Greil Marcus - November 5th, 7 PM, Lisser Theatre

Jay Defeo and All That Jazz

Noted author and cultural critic Greil Marcus will discuss the work of Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo (1929-1989). DeFeo was part of a vibrant community of avant-garde artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s, and was a faculty member at Mills College in the 1980s. Although best known for her monumental painting The Rose, DeFeo worked in a wide range of media and produced an astoundingly diverse and compelling body of work over four decades. Her unconventional approach to materials and her intensive, physical method make her a unique figure in postwar American art.

Greil Marcus is a contributor to the exhibition catalogue accompanyingJay DeFeo: A Retrospective, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from November 3, 2012 to February 3, 2013. He is the author ofLipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, The Dustbin of History, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n Roll Music, The Manchurian Candidate: BFI Film Classics, The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, and most recently, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years. With Werner Sollors, Marcus is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published by Harvard in 2009. He lives in Oakland, CA.

Presented by the Jane Green Endowment for Studies in Art History and Criticism.

Michael Robinson - October 30th, 7 PM, Danforth Hall

The Mills College Art Lecture Series continues with experimental filmmaker Michael Robinson!

Tuesday, October 30th, 7 PM
Danforth Lecture Hall
Mills College

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Michael Robinson is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and the dangers of mediated experience. Cultivating new resonances between seemingly disparate elements, his collaged films ride the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria. He was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000's by Film Comment magazine and featured as one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” by Cinema Scope magazine.

Interested in seeing Mr. Robinson's work? Check out his wonderful website:
http://poisonberries.net/

John Chiara - October 10th, 7 PM, Danforth Hall

Note: The venue for the John Chiara lecture is in Danforth Lecture Hall rather than Littlefield. Apologies for the previous error.

Interested in learning more about upcoming speaker John Chiara? Check out his page at the Haines Gallery website:
http://www.hainesgallery.com/artists/Chiara_John/Chiara_01.html
As well as this great documentary on his process produced by KQED in 2006.

www.lightdark.com

Abelardo Morell - September 19th, 7 PM, Danforth Hall

Amazing photographer Abelardo Morell is speaking at Mills this Wednesday at 7 PM in Danforth Hall. If you don't know his work, check out his website, the trailer to his documentary Shadow of the House, and this great clip about his Fort Point piece as a part of International Orange: the Golden Gate Bridge at 75.

www.abelardomorell.net

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qyJ01H4Y-4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzbYrrHHeMI

Join the event on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/events/350331738387959/

September 13th - Desirée Holman, 7 PM, Lisser Theatre

CCA professor and multimedia artist Desirée Holman will be starting off the series this Thursday, September 13th.
Desirée Holman is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist. Holman manipulates figurative props and costumes in role-playing scenarios to ask what games of make-believe can tell us about our behaviors in the ‘real’ world. Holman was awarded the 2008 San Francisco Modern Museum of Art SECA award and a 2007 Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. In 2011, her second solo museum exhibition opened in the Berkeley Art Museum’s MATRIX program.


http://www.desireeholman.com/
http://www.inthemake.net/Desiree-Holman

Lectures are always free and open to the public. Parking is free at Mills and refreshments will be served afterwards. For directions please visit http://www.mills.edu/directions/

Lecture Series 2012-2013 Announced

The time has finally arrived for the Mills College Art Lecture Series, 2012-2013!

If you are a part of our mailing list, you own copy of our poster will be arriving in the mail soon.

But for the rest of us, here are samples of the poster and the details for our upcoming lectures.

 

September 13    Desirée Holman

Lisser Theater    
Desirée Holman is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist. Holman manipulates figurative props and costumes in role-playing scenarios to ask what games of make-believe can tell us about our behaviors in the ‘real’ world. Holman was awarded the 2008 San Francisco Modern Museum of Art SECA award and a 2007 Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. In 2011, her second solo museum exhibition opened in the Berkeley Art Museum’s MATRIX program.

