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.

Mills College Art Lecture Archive (Jan - Aug 2010)

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Mills Art Lecture Series 2010-2011

Binh Danh; September 8, 2010, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall
Misha Glouberman; September 29, 2010, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall
Tom Marioni; October 6, 2010, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall
Kathryn Spence; October 13, 2010, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall
Jim Campbell; October 27, 2010, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall
Paul Koss; November 17, 2010, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall
Laerke Laurta; January 19, 2011, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall
Marie Watt; February 23, 2011, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall
Bill Brown; March 16, 2011, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Between You and ME, Mills College MFA Thesis Exhibition 2010

BETWEEN YOU AND ME

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 1, 2010, 6-9 pm

Exhibition Dates: Sunday, May 2 to Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Mills College Art Museum is proud to present Between You and Me, the thesis exhibition for the 2010 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.

Between You and Me features work by Nic Buron, Joey Castor, Chris Fraser, Dana Hemenway, Kija Lucas, Bobby Lukas, Monica Lundy, Kate Stirr, Adam Vermeire and Doug G. Williams.

Driven by the desire to cultivate a sense of wonder, Kate Stirr creates otherworldly creatures, portrayed through drawings, video, and as sculpture, which explore the mysterious place between nature and artifice. Chris Fraser creates situations that address the links between light, pictures and experience. His installations isolate and idealize everyday occurrences: an open door, a curtain, the way the sunlight projects through the branches of a tree.

Nic Buron uses photography to examine the complexities of "place" and "placelessness,” focusing on Treasure Island, a location with a long history of transformation. Alternately, Bobby Lukas' sculptural work provides an avenue for voluntary simplicity and quiet romance, creating a contrast to the excesses of everyday
life.

Dana Hemenway is interested in how we understand and frame objects and experiences. She is fascinated with forms of aesthetic display. The resulting work ranges from video to sculpture to site-specific installation.

Kija Lucas uses the home environment as a setting to investigate the personal fairytale, stories that we tell in order to explain who we are. Her large-scale photographs are recreations of seemingly inconsequential moments that have changed the course of a
single lifetime or impacted several generations. With a similar interest in autobiography, Adam Vermeire explores how race continues to impact his life, searching for answers that cannot be found.

Joey Castor addresses various aspects of physical labor, focusing on how the repetitive, meditative and physical motions affect the body and mind. Monica Lundy's investigations of historical California criminals manifest in a series of paintings and sculpture that explore identity perception in relation to systems of social classification.

Doug G. Williams investigates the psychology of perception and persuasion in videos and interactive installations that are at once uncanny, humorous, and intimate.

The Mills College Art Museum, founded in 1925, is a dynamic center for art that focuses on the creative work of women as artists and curators. The Museum strives to engage and inspire the diverse and distinctive cultures of the Bay Area by presenting innovative exhibitions by emerging and established national and international artists. Exhibitions are designed to challenge and invite reflection upon the profound complexities of contemporary culture.

Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Boulevard
Oakland, CA 94613

510.430.2164

http://www.mills.edu/museum

Museum Hours:
Tuesday-Sunday 11:00-4:00pm
Wednesday 11:00-7:30pm
Closed Mondays

Admission is free for all exhibitions and programs.

MILLS COLLEGE ART MUSEUM
DATE: March 31, 2010

PRESS CONTACTS:
Lori Chinn, Program Manager, lchinn@mills.edu
Chris Fraser, Press Contact, cfraser@mills.edu
Abby Lebbert, Publicity Assistant, alebbert@mills.edu

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Vito Acconci 3/31

VITO ACCONCI, Words/ Action/ Architecture

Presented by the Technology and Society Lecture Series at Mills College
Wednesday March 31, 2010 at 7:30 pm, Littlefield Concert Hall, Music Building

Please join Mills in welcoming artist Vito Acconci Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 7:30pm in the Littlefield Concert Hall, (located in the Music Building) at Mills College.

