Wednesdays from 5PM to 7PM in the University Theater (UT-108)
September 1: GLAMFA Panel
The Fine Arts Round Table (FAR) from California State University, Long Beach begins this academic year by presenting the Greater Los Angeles Master of Fine Art Exhibition (GLAMFA). It is one of the largest student-conceived and organized art events in both the CSULB School of Art and in Southern California history. Now in its sixth year, GLAMFA is devoted to generating and maintaining an active dialogue among emerging artists in MFA programs across Southern California. FAR will bring together MFAs from several schools across Southern California and students (and alumni) from CSULB in a round table discussion. Moderated by GLAMFA coordinators, the panelists will be asked to explore a range of issues, beginning with their individual practices and moving into collective topics, including parallel concepts and themes in the show. These include identity politics, social histories, the influence of the MFA institution, the place of materiality in art making, and what it means to be an emerging artist in Southern California.
*The GLAMFA 2010 exhibition will remain open until 8pm after the round table. The exhibition is located in all of the School of Art galleries.
September 22: Simon Leung
Born in Hong Kong and living primarily in Los Angeles, Simon Leung is an artist who works across disciplines and mediums. His project-based works include “squatting projects” in various cities; an opera set in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park; a rethinking of the psychological, philosophical, and political dimensions of AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; a reposing of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre as a discourse in ethics; meditations on “the residual space of the Vietnam War” (comprising of projects on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing); and a video meditation on Edgar Allan Poe and “the non-site.”
Leung’s work has been exhibited in the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial; the 2003 Venice Biennale; the 1993 Whitney Biennial; the Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; NGBK in Berlin; the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA; and the Generali Foundation in Vienna. He has taught at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), New York University, CalArts, the Rhode Island School of Design, and since 2001, at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a Professor of Studio Art.
October 6: Rob Swainston
Rob Swainston’s work crosses from print and paper into sculpture and installation. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Swainston made his first relief print “Hippopotamus” at age five. He studied art and political science at Hampshire College, and subsequently lived and worked in Central Europe, pursuing postgraduate studies in political science at Budapest’s Central European University. He received his M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2006 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. He is a cofounder and master printer of Prints of Darkness, a collaborative printmaking studio in Brooklyn, NY. He has also worked as a master printer and taught printmaking at Columbia University. Swainston is an alumnus of the Philadelphia art collective Vox Populi. He lives and works in New York City, where he recently finished the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program.
October 13: Rebecca Lowry
Trained as an architect, Rebecca Lowry has been pursuing an independent fine art practice since 2003. Originally from Northern California, Lowry lived nearly a decade in Boston, Massachusetts, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts at Boston University and a Master of Architecture degree at Harvard’s Design School. Time spent working at the firm of Herzog & de Meuron in Zurich strongly informed and influenced her visual art practice. Her works create relationships between texts, objects and actions as a means of modifying and reinforcing the associations already inherent in them, creating, as Lowry states, “object-based poems”. She has exhibited with Lawrence Asher Gallery and Kristi Engle Gallery in Los Angeles and was the recipient of the “Visions from the New California” Award in 2010. Lowry teaches at USC and lives in the Los Angeles Warehouse District.
October 20: Eric Goldberg
Eric Goldberg is an American animator and film director. He is best known for his work at Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios. Born and raised in New Jersey, Goldberg studied at Pratt Institute, where he majored in illustration. He first entered the industry in the mid-1970s working on Raggedy Ann and Andy for the Richard Williams studio, eventually moving to Williams’ London studio and rising through the ranks from Assistant to Director. During the 1980s, Goldberg started his own London-based studio, Pizazz Pictures, to produce television commercials. His works as a director include A Monkey's Tale (2006), The Magic Lamp 3D (2001), Rhapsody in Blue (2000), Fantasia/2000 (1999), and Pocahontas (1995). Works as an animator include Aladdin (1992), Hercules (1997), The Pink Panther (2006), The Princess and the Frog (2009) and Winnie the Pooh (in production, 2011).
October 27: Helen Shirk
Helen Shirk is a metalsmith/jeweler and educator. She is known for her large richly colored copper vessels that draw on the power and diversity of the natural world for inspiration and meaning.
She is currently a Professor of Art Emerita at San Diego State University. She studied with Earl Pardon at Skidmore College (B.A. 1963) and Alma Eikerman at Indiana University (M.F.A. 1969). Her work can be found in many public collections, among them the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim, the National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto), the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Australia, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Oakland Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
November 03: Martin Kersels
Martin Kersels is a Los Angeles-based artist who works with sculpture, audio, photography and performance. He has had one-person shows in New York, Los Angeles, Bern and Paris. In September 2008, Martin Kersels' retrospective exhibition, Heavyweight Champion, was shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Kersels’ work has been in numerous group shows such as Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty, Young Americans 2 at the Saatchi Collection, and the 1997 and 2010 Whitney Biennials. His work is held in various collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Norton Family Foundation. He recently won a Guggenheim Fellowship Award for 2008/09. Kersels is also the co-director of the Program in Art at California Institute of the Arts.
November 10: Mark Wyse
Mark Wyse is a professional printer, a photographer and an educator based in Los Angeles. Wyse obtained his B.A. from University of Colorado and M.F.A. from the School of Art at Yale University. He makes technically assured yet enigmatically reticent images showing traces of past life or activity. Wyse’s photographs reflect ambiguously upon the relationship between the mix of conscious and unconscious intentions that is the stock and trade of photography’s relation to the world. Public collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Yale University Art Museum. Wyse is currently represented by Wallspace Gallery in New York City and has recently exhibited his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Danziger Projects, and Robert Mann Gallery in New York, as well as Blum & Poe and Sandroni Rey Galleries in Los Angeles,
November 17: Dr. Bruce Love
Dr. Bruce Love is an anthropologist specializing in Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures. He specializes in hieroglyphic writing, pre-Columbian painted books, and the Colonial-Period Maya literature of Yucatán. Dr. Love is a real-life “Indiana Jones” who has been an independent researcher for more than a decade in the field of archaeology, ethnohistory and cultural anthropology of the Yucatán Peninsula. He also runs an Eco-Tour in the Yucatán Peninsula where he shares his knowledge and passion with travelers from around the world. Bruce’s books include Maya Shamanism Today: Connecting with the Cosmos in Rural Yucatan (2004) and The Paris Codex: Handbook for a Maya Priest(1994). Dr. Love obtained his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology at University of California Los Angeles.
