Evergreen Art Lecture Series

Aisha Harrison is interested in the experience of power and privilege derived from an individual’s race, and class, and gender identities.  She works with brown bare clay and salt to create figures that get at the emotional impacts of privilege. Aisha has a studio in Olympia, Washington and is a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College.  She received a BA from Grinnell College, a BFA from Washington State University, and an MFA from University of Nebraska- Lincoln.  She has been a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards from institutions around the country and her work is shown nationally.

Alain LeTourneau: Wednesday, April 23 11:00-1:00 pm in Lecture Hall 1

Alain LeTourneau is a Portland, Oregon based artist. He utilizes 16mm film, video and still photography to explore the social and personal histories embedded in landscapes, and to consider how the accumulated actions of individuals and organizations define the function, shape and character of the built environment.

Alain is the co-founder of 40frames.org, a 16mm conservation initiative that maintains the international exhibitors list 16mmdirectory.org and houses a collection of 16mm film prints. From 1999-2009, Alain presented important and challenging films in the 16mm format at a micro-cinema operated by 40 Frames in Portland’s Central Eastside Industrial District.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including Anthology Film Archives, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Film Studies Center at University of Chicago, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, International House Philadelphia, Images Festival (Toronto), Los Angeles Filmforum, Portland Art Museum, San Francisco Cinematheque, Unknown Pleasures (Berlin) and Vancouver International Film Centre.

Alain’s latest projects include the photographic series Swan Island Industrial Park, and Open Road, a 16mm film about the landscape of private, automotive transportation.

Carl Smool is a Northwest native who spent the first 30 years of his career working in Seattle, often in the margins and in-between spaces of the art world.  Arriving in Belltown in the late ’70s, he was motivated to address social, political and environmental issues in his art; these issues continue to inform his work.  While working as an editorial illustrator for The Rocket, his cover portrait of Ronald Reagan got the paper banned from Pacific Lutheran University; his graphic work for a campaign opposing Reagan’s re-election earned him death threats; and his altered billboards made national news. His work has appeared at the Center On Contemporary Art, the Whatcom Museum, the Mia Gallery, the Bellevue Art Museum, and many other venues.

 In the ’90s, he expanded his work with Bumbershoot, the Seattle Arts Festival, creating numerous large scale installations, including a sinfully delightful fire ceremony in 1997.  He designed the grounds and stage décor for WOMAD-USA (the World Of Music, Arts and Dance Festival held in Redmond) from 1998 through 2001, and in 1999, he brought his work to WOMAD UK. Carl’s five stage, 17 sculpture piece, “At the Crossroads, a Fire Ceremony for the New Millennium,” was commissioned by the Seattle Center, but got caught up in Mayor Paul Schell’s post WTO terrorist anxiety.

In the new millennium, Carl has created plaza artwork for Seattle’s light rail system, celebrating the nation’s most diverse community. He also worked with 14 middle-school students to create a large solar powered installation, celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, at the Seattle Center. He now resides in Olympia, where he is pausing to more closely examine our global predicament, and asking: what’s next?

Born in 1973, Berk received a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1997, and an M.F.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1999.  His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Lawrimore Project, the Lee Center, and Howard House in Seattle, cherrydelosreyes in Los Angeles, and the Bellevue Art Museum. His work has been included in shows at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Galleri Erik Steen in Oslo, Edward Cella in Los Angeles, d.u.m.b.o. Arts Center in Brooklyn, Tacoma Art Museum, Marylhurst University in Portland, and California State University, Long Beach.

Berk has been honored with grants and awards by the Seattle Art Commission, Artist Trust, and 4Culture and was the recipient of the 2010 Arts Innovator Award and the 2013 Betty Bowen Award.  His work has been published in Art in America, Art Ltd., LA Times, Modern Painters, The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post Intelligencer, The Stranger, and Seattle Weekly, and has been acquired by such public collections as the Tacoma Art Museum; Frye Art Museum; University of Washington; City of Seattle; King County; Amgen Corporation, Seattle; and the United States Department of Navy.  Berk lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Juliana Spahr is a poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response. Her most recent book is the novel, An Army of Lovers, written with David Buuck and published by City Lights.  Her many titles include,Well Then There Now, The Transformation, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, and Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity.  With Jena Osman, Spahr edits the book series Chain Links, and with nineteen other poets she edits the collectively funded Subpress. The editor of numerous critical anthologies, she teaches at Mills College.

David Buuck is a writer and teacher who lives in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. From 2003-08 he was associate editor at Artweek, and from 2007-11, the President of the Board of Directors of Small Press Traffic, a literary nonprofit in San Francisco, where he also co-curated the annual Poets Theater festival. The Shunt, a book of poetry about the Bush years, was published in 2009 by Palm Press and was named on several year-end top tens lists at Attention Span. Site Cite City, a collection of cross-genre prose works about the Bay Area, will be published by Futurepoem in 2014. His site-specific, multi-media art project BARGE was featured in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’  “Bay Area Now” biennial in 2008, and he was awarded the first ever Visual and Cultural Criticism Residency at Mission 17 Gallery in San Francisco. He is also an occasional performer, musician, and dancer, having performed in several venues in the US and more recently as part of Abby Crain’s LOOK dance and performance company.

