Evergreen Art Lecture Series

Photo by Shauna Bittle, courtesy of The Evergreen State College

Janice Arnold’s art and installations have been redefining the boundaries of handmade FELT since 1999.  The daughter of a cartographer, she learned a global perspective and scale as second sense. Arnold’s virtuosity is evident in the multifaceted character of her work. She creates permanent and temporary installations, and public events, ranging from intricately executed pieces to elaborate environments incorporating her handmade textiles. The textures range from supple and luminous to dense, resilient and complex.  Her work honors an ancient tradition yet stretches it to new places with innovation, exploration, quality and scale putting her in a league of her own as an artist and designer. Beyond beauty, her work transfigures spaces in ways that are thought-provoking, ethereal and sensuous.  She has shown in several major museums, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Gates Foundation, Nordstrom Corporation, and the Lumber Room Foundation.

The work of Janice Arnold ’78 is currently on display in The Evergreen Gallery, on the main floor of the Library building.  The exhibit, “Palace Yurt: Deconstructed,” continues through December 11, 2013.  Additionally, the  Tacoma News Tribune ran a nice story on Janice Arnold’s exhibit now showing in the Evergreen Gallery.

Dennis DeHart’s (b.1970) fine art photographs and interdisciplinary projects are compelled by the connections, conflicts, and intersections of the natural and cultural worlds. His work has been exhibited in a diversity of venues including group and solo shows regionally, nationally and internationally.  Dennis has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His photographs are included in private and public collections including the Getty Archives in Los Angels, The City of Phoenix,  and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Dennis received his MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico. He previously served as an Assistant Professor of Photography with the State University of New York College at Buffalo and is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography with Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Most recently (summer/fall 2013) Dennis exhibited in a solo show with China’s Pingyao International Photography Festival, in addition to participating in Backlight Photography Festival/Photographic Centre Nykyaika Residency in Tampere, Finland.

Naima Lowe is a 34 year old Queer, African-American artist and educator based in Olympia, WA. Her films, videos, performances and writings have been seen at the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, The Knitting Factory, The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific Islander Experience, The Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery, The International Toy Theater Exhibition, and Judson Memorial Church.

Her first film “Birthmarks” was a Student Academy Awards Finalist, won Best Experimental Film at the Newark Black Film Festival and was honored for Best Sound Design in the NextFrame International Student Film Festival. Her collaborative performance and installation Mary and Sarah and You and Me made its New York debut at the historic Judson Memorial Church.

Naima has been recently working with letterpress printing, hand made 16mm film, and other forms of archaic producible visual media. Her 40 page, limited edition, looseleaf book Thirty-Nine (39) Questions for WHITE PEOPLE was shown at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle from May-November 2013.

Naima is currently a member of the faculty at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.

A former NEA Fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of four books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses. He’s also published seven chapbooks, most recently Helplessness, [ black sun crown ], and SORE EROS. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

 David Brody was born in New York City,  did undergraduate work at Columbia University and Bennington College, and received an MFA in painting from Yale University (1983). In addition to solo exhibitions at Gallery NAGA in Boston, Esther Claypool Gallery in Seattle, Gescheidle in Chicago, and Galeria Gilde in Portugal his work has been featured in over seventy group shows including ones at the Chicago Center for the Print; the Center on Contemporary Art (COCA) and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle; The Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Florida, Tallahassee; and at The Painting Center, Alternative Museum, and Bridgewater Gallery in New York City. His work has also been shown at the Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporàneo (ARCO Art Fair) in Madrid, the RipArte Art Fair in Rome, the Trevi Flash Art Museum, in Trevi, Italy, the FAC Art Fair in Lisbon and at Art Chicago in the US. He is represented in Seattle by by Prographica,  Fine Works on Paper.

His work is the subject of two monographs, “David Brody, Selected Painting 1985-1994” and “David Brody, Selected Painting 2000-2001”. The latter features an essay by Elisabeth Sussman, a curator at the Whitney Museum in New York. An exhibit at the Esther Claypool Gallery in Seattle was described by the Seattle Weekly as, “daring, humorous, and superbly executed”; in Artforum they wrote: “Brody’s . . .paintings . . . provide a stunning visual punch . . . [and] are rendered with a bravura that is both compelling and hypnotic.”; and, Sue Taylor, wrote in Art in America, “A highly intelligent artist . . . Brody is absolutely serious about technique. An emphasis on fine drawing, delicate surfaces and careful considerations of color and light informs all his pictures.” Brody has been written about in many other publications including The Boston Globe, the New Art Examiner, the Spanish journal, Lapiz, and in the Lisbon daily Ò Publico.

