WWNY-7, based in Watertown, NY, recently ran a short story on the Cellblock Visions currently on display in the gallery.
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A group of St. Lawrence University students, faculty, and staff have organized a town hall meeting entitled “How do we talk about prisons in New York State?” for Thursday, April 3, at 7:00 p.m. in the Noble Center Room 109.
Savannah Crowley ’14 and Allison Paludi ’14, both global studies majors and members of Amnesty International, will introduce a panel comprised of Natasha Haverty, journalist and producer of North Country Public Radio’s Prison Time Media Project; Rev. David Van Epps, retired state chaplain at the Ogdensburg Correctional Facility; and Lauren Melodia, campaign organizer for Milk Not Jails. Dr. Mary Jane Smith, associate professor of history, will moderate the discussion with time set aside for community members’ comments and questions.
Crowley and Paludi note that “the purpose of this event is to facilitate a community dialogue about prisons in New York State that are so economically, politically and socially important to the North Country. In consideration of prisons’ role in our society and their effects on our communities, it is vital we add local voices to a larger political conversation.”
Visitors are also encouraged to view art and prison exhibitions at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery that will be on display in the same building through April 12, 2014: Cellblock Visions: Set Free in the Penitentiary; Photo Requests from Solitary; Milk Not Jails, and drawings by former inmate turned prison reform activist Five Mualimm-ak.
For more information, contact Savannah Crowley at smcrow10@stlawu.edu, Mary Jane Smith at msm1@stlawu.edu, or Catherine Tedford at ctedford@stlawu.edu.
In coordination with the Brush Gallery and other programs on campus, SLU’s Global Studies department is holding a symposium on prison reform.
The symposium will include several events dedicated to raising awareness and facilitating conversation between North Country students, faculty, and community members on issues such as the prison industrial complex, solitary confinement, and prison reform efforts across the United States. Through these events, we hope to foster a dialogue about northern New York’s role in these larger processes, which are often missing from mainstream news coverage.
The first event is a lecture by prison reform and social justice activist Five Omar Mualimm-ak at 7:00 p.m., in Griffiths 123. Mualimm-ak’s drawings are featured as part of the Brush Gallery’s current exhibitions, which address issues of incarceration in New York State and the nation.
The symposium’s events are sponsored by SLU Amnesty International, the African American Studies Department, SAGA (Sexuality and Gender Activists), the Weave, the Brush Gallery, and North Country Public Radio’s Prison Time project.
Last week, Drew Matott and Margaret Mahan from Peace Paper were on campus to conduct Panty Pulping workshops in papermaking and printmaking. Drew and Margaret have been on campus before to for workshops and to make paper, but this was the first time that panties have been pulped on campus!
As they describe the project, “Panty Pulping workshops bring people together to share their strengths and joy through the transformation of their most intimate garments into paper. The concept of creating paper from clothing with personal significance reaches a new level as participants of all ages snip, beat, and reform their underwear together. When we pulp our underwear, we make a statement that violence will not be tolerated. We stand together in solidarity for survivors, for the global advancement of women, and for creative revolutions.”
This week-long, multi-layered event brought awareness of sexual assault to a wide audience through active participation and hands-on learning. The content is social activism through the vehicle of art-making.
This morning, NCPR aired a story by Zach Hirsch which describes the Panty Pulping project: Margaret and Drew interviewed by Zach Hirsch, NCPR.
And more photographs are available on the gallery’s flickr site.
Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and also the first day of the spring semester here at St. Lawrence.
Signs Readied for Washington March, August 27, 1963
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. This photograph was taken on August 27 as protesters prepared for the march. The gallery recently acquired a group of press photographs related to the civil rights movement in the US. We are working on digitizing these photographs, which will be studied this semester in Mary Jane Smith’s History 273 class, “The History of the Civil Rights Movement.”
A sacred song service called “Let Freedom Sing” will be held on Monday, January 21, at 5 p.m. in Gunnison Memorial Chapel for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday. The service will include a reflection by President William L. Fox and is open to the public.
SLU is celebrating reunion weekend, and we’ve just learned about interesting new projects that two alumni are working on.
In the first, Alexey Timbul (who went by the last name Boulokhov while at SLU and graduated in 2003), is using Kickstarter to fund his performance art project, in which he will “perform simple life routines, gestures and expressions in memoriam of the queer victims of the Nazi persecution. This performance art project will consist of naming, numbering, dedication, doing and documenting of 175 simple actions, an allusion to the infamous Paragraph 175 which criminalized homosexuality.”