Vito Acconci’s design and architecture stems from his work as a writer and visual artist. His performances in the 70’s helped shift art from object to interactions between the artist and viewer. His installations treated visitors to the gallery/museum not as viewers but as inhabitants of and participants in a public space. By the late 80’s his work had crossed over, and he formed Acconci Studio. The operations of Acconci Studio emerged from computer-thinking, and mathematical and biological models in which they treated architecture as occasions for activity and made spaces fluid, changeable, and portable. They have recently completed an artificial island in Graz, a clothing store in Tokyo, and an elevated subway-station in Coney Island. Currently, Acconci Studio is building a perimeter in Toronto and a street that runs through a building in Indianapolis. They are also working on a three-story building in Milan, a bridge-system and park near Delft, and an amphitheatre in Stavanger.

This event is free and open to the public

Monday, March 8, 2010

Lisa Anne Auerbach 3/17

Lisa Anne Auerbach
March 17, 2010, 7:30pm

Lisa Anne Auerbach runs a modest publishing and propaganda empire out of a
former stuccolow in south Los Angeles. When she's not on her bike, she's
knitting inflammatory, slogan-adorned sweaters and banners, making
photographs of overlooked landmarks, and putting small publications out into
the big world. She received her Mfa from Art Center College of Design in
Pasadena, California and her BFA from Photography Rochester Institute of
Technology in Rochester, New York. She is the recipient of a 2007 California
Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists and is represented by
Gavlak, West Palm Beach, Florida.

Lecture made possible by the Herringer Family Foundation

Friday, March 5, 2010

VITO ACCONCI, Words/ Action/ Architecture 3/31

Presented by the Technology and Society Lecture Series at Mills College
Wednesday March 31st 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Lisser Theatre, Mills College 5000 MacArthur Blvd. Oakland, CA 94613
This event is free and open to the public

The Technology and Society Lecture Series at Mills College is pleased to be hosting Vito Acconci who will be presenting his lecture titled, “Words/ Action/ Architecture” on Wednesday March 31st 2010 at 7:30 p.m. in the Lisser Theatre.

Vito Acconci’s design and architecture comes from another direction: a background first in writing and then in art. His performances in the 70’s helped shift art from object to interactions between artist and viewer; his installations treated visitors to the gallery/museum not as viewers but as inhabitants of and participants in a public space. By the late 80’s his work had crossed over, and he formed Acconci Studio; their operations come from computer-thinking, and mathematical and biological models -- they treat architecture as occasions for activity -- they make spaces fluid, changeable, portable. They have recently completed an artificial island in Graz, a clothing store in Tokyo, an elevated subway-station in Coney Island. About to be built is a building perimeter in Toronto and a street through a building in Indianapolis. They are currently working on a three-story building in Milan, a bridge-system and park near Delft, and an amphitheatre in Stavanger.

Please join us for the lecture at the Lisser Theatre located at Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd. Oakland, CA 94613. Mills is located immediately off of Highway 580 in Oakland at the junction of 580 (MacArthur Freeway) and Highway 13 (Warren Freeway), approximately seven miles from the Bay Bridge.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Anthony Discenza Lecture 3/03

Anthony Discenza

3/03/10 - 7:30 PM

Danforth Lecture Hall

Anthony Discenza has a graduate degree in Film and Video from California College of Art and an undergraduate degree in Studio Art from Wesleyan University. His work is directed by a preoccupation with interrupting the flow of information in various formats, primarily in video, but also other media such as computer generated sound, text, and imagery. Discenza’s video works have been screened widely nationally and internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Whitney Museum of American Art—and most recently at the Getty Center and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. His work has garnered critical attention in Artforum, Artweek, and ArtReview, among other publications.He lives and works in Oakland, California.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Phil Ross February 19th

Phil Ross
February 19, 2010, 7:30pm

Phil Ross received his MFA from Stanford and his BFA from SFAI and is
currently a Professor of Sculpture at the University of San Francisco. His
creative work resides in the space between art, technology, education, and
the history and philosophies of science. Ross has grown and designed
biotechnological structures that are at once highly crafted and naturally
formed, skillfully manipulated and sloppily organic.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Robert Irwin 2/11 7:30 pm

