The Sarah Moody Gallery of Art presents the exhibition Alice Hohenberg Federico: The Liberation of Clay November 29, 2018 – January 11, 2019. The artist will present a lecture about her work Wednesday, Nov. 28, at 6:00 p.m. in 205 Gorgas Library. The public is invited to the opening reception for the exhibition, Thursday, Nov. 29, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. New York artist and Selma, Ala., native Alice Hohenberg Federico works on the potter’s wheel to create sculptural vessels that transcend function. As she puts it, these vessels are “metaphors that are abstractly figurative.” Her work is influenced by ancient Greek pottery, as well as a fascination with Austrian-born British studio potter Lucie Rie’s work. “Pieces are pulled and twisted, wrapped – they are expressive, singular. To me, some are even imperfectly perfect,” said Federico in an interview with art historian and critic Vered Lieb. Lieb has written an essay about Federico's career and work for a catalog to accompany the exhibition. Federico is represented by George Billis Gallery, New York, N.Y. Her work has been featured and reviewed in Women with a Voice, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun, The New Republic and Clay Chat. She did her undergraduate work in history and received an MFA in ceramics from East Carolina State University. She returned to school later to study ceramics with renowned master potter Ken Ferguson at Kansas City Art Institute where she earned a BFA degree. In conjunction with the Federico exhibition, selections from the Permanent Collection of the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at The University of Alabama will be on display. The Permanent Collection is dedicated to works on paper including prints and photography. Paintings, drawings and small sculpture will also be featured. Image credit: Alice Hohenberg Federico, Water from the Desert Well, 1320, white stoneware clay, 14 inches high. The Sarah Moody Gallery of Art is supported by The University of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Art and Art History. For further information, contact the gallery at (205)348-1891 or go to our website: https://art.ua.edu/gallery/smga/. Garland Hall is a five-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/. For more information about The University of Alabama’s programs in studio art and art history, go here: https://art.ua.edu/academics/.
Curator To Discuss Aboriginal Art Exhibition
Tuscaloosa – Contemporary Australian Aboriginal art is one of the most significant art movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, according to Anne Keener, curator of the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art's upcoming exhibition, Pattern Thinking: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Collection of Tom and Cynthia Schneider. Keener will speak about the exhibition and the art on Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018 at 3:30 p.m., in Lloyd Hall 226. Join us for a reception after the lecture from 5-7 p.m., in Garland Hall 103. The exhibition runs Oct. 11 – Nov. 16. “The indigenous Australian paintings express stories of patterns of interrelation of the forces of all of life, laid down by creator beings,” Keener said. She will talk about the Aboriginal artists in this exhibition and the ideas behind their work. Keener, who received her MFA in painting and drawing, and her BA in comparative studies/religious studies from The Ohio State University, said that she learned the term “pattern thinking” while listening to a talk by the influential Aboriginal elder David Mowaljarlai. Pattern thinking embodies the interconnectedness of all life that the indigenous people of Australia see in the world around them. Mowaljarlai said, “Indigenous elders from all over Australia, from the top end down to the cold country, believe that culture is the lifeblood of the people – the source of inner strength in an individual.” Pattern thinking, an integral part of indigenous Australian culture, according to Mowaljarlai and other Aboriginal leaders, contributes to a balanced life and good mental health and creates and encourages cross cultural dialogue. Image credit left: Johnny Possum Tjapaltjarri, Possum Dreaming, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 24.4 x 23.6 inches. Image credit right: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Snake and Kangaroo Dreaming, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 32 x 51.9 inches The Sarah Moody Gallery of Art is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Art and Art History. For more information, contact the gallery at (205) 348-1891. Lloyd Hall is a five-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/.
Sheila Pree Bright: A Community Conversation about Social Engagement through Art
Sheila Pree Bright: A Community Conversation about Social Engagement through Art Date: Wednesday, September 05, 2018 Time: 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Location: Warner Presentation Room, Wynn Fine Arts Center, Stillman College Cost: Free and open to the public Join Sheila Pree Bright in a community engagement conversation about art! The questions: Can art be a form of activism to create awareness and bring shared communities together to critically look at ongoing social and political struggles? Is it the artist’s responsibility to create social change through art? How can socially engaged art reshape the approach to under-resourced communities to help overcome barriers to participation and create equitable access? What role can young people play in furthering these conversations? Bright will share the short film Election Day: Lens Across America and examples from her recent photographic series Young Americans, 1960 Who, and #1960Now as a point of entry to this community conversation. Sheila Pree Bright's event is part of the Paul R. Jones Lecture Series, sponsored by UA College of Arts & Sciences.
