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.

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.

Emily Gawdey-Backus wrote a(nother) thoughful essay about the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery and Permanent Collection in the current issue of The Hill News.  Essays like these help communicate to students and others information about the function of the gallery as a source for learning and research.

Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office

“The Copyright Advisory Office is a new service based at Columbia University to address the relationship between copyright law and the research, teaching, and service activities of the university. Complex copyright issues arise as members of the university community create and use a rich variety of works. Under today’s law, copyright protection applies automatically to almost all writings, artworks, motion pictures, computer programs, and websites. Copyright protection extends to dance choreography, architectural designs, and even the flood of routine emails. Whenever we create or use any of these materials, we may stir copyright questions. One of the main objectives of this office is to help address these issues in a constructive and practical manner, and in the best interests of advancing the university’s teaching and research mission. This website will evolve and grow. Its overarching purpose is to provide information to the academic community in order to help faculty members, librarians, administrators, students, and others to learn and apply copyright principles of importance to their work.”

The Gallery will bring Rockpool Candy to SLU this fall.  Carole and I met her and her husband Mytarpit by chance at the Pictoplasma Conference in Berlin last March and have stayed in touch ever since.  The Gallery will be putting together a posse of fiber activists to work with her to create public installations around campus and in the community in late October.  Stay tuned!

Check out this series of her fiber reef sculptures made from recycled materials.

Djifa Kothor and Josh Sharlow (not pictured) finish lighting the Sister Corita exhibition, while our dear Jodie Phaneuf ‘97 applies for grad school.

I love the Internet.  Check this out.

The three gallery ninjas are trying to figure out controlled vocabularies, authority lists, custom queries, etc. for cataloging works of art.  The Library of Congress has over 330,000 search terms for SUBJECT.  How in the world have they come up with so many?

The 2009 fall semester begins with an exhibition of prints by Sister Corita Kent from August 19 to October 24.  Dianne Drayse from Ogdensburg Free Academy will be doing curriculum development, and she pointed me to a few videos on YouTube including this one by Aaron Rose, an independent curator from L.A.  He organized an exhibition of Sister Corita’s work called Passion for the Possible, which was on display in Berlin in 2008.  In the video, he talks about some of the similarities between Corita’s work and the work of graffiti artists, then and now–all of whom he thinks were/are social outsiders in one way or another.  Check it out!

Lauri Lyons will be showing her Flag photographs at the Gallery during January – March of 2010.

From her Web site:

“Flag reveals what is beneath the surface of the American dream by looking beyond stereotypes and into the minds of ordinary citizens whose feelings about America not only tells the viewer what America really is, but also what it can become. Through each person’s photographs and hand-written statements about America, the viewer becomes aware of the beauty, inequity and hope that have created the American cultural fabric.”

A recent post from Lorne Oke on the NMC listserv (02July09) suggested that “the New Epistemology requires…the ability to find/collaborate/sift/sort/discern information rather than read/listen/memorize/mimic instruction. This is a very different skill set than what we are currently ‘teaching’ and assessing.  The real challenge will be to create systemic change that fosters a fundamental shift on the part of our teachers/faculty to adapt to this new paradigm.  Once our learning communities accept these realities, can we assist each other in embracing them?”

We seem to have a broken link to the Vietnam War-era photographs, but it will be taken care of later today.

The ninjas met with NYU Institute of Fine Arts visual resources staff this morning.  Wow.

Screen capture 06.27.09

The NEH offers several opportunities for St. Lawrence University to develop digital projects.  Good summer reading and writing!

Here is a possible new dummy for CONTENTdm records that don’t have digital image files associated with existing metadata.  What do you think?

The Griffiths and Noble Center arts buildings are almost empty today.  I saw one student, Alex Comeau, in the NCAT this morning and remembered he was awarded a SLU Fellowship to study mass media advertising, branding, and marketing.  By chance I came across his excellent blog called PAC Online.  Very nicely done, Alex.

Carole has led me to some absolutely amazing Web sites about knitting, subversive crafts, anticraft, yarn guerrillas, etc.  There is an outdoor exhibition at PS122 in NYC right now (extended past May 17, 2009) with a fence covered with yarn strips and stripes, crocheted stars, and knitted webs from a group called Yarn Theory.  While reading online this morning, I found work by knitallate who crochets around stones.  Check out these photographs.

We had a festive reception the day before Commencement for students and their families.  Music with Minor Swing.  President Sullivan and Ann Sullivan were able to join us, as well as alumna Connie Harris Saddlemire, pictured with FA faculty Melissa Schulenberg and Kasarian Dane.

In honor of President Daniel F. Sullivan and Ann H. Sullivan, the gallery presents an exhibition of works by students, faculty, and alumni from the past twelve years.  Here is a detail of a digital photograph by Cassie Walsh ‘09, a project in which she asked people to “hold the tomato.”

Jack himself.

At the Fine Arts Honorary Induction, we decided to give fun, creative toys to students and faculty.  Here is Dr. Limouze’s cat IVO with a new Gloomy Mini Mascot.