September 19   Abelardo Morell     
Danforth Lecture Hall
Best known for installing and photographing camera obscuras, Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14. He has received a number of awards and grants, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 1994. Among his many books are a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and a collaboration with the designer Ted Muehling and neurologist Oliver Sacks. A retrospective of his work organized jointly by the Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty, and The High Museum in Atlanta will be on view starting in the summer of 2013.

October 10    John Chiara
Danforth Lecture Hall 
Chiara photographs cityscapes in a process that is part photography, part event and part sculpture – an undertaking in apparatus and patience.  Many times this process involves composing pictures from the inside of a large hand-built camera mounted on a flatbed trailer to produce large scale, one-of-a-kind, positive exposures. A native Californian who lives and works in San Francisco, Chiara has produced work focused on Bay Area landmarks, including Lands End, Lime Point, and Point Bonita.

October  30    Michael Robinson
Danforth Lecture Hall
Michael Robinson is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and the dangers of mediated experience.  Cultivating new resonances between seemingly disparate elements, his collaged films ride the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria. He was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000's by Film Comment magazine and featured as one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” by Cinema Scope magazine.

November 5    Greil Marcus
Jay DeFeo and all that Jazz
Lisser Theatre     
Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History, Mystery Train, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, The Old, Weird America, and most recently The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.  With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published by Harvard University Press in 2009.  He lives in Oakland.

November 14    Melissa E. Feldman
Danforth Lecture Hall    
Melissa E. Feldman is an independent curator and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and frieze. Feldman is the guest curator of the exhibition Dance Rehearsal: Karen Klimnik's World of Ballet and Theater at the Mills College Art Museum. Recent projects include the traveling exhibition Afterglow: Rethinking California Light and Space Art, The Life and Times of Sarah McEneaney at Mills College Art Museum, and Sampler: Textiles at Creative Growth at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland.


February 6    Gay Outlaw
Danforth Lecture Hall 
Gay Outlaw draws upon materials that range from industrial to domestic and familiar to make work with a strong sense of pattern and play. Her experience as pastry chef and photographer inform her sculpture, including a 34-foot wall of fruitcakes installed in Yerba Buena gardens. A recipient of the SECA award in 1999, Outlaw has had recent solo exhibitions at the Sacramento Center for Contemporary Art, Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, and Napa's di Rosa Preserve.


February 20   Julio Cesar Morales
Danforth Lecture Hall    
Julio Cesar Morales is an artist, educator, and curator. He utilizes a range of media including photography, video, and printed and digital media to make conceptual projects that address the productive friction that occurs in trans-cultural territories. Morales' work consistently explores issues of labor, memory, surveillance technologies and identity strategies. He teaches and creates art in a variety of settings, from juvenile halls and probation offices to museums, art colleges, and alternative non-profit institutions.


March 6    Jennie Ottinger 
Danforth Lecture Hall   
Jennie Ottinger is a painter who was raised in Massachusetts and currently lives in San Francisco, CA. Ottinger earned her BFA from California College of the Arts and her MFA from Mills College. She recently had a solo exhibition at Johansson Projects entitled What To Do With Your Orphan: A Manual and has had work at the NADA Art Fair in Miami, Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, Adobe Books and Volta NY Art Fair, as well as galleries in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles.


Lectures made possible with generous support from the Herringer Family Foundation, Jane Green Endowment for Studies in Art History and Criticism, and the LEF Foundation.

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Mills College Art Lecture Archive (Sep 2010 - Oct 2011)

Monday, October 3, 2011

Mills College Art Lecture Series 2011-2012

Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613
510.430.2164
mcam.mills.edu

Museum Hours:
Tuesday-Sunday 11 am - 4 pm
Wednesday 11 am - 7:30 pm
Closed Monday
Admission is Free

Lecture Information:
All lectures take place at 7:00 pm
in Danforth Hall in Aron Art Center
unless stated otherwise.
Lectures are free and open to the public.