Danish Architect to Speak at UA
The architecture of Denmark expresses the close connection between art and architecture in Danish culture. How does Danish (or any) architecture become art? Architect Morten Sonnenborg will give a talk on the aesthetics of Danish architecture on Tuesday, September 4 at 4:00 p.m. in Smith Hall 205 on UA campus. Sonnenborg has practiced architecture for almost two decades. He received his master of architecture (M.Arch.) from the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole) in 2000 and is the founder and owner of aNNeKS, a small architectural practice in North Sealand, on the Danish Riviera. In his firm, the architects "concentrate on the question of how people feel within the architecture." They ask the client, "Does the daylight fall into the rooms in a beautiful way? Are the rooms proportional and harmonic? Is the outside green space integrated with the interior?" Sonnenborg will give a talk on Danish architecture as art, and how architecture is practiced in Denmark. Morten Sonnenborg's visit is sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Classics and the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Alabama. For more information, contact Associate Professor Douglas Lightfoot: (205) 348-5054; or Professor Jason Guynes: (205) 348-5967. Smith Hall, 427 Sixth Avenue, Tuscaloosa, is a four-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/.
Spirit Citizen – An International Dialogue with Artist Edgar Heap of Birds
Tuscaloosa – Internationally known artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds headlines a series of events on UA campus October 8-24, 2018, centered around an exhibition of his work in the Sella-Granata Art Gallery. During his visit, Oct. 22-24, Heap of Birds will present an artist lecture, gallery talk, book signing and reception, as well as a roundtable discussion with students. Spirit Citizen – An International Dialogue with Artist Edgar Heap of Birds will showcase more than thirty posters from Heap of Birds’s international and national exhibitions as well as a video created by Associate Professor of Art Sky Shineman and Assistant Professor of Journalism and Creative Media Nick Corrao, October 8-24, 2018, in the Sella-Granata Art Gallery. The public is invited to participate in all these events: October 8–24 Edgar Heap of Birds Poster Exhibition Sella-Granata Art Gallery, 109 Woods Hall Monday–Thursday, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. October 22 Artist lecture by Edgar Heap of Birds Gorgas Library 205 6:00 p.m. October 23 Gallery talk by Edgar Heap of Birds with reception and book signing following Sella-Granata Art Gallery, 109 Woods Hall 4:00 p.m. Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (b. 1954) is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Tribes of Oklahoma and an internationally known multi-media artist. Heap of Birds has exhibited his work in the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, and China and participated in Documenta 8, and the Venice Biennale. He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Lila Wallace Foundation, Pew Charitable Trust and the Andy Warhol Foundation, among others. Heap of Birds is the subject of a book by art historian Bill Anthes published by Duke University Press. Edgar Heap of Birds maintains a disciplined practice in multiple genres: public art installations; abstract-landscape paintings of his ongoing Neuf series; large scale, text-based drawings; prints and multiples; works in glass; and monumental porcelain enamel on steel outdoor sculpture. Image credits: top: Edgar Heap of Birds in his studio in Oklahoma City, 2018. Photo by Shanna Ketchum Heap of Birds. bottom: Edgar Heap of Birds, Neuf Painting for Autumn (2), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 44 inches. Edgar Heap of Birds’s visit is sponsored by the Visiting Artists and Lecturers Series of the Department of Art and Art History, the College of Arts & Sciences Diversity committee, American Studies, Race & Gender Studies and is organized by Associate Professor of Art Sky Shineman. Woods Hall is a six-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Gold 1, Crimson, Blue and Bronze CrimsonRide buses stop between Garland Hall and Gorgas Library. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/.
