Chakai Booker Monday 7pm Falvey!

Chakaia Booker is one of America's foremost contemporary sculptors and African-American artists. She is best known for the material and process that characterize the majority of her work: cut-up automobile tires that are reassembled on wooden or steel armatures to create abstract sculptures. Formally, Booker's work is engaged in dialogue with the history of Western sculpture, from the ancient and the classical tradition of the human figure through the geometric and minimal non-objective sculpture of the twentieth century. What sets her work apart, and significantly expands upon the history of sculpture, is her ability to manipulate rubber tires to create surfaces on objects that resemble skins, feathers, scales, spikes, armor or attire. The surface patterns created, in concert with their underlying forms, serve as metaphors for a potent range of emotions and psychological states. Common themes in her work include issues of black culture, identity, gender and ecology.

HUMBLEFACTURE! Feb 2 at 3pm FALVEY!

Dominic Muren is a lecturer in industrial design at the University of Washington whose work explores techniques and technologies that empower designers to manufacture more products locally. In his lecture, he will explain the framework for low-infrastructure manufacturing he is developing called Humblefacture. He was awarded a 2010 TED Global Fellowship for his work on Humblefacture.com, an evolving manifesto which argues that by bringing factories down to a local, accessible scale, manufacturing can be made more environmentally, socially and functionally positive.

Muren’s writing explores the interconnections between designed objects, the environment and society. His most recent book, "Green’s Not Black & White: The balanced guide to making eco-decisions," has been reprinted in six languages, he founded the popular industrial design blog IDFuel.com and he served a contributing writer for Treehugger.com — dubbed “The Green CNN” — for more than five years. In addition to his writing and teaching, Muren is an award-winning industrial designer and principle of The Humblefactory, a design laboratory in Seattle, Wash.

POTLUCK with Bread and Puppet

We are fortunate to be able to host members of the legendary Bread and Puppet Theater troupe at MICA on Friday, February 11th, during a tour stop in Baltimore. 

After a workshop with students, we invite anyone who is interested in meeting the company and fellow students and community members to a:

POTLUCK

Station Building, 

Room S-104

Friday, February 11

6:30-7:30 pm

Please bring a dish to share and a plate! 

Questions? Please email: Valeska at vpopuloh@mica.edu

For more opportunities to see Bread and Puppet while they are in Baltimore:

* Bread and Puppet will be conducting a cantastoria workshop at the Visionary Art Museum on Saturday, February 11th at 1pm.

* They will be performing their Decapitalization Circus on Sunday, February 13th at the Creative Alliance. 

* Bread and Puppet will be offering The Institute for Subversive Paper Maché, a community-based workshop on some of their approaches to performance and political action, on Monday, February 14th at 6pm at 2640/St.John's Church, located at 2640 St. Paul Street. For more information, please visit: www.redemmas.org/events/ 

Snow play

So I was thinking about how people enter a state of play in the snow and similar situations. Its really amazing how the environment and situation can cause a psychological change like that. The current weather and all the people ive seen just playing in the snow or how i just want to walk around in the snow without a purpose but to do it got me thinking. I don't know why people are like this but it's pretty amazing.

enjoy the snow,

Patrick

Radiolab: Secrets of Success~

Here is the story I mentioned this morning and the amazing radio program: Radiolab.

Malcolm Gladwell doesn't like Gifted and Talented Education Programs. And he doesn't believe that innate ability can fully explain superstar hockey players or billionaire software giants. In this podcast, we listen in on a conversation between Robert and Malcolm recorded at the 92nd St Y.

Robert asks Malcolm if he's a 'genius denier,' and Malcolm asks Robert if he's uncomfortable with the power of love, as they duke it out over questions of luck, talent, passion, and success.

Last semester's visiting artist Ryan C. Patterson

has been putting together the audio for this exhibit-

check it out!

-Elle

Competitive Scholarship Reminder

Competitive Scholarships are due on February 1, 2011. If you would like to meet with me to get feedback on your submission, please let me know via email or in class.

I have been on various scholarship review committees. It is not infrequent that I see student submissions in which the images and information submitted does not at all reflect the quality or depth of the work. I am thus very glad to support you all in making sure your submission accurately represents your work!

Mark your Calendars! Upcoming Events at MICA

Dear People of the Elements - The semester ahead looks studded with some gems! Here are some interesting events coming up. If you have some to share, please post them here!