For more information visit
mcam.mills.edu
millslectureseries.blogspot.edu
For directions call 510.430.3250


Martha Wilson ** Oct 26
Martha Wilson: Staging the Self (Transformations, Invasions and Pushing Boundaries)
Martha Wilson will trace her work as a performance artist, activist, and the founder and ongoing Director of Franklin Furnace. She will begin in 1971 with her early “body art” in Nova Scotia, Canada, followed by her move to New York in 1974, where she continued to work as an artist. In 1976 she founded Franklin Furnace, the famous New York-based alternative art space that has for 35 years championed temporal art: artists’ books, installations, and performance art.
Lecture will be held in Lisser Theatre.

Camille Utterback *** Nov 9
Camille Utterback creates spaces for kinesthetic discovery and play using video tracking software or other sensors to react and respond to human movement and gesture. In her installation Text Rain (1999), participants use their bodies to catch and play with projected lines of a poem. In her External Measures series (2001–2007) Utterback explores the possibilities of interactive painting systems. She will also discuss her large-scale public commissions, such as Aurora Organ (2009), City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota and her recently completed commission for the Sacramento Airport. Utterback’s extensive exhibit history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002).

Leslie Shows * Nov 16
Leslie Shows reinvigorates the practice of landscape painting with large, materially rich pieces that conflate a vast continuum of geological and human change. Through broad gestures and intricate details, she articulates a world in which we are but fleeting specks. She has won numerous awards including an Artadia Award; Eureka Fellowship, Fleishhacker Foundation; SECA Art Award, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tournesol Award, Headlands Center for the Arts; and the Cadogan Award. Her work has been exhibited widely including four solo shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco.

Frances Stark Dec 7
Frances Stark is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer who completed her MFA at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA and is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Through performance, writing, and visual art, Stark addresses the conditions of creative labor, producing candid and affecting work about the nature of artistic practice and the corresponding yet integral banality of the everyday. She has had numerous national and international exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Portikus, Frankfurt; Secession, Vienna; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Kunstverein, Munich.
Presented in conjunction with Frances Stark: The whole of all of the parts as well as the parts of all the parts, on view at the Mills College Art Museum September 15 to December 11, 2011

Trevor Paglen * Jan 25
Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. His work has been widely exhibited from the Tate Modern to the Istanbul Biennial 2009, as well as published in The New York Times, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Artforum. Paglen has received grants and awards from the Smithsonian, Art Matters, Artadia, the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, and the Aperture Foundation. He holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley, an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley. In 2011-2012, Paglen is an artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and at MIT, Cambridge.

Jennifer Steinkamp *** Feb 8
Jennifer Steinkamp is a Los Angeles-based artist who uses computer animation and new media to create projection installations that explore architectural space, motion, and phenomenological perception. Her digitally animated works show the interplay between actual and illusionistic space. Steinkamp’s recent projects and exhibitions include Five in Istanbul at the Borusan Muzik Evi in Istanbul, Turkey; Madame Curie at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and set design for Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung at the New York City Opera. In November 2011, she will participate in Prospect New Orleans, Louisiana.

Apsara DiQuinzio * Feb 15
Apsara DiQuinzio is currently assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she has organized solo exhibitions with Felix Schramm, Paul Sietsema, Mai-Thu Perret, Vincent Fecteau, and R. H. Quaytman. She organized the 2008 SECA Art Award Exhibition, as well as the forthcoming 2010 iteration, and Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart. Formerly she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art where she organized the exhibitions Burgeoning Geometries: Abstract Constructions and Skin Is a Language. In 2010 she received a curatorial research fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. DiQuinzio has an M.A. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute Chicago (2001), and a B.A., cum laude, from Colgate University (1998).

Laurel Nakadate * Mar 14
Laurel Nakadate is a New York-based photographer, video artist and filmmaker. Her first feature film, Stay the Same Never Change (2009), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was featured in New Directors/New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. Her second feature film, The Wolfe Knife, premiered at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival and was nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award and Independent Spirit Award. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and The Reina Sofia, Madrid; and her 2011 ten-year survey exhibition Only the Lonely was on held at MoMA P.S.1.