Renowned Scholar To Speak on Apocalyptic Images
Tuscaloosa. — Explore the visionary landscape of the medieval Book of Revelation with one of its eminent scholars, Dr. Richard K. Emmerson. Dr. Emmerson will deliver a public lecture, “Apocalypse Illuminated,” on Tuesday, September 11, 2018 at 6:30 pm in Smith Hall 205 on UA campus. Richard K. Emmerson is Dean Emeritus of the School of Liberal Arts at Manhattan College, former Professor and Chair of Art History at Florida State University, and currently Visiting Distinguished Professor at FSU. He has served as Deputy Director of Fellowships at the National Endowment for the Humanities and as Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America, and has edited Speculum, Studies in Iconography, and Traditio. A Fellow of the Medieval Academy, he received the Medieval Academy Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies in 2009. Dr. Emmerson’s research focuses on medieval apocalypticism and its representation in art, drama, and visionary poetry. He has published seven books, including Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (1981), The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (1992, with Ronald B. Herzman), and The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (1993, with Bernard McGinn). His most recent book, studying the seven-hundred year history of medieval Apocalypse manuscripts, is Apocalypse Illuminated: The Visual Exegesis of Revelation in Medieval Manuscripts, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2018. He has authored more than fifty articles, many studying word-image relationships in medieval illustrated manuscripts. Recent essays include “On the Threshold of the Last Days: Negotiating Image and Word in the Apocalypse of Jean de Berry,” in Exploring the Threshold of Medieval Visual Culture (2012); “Visualizing the Visionary: John in his Apocalypse,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art and Thought (2010); “Framing the Apocalypse: The Performance of John’s Life in the Trinity Apocalypse,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance (2008); “Visualizing the Vernacular: Middle English in Early Fourteenth-Century Bilingual and Trilingual Manuscript Illustrations,” in Studies in Manuscript Illumination: A Tribute to Lucy Freeman Sandler (2008); “A ‘Large Order of the Whole’: Intertextuality and Interpictoriality in the Hours of Isabella Stuart,” Studies in Iconography (2007); and “The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias: Image, Word, Commentary, and Visionary Experience,” Gesta (2002). Image credit: Silos Apocalypse: Northern Spain, c.1100, British Library Add. MS 11695, ff.147v-148. Richard K. Emmerson's lecture is part of the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Continuing Studies at The University of Alabama. To see our past and future visiting artists and scholars, go here: https://art.ua.edu/resources/visiting-artists/. Smith Hall, 427 Sixth Avenue, Tuscaloosa, is a four-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/. For more information on this or the other speakers in our upcoming Visiting Artist and Scholar Series, contact Rachel Dobson (rachel.dobson@ua.edu) or Pete Schulte (pschulte@ua.edu).
Artist Karl Haendel to Speak at UA
Tuscaloosa. — Artist Karl Haendel will give a public lecture on Thursday, April 12, 2018, at 6:30 p.m. in 205 Smith Hall, on UA campus. Known for his use of appropriation and meticulous draftsmanship, Karl Haendel works in "issues of artistic and cultural heritage and power." His work has been described as "strategically [manipulating] tangled visual, material, and textual themes, often to humorous and evocative effect." Haendel makes drawings, installations, films and public projects in Los Angeles where he lives and works. He received a bachelor’s degree in art semiotics and art history from Brown University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Haendel also studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Articles and reviews about his work have been featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian and in magazines including The New Yorker, Artforum, Frieze, Art and America and Modern Painters. Haendel has been included in the Biennial of the Americas (2015), the Whitney Biennial (2014), Biennale de Lyon (2013), Prospect (2011), and the California Biennial (2004, 2008). His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Fogg Art Museum; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo. He has been the recipient of grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the California Community Foundation and is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY; Wentrup, Berlin and Barbara Seiler, Zurich. Image Credit: Karl Haendel, Rodeo 9, 2017, pencil and graphite powder on paper, 103 x 77 inches. Image courtesy of the artist. Karl Haendel's lecture is part of the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, the Visiting Artist and Scholar Committee, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Continuing Studies at The University of Alabama. To see our past and future visiting artists and scholars, click here. 205 Smith Hall, at 427 Sixth Avenue, Tuscaloosa, is a four-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/. Parking is free on campus in a legal space after business hours. For more information on this or the other speakers in our upcoming Visiting Artist and Scholar Series, contact Rachel Dobson (rachel.dobson@ua.edu) or Pete Schulte (pschulte@ua.edu).
