Flag International - with Kevin Carvill at left.
photographs by Lauri Lyons
Lauri Lyons will visit campus at the end of February — not so far away!
The Gallery will begin the spring 2010 semester with an exhibition entitled Flag International of photographs by Lauri Lyons. Lauri interviewed and photographed people from around the world, asking each person to comment upon his/her feelings about the United States and the American flag. After each person wrote in one of her journals, she would photograph them in any way they felt comfortable. The photographs arrived yesterday, all the same size and all beautifully framed in similar black wooden frames. Yet, when you look closer, you see that each photograph within tells a moving personal story. Tomorrow, we’ll sequence the show, arranging the photographs in such a way as to let each one tell its own story, but also to let the photographs share stories with one another. That’s the creative part from our end!
Lauri will be coming to campus in February to give a lecture and meet with students. Keep an eye out for more info on the Gallery’s Web site.
Our friend Jason Lujan gave us a heads-up on Vandana Jain.
Matt Bogosian and his creative company, the Vanderbilt Republic, are in Cambodia for several weeks to photograph the masters of traditional arts. This was their recent entry on Facebook:
The VRF’s “Masters” creative team scouts the Angkor Wat Archaeological Complex, November 16, 2009. Photograph by Matthew Bogosian.
A friend forwarded this YouTube video of Rauschenberg’s erased Willem de Kooning drawing. Fantastic.
While on campus in October, Rockpool Candy created an outdoor neolithic loom, as she describes it, and here is one of our dear gallery ninjas going at it.
In October, Rockpoolcandy and Mytarpit visited campus. They workshopped with SLU students, created scads of cool stuff, and instigated an outdoor giveaway art exhibition. Rockpoolcandy even made a loom!
This from the MacArthur Foundation outlines 11 new skills regarding media literacies. Although the article is geared toward children, the skills seem quite useful for college-aged students and older adults (IMHO).
Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving;
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery;
Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes;
Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content;
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details;
Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities;
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal;
Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources;
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities;
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information;
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
Our dear friend Tenzin Yignyen is on Facebook! He came to St. Lawrence three times in the past decade to create intricate Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas. This reminds me of a time in Kathmandu when a few SLU faculty who were studying there were granted an audience with the Venerable Chokyi Nyima, and he stopped midway through his teaching to take a call on his cell phone.
Tenzin has been teaching at Hobart for several years, and every time I talk with Hobart students and faculty, they value his work very much there. Tenzin teaches courses on the meaning and signifiance of sand mandalas and other sacred arts.
Carole and I attended the Artists Books Conference in NYC last week, which was superb. One of the best sessions was on ‘zines and alternative presses and institutional approaches to collection development in this genre. Both Barnard and Pratt have been developing ‘zine collections for teaching and research. The presenters seemed opposed to digitizing their collections, as if digitizing compromised the original intentions of ‘zine artists who often want to lay low and/or underground. The Brush Art Gallery has been collecting ‘zines for several years, mostly from Printed Matter, where David Platzker (SLU alum) was director for several years.
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