Lectures made possible with the generous support from the:
*Herringer Family Foundation
**Jane Green Endowment for Studies in Art History and Criticism
***LEF Foundation

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Walking Backwards Forward, An Exhibition of New Work By Mills College Graduate Students

Exhibition Dates:
May 1–29, 2011

Opening Reception:
Sat, April 30, 6:00-8:00 pm

Panel Discussion:
Sat, May 7, 5:00-7:00 pm


Oakland, CA—March 24, 2011. The Mills College Art Museum is proud to present Walking Backwards Forward, the thesis exhibition for the 2011 Master of Fine Arts degree recipients. The exhibition showcases works by a promising group of emerging artists created during their graduate program in the Mills College MFA studio program. The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Hanor, Director of the Mills College Art Museum.

Walking Backwards Forward features work by Alexa Alexander, Sholeh Asgary, Sohyung Choi, Hilary Galián, Sarah Hirneisen, Amy M. Ho, Emily Hoyt, David Johnson, Danielle Lawrence, Chelsea Pegram, David Sleeth and Alexander Treu.

According to Hanor, “Walking Backwards Forwards demonstrates not only the high quality of the work produced by the Mills MFA candidates, but also their dedication to continually pushing themselves to stretch and test their artistic capabilities.”

David Sleeth explores his interests in archeology through experimentation with materiality and form. His aim is to manipulate the perceived context of objects allowing the viewer to re-imagine their understanding of the world around them and their place within it. Using the metaphor of a knot, Sarah Hirneisen’s sculptures explore heritage, human relationships, and memory, creating logical connections between complicated systems.

In a climate of porous borders, Hilary Galián paints real and unreal places to investigate the condition of connectedness and belonging. David Johnson wants you to know that the world is made up of all sorts of ordinary things, but most importantly, it is made up of the interactions between these things. Through various time-based methods, he examines these interactions in order to better grasp the sum and the parts of the past, present and future. Sholeh Asgary is interested in exploring how memories are a fusion of fact and subjective filter. Through memory, the abstract and representational aspects of our experiences become intertwined, and in her mixed media works, she attempts a literal representation of this phenomenon.

Danielle Lawrence playfully investigates the perception of both formal and psychological space within traditional and hybrid offerings of representation. The resulting videos, paintings and sculptures explore illusions of security in our ever-changing social and environmental landscapes. Emily Hoyt questions how we can see the world fully when our emotional perspective is constantly changing. She creates installations using light, shadow, and linear forms as a way to frame the surroundings, underscoring our limited ability to grasp them in their entirety. Through her sculptural work, Chelsea Pegram explores a visceral mode of perception in which line and space are sensed and tactilely navigated as a way to reconsider our methods of making meaning.

Re-appropriating found photography, Alexa Alexander investigates how photographs are viewed and remembered. By physically dissecting and fragmenting photographs, she redirects the viewer’s focus to the act of looking while emphasizing recollection. Amy M. Ho builds video and spatial installation works that bring attention to the duality of our existence as both physical and psychological beings.

Every consumer product has a story about its origin, a story that reveals an alternative history of our lives. Through mixed media installations, Alexander Treu demonstrates his obsession with the food industry’s manipulation of our minds and bodies. Sohyung Choi’s large-scale, multimedia installation works explore self and cultural identity.


Special Events (please visit our website for updated details):

Sat, April 30, 6:00-8:00 pm
Art Museum
Opening Reception for Walking Backwards Forward

Sat, May 7, 5:00-7:00 pm
Art Museum
Panel Discussion with the MFA Artists moderated by Glen Helfand

Stephanie Syjuco Lecture 4/6

Wednesday, April 6th 7:00pm - 8:00pm, Danforth Lecture HallSTEPHANIE SYJUCO's recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; presenting a parasitic art counterfeiting event, "COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone" for Frieze Projects, London (2009); and “Shadowshop,” an alternative vending outlet embedded at SFMOMA exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work (2010).www.stephaniesyjuco.com

Friday, March 18, 2011

Sharon Lockhart Lecture 3/31

Thursday March 31st @ 7:00 pm Mills College, Fine Arts Annex 106

Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart creates films and photographs that are at once rigorously formal and deeply humanistic, meticulously observing the details of everyday life while also exploring the limits and intersections between the two mediums. Her work has been exhibited at major museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Vienna Secession. Her project Lunch Break, 2008, is currently the subject of a solo show at Gio Marconi in Milan and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in October 2011. Sharon teaches undergraduate photography and is a member of the MFA Core Faculty at the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles.