Robert Irwin February 11, 2010, 7:30 pm Littlefield Concert Hall

Robert Irwin has been one of the pivotal artists in American Art for more than 46 years both as a practitioner, a theoretician, and a teacher. Irwin began his career as an abstract expressionist; however, by the late 1960s he had moved away from painting to become one of the creators of the art of light and space, using ephemeral materials such as scrim, lighting and orientation to alter and heighten the viewers' perception of the space in which they encountered his work. Since the early 1980s Irwin has won an international reputation for his "site-generated" works in public spaces, which often make intimate use of site conditions, architecture, natural elements, plantings and topographic features.

Irwin received his art education at Otis Art Institute, Jepsons Art Institute and Chouinards Art Institute (1948-1954). Later, Irwin taught at Chouinards (1957-58), University of California, Los Angeles (1962), and in 1968-69, he developed the graduate program at the University of California, Irvine, working with a number of now successful artists such as Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Vija Celmins, Alexis Smith and Chris Burden among others.

Lecture presented by the Correnah W. Wright Endowed Fund

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Trisha Brown Artist Lecture 1/27 5:30 PM

Trisha Brown January 27, 2010, 5:30 PM  Trisha Brown is widely considered to be the most

important choreographer to emerge from the postmodern era. Since graduating from Mills 

College in 1958 with a degree in dance, Brown has become widely acclaimed for her 

maverick spirit and ability to push the human body to perform in unexpected ways. 

Unafraid to challenge new genres, she has choreographed opera, jazz, classical music, and 

ballet over the course of her storied career. Founding her own company in 1970, Brown 

explored the terrain of her adoptive SoHo, creating her early dances for alternative spaces 

including roof tops and walls, and flirting with gravity--alternately using it and defying it. 

Recognized as a visual artist as well as a dancer, Brown was invited to participate in 

Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, garnering much critical acclaim.* 

Presented in conjunction with the traveling exhibition, T*risha Brown: So That the Audience 

Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing*, organized by the Walker Art Center, 

which will be on view at the Mills College Art Museum from January 20-March 14, 2010.

Mills College Art Lecture Archive (Apr - Nov 2009)

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Patty Chang Lecture

*Patty Chang* November 18, 7:30pm*  *Patty Chang received her BA from University of California, San Diego, she currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA; Deste Foundation Center for Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece; the Fri-Art Centre d'Art Contemporian Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland; the Hamburg Kunstverein in Germany and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

On Wednesday, November 4th at 7:30pm in Danforth, the Painting and Drawing Department will be hosting a lecture by three abstract painters: Stephan Fritsch, Leonhard Hurzlmeier, and Brent Hallard. This lecture will be a small group discussion about abstraction in contemporary art practice as well as an opportunity to hear from artists who work internationally. Each artist will make a 20 minute presentation of their work and then Robin McDonnell will moderate the discussion. Although the program begins at 7:30pm, there will be an opportunity to mingle with the artists while enjoying pizza and beer at 7pm.

Stephan Fritsch
http://www.stephanfritsch.de/
http://www.galerie-ebbers.de/index.php?id=46,0,0,1,0,0

Leonhard Hurzlmeier
http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/59602-leonhard-hurzlmeier

Brent Hallard
http://www.brenthallard.com/work/index.shtml

Friday, October 9, 2009

Uta Barth Lecture October 21st

We are very excited to present Uta Barth as part of our Artist Lecture Series.
October 21, 7:30pm*

*German-born, American-based artist Utha Barth is among the key recent figures who have brought photography to the prominent position once occupied by painting. Her photographs of interior and exterior, urban and natural environments capture fleeting moments as if glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye, where we become aware of the beauty of everyday light, space, texture and luminous surfaces. Barth's work has been exhibited at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 2004-05.*

*All programs will take place in Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Building unless noted.* 

Art 21 Season 5 sneak peek

We are very lucky and excited to get a chance to screen a couple of sneak peeks of the BRAND NEW season of Art 21. Last Wednesday we had our first screening, we watched Part 3. We were very pleased to have the art critic/art historian Glen Helfand give a short presentation introducing the episode.

