Earl Grey on Enid Yandell

On Tuesday afternoon, I will be at Transylvania University in Lexington offering some thoughts about Enid Yandell, Kentucky's most celebrated sculptor. My talk is related to my current research on Yandell and is being offered in conjunction with the exhibition of the sculptor group ENID: generations of sculptors which is on view at Morlan Gallery through March. 

If you're free on Tuesday at lunch time, come with me to Lexington:) 

R.C. May Photo Lecture at UK Friday, 4 PM

EUGENE RICHARDS
Exhibition: March 14 - April 27, 2014
Lecture: March 14, 4 pm in the UK Student Center's Worsham Theater

A conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, Eugene Richards joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) in 1968 and found himself working in a community service organization in eastern Arkansas. Running afoul of the Ku Klux Klan earned him a serious beating and numerous threats, but he left Arkansas with a series of haunting photographs of rural poverty that launched his career. For seventeen years, he traveled the world as a photojournalist for the agency Magnum and now focuses on his own projects. Intensely personal and deeply felt, his work also reflects a lifelong commitment to social activism, whether he is photographing the ravages of cocaine addiction, his first wife’s struggle with breast cancer, or the emotional aftermath of 9/11.

Image credit: EUGENE RICHARDS, After the Birth, 2008 gelatin silver print photograph ©Eugene Richards, All Rights Reserved

Originally posted at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky

R.C. May Lecture at UK: Catherine Opie

Exhibition: February 7 - March 9, 2014
Lecture: February 7, 4:00 PM in the UK Student Center's Worsham Theater

In Catherine Opie’s mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2008, the sheer range of her subject matter and corresponding stylistic approaches was dizzying. Her earliest work examines concepts of masculinity and feminity in lush color portraits of transgender individuals, cross-dressers, and pierced practitioners of sadomasochism in the subcultures of Los Angeles’s gay and lesbian community. She has also made encompassing seascapes that feel like color field paintings, both meditative and visually stunning. Always informed by art historical traditions, her seemingly unrelated series are united by her ability to embrace and document her subjects in a way that is both personal and true.

Image credit:
Catherine Opie, Sunset #1, 2009, C-print. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, © Catherine Opie

Content from The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky website: http://www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum/may_opie.html

Report: Lecture for the KHS and the NEH

A good picture cannot be taken in Chao Auditorium at the U of L.
Case in point.

Friday afternoon I presented a lecture "Louisville’s Confederate Monument: Narratives of Commemoration, Loss, and Gender" to participants in the Kentucky Historical Society's NEH-sponsored conference entitled "Torn Within, Threatened Without: Kentucky and the Border States In the Civil War.” 

On the East face of the monument, I am introducing participants
to the process and production of Louisville's Confederate Monument.

The participants attended over 20 separate sessions, which consisted of six lecture gatherings—including one by State Historian and fellow GC faculty member, Dr. Jim Klotter— as well as four breakout/research sessions and ten site visits. 

Opportunity: Lecture on Math and Art

"Algorithms Meet Art, Puzzles, and Magic," on Wednesday, April 24, at 5 p.m. in the Worsham Auditorium of the UK Student Center with Erik Demaine, MIT. A reception at 6:30 p.m. at the Art Museum in the Singletary Center will feature an exhibition of works by Erik and Martin Demaine.

Abstract of talk: When I was six years old, my father Martin Demaine and I designed and made puzzles as the Erik and Dad Puzzle Company, which we distributed to toy stores across Canada. So began our journey into the interactions between algorithms and the arts (here, puzzle design). More and more, we find that our mathematical research and artistic projects converge, with the artistic side inspiring the mathematical side and vice versa. Mathematics itself is an art form, and through other media such as sculpture, puzzles, and magic, the beauty of mathematics can be brought to a wider audience. These artistic endeavors also provide us with deeper insights into the underlying mathematics, by providing physical realizations of objects under consideration, by pointing to interesting special cases and directions to explore, and by suggesting new problems to solve (such as the metapuzzle of how to solve a puzzle). This talk will give several examples in each category, from how our first font design led to building transforming robots, to how studying curved creases in origami led to sculptures at MoMA.

The audience will be expected to participate in some live magic demonstrations. Visit http://erikdemaine.org/ to learn more about Erik Demaine. 

Robert C. May Photo Lecture at UK Today

LALLA ESSAYDI

Exhibition: November 16 – December 23, 2012
Lecture: November 16, 4 pm
in the UK Student Center's Worsham Theater
FREE

In her lyrical representations of the female body, Lalla Essaydi employs a visual language rooted in her childhood in Morocco, where public spaces were defined by men, and women were confined to the private region of the home. In her photographs, women literally become part of the space they inhabit: she covers them in Islamic calligraphy that extends to the walls, furniture, and drapes, or garbs them in marvelous patterns that merge into surrounding mosaics.

