Evergreen Art Lecture Series

Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and author of several popular books about contemporary art. Her recent writing explores the vanguard intersection between art and environmentalism, including TO LIFE! Eco Art In Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press). Weintraub’s previous books on eco-art include the series, Avant-Guardians: Textlets in Art and Ecology (2007). Weintraub established Artnow Publications in order to apply environmental responsibility to the books’ material production. She is also the author of In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society. Weintraub served as the Director of the Bard College museum where she curated over sixty exhibitions. She was the Henry Luce Professor of Emerging arts at Oberlin College. Her current book projects include Art-is-an Environmental Health Clinic (author) and  In The Making: Creative Options For Contemporary Architecture (editor).

Sister Spit began in San Francisco in the 1990s as a weekly, girls-only open mic that was an alternative to the misogyny-soaked poetry open mics popular around the city (and the nation) at that time. Inspired by two-bit punk bands who managed to go on the road without hardly knowing how to play their instruments, Sister Spit became the first all-girl poetry roadshow at the end of the 90s, and toured regularly with such folks as Eileen Myles, Marci Blackman, Beth Lisick, and Nomy Lamm. The tour was revived as Sister Spit: The Next Generation in 2007, and has toured the United States annually since, with authors and performers such as Chinaka Hodge, Dorothy Allison, Lenelle Moise, Justin Vivian Bond, and many others. In this next incarnation, out of respect to the changing gender landscape of our queer and literary communities, Sister Spit welcomes artists of all genders, so long as they mesh with the tour’s historic vibe of feminism, queerness, humor, and provocation.

In addition to the authors of Sister Spit Book’s two most recent publications, Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man, and Rad American Women A-Z, the tour incorporates artists and activists with wide-ranging audiences, styles and voices. Furthermore, the Sister Spit Tour invites local guest writers to add to the lineup.

I am an artist-researcher, educator, poet, and activist.  I’m an immigrant from Taiwan—a contested spit of land with a long history of colonization.  As the mother of two beautiful human beings, I struggle to pass on ancestral knowledge that I hang onto, by a very thin thread, worn thin by the mandate to assimilate. I’m learning to listen for the thread that resists the loud clamoring of a fossil-fuel dependent culture of capitalism, globalization, and neo-liberalism. Our world has been fractured and broken; I believe the stories of our ancestors, stories of young and old, from the wildly diverse corners of the world, need to be gathered together to restore cultures of care and love. I do the work of listening to and gathering stories in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, where I am the Program Director, and at the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living in Rhode Island. Though I currently live in Rhode Island, my soul migrates from shore to shore at regular intervals, touching down in rural Vermont, suburban Chicago, and coastal Port Townsend.

Ju-Pong Lin collects stories from her neighbors, makes art on her couch, in galleries and in theaters. Laundry, bread, and everyday stories are the seedlings for Ju-Pong’s interdisciplinary, socially engaged videos, participatory installations and performances.  She received her MFA in Intermedia from The University of Iowa, and has shown her work nationally (Women in the Director’s Chair, Walker Museum of Art, and New York’s Mix festival.)  She has taught media arts on the faculty of The Evergreen State College, and is currently the Program Director of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.  Ju-Pong lives in Rhode Island and parents two children, who school her in the practice of love and compassion every day.

As an artist, Ju-Pong fuses story circle, video, needlecraft, and community organizing to advocate for grassroots sustainability education and climate justice, in solidarity with indigenous movements to reclaim space.

Bruce Conner, BOMBHEAD, 1989, Courtesy of The Conner Family Trust, San Francisco

“Bruce Conner’s Atomic Sublime Cinema”

San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner made his first experimental film, A MOVIE, in 1958, at the height of national anxiety about the atomic threat. Over the following decades, his films continued to address the cultural and political fallout of the Cold War. This talk examines Conner’s filmic output over two and a half decades, from his pioneering works of “found footage” montage, to his participation in psychedelic expanded cinema performance, to his more intimate portraits of female friends and later interest in music video. It argues that these works are expressions of the “atomic sublime,” an aesthetic that captures the paradoxical experience of “terrible beauty” that is generated by witnessing an atomic explosion. By attending closely to the historical and cultural context of Conner’s apocalyptic cinema, this talk proposes a reconsideration of postwar American art’s engagement with the aesthetics of “the sublime.”

Johanna Gosse is an art historian specializing in the postwar American avant-garde, with an emphasis on experimental film and media practices. She earned her PhD in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College in 2014 with a dissertation on the experimental films of San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Camera Obscura, MIRAJ: Moving Image Review & Art Journal, Radical History Review, The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, various exhibition catalogues, and Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, an edited collection forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2015. You can read more about past work and current projects at: www.johannagosse.com.

Small shifts in what is familiar amplify human presence and speak to the intricacies of social relations in MK Guth’s work. Her videos depart from everyday scenarios into the site of fiction as an entry point to more complicated issues of identity and self and her sculptural installations often act as visual containers for audience interaction.