Art Historian to Talk on Black Arts Movement
Tuscaloosa. — Dr. Rebecca Zorach will deliver a public lecture, “‘The Time is Now!’ The Black Arts Movement in Chicago, circa 1968,” on Wednesday, March 21 at 6:30 p.m., in 205 Gorgas Library. Please join us for a pre-lecture reception at 5:30 p.m. in 205 Gorgas Library sponsored by the College of Arts & Sciences Diversity Committee. Rebecca Zorach (Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago) is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University where she teaches and writes on early modern European art (15th-17th century), contemporary activist art and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Particular interests include print media, feminist and queer theory, theory of representation and the multiple intersections of art and politics. Included among her many publications is the award-winning book, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Before joining the faculty at Northwestern she taught at the University of Chicago for fourteen years. She has been a visiting faculty member at Yale University, the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales and Williams College, where she was Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor in 2013-14. Her books include The Passionate Triangle (University of Chicago Press, 2011); the edited volumes Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis (with Amy Bingaman and Lisa Shapiro Sanders, Routledge, 2002); The Idol in the Age of Art (with Michael Cole, Routledge, 2009) and Art Against the Law (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014). Recent articles have addressed AfriCOBRA's gender and family politics; Claes Oldenburg's lawsuit challenging the copyright of the Chicago Picasso and the experimental art center Art & Soul, founded on the west side of Chicago in 1968 by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Conservative Vice Lords, a former street gang. She is currently completing a book on Art & Soul and the landscape of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago (late 1960s-1970s), and undertaking a new project that will consider the relationship of artistic and political agency to natural and social ecologies. She is a member of Feel Tank Chicago, is on the board of the South Side Community Art Center and South Side Projections and co-organizes the archive and oral history project Never The Same with Daniel Tucker. Image credit: Darryl Cowherd, Be Black, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Dr. Zorach's lecture is part of the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, the Visiting Artist and Scholar Committee, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Continuing Studies at The University of Alabama. To see our past and future visiting artists and scholars, go here: https://art.ua.edu/resources/visiting-artists/. Gorgas Library, 711, Capstone Drive, Tuscaloosa, is a four-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/. Parking is free on campus in a legal space after business hours. For more information on this or the other speakers in our upcoming Visiting Artist and Scholar Series, contact Rachel Dobson (rachel.dobson@ua.edu) or Pete Schulte (pschulte@ua.edu).
Artist Wendy White to Speak at UA
Tuscaloosa. — Artist Wendy White will give a public lecture on Tuesday, February 27, 2018, at 6:30 p.m. in Gallalee Hall Room 227, on UA campus. Wendy White’s work has been described as “most preoccupied with the lifespan of seemingly dissonant places, people, and things, all of which are bound by the same sense of impermanence and eventual decay.” The themes of White’s work include athletes and athletics, machismo culture, domesticity, branding and pop culture, which she expresses with photographic images, layered fields of paint, cutout shapes, letters, text and spray-painted graffiti. Wendy White lives and works in New York City. She holds a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her exhibitions include The Art Show: Art of the New Millenium in Taguchi Art Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan; Futbol: The Beautiful Game, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014); Taguchi Hiroshi Art Collection: A Walk around the Contemporary Art World after Paradigm Shift, Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan (2015); So Athletic, Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin (2012); Informal Relations, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (2011); Hue & Cry, Sotheby's S|2, New York, N.Y. (2012); Idealizing the Imaginary: Invention and Illusion in Contemporary Painting, Oakland University, Mich. (2012); Third Thoughts, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain (2010); and Borderland Abstraction, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Neb. (2010). She has had solo exhibitions at Leo Koenig Inc., New York, N.Y.; Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Brussels, Belgium; Van Horn, Düsseldorf, Germany, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Cabinet, Milan; Galerie Jérôme Pauchant, Paris; and Galeria Moriarty, Madrid. White is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts painting fellowship in 2012 and a George Segal painting grant in 2008. Her work was featured in Phaidon’s anthology Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting and will be included in the forthcoming group show entitled The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art, curated by Franklin Sirmans, at Perez Art Museum, Miami. Her website is here: http://www.wendywhite.net/. Image Credit: Wendy White, Janet Guthrie, 2017, acrylic and inkjet on three canvases, Dibond, 72 1/4 x 60 1/4 inches. Image courtesy of the artist. Wendy White’s lecture is part of the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, the Visiting Artist and Scholar Committee, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Continuing Studies at The University of Alabama. To see our past and future visiting artists and scholars, click here. Gallalee Hall, 174 6th Ave., Tuscaloosa, is a little over five-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/. Parking is free on campus in a legal space after business hours. For more information on this or the other speakers in our upcoming Visiting Artist and Scholar Series, contact Rachel Dobson (rachel.dobson@ua.edu) or Pete Schulte (pschulte@ua.edu).