Brody has received numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, a Basil H. Alkazzi Award, an Elizabeth Foundation Grant, two Massachusetts Artist Fellowships, two University of Washington Royalty Research Fund grants, and was a Fellow at the Shave International Artists’ Workshop in Somerset, England. He has been a visiting critic at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, The University of Chicago, and Harvard University. He has been a Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle since 1996.

He’s had a parallel career in music. Early on he played Swing, Bluegrass, Celtic and Klezmer music and recorded nine albums with various artists and groups on the Flying Fish, Rounder, and Vanguard labels. He has appeared at Avery Fisher Hall and Symphony Space in New York City, on Garrison Keillor’s radio show “A Prairie Home Companion and at major venues and festivals across the US, Canada, and Europe including the Philadelphia Folk Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, and Nyon Folk Festival (Switzerland). He has published five books on music including the best-selling The Fiddler’s Fakebook. He currently writes and performs all original music.

Week 2, 10/9 David Brody
Week 3,  10/16 Brian Teare
Week 4,  10/23 Naima Lowe
Week 6,  11/6 Dennis DeHart
Week 8,  11/20 Janice Arnold
Week 10 12/11 Johanna Drucker

Ashley Hunt is an artist and activist who uses video, photography, mapping and writing to engage social movements, modes of learning and public discourse. Among his interests are structures that allow people to accumulate power and those which keep others from getting power, while learning from the ways people come to know, respond to and conceive of themselves within these structures. Rather than seeing art and activism as two exclusive spheres of practice, he approaches them as complimentary, drawing upon the ideas of social movements and cultural theory alike — the theorizing and practices of each informing the other. This has included investigations into the prison, the demise of welfare state institutions, war and disaster capitalism, documentary representations and political activism. His recent performance, Notes on the Emptying of a City, explores the first-person politics of being in New Orleans with a camera in the months following Hurricane Katrina, when he engaged with community activists to research the city’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison. Other projects include a number of works included under the umbrella of The Corrections Documentary Project (www.correctionsproject.com), which centers around the contemporary growth of prisons and their centrality to today’s economic restructuring and the politics of race; 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, a collaboration with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sanderand David Thorne, and an ongoing collaboration wtih Taisha Paggett, On Movement, Thought and Politics.

Hunt’s work has been screened and exhibited at the P.S.1/MOMA, Project Row Houses, Documenta 12,the Gallery at REDCAT, Nottingham Contemporary, the 3rd Bucharest Bienial, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, as well as numerous grassroots and community based venues throughout the U.S.

Writings and publication include, Printed Project 12 (’09), the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (‘08, ‘07& ‘05), On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader (BAK ’08), Art Journal (‘07), Chto Delat (‘07), Rethinking Marxism (‘06), and at Artwurl.org (‘03–‘05), and Sandbox Magazine (‘02) .

Susan Gevirtz lives in San Francisco. Assistant professor for 10 years at Sonoma State University, Calfornia, she now teaches in CCA’s graduate Visual and Critical Studies and Fine Arts programs. Her books of poetry include Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street, 2010); BROADCAST (Trafficker, 2010); Thrall (Post-Apollo Press, 2007); Hourglass Transcripts (Burning Deck, 2001); Spelt, a collaboration with Myung Mi Kim (a+bend, 1999); Black Box Cutaway (Kelsey Street, 1999); PROSTHESIS : : CAESAREA (Potes and Poets, 1994; reissue Little Red Leaves, 2009); Taken Place (Reality Street 1993); Linen minus (Avenue B 1992); and Domino: point of entry (Leave Books, 1992). Many essays have appeared in literary magazines and scholarly journals. She was an associate editor of HOW(ever) a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship, on the editorial advisory board of the journal Avec, and the online journal HOW2. She received the New Langton Arts “Bay Area Award in Litertaure” in the Spring of 2000. She has recently collaborated with interdisciplinary artist Margaret Tedesco and sound artist Andrew Klobucar. Her play Motion Picture Home was performed as part of a poet’s theatre event in the winter of 2002.

For more than a decade, solo performer Stokley Towles has been studying us. He examines the mundane aspects of life in Seattle like an anthropologist from another planet–our libraries, our trash system, our police force, the history of a single city block–and delivers his findings in rich, understated monologues full of bizarre, colorful trivia and bittersweet observations about how people navigate the world and each other. His latest study, Stormwater, is about the rivers that run beneath our feet. — Brendan Kiley, The Stranger Weekly