This lecture has been generously founded by the LEF foundation.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Bill Brown Lecture 3/16

The Mills College Art Lecture Series presents Bill Brown
Wednesday March 16, 2011 at 7:00 pm,
Danforth Lecture Hall in the Aron Art Center
Lecture made possible by the Herringer Family Foundation

Bill Brown is a filmmaker from the “Paris of the Plains,” Lubbock, Texas. He has made several short experimental documentaries about the dusty corners of the North American landscape. His work has screened at museums and festivals around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Rotterdam, and Sundance. Along with Sabine Gruffat, he has created Bike Box, a roving, mobile media bicycle library that allows cyclists to explore the urban soundscape.

All lectures are free and open to the public

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Marie Watt Lecture

Mills College Art Lecture Series presents Marie Watt
February 23, 2011 7:00 pm
Danforth Lecture Hall in the Aron Art Center
Lecture made possible by the Herringer Family Foundation

Marie Watt is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in Seattle in 1967 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her approach to art-making is shaped by the proto- Feminism of Iroquois matrilineal custom, a discourse on social practice, as well as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Like Jasper Johns, she is interested in "things that the mind already knows." Unlike the Pop artists, she use a vocabulary of natural materials (stone, cornhusks, wool, cedar) and forms (blankets, pillows, bridges) that are universal to human experience (though not uniquely American) and noncommercial in character.

All lectures are free & open to the public

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Paul Kos Lecture Wednesday 11/17/10 @ 7:00

Mills College Art Lecture Series presents Paul Kos

Wednesday November 17, 2010 at 7:00 pm,

Danforth Lecture Hall in the Aron Art Center
Lecture made possible by the Herringer Family Foundation

Since the early 1970’s Paul Kos’s work has challenged conventions of art media and subject matter. For a global audience he staged new possibilities for artistic treatments of time, space and cultural systems.

Kos, one of the founders of the Bay Area conceptual movement, has exhibited internationally and has work represented in major museum collections including New York’s MoMA, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, SFMoMA, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Lectures are free and open to the public

Friday, October 15, 2010

Jim Campbell Lecture Wednesday 10/27/10 @ 7pm

Mills College Art Lecture Series presents Jim Campbell
Wednesday October 27, 2010 at 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall in the
Aron Art Center
Lecture made possible by the Herringer Family Foundation

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received 2 Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978. His work has been shown internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The International Center for Photography, New York, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo. His electronic art work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum and the University Art Museum at Berkeley. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the United States in Phoenix, Arizona, and is currently working on large scale permanent public artworks at the San Diego Airport, and a collaborative work with Werner Klotz at The New San Francisco Central Subway, Union Square Market St. Station. He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY. He has received many grants and awards including a Rockefeller Grant in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing.

Lectures are free and open to the public

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Tom Marioni Lecture Wednesday 10/6/10 @ 7:00

Please join us for Tom Marioni's Lecture on 10.06.2010 @ 7:00 pm in the Danforth Lecture Hall

Tom Marioni pioneered the use of social situations as art and explored performance as sculptural actions using sound, drawing, photography, and installation. Marioni was born in 1937 in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended the Cincinnati Art Academy, and in 1959 moved to San Francisco, where he still lives. His first sound work, One Second Sculpture, 1969, was celebrated in the 2005 Lyon Biennial as presaging the work of many artists today who use sound and duration as subjects. His first museum show was in 1970 at the Oakland Museum of California. Titled “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art,” it was an early example of social activity as art.