Category Archive

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.

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.

I love the Internet.  Check this out.

a few vinyl toys

Dianne Drayse-Alonso brought some students from Ogdensburg Free Academy at the tail end of the spring semester to see some of the toys from the SLU Permanent Collection.  The students were making plushes and thinking about how artists view the relation between commercial and fine art.

and gloomy bear

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.

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.”

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.