Pilot project #3: West African textile collection

This project has been the most complex of the three pilot projects we’ve initiated in the last 18 months.  Some of the steps included professional photography and on-site interviews, and the next step will be to incorporate this digital online collection into various courses at SLU, including fine arts and those in African Studies.

Step #1

For two days in June 2008, Matt Bogosian ‘02 and his crew came to campus to photograph the West African textiles, assisted by Jose’ Domingo ‘09, Tsewang Lama ‘11, and Kevin Carvill ‘11.  The gallery was turned into a photo studio, and we borrowed John Larrance’s genie lift to have the textiles photographed from above.

Step #2

In July 2008, Stanzi McGlynn ‘10 met with Christopher Roy to discuss the history and meaning of the textiles.  The interview was recorded and later transcribed.  After Stanzi’s study abroad in Kenya in the spring of 2009, she will work this summer to add sections of the transcription to the CONTENTdm digital collection.  We plan to include portions of the interview to the online collection in the form of sound files.

Step #3

During the academic year 2008-09, Gallery ninjas Arline Wolfe and Carole Mathey have been cataloging and properly housing the textiles.

Step #4 and beyond

The textiles will be presented in an exhibition at the Gallery in the fall of 2009.  In the meantime, faculty and students can use the digital collection as a starting point to conduct their research.  Writing assignments will be designed to include short essays for exhibition text panels and as longer research papers.  From here on, Obiora Udechukwu in Fine Arts will be our primary source of expertise.

April 9 – 22, 2009

Thursday, April 9 at 7:00 p.m.
Artist’s lecture by David Beck, juror
Opening reception to follow

For this year’s juried exhibition, students were asked to create up to four works that explored the concept of be(com)ing.

David Beck teaches digital art at Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, and has shown his work extensively throughout the United States.  His artwork is featured in the book GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (John & Levi, 2006), the first volume entirely dedicated to game art.

The department of fine arts presents the student exhibitions with assistance from the Jeanne Scribner Cashin Endowment Fund and the gallery’s Barnes Endowment Fund.

Carole Mathey, Amy Hauber, and Cathy Tedford attended the third Pictoplasma conference in Berlin last week–three full days of artists’ lectures, videos, exhibitions, and character walks.  We’ll have pictures and other responses soon.

CT met with photographer Rachel Sussman in Brooklyn yesterday.  Rachel is working on a project to document The Oldest Living Things in the World (OLTW).  She’s got a blog for OLTW, describing the sites she has visited in Japan, Greenland, Chile, US, etc.  I’ve invited her to show her photographs in an upcoming exhibition called Deep Looking: Cultural Landscapes in Photography and New Media (working title) and hope/plan to purchase one of her photographs for SLU’s Johnson Hall of Science.  Rachel works closely with biologists and archeologists to identify and document various sites around the world.  Her Web site doesn’t do full justice to the photographs themselves, which are stunning as visual objects. This image documents a well-known jomon sugi japanese cedar #0507 02 (7,000 years old, yaku shima, japan)

In reading about Google’s current effort to digitize LIFE Magazine’s 10,000,000 photographs, I’ve wondered if we really need so many online resources like this.  Ten million photographs from LIFE’s archive?  How about five million?  How about one million?

I’ve recently seen several CONTENTdm institutional users featuring newspapers and journals numbering anywhere from 30,000 images/pages to 90,000 images/pages.  Goodness.

Holland Cotter writes in his New York Times article Why University Museums Matter (02.19.09) that “at least one good idea seems to be gaining ground. In a bleak economy, when our big public museums threaten to sink under budget-busting excesses, the university museum offers a model for small, intensely researched, collection-based, convention-challenging exhibitions that could get museums through a bumpy present and carry them, lighter and brighter, into the future.”

02.24.09 – Tuesday at 7:00 p.m.
03.03.09 – Tuesday at 4:30 p.m.
Screenings in the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery

In 1962, James Joseph Dresnok, a U.S. soldier sent to guard the peace in South Korea, deserted his unit, walked across the most heavily fortified area on earth, and defected to the Cold War enemy, the communist state of North Korea.  He then simply disappeared from the face of the known world.  Dresnok became a coveted star of the North Korean propaganda machine and found fame acting in films, typecast as an evil American.  Dresnok has now lived in North Korea twice as long as he did in America and uses Korean as his daily language.  He has three sons from two wives.  At one time, there were four Americans living in North Korea.  Today, just one remains.  Now, after 45 years, the story of Comrade Joe, the last American defector in North Korea, is told in the film Crossing the Line.

Crossing the Line will be screened at St. Lawrence University in conjunction with the exhibition North Korean Images at Utopia’s Edge, on display at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery until March 12, 2009.  The prints in the exhibition are on loan from Nicholas Bonner, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who has been traveling to North Korea for the past 15 years.

Recent multimedia work by SLU professor Christopher Watts opens February 16, 2009.  Check the Gallery’s Web site for more information about the exhibition.  Chris will present a performance using live interactive electronics, foregrounding process while asking the listener to think about the relationship between person and machine.  “Jack of all Trades” will premier in the Gallery at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, March 9, 2009.