Next Wednesday we will be screening Part 1, at 7:15 pm in the Danforth Lecture Hall. Please join us!

Pae White Lecture

Last week we had artist Pae White fill the Danforth Lecture Hall for a great lecture. 

Pae was speaking as part of the Mills Artist Lecture Series. 

Here's some info about Pae White and the lecture.

*Pae White September 30, 7:30pm   Presented in conjunction with *Pae White: In Between the Inside-Out* on view at the Mills College Art Museum from September 2-October 18, 2009. This exhibition has been co-produced by New Langton Arts, San Francisco. Major support for the production of Pae White's show has been received from the LEF Foundation, the FOR-SITE Foundation and a San Francisco Arts Commission Organization Project Grant.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

YOUNG AMERICANS & MFA Open Studios

If you missed the opening reception, the Mills College MFA Thesis Exhibition is up and running through the month of May.

Also, this Saturday from 1pm to 6pm, the Spring 2009 Mills College MFA Open Studios.  Come see the work and talk with the 22 MFA students currently enrolled in this unique MFA program.  It's a wonderful setting and the museum is located next door.

For directions click here.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

YOUNG AMERICANS

Exhibition Dates:  Sunday, May 3 to Sunday May 31, 2009

Opening Reception:  Saturday, May 2, 2009.  7 to 9pm

The Mills College Art Museum is proud to present Young Americans, featuring works by the 2009 Master of Fine Arts degree recipients. This exhibition provides an opportunity to see works in all media created by a promising group of emerging artists eager to share what they have been developing during their graduate program with a broader audience. This year's exhibition is curated by Terri Cohn, Bay Area writer, independent curator, and faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute.

In the brochure accompanying the exhibition, Cohn observes that the ten artists who will receive their MFA degrees this year are unusual in their choice to name their MFA show Young Americans. The title situates them as citizens emerging within a national context, and suggests that in addition to their collective experiences as youthful Americans-with the burden of history this implies, this identity also affords them an intrinsic right to personal freedom. A desire for a sense of security-articulated in various metaphoric and formal ways-is one fundamental concern expressed through their work.

Kate Pszotka's fascination with the idea of home and stability has motivated her consideration of family members, which she represents iconographically with everyday objects, realized as paper cut out line drawings. Gina Tuzzi's seemingly simple, naïve structures-houses, barns, huts-stacked on trucks to become rolling homes, or represented as drawings, underscore a sense of safety and comfort in the mythic past of coastal California.

In related ways, Esther Traugot's knitted tree sweaters and forest of trunks with projected flower pattern coverings suggest the utopian potential of the natural world, as well as her desire to protect and preserve it. By contrast, Leigh Merrill's large-scale photographs explore the relationship between fantasy and reality in our constructed environments, blending urban and suburban architecture and landscape styles, or cut and artificial flowers. Modesto Covarrubias has spent much time creating rooms and shelters as means to define and express his fears, insecurities, and sense of vulnerability, while Andrew Witrak's sculptures pose slightly ridiculous solutions to the question of what can provide some fleeting impression of safety or exit: lifejackets sewn together; a beeswax boarding pass. Annie Vought translates found handwritten letters to wall-mounted versions created with cutout text, fragile portraits of each author that are reminiscent of silhouettes.

Joseph Berryhill's paintings express a tension between order and chaos, proposing ways that animate experience can be distilled into visual experience. Steuart Pittman's abstract paintings reflect what he calls a "longing for quiet beauty in a chaotic, high-speed age," while Brian Caraway creates tools and rules to implement his mixed media works, relating his process-based investigations through texture as they change over time.