As a contemporary artist, she also contests sexualized Western stereotypes of the harem seen in nineteenth-century Orientalist painting. “In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses—as artist, as Moroccan, as Saudi, as traditionalist, as liberal, as Muslim,” she says. “In short, I invite the viewer to resist stereotypes.” re-post from the Art Museum at UK

Robert C. May Photo Lecture @ UK, Friday

DAVID HILLIARD

Exhibition: October 5 - November 11, 2012
Lecture: November 2, 4 pm
in the UK Student Center's Worsham Theater
FREE

David Hilliard’s expansive, multi-panel photographs invite the viewer into the world of his subjects. His portraits are panoramic in scale and suggest subtle narratives about the nature of love, family, adolescence, and sexuality. Often the work is based on his own life, as in a self-portrait of him with his father. Titled Rock Bottom, they are emerged in a lake, both connected and separated by the body of water between them.

Hilliard’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States in addition to venues in Spain, Germany, and France. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2001 and a Fulbright Grant in 1995, among other honors, and his work is included in many collections, among them the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

DAVID HILLIARD, Mary Remembering, 2008, c-print, courtesy of the artist and Carroll & Sons, Boston

See original post HERE.

Jessica Ferguson: Museum of Memory at U of L

"My work is slow, handbuilt, and cumulative, rather like the layering of dust of memories over time."

Exhibition
August 23 - September 30, 2012
Schneider Hall Galleries
Gallery X | Hite Art Institute

Barbara Bullitt Christian Memorial Lecture
Presence, Absence & Pinhole Photography
Tuesday, September 18, | 6:30 pm
Schneider Hall Galleries

Reception prior to lecture
5: 00 pm, Schneider Hall

The University of Louisville Hite Art Institute is pleased to announce an exhibition of pinhole photography by Jesseca Ferguson of Boston, Massachusetts, titled “Museum of Memory” in Gallery X of Schneider Hall Galleries on Belknap Campus.

Ferguson’s photography alludes to the passage of time, and to what she refers to as a “private interior library” which she believes serves as a paradigm for collective and personal memory. The work exhibited combines 19th, 20th, and 21st century photographic techniques.

Ms Ferguson will be a visiting artist at the Hite in September and present the Barbara Bullitt Christian Memorial Lecture titled “Presence, Absence, and Pinhole Photography” Thursday, September 18 at 6:30 pm in the Hite Galleries. A reception to meet the artist, beginning at 5:00 pm that afternoon, will precede her talk. For further information about Ms. Ferguson or Barbara Bullitt Christian Lecture, contact the Schneider Hall Galleries at (502) 852-6794.

Link to original message via U of L

Amy Stein @ UK on Friday

The first Robert C. May photography lecture of the spring semester is this Friday at 4:00 PM in the Worsham Theater of the UK Student Center. The series this year focuses on the "constructed" photographic image. Amy Stein, whose work is on exhibit in the UK Art Museum, will be speaking about her photographs. To see more of her work, click HERE.

Quoted from the UK Art Museum website...

Lecture: February 10, 2012

Exhibition: January 22 to March 4, 2012

Amy Stein photographs a new incarnation of the natural world in her series Domesticated. A bear peers over a fence at a girl standing on a diving board, both frozen at the encounter. A fawn takes shelter in the warmth of a green house, wild cats perch in the skeleton of a home under construction. In a world in which animals like coyotes are becoming common in suburbia, the interaction between humans and wildlife requires adaptation on the part of both. 

Stein set out to investigate themes of human domination over the natural world in the twenty-first century, but as she began working in the northeastern Pennsylvania town of Matamoras, people began telling her about the encounters with wild creatures and she discovered a far more complex narrative. “Each story was relayed with a sense of wonder and fascination that hinted at a deeper connection,” she says. “I began to realize that something far more primal and mystical was happening in this town.” 

Click HERE to read more.

Hope to see you there.

Prof. Kincer

Image above: AMY STEIN, Watering Hole, 2005, C-print

Upcoming Lecture: Memorial Mania

Memorial Mania

The Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville presents the Frederic Lindley Morgan Lecture entitled "Memorial Mania," by Erika Doss, author of the book with the same title.

Why do we make memorials in America today, and why do we make so many of them? Doss's talk focuses on contemporary American interests in memory and history and urgent desires to express them in public art and commemoration. Location and contact information are located here.

Fans of public art, American studies, and contemporary issues may find this lecture of great interest. Doss is professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She has authored several American studies titles over the past two decades, including Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities and Elvis culture: Fans, Faith, and Image.

Hope to see you there!

Robert C. May Photo Lecture Friday

Mark Klett
Lecture: 4 PM, Worsham Theatre in the Student Center at the University of KY (Euclid Ave & MLK Blvd, Lexington)
Exhibition: October 9–November 13, University of KY Art Museum, Singletary Center

"Mark Klett walks in the footsteps of nineteenth-century photographers who journeyed to the great wilderness of the American West and created iconic images that helped define us as a nation. His work at locations like Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon examines the intersection of time and place, analyzing how we conceptualize both.

Klett, who trained as a geologist, takes a long view of the landscape. In 1977, he and two colleagues began the Rephotographic Survey Project. Looking at photographs made a century earlier, they located the exact vantage points used by Carlton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and others, and then meticulously rephotographed the view. The old and new images, published side-by-side in a 1984 book called Second View, revealed both enduring geographic features and the human impact on the environment.

In recent years, collaborating with Byron Wolfe, Klett has created large scale panoramas that merge his own photographs with historic views, uniting past and present in a visual continuum. In Rock Formations on the Road to Lee’s Ferry, AZ, two black-and-white 1872 photographs by William Bell are seamlessly inserted into a contemporary digital color image of the scene. The road through the sun-bleached desert eerily disappears in the old photographs and humans sitting on the ground are dwarfed by dramatic rock formations. In the present day, a camper chugs out of the past in a terrain that has barely changed in one hundred and thirty years, save for that stretch of blacktop.

Klett has expanded the range of historic images he uses to embrace classic modernist photographs from the 1930s by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, vintage postcards, and historic drawings and sketches. However, he continues to meld old and new, creating a sense of past and present co-existing.

Klett’s work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally for more than three decades and is part of the collection of more than eighty museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. He has received fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. He is the author of thirteen books, including Saguaros (2007); Yosemite in Time (2005); and Third Views, Second Sights (2005), a follow-up to Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984). Klett is Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe." from UK Art Museum website

To find out more, click HERE.

Countdown to Linda: TODAY, updated!

UPDATE! following event

See above for footage of 2 seconds of fame. Boris and I waiting for the rest of our troops to depart from the Speed and head over to the reception following the lecture last evening. Who's in the background? None, other than Dr. Nochlin and Dr. Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, faculty at the U of L who studied under Dr. Nochlin and introduced Linda last evening. The evening also included visits to the Speed galleries and the work of Tom Huck in the Hite Galleries at the U of L.

about the event...

Join AHRECO (Art History Reading Community) for the journey to Louisville to hear noted art historian, Linda Nochlin, who will lecture at the U of L. Details: leave GC at 2:15 today (note earlier time than previously posted), head over to the U of L/Speed campus. Lecture at 6 pm. Those who wish can visit 21C on the way home. Hope you can join us. RSVP to Dr. Decker by noon TODAY! Also, join the reading group, as we'll review Nochlin's seminal essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"

Nochlin's topic tonight is poverty and the French artist Gustave Courbet -- "Misère: Courbet, Millet, and the Representation of Poverty in the Nineteenth Century." Update on the event is above this post.

Countdown to Linda: two weeks....

Join AHRECO (Art History Reading Group) for the journey to Louisville to hear noted art historian, Linda Nochlin, who will lecture at the U of L. Details: leave GC at 3 pm, head over to the U of L/Speed campus. Lecture at 6 pm. Those who wish can visit 21C on the way home. Hope you can join us. RSVP to Dr. Decker by noon on 3/31. Also, join the reading group that day, as we'll review Nochlin's seminal essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" All current students and alum are invited to join AHRECO that day!

A slow hunch

For my post today I wanted to reflect upon a portion of a talk by Steven Johnson, not the whole talk but just one portion.  The whole talk is about where good ideas come from and where creativity and innovation exist.  I would highly recommend watching the video, like most ted talks is it about 18 minutes long. He talks a lot about the english the coffee house and how coffee played such a big role in the enlightenment. Good stuff.  But what I wanted to talk about for a few moments starts at 9 min 30 sec.  Johnson talks about what he calls the "slow hunch".  An idea that is not a eureka moment but it is something that exists underneath or behind other ideas for years.

Link to VIDEO

In the coming months we will have great discussions at Art for Lunch. One will be on tattoos one on higher education, but the one that I think I am getting most excited about is about unforeseen visions.  All of the art faculty and staff are going to be discussing ideas that never came to fruition.  So often I look back on my sketchbooks and come across ideas, or images of ideas that have never come to the workbench but have been peeking in and out of my work for some time.  The exhibition "Bookends or Lapjoint" that Darrell Kincer and myself had at the TUSKA center at UK has really set with me in terms of reflection.  It was so interesting to look back and see so many threads I had not seen before. My first performance works dealt with chairs and then no chairs for 5 years. In graduate school I start making performative chairs and some prints about chairs as containers.  Chairs leave for a few years and then I start making chairs as a form of portraiture and hiding things in chairs from Goodwill.  Chairs leave for a few years and my little girl Olive asked me to draw with her and I start drawing a chair, my wife comments "Why is it when anyone asks you to draw something you draw a chair?"

Photo Lecture @ UK Friday

Each year four artist-photographers speak at the University of Kentucky's Robert C. May Photography Lecture Series. This coming Friday, November 5, marks the first in the series.

Jeff Liao will be presenting his work in the Worsham Theatre in UK's Student Center at 4:00 PM. The lectures usually last about an hour. In addition work by the artist is typically on exhibit in UK's Art Museum, a short walk from the student center. Many times the speaker will go to the museum afterward to greet and talk to lecture attendees.

The lectures are usually a highlight of the academic calendar for me and I do my best to attend each one. I hope you might consider joining me for this and future May Lectures.

Click HERE to find out more about Jeff Liao.

Click HERE to find out more about the lecture schedule for this year.