M.K. Guth is a visual artist working in video, photography, sculpture, performance, and interactive based exchange projects. In 2012, Marylhurst University released the first Monograph on Guth’s work. The NY Times, Flash Art, ArtForum on line 500 words, Art News, Art in America, and Sculpture magazine are just a few of the periodicals where Guth’s work has been discussed. She is a recipient of a Bonnie Bronson Award, a Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award through the Seattle Art Museum and an Award of Merit from the Bellevue Art Museum.

She has exhibited with numerous galleries and institutions including, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, Boise Art Museum, The Melbourne International Arts Festival, Australia, Nottdance Festival, Nottingham, England, Swiss Institute, NYC, Gallery-Pfeister, Copenhagen, Franklin Parrasch Gallery NYC, Betty Moody Houston TX, White Columns, NYC, The Art Production Fund (NYC / Las Vegas), Yerba Buena, in San Francisco and the Henry Art Museum.  Guth is a member and the originator of RED SHOE DELIVERY SERVICE, a collaborative interactive video/performance project.  (with Molly Dilworth and Cris Moss) www.redshoedeliveryservice.com  MK Guth is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland Oregon and is an Associate Professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.”

Cobb’s work combines history, nonfiction narrative and poetry to address issues of landscape, politics, and ecology. She is a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist; a 2014 Playa Resident Artist; she received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission; and she was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She works for the Environmental Defense Fund. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Historian and philosopher of art,Thierry de Duve, is Professor emeritus from the University of Lille 3, and was Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, for the fall semester of 2013. His English publications include Pictorial Nominalism (1991), Kant after Duchamp (1996), Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (1996, 2010), Look—100 Years of Contemporary Art (2001), and Sewn In the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp (2012). He is presently finishing a book of essays on aesthetics, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), and, with Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012). Abra, a collaboration with Kate Durbin forthcoming from 1913 Press, recently received an NEA-sponsored Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and will be issued in 2014 as an artist’s book and iPad app created by Ian Hatcher. Her collaborative digital projects include an erasure bookmarklet, The Deletionist, with Nick Montfort and Jesper Juul, and Whispering Galleries, a site-specific LeapMotion erasure work for the city of New Haven. Another collection of poems is forthcoming from Kore Press. Amaranth is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where she also teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics.

Andy Fitch’s most recent books are Sixty Morning Talks and (with Amaranth Borsuk) As We Know. Ugly Duckling soon will release his Sixty Morning Walks and Sixty Morning Wlaks. He recently published a critical book, Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard, with Dalkey Archive Press. With Cristiana Baik, he is currently assembling the Letter Machine Book of Interviews. He has a collaborative book forthcoming from 1913 Press. He is a founder of The Conversant and currently edits Essay Press. He teaches in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program.

Makah artist, Alex McCarty, is the great-grandson of Hishka, who was chief of the Waatch village, one of the five villages in Neah Bay, Washington.  Alex is a carver, painter, printmaker and teacher.   Alex earned his Bachelor in Visual Arts and Social Studies from The Evergreen State College in 2000.  In 2002, he obtained his Master in Teaching degree from The Evergreen State College.  Following his Masters, he was the Art/Carving Teacher at Chief Leschi Schools in Puyallup, Washington for several years.

Alex is currently teaching woodcarving in a full year program at Evergreen titled “Studio Projects: Tradition and Innovation.”  His work is being showcased in the library; his carvings and prints, and other traditional style art pieces can be found in display cases within the library.  Photographs of McCarty and his students by Briana Martini can be found on the staircase leading up to the 3rd floor of the library.
Alex is a young carver with great respect for older carving traditions.  His interest in Makah carving traditions and culture was triggered in high school, when he was asked to work on a diorama of the Ozette Village for the Makah Museum.  Working on the project over a nine-month period, Alex had a chance to look deeply into the past.  Part of his preparation for making the miniature model was to visit the landforms at the site, and to become familiar with the collection of artifacts housed at the museum.  It was Alex’s job to understand everything he could about everyday life at the village, and this helped to create his passion for history.
Through carving, Alex seeks to preserve cultural traditions that he can trace back through time. By observing the pieces from Ozette, as well as other classic West Coast carvings, he discerns “prevalent form-lines,” which characterize the Makah tradition.  He works hard at understanding the essence of his heritage, and sees his own work as a preservation and interpretation of this older style.  Alex is driven to understand the past in his quest to develop his carving.  He observes that “you need to ‘get’ something before you can preserve it.”
Throughout his work, Alex strives to incorporate flowing, bold-line designs that he feels are so characteristic of classic West Coast artwork. It is important to him that his work is done well, and that his designs work from different perspectives. As a teacher, he makes the analogy that we need “to see things through multiple perspectives-the way that other people see things” in order to gain a deeper understanding of the world.
While Alex’s work is in demand, often commissioned by galleries or individual collectors, he sees his work as providing more in his life than just income.  He values teaching and learning from other artists, and advises people to seek out learning opportunities such as the one he had at Ozette, which he sees as an under-utilized resource.  Perhaps his approach to his carving tradition can be summarized in this way: “learn it with care, preserve it with beauty, and pass it on.”