Tuesday, February 8, 2011     7pm   Nick Cave 
Nick Cave is an American fabric sculptor, dancer, and performance artist. He is best known for his Soundsuits: wearable fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly. He also trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey. He resides in Chicago and is director of the graduate fashion program at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Friday February 11, 2011        7 pm    Falvey Hall

Ryan Scammel is a New York radio producer, writer, animator and former designer for the Chicago crime-Jazz band, Buddha's Belly. His stories, featured on NPR’s Weekend America and WNPR’s Radio Lab, are sound-rich with interviews, archival footage, sound effects and other musings. He calls them, “an ongoing process of trying to turn stories into music, to find some kind of meeting ground between the mediums.” The performance will feature live and pre-produced storytelling and sound performance, and an excerpt of his film, "Immune: The Origin of Ryan Scammell Superhero (trailer)." For more info: ryanscammell.libsyn.com/

Loss & Consequence

Dear People of the Elements, 
Attached is information about a project MICA has become involved in. We will talk about it in class. If you are interested in participating in this project, please let me know so we can figure out how to integrate it into your Elements II semester's work. 


Maryland State Highway Office (MHSO) and Urbanite approached MICA with an interest in partnering with our students to explore and highlight the issue of drunk driving, using new media and new messages that resonate with young adults. Each year, over 150 people in Maryland die at the hands of an impaired driver; statistically over-represented among drunk-driving fatalities are young men, ages 21-34.  MHSO has offered to fund the production of a wide range of work and to collaborate with MICA on educational programming. Urbanite will feature the project, and publish images, in its magazine.  Key elements include:


Two- and three-dimensional work will be juried and exhibited in May and July. Graphic art will be juried and selected for use throughout the state. Student videos will be screened during Artscape. Work will be chosen to adorn city buses and for billboards.  Additional exposure will be generated by Urbanite which plans to special the project in its June transportation issue.
A speaker’s panel, in Falvey Hall on February 1^st 2011, will provide participants with initial research on the subject and will serve as the project’s official launch. The panel will be open to all students and the general public. A wealth of materials and links will be provided by MSHO, to aid students in research.


Discretionary funding for production, materials, and supplies is being made available by MSHO and will be administered through the Office of Community Engagement.

Time-line

February 1:       Panel Discussion, Falvey Hall. (Required for all interested participants.)

March 30:         Deadline for all 2-D and 3-D submissions

April 30:           Deadline for all video-based submissions

May 1:              Work is installed at off-campus gallery

May 3:              Rollout Party with jurors, artists in attendance.  

June 1:             Special Section in Urbanite, highlighting the work and the project

July 15-17:       Winning art works and designs are displayed at Urbanite Stage at Artscape

SHARY BOYLE & EMILY DUKE / THE ILLUMINATIONS PROJECT

In the spirit of our upcoming return to collaboration, I thought I'd share this project with you now on view at the ICA in Philadelphia.

Looking for an alternative to the convention in which images illustrate texts and texts explicate images, Shary Boyle and Emily Duke developed a looser, more associative method of combining words and pictures. The Illuminations Project is a series of 33 drawings and text pairs generated through long distance correspondence between 2003 and 2010. This exhibition displays 15 of the diptychs. Half of Boyle's drawings were developed in response to Duke's poems, and vice versa. In both cases, the responding artist used the other's work as a point of departure rather than a directive. As a result, the project contains both narrative and more ambient pieces, exploring a violent and misogynistic world through two central characters—Bloodie and Peg-Leg. Privileging neither female nor male, nature nor culture, animal nor human, Boyle and Duke consider a wide range of issues, situations, and contexts, producing a series that presents a dark feminist take on affect and politics. This is the first public presentation of the work, which will be on view in ICA's Project Space from January 13 - March 20, 2011.

I thought some of you might be interested in the work of Tara Rogers (Pink Noise):

http://pinknoises.com/projects.html

Tara Rodgers (Analog Tara) is a musician, composer, and feminist technology scholar. Originally from upstate New York, she is now based in the DC area. She performed jazz piano in NYC in the mid-1990s and has made electronic music and sound art for about 10 years. Recent projects include sound installations based on butterfly migrations, human population shifts, and urban landscapes; a quiet album of piano and field recordings; and a live techno set. She received the 2007 New Genre Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music, and a 2006 Frog Peak Experimental Music Award. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Eyebeam and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Recordings have been released on the Le Tigre Remix 12" and other compilations.