Introduction

by Elaine Mayes, Chair
Department of Photography

Held annually for two weeks during the summer in the Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography, the National Graduate Seminar is a unique gathering of talented students and creative professionals. This was the eighth year of the seminar. We are proud that 160 Fellows and 249 creative artists and scholars have participated since the seminar's beginning in 1991. As in prior years, the discussion this summer was vigorous and intense.

The topic for 1998, "Public Strategies: Public Art and Public Space" was aptly introduced by Tom Finkelpearl in his seminar opening remarks: "I would like to say that I have been involved in public art for the last ten years and have been to every major convention about public art. This is the best collection of public art speakers and artists that I have ever seen." (Tom, when Director of the Percent for Art Program, worked under the administration of TISCH School of Arts' Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell who was the NYC Commissioner of Cultural Affairs from 1987 to 1991.)

As a measure to share the seminar's offerings to a wider audience, this year's seminar was open to the public for the first time. As a result the sessions drew a variety of creative and professional participants from the art community and received notice in the New York Times. The exhibition, "Police Pictures: The Photograph As Evidence", shown at the Grey Gallery, and the reception for Bob Haozous at the American Indian Community House Gallery/Museum added to a full and intensive schedule.

The seminar began with a presentation by Cheryl Younger and Anna Novakov, who together were the primary planning forces behind this year's offerings. Each raised questions that became the topics for discussions during the sessions that followed. Eleanor Heartney then offered a survey of developments in public art over the last twenty years, and Rosalyn Deutsche set forth a theoretical context for the seminar in her address, "The Question of Public Space."

On the first evening, Artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude share proposals for two projects currently in the planning stages: The Gates, planned for New York City's Central Park and Over the River, a project to cover four to six miles of the Arkansas River in Colorado.

Issues of race, class and gender, were addressed throughout the seminar, beginning with a presentation by Allan Bérubé.

Discussions concerning expansion of public space for art and artists focused on a re-definition of the word "private" and issues ofsurveillance, voyeurism and scopophilia. In addition a discussion of "community as context" was followed by artist presentations that dealt with the artist in relationship to community. Included were the artist's role in helping to establish community identity, rural and urban, as well as the artist's role as an agent for change.

In the sessions concerning "Place, Audience and Historical Memories," Shimon Attie, Esther Gerz, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Leslie King Hammond discussed works created to document the history of communities that are often left out of the textbooks and exist without monuