Archive for February, 2012

Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems ranging from the lynching photograph to museum display. The Searching for California Hang Trees series offered a critical look at the legacies of landscape photography in the West while his most recent project considers the sculptural depiction of race. Profiled began as an exploration of the influence of eighteenth century “scientific” thought on twenty-first century institutions ranging from the prison to the museum. Using the sculpture and portrait bust collections of several major museums including: The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Field Museum, The Museum of Man in San Diego, L’École des beaux-arts in Paris, The Bode Museum, and Park Sanssouci in Potsdam, among others. Gonzales-Day lives in Los Angeles and is Chair of the Art Department and a Professor at Scripps College.

Grants and fellowships awarded to Gonzales-Day include: COLA; Art Matters; California Communtiy Foundation; Durfee Fondation; Graves Award for the Humanities; Visiting Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Getty Research Institute; Senior Fellow, American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution; Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy; Fellow, ISP, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Christopher Reiger is a writer, artist, and curator living in San Francisco, California. Originally from the rural Delmarva Peninsula, Christopher attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He then moved to New York City, where he lived and worked for the next decade. He graduated from the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (NYC) in 2002; since that time, his paintings and drawings have been included in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and South America.

Christopher has contributed art criticism to a number of print and online journals, including ArtCat:Zine, NY Arts Magazine, Art Practical, and Square Cylinder. Essays and short-form pieces about art, natural history, and miscellany are published on his long-running blog, Hungry Hyaena. Additionally, he has contributed essays to exhibition catalogs and books, and more book projects are forthcoming.

Christopher teaches art classes at Root Division, an arts education non-profit in San Francisco’s Mission District, and at the Sharon Art Studio, in SF’s Golden Gate Park, and has presented guest lectures at undergraduate and graduate art programs about art’s relationship to ecology and ethics.

Yvonne Rainer is an experimental dancer, choreographer, and filmaker. Rainer’s dance choreography from the 1960s sought to question the nature of how dance is perceived. Her work blurs the line between traditional dance and everyday movements. Furthermore, Rainer excluded any form of narrative or persona from her practice choosing to maintain an objective presence. By removing the drama from dance, Rainer questioned the role of entertainment in the medium. Feminist themes are also prevalent in Rainer’s dance and filmmaking.

Beginning in the 1970s, Rainer focused her attention on filmmaking. Avoiding conventional filmmaking structures, Rainer addressed social and political topics. Rainer’s directorial oeuvre includes Lives of Performers (1972), Film about a Woman Who (1974), Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). Rainer has received numerous awards including two Guggenheim Fellowships, three Rockefeller Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and the Wexner Prize. Additionally, Rainer holds four Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees and has authored four books.

Jae Rhim Lee is a visual artist, designer, and researcher whose work proposes unorthodox relationships between the mind/body/self and the built and natural environment. Jae Rhim’s work follows a research methodology which includes self-examination, transdisciplinary immersion and dialogue, and diy design, ultimately taking the form of living units, furniture, wearables, recycling systems, and personal and social interventions.
Jae Rhim studied psychology and the natural sciences at Wellesley College, received a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT, and holds a certificate in permaculture design. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and in the US. She is a recipient of a 2009 Creative Capital Foundation Grant, a 2010 Grant from the Institut fur Raumexperimente/Universitaet der Kunste Berlin, and a 2011 MAK Schindler Scholarship and Artist Residency in Los Angeles, CA. Lee is a 2011 TED Global Fellow and a Research Fellow in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology in Cambridge, MA.

Matthew Coolidge is the founder and director of the Center for Land Use and Interpretation.  Established in 1994, the CLUI is an educational nonprofit organization dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.  Coolidge’s work takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding our relationship with the built American landscape.

In addition to lecturing both nationally and internationally, Coolidge acts as a project director, curator, and photographer for CLUI exhibitions. Furthermore, he is the author and editor of several books including: Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America With the Center for Land Use Interpretation (2006); Route 58: A Cross-Section of Southern California; Back to the Bay: An Examination of the Shoreline of the San Francisco Bay Region (2001); Around Wendover: An Examination of the Anthropic Landscape of the Great Salt Lake Desert Region (1998), and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (1996). Coolidge is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2004) and the Smithsonian Institute’s Lucelia Artist Award (2006).