call conventional delineations of production into question. Nicolás Guagnini, Heman Chong and Kim Seob Boninsegni assemble visual lexicons from the material and rhetorical fragments of exhibition posters and propaganda. John Baldessari's shallow-relief sculptures and Ann Craven's fluttering birds offer representations of the organic and programmatic forces at play throughout the exhibition.
A series of performances and events will run concurrently with No Bees, No Blueberries, with contributions from B'ling, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Catherine Czacki/Summer Guthery, Cleopatra's and others.
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SMITHS presents Indigo Girls* by Travis Boyer on June 9th.
Indigo Girls is a craft-action dye happening and social sculpture that Brooklyn-based artist Travis Boyer has been performing since December of 2008. For this event, he invites participants to come and dye whatever they like in a natural fermentation indigo dye vat: clothes, art projects, wood, leather, etc. The results are gratifyingly positive; the craftwork is non-age or skill level-discriminant. Indigo Girls is a party about auto-fashion empowerment, creativity, identity, pedagogy, and comraderie. The technique is ancient and cross-cultural. It is ecologically green and non-toxic. Boyer writes, "The process of dying marks the dyers; it stains our hands and costumes but also facilitates profound illumination."
Indigo Girls begins Tuesday, June 9th at 2PM, Open to the public at 7PM
356 24th St. in Downtown Oakland
1.5 blocks East of Broadway near the corner of Valdez
Directly across the street from Creative Growth
RSVP appreciated.
SMITHS is a storefront project by Allison Smith inspired by historic general stores as intimate public spaces of exchange. From tinsmiths to tunesmiths, various kinds of makers are invited to the store each month to demonstrate their skills. These gatherings are paired with congenial and incongruous lectures and discussions that aim to expand our notions of crafting dialogue. Open randomly and by appointment.
* Indigo Girls, the dye vat performance, is a craft project and not a musical project and is not endorsed by or associated with the musical group Indigo Girls.
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Exhibition Opening at SoMArts in San Francisco on June 7th.
Indigo Girls is a satellite event organized in conjunction with the Queer Cultural Center's 2009 National Queer Arts Festival and the exhibition Threads. From the press release: "Threads is not just about fabric and costume but also how queerness weaves the threads of our physical, social and moral existence together into a multi-dimensional fabric of community and our selves. What are the threads that bind, mend and sometimes unravel this spectacular fabric? How do we fashion, perform, subvert or display queerness in our art and lives?" For more information visit www.queerculturalcenter.org and www.blog.somarts.org.
Threads Opening, June 7th at 3PM
SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan St.
Curators: Tirza True Latimer, Rudy Lemcke, Matt McKinley, Pamela Peniston, Allison Smith, and Tina Takemoto
Exhibition Co-ordinators: Courtney Dailey & Tamara Loewenstein
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Exhibition Opening at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA on June 6th.
I am presenting an installation of seven life-size dolls in the exhibition "The Old Weird America," curated by Toby Kamps at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The show explores folk themes in contemporary art and comes with a great catalog. Artists in the exhibition include Dario Robleto, Matthew Day Jackson, Kara Walker, and Margaret Kilgalen, among others.
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