Pump Up The Volume!

Artist conversation

David Bowie, Visual Artist

New York Times article by Roslyn Sulcasjan, January 14, 2016

"LONDON — One day in the early 1990s, Karen Wright, then editor of the British magazine Modern Painters, received a phone call asking if David Bowie could come to dinner with her editorial board. “We arranged to meet at the Groucho Club” in London, Ms. Wright said in a telephone interview. “When I arrived, he was looking at a Picasso catalog, and we immediately began to talk about the images, and then quickly chose a cover for my next magazine.” Mr. Bowie joined the board, and over the next few years he interviewed numerous art world figures, including Balthus, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel.

During this same period, Mr. Bowie was fervently creating his own art, producing hundreds of paintings, chalk and charcoal drawings, collages of computer-generated images and sculptural objects that began to find their way into auctions and exhibitions.

Composer, pop icon, designer, movie star, fashion inspiration, conduit for the avant-garde — Mr. Bowie was all that, and a visual artist and collector, too, who at this particular moment in his life gave as much attention to painting, drawing and sculpture as he did to his music...." For the rest, go to the article.

Won Ju Lim: Raycraft Is Dead | YBCA

Published on YouTube in 2015

See more at http://ybca.org/won-ju-lim

Artist Won Ju Lim talks about her exhibition, Raycraft Is Dead at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. An ongoing body of work set in Yerba Buena's Center for the Art’s Terrace Landing, Raycraft Is Dead is composed of sculptures, video projections, and a collage that were born of Lim’s looking at domestic spaces as witnesses to the history of a certain place. The artist makes art out of her experience fighting over property where she lives. Her art is a strikingly unique meditation on buildings, home and spaces: subjects that are common to everyone, but Lim makes us think about them differently.

PUMP UP THE VOLUME! 

Jane Dickson

Pump Up The Volume: An Exhibition of Art by Jane Dickson and Joe Lewis

January 25 to March 3, 2016
Robert Else Gallery
Art Department, Kadema Hall
Sacramento State

Pump Up the Volume is Jane Dickson and Joe Lewis’ celebration of hip-hop’s ascension into a global movement from its earliest moments that they witnessed in the South Bronx. The exhibition consists of approximately 60+ discrete pieces, including portraits of important genre artists, dating from 1979 - 2015. There is also an audio component overlay of 278 songs (18 hours of music) tracing the history of hip-hop music from the Bronx.

Jane Dickson arrived in Times Square in 1978 and began working on projects at Fashion Moda in the South Bronx in 1979. She created City Maze there in 1980 with Graffiti artists Crash and Noc and began collaborating with her future husband, Charlie Ahearn on the first hip hop movie "Wild Style" in 1981. Often working on industrial materials, her paintings examine the conventions and disjunctions of contemporary American life, from the crowded theatricality of street life in New York. More than 30 museums including the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum own her work.

Joe Lewis

Joe Lewis’s works are reflections of his introduction to hip-hop and street culture. He grew up on B’way during the golden age of the pop music business and subsequently wound up in the South Bronx at Fashion Moda curating and producing art, performance and music. Primarily using text, his focus is on “the Word”; its influence on animate and inanimate ideas, places and things like "revolution." He also considers ways one might get out of the ghetto for good. Sometimes, he muses on the mystical and supernatural meaning of everyday things when taken out of context, like a prep school boys dressing and acting like a “gangsters.” Lewis has exhibited widely in the US and abroad. His work is in collections at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Deutsche Bank.

MEET REBECCA CROWTHER

Rebecca at work

Careers in Art & Art History:
REBECCA CROWTHER
Monday, February 24, 6-7:30pm
Kadema Hall 170

To help students think about life after graduation, the Art History faculty is inviting our recent alumni back to Sac State for conversations about finding a great job.

The first conversation is with Sac State alumna Rebecca Crowther, Photograph Archivist at the Center for Sacramento History, who will tell us about her CSUS graduate education in photography and art history, her career search, and her job.

Art in Chicago

There wasn't much time to see art while I was in Chicago last week for the College Art Association conference, but two world-class art museums were within walking distance of my hotel: The Chicago Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago MCA), so I visited both. On view at the MCA is a provocative and convincing exhibition titled The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, organized by Dieter Roelstraete, Senior Curator at MCA, which presents artworks made since 2000 that in various ways excavate the past. This includes some of the most interesting artworks and artists of our time, so it's an important show and gave me much to think about. In this video, the curator and some of the artists discuss the exhibition and their artwork: The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology

Looking at Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy
Should Not Exist (detail), 2007–present, at Chicago MCA
February 13, 2014, Way of the Shovel exhibition

The installation by Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, is one of the works that captured my interest. Rakowitz has made copies (in an ongoing process) of ancient works of art that have gone missing from museums in Iraq since the war began. He makes them out of pop detritus: packaging of popular commodities (like chewing gum wrappers) from the region.

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (detail), 2007–present

Ionit looking at details of Mark Dion's installation,
Concerning the Dig, 2013, in The Way of the Shovel

Mark Dion is well known in California and has shown in San Francisco recently, but in the context of this exhibition, his focus on the past - museums, archaeological digs, including the archaeology of everyday contemporary life (like the installation in the MCA show - fits a paradigm that includes many other artists and is presented here as a defining subject of our time.

Library Gallery exhibition opened last night

Mehr and Jeff 

Last night's opening of the beautifully- installed exhibition of contemporary Korean prints had too many interesting people to talk with to get a good look at the art. I'll go back to the Library Gallery after the CAA conference in Chicago and spend all the time I want.

Photo by Jennifer Porras

Photo by Jennifer Porras

Photo by Jennifer Porras