At this time, there are three days left for the project to find funding — he has reached 70% of his goal! — and we hope he finds the support necessary for this undertaking.
The second project also involves “performance,” but of an entirely different sort. Alex Duane graduated this year and participated in both senior exhibitions at the gallery this semester. With Andrew Skaggs and Matthew Didisheim (also SLU alumni), Alex will be bicycling across the country, starting in Vermont and heading east through the northern part of the US and southern Ontario and then into British Columbia before heading south into Washington and down the Pacific coast. It looks like the final destination is somewhere in northern California.
The group will be keeping a blog at bicycletraverse.wordpress.com/. Alex is a thoughtful and engaging writer, and I’m looking forward to his posts.
On Sunday, May 20, cartoonist Garry Trudeau will speak to SLU’s class of 2012 and also receive an honorary degree. Trudeau grew up in Saranac Lake and holds a bachelor’s degree and MFA in graphic design from Yale University. He launched the “Doonesbury” comic strip in 1970, and it now appears in nearly 1,500 newspapers in the United States and abroad, distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. In 1975, Trudeau became the first comic-strip artist to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Since then, he’s been a finalist three times, including this year for his strips concerning the war in Iraq.
SLU’s permanent collection includes a drawing from Doonesbury, a gift from Universal Press Syndicate.
Garry Trudeau
Doonesbury, July 22, 1972
Ink on paper
Gift of Universal Press Syndicate
SLU X.300
Hatch Kingdom | Stickerkitty
International Sticker Exhibition
Fresh Paint – Peint Frais
Edition III
Hatch Kingdom, the only sticker museum in the world, has collaborated with Catherine Tedford, a.k.a. Stickerkitty, to present an exhibition of street art stickers and photographs from Berlin and New York City, with additional pieces from cities across Europe and North America. As part of a larger exhibition entitled Edition III, which includes work by contemporary muralists, graffiti artists, photographers, and others, the international sticker exhibition will be on display at Fresh Paint Gallery, Montréal, Québec, from December 2, 2011, through January 29, 2011.
Founded by Oliver Baudach in 2008, Hatch Kingdom began as a small gallery space in Berlin’s alternative Friedrichsain district to serve as a platform for stickers, sticker artists, skateboard fans, and collectors. An expanded Hatch HQ is now located in central Mitte, with two gallery spaces devoted to Oli’s ever-growing sticker collection, now numbering well over 25,000 stickers, and one gallery for rotating exhibitions by young urban street artists.
Catherine directs St. Lawrence University’s art gallery in Canton, NY, and has been actively collecting stickers since 2003, having now collected over 6,000 original stickers by hand, primarily from Berlin and NYC, with stickers also from Hamburg, Munich, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cambridge (MA), Ottawa, Toronto, Amsterdam, Budapest, and other cities in western and central Europe. Part of the collection is being digitized and can be found at SLU’s gallery Web site. Catherine has presented papers at academic conferences for the College Art Association, the Visual Resources Association, and the International Arts in Society; in 2012, she will present a paper entitled “WTF. It’s Only a Sticker” at the annual CAA conference in Los Angeles. Check her Stickerkitty blog for more information.
The exhibition at Fresh Paint also includes six original drawings and collages from “Oversized and Underpriced,” a project initiated by Oliver Baudach in which artworks on oversized sticker printouts are sold at low prices with proceeds to benefit Skateistan, a skateboarding school in Kabul, Afghanistan, for young boys and girls.
In addition to art, music, and tagging stickers, political stickers in the exhibition from Germany and the U.S. focus on anti-authority, anti-capitalism, post-9/11 surveillance measures, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 US Presidential election, the environment, oil consumption, and the economy. Examples of these were included in a recent gallery exhibition at St. Lawrence in 2010, which was based in part on a summer research grant from the Center for International and Intercultural Studies in which three students and an alumnus traveled to Berlin and Munich to study street art.
Cathy is showing part of her sticker collection, including additional stickers from the Hatch Kingdom, in Montréal at an amazing gallery (Fresh Paint/Peint Frais) that focuses on street art, graffiti, and other urban endeavors. More details to come, but I thought I should post some photographs of the installation.
In conjunction with the Re-framing Terrorism exhibition, artist Wafaa Bilal will give a lecture in Griffiths 123 on Thursday, October 6, at 7:00 p.m.
More information about Bilal can be found at wafaabilal.com.