As artists who have come of age in the extraordinarily volatile circumstances of the 21st century, these individuals focus on singular modes of expression as a way to make sense of and stake a claim in their separate and collective futures. Their works express a sense of hope and possibility, going forward into their lives as young Americans.

In addition to an essay by Cohn, the illustrated catalog for Young Americans contains an essay by critic Glen Helfand. This publication will be available in the gallery during the course of the exhibition.

Mills College Art Museum

5000 MacArthur Boulevard

Oakland, CA 94613

510.430.2164

http://www.mills.edu/museum/

Museum Hours:

Tuesday-Sunday 11:00-4:00pm

Wednesday 11:00-7:30pm

Monday Closed

Admission is free for all exhibitions and programs. 

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Spring Is Here!

Young Americans and Open Studios on the horizon...

The Senior Thesis Exhibition, Meridian, just closed this past weekend.  Now, the graduate students are gearing up for the MFA Thesis Exhibition as well as Spring 2009 Open Studios.

Come back for updates...

Mills College MFA Open Studios Blog Page:  http://millsmfaopenstudios.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Mary Heilmann - Thursday April 16, 2009

The Mills College Art Department's annual Correnah Wright art lecture will feature artist Mary Heilmann on April 16 at 7:30 pm at the Littlefield Concert Hall, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613. The event is free and all members of the public are invited.

The New York Times describes Heilmann's work as "wildly colorful abstractions that riff with irreverent verve on basic elements of Modernist painting: the grid, the monochromatic rectangle, stripes, organic forms, linear webs, spots, checks, and drips...She makes it look easy and fun...the final picture almost always seems spontaneous, and her lively touch gives her works a sensuous intimacy."

The New Yorker said she is "a formalist impatient with formal consistency" and describes her technique as "Big, fluid strokes often seem to sail, albeit invisibly, into surrounding space. When she does emphasize the edge, it's as if she were observing the arbitrary rules of a rather silly but interesting game."

Heilmann will present Her Life which is a multimedia presentation she said is arranged in a poetic rather than linear narrative tale. "I'd like the people that are watching it to get a feeling for how it felt to be making that work," she said.

Her recent exhibition Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone was at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.

Heilmann, 68, is a California native who grew up in San Francisco. She received a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1962, and a MA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. In 1968, Heilmann went to New York City to try to break into the minimalism and post-minimalism art scene dominated by male artists. She came as a woman, a Californian, and a painter and with that she faced challenges from the art establishment.

"She's an inspiration," said Mills College art professor and head of the department Ron Nagle, "She stuck to her guns, got into fights with the art world, but didn't change her style."

Nagle, who knew Heilmann when they were at UC Berkeley together where she originally trained in ceramics, calls Heilmann a "minimalist with a funky edge."

Her colorful, playful, and abstract painted works range from truncated drips of paint to nesting canvases and looping brushstrokes, but she also creates chairs and ceramics.

While her works have been in major galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, for more than three decades, their price have only recently escalated with the demand from collectors clamoring for them. In the late 1990s, the Hauser & Wirth gallery in London, which represents her, also began cultivating an audience for her in Europe.

Heilmann's current auction record for a single work is $169,000, set at Sotheby's in May 2008 for The Yellow Blue of the Square Pair, 1976, which sold for $38,4000 only four years earlier. However, 303 Gallery in New York, which also represents Heilmann, said her large paintings sell for about $300,000.

Each year the Mills College Art Department sponsors a practicing artist for the Correnah Wright lecture. The annual event gives graduate studio art students access to some of the top artists in the country. More information about this selective art program is available at www.mills.edu/art.

Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering a dynamic progressive education that fosters leadership, social responsibility, and creativity to approximately 950 undergraduate women and 500 graduate women and men. Since 2000, applications to Mills College have more than doubled. The College is one of the top colleges in the West by U.S. News & World Report, one of the Best 368 Colleges by the Princeton Review, and ranks 75th among America's best colleges by Forbes.com. Visit us at www.mills.edu.