Stephen Hayes was born and raised in Washington D.C. where his earliest memory of an interest in art is of a drawing he made with silver crayons of John Glenn and his “Rocket Ship” in 1960 something. He was about six.

The mature artist, Stephen Hayes, received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1980, having focused on drawing and specifically on drawing the human form. His studies took him as far as a full dissection of the cadaver via the University Medical School, culminating in a thesis on portraiture.

Immediately following graduate school, Hayes moved to the Middle East for nearly four years where he was overwhelmed by the awesome beauty of the Cypriot landscape. It was there that his interest in the land as a vehicle for expression of human condition began. His travels and work in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain and Cyprus planted a seed that is still bearing fruit in his work today. While his landscape paintings are rarely populated, there is always the sense that we have knowledge of the place, or the mood, or the potency of place. This quality is a result of years spent walking alone through natural and often rugged beauty, and drinking that quality in to the core.

In 1984 Hayes moved first back to Washington for a brief stint at the Phillips Collection as one of their Museum Assistants, and then within six months decided to go somewhere unknown. He headed west and settled in Portland, Oregon where he currently lives. He continues through his painting and print work, to translate, viscerally, the physical and emotional experience of places of nature.

In the roughly 25 years that Hayes has spent working and teaching in Portland he has participated in scores of exhibitions and produced dozens of one-man shows of his paintings, prints and drawings. Hayes has received awards that include a WESTAF Individual Artist Fellowship, an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and is a 2011 recipient of the Hallie Ford Fellowship for Individual Artists.

He is represented in Portland by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery and his work can be found in numerous private, public and corporate collections throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Japan and South America.

Autumn Womack received her PhD from Columbia University where her research focused on 19th and early twentieth century African American literary culture. At Columbia she developed a rich interest in archival practices, visual studies, black print culture, and social science. As an Assistant Professor in The University of Pittsburgh’s English Department, Autumn continues to explore these topics in her current book project, Social Document Fictions, which uncovers a small genre of literature published between 1890 and 1928, looking in particular at writers deployed formally experimental and generically hybrid texts to advance social scientific epistemologies that uncover archives and social bodies that remain opaque to normative visual techniques. Her lecture today is drawn from the final chapter of this book in which she reads Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic films as articulating an epistemology of black inaccessibility, which comes to define her late 1920s writing.

Paula Rebsom is an inter-disciplinary artist that makes large-scale paintings posed as sculptures in the landscape often documented and presented as photographs. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Oregon in 2006 and completed undergraduate work at the University of Minnesota and Dickinson State University.

Solo exhibitions include Half/Dozen, Portland, OR; The Art Gym, Marylhurst University, Lake Oswego, OR; and Form Space Atelier, Seattle WA; and group shows at RAID Projects, Los Angeles, CA; and Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, WY.

Recent awards include a Djerassi Resident Artists Program month-long residency sponsored by The Ford Family Foundation; and project development grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, The Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts and Cultural Council, and the Marylhurst University Faculty Innovation & Excellence Fund. Upcoming exhibitions include Pushdot Studio, Portland OR, and a collaborative endeavor with artist Grant Hottle at the Galleries of Contemporary Art, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 2015.

Debra Baxter is a sculptor and jewelry designer who combines carved alabaster with crystals, minerals, and metals. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Bard College in 2007 and her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1996. She also studied at Academia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. Debra has received an Artist Trust Individual Artist Grant and three 4Culture Individual Project Grants. She was nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award and a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Art Award.

Debra’s work has been featured in Zoo Magazine Germany, Edelweise Magazine Switzerland, Zink, Art Ltd., Design Bureau and Sculpture magazine, as well as in hundreds of blogs all over the world. Debra’s work has been exhibited in solo shows including Wanting is Easier Than Having, Platform Gallery, Seattle WA; So Proud of You, Howard House, Seattle, WA; and Debra Baxter, Massimo Audello, NYC, NY. Recent group shows include Scientific Visions, OCHI Gallery, Sun Valley, Making Mends, Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue WA. Death and other Objects, Or Gallery, Vancouver BC; Woman in the Directors Chair, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to digital humanities and aesthetics, visual forms of knowledge production, book history and future designs, graphic design, historiography of the alphabet and writing, and contemporary art.

Her most recent titles include the jointly authored Digital_Humanities (MIT, 2012) with Anne Burdick, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp; Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson Prentice Hall) with Emily McVarish, and SpecLab: Projects in Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009).

A collection of her essays, What Is? is forthcoming from Cuneiform Press and Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production is in production with Harvard University Press as part of their new MetaLab series on the impact of digital humanities and design.

Evergreen is honored to host Selected Druckworks, January through March at the Evergreen Gallery, which surveys Drucker’s books, graphic art and visual projects, revealing key insights into the artist’s development over the course of four decades. It is a smaller version of Drucker’s 40-year retrospective exhibition, Druckworks, which is currently touring the country.

In addition to her academic work, Drucker has produced artists books and projects that are the subject of a retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, that began at Columbia College in Chicago and has been travelling. Her artist’s books are represented in museum and library collections throughout the United States and Europe.