RENNY PRITIKIN

RENNY PRITIKIN
MFA in Visual Studies Graduate Lecture Series
6:30pm / Thursday, April 8th, 2010
@ the Lab / Museum of Contemporary Craft
724 NW Davis
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

“Art and the Invisible, Unseen and Unseeable”

Renny Pritikin is the Director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collection at the University of California Davis and 
former Chief Curator for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has received numerous awards including a Fulbright Fellowship 
to lecture in museums throughout New Zealand. Pritikin gave early support to such noted artists as Nayland Blake, Nancy Rubins, 
Fred Tomaselli, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Chris Johanson, and many others.

DANIEL JOSEPH MARTINEZ

DANIEL JOSEPH MARTINEZ
MFA in Visual Studies Graduate Lecture Series
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
@ the Lab / Museum of Contemporary Craft
724 NW Davis

Check out this great interview with Martinez by Brooklyn Rail’s Phong Bui:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/03/art/daniel-joseph-martinez-with-phong-bui

From the artist himself:

I am an artist who lives and works in the Crenshaw district in South Los Angeles. My work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally since 1978. My artistic practice is known for its complex artistic vocabulary, which is likely to include text, sculpture, installations, painting, video and photography. I endeavor to engage history and contemporary geopolitical realities to expose their complex dynamics and to destabilize and reorder them in ways that can be alternately (or simultaneously) poetic, humorous, or revelatory.

In 2006 I represented the United States at the Cairo Biennial. I participated in the groundbreaking 1993 Whitney Biennial and again in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the 2004 San Juan Triennial, the 2005 Lima Biennial, the 2007 Moscow Biennial, and the 1993 Venice Biennale. I also participated in the 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. In 2010 my work will be presented in group exhibition in Madrid, at the Instituto Cervantes. I am represented by the Simon Preston Gallery in New York .
I have received two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Individual Artist Fellowships (1990-91, 1995-96) and an NEA Project Support Grant (1990); a Getty Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship (1997-98); a Pollock-Krasner Individual Artist Fellowship (2001-02); a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (2003-04); an ArtPace Foundation Fellowship; a Peter Norton Family Foundation Project Support Grant (1991) and five Norton Foundation Artist Fellowships (1997-2001); the First Prize Grant Award of the Tijuana Biennial (2000); and a Flintridge Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship (2000-01). In 2007 I was awarded the United States Artist Grant, and in 2008-09, I received the Rasmuson Foundation Alaska Artist in Residence Award.

I have been teaching since 1990 at the University of California, Irvine, and am currently a Professor of Theory, Practice, and Mediation of Contemporary Art in the Graduate Studies Program and New Genres Department.

My work has been the subject of three exhibition catalogues: The Things You See When You Don’t Have a Grenade! (Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, Calif., 1996); Coyote, Quiero a México y México me Quiere, O Simplemente Otro Mexicano Muerto [Coyote, I Like Mexico and Mexico Likes Me, Or Simply Another Mexican Dead] (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico, 2001); and The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant: Daniel Joseph Martinez: United States Pavilion, 10th International Cairo Biennale 2006 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2006).

I was also honored by the recent publication of a monograph on my work by eminent German publisher Hatje Cantz (Daniel Joseph Martinez: A Life of Disobedience, 2009), with essays by eight provocative critical thinkers, including Arthur C. Danto, David Levi Strauss, Michael Brenson, and Hakim Bey. These various perspectives combine to present my work as an aesthetic trajectory informed by an ethos of poetry, complexity, and risk taking.

MARY WEATHERFORD

MARY WEATHERFORD
Thursday, February 25th – 6:30pm
The Lab @ Museum of Contemporary Craft
724 NW Davis
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

The MFA in Visual Studies program welcomes Los Angeles-based Artist Mary Weatherford in a free public lecture, 6:30 pm Thursday, February 25 in The Lab at Museum of Contemporary Craft, 724 NW Davis St.

Mary Weatherford is a painter with a long career of exhibitions at spaces dedicated to artistic and cultural experimentation. Among her many exhibitions are solo exhibitions at P.S. 1 Museum, New York; Orange County Museum of Art, California; Marc Jancou Gallery, Zurich; Debs & Co., New York; and Sister, Los Angeles, among others.

Since the 1990s, her paintings have borne the influence of Ojai mysticism, California seaside craft and souvenir art, landscape painting of the American Symbolist movement and New York School Abstraction.

Of her work, painter Stephen Westfall has written: “Like a true Symbolist her gaze wanders out across an ocean horizon, confronts a looming rock or cave, or plunges deep into a thicket of vines and weeds. Light and shadow confound and dazzle, sometimes sending off overlapping shards reminiscent of Feininger. Other historical stylistic models include Burchfield, Munch, and Friedrich. The Pop element comes from a “knowingness” with regards to style and how it can be essentialized into a compact shorthand that reflects the constructed nature of the paint surface as much or even more than the represented source, which is often itself a mediated source. Her paint surfaces are often astonishingly beautiful. Painted in Flashe vinyl paint over a heavy ground sanded smooth, they are both fluid and matte, with the chromatic richness of oil and the delicate, mineral grain of gouache.”

The lecture is part of PNCA’s Graduate Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

View work by Mary Weatherford at Kathryn Brennan Gallery.