The recent Coburn Amendment passed yesterday in the Senate by a 3:1 margin.  When an amendment like this passes, how do we teach students to value the arts in a liberal arts university?

The language of the amendment, (Amendment No. 175, as filed) is, “None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas.”

See AAM President Ford Bell’s letter to Harry Reid.  (Scroll down.)

This past week, Brandeis announced its intention to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its entire collection of art objects and artifacts.  The American Association of Museums, the College Art Association, and the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries have responded with statements protesting this decision.  You can also read more at the Culture Grrl blog.

Across the nation, Americans are saving newspapers, posters, buttons, and bumper stickers to commemorate the historic election and inauguration of Barack Obama, America’s first African American president. Anne-Imelda M. Radice, Director of the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), encourages citizen-collectors to make sure that their presidential inauguration collections will be preserved long into the future.

“The election day newspaper – cared for properly — will still be there years from now to remind us and future generations of this singular moment in American history,” Radice said. “This is a great time to raise awareness of the need to protect election and inauguration-related items from common threats such as high temperature, humidity, and light exposure.”

More information is here.

Amy Hauber (FA) created a great blog about blogging.  Check it out!

Students in Professor Kasarian Dane’s class install COLOUR.

IM-super-HO, Techfest was a little flat this year.  I wish I had seen more faculty examples of digital projects.  I was particularly impressed with Amy Hauber’s Digital Culture class blog (FA) and Marilyn Mayer’s class blog (BIO).  I was particularly impressed with so much information contained within each, and what a fantastic portfolio of/from/by each course.  MM’s blog link to come!!

As part of SLU’s Techfest 2009, Bart Harloe (University Librarian), Rhonda Courtney (Library Assistant), and Cathy Tedford (Gallery Director) will present a session on What’s Fair with Digital Images?  A list of references is available on SLU’s Digital Collections Web site.

Specific images from the Gallery’s CONTENTdm Web site will be presented, including:

• Wall Street, New York photograph by Paul Strand
• Altar inside the Norbulingka, Tibetan Buddhist Monastery photograph by Alison Wright
• My Squad, Quang Tri Province photograph by Patrick T. Stearns
• FOX News sticker by leeharveyinc.com

A selection of 63 Vietnam War-era photographs from the United States and Vietnam that are part of the University’s Permanent Collection will also be presented, as well as a larger selection of 211 photographs from the Permanent Collection.

Info. available on the  RFBAG gallery web site.

Our new CONTENTdm digital image collection is now live with a link on the Gallery’s Web site.  We’re still working out some details, deciding whether to present individual images one at a time (which makes it difficult to put the images in any sort of chronological order as we would like), or to create a “compound object” (which looks awkward in CONTENTdm, because it’s difficult to find the tiny link to the collection itself).  Plus, using the former option, the items in each collection include alot of repetitive metadata which becomes very text-heavy, to the point where the text overwhelms the images.  Perhaps CONTENTdm version 5 will address this issue.

The Richard F. Brush Art Gallery’s Web site now has a live link to our blog.  Thanks, Carole.

Carole and I are working on a new CONTENTdm collection that will document our rotating exhibitions, educational programs, and projects related to SLU’s Permanent Collection.  We’ll have a link on the Gallery’s Web site soon.

From the NY Times, Friday, November 28 article “Tag That Image: Visual Bookmarking Sites Worth Visiting.”

Check it out.

David will be speaking on November 19, at 7:00 p.m. in Griffiths 123.  This guy is brilliant.  Mark your calendars now, and more info about the author/illustrator and lecture will be provided in the next few days.  David says this will be GYWO’s post-election post-mortem.

Check out his Web site and most recent publication Get Your War on, The Definitive Guide to the War on Terror, 2001-2008.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.  We ask oursleves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?”  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.  There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.  We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Chris Sperandio of the Kartoon Kings had to do some fancy footwork to get out of the North Country today.

Here is Noli Chew at the beginning of the project.

Scores of SLU students from Jenny MacGregor and Relani Prudhomme’s FYP Sprague College and Kasarian Dane’s painting class participated in a community-based site-specific installation using designs painted by the Kartoon Kings based on the work of Canton-born Frederic Femington,  We also had the pleasure of working with Dianne Drayse-Alonso’s students from Ogdensburg Free Academy and Ray Whalen’s students from Parishville Central School.

We hope you can all come to the lecture and reception to follow.

Thanks to Amy Hauber, assistant professor in the Fine Arts department, for creating our new Richard F. Brush Art Gallery blog.  This is going to change everything!

What an amazing weekend with the artists from the Combat Paper Project. To find out more about the visiting artists who were here for the past three days, visit the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery website for background information, the Combat Paper Project at Green Door Studio (Burlington), and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Here are some pictures from Amy Hauber:

Welcome to the new Richard F. Brush Art Gallery blog, where you can learn about rotating exhibitions, educational programs, and the University’s Permanent Collection.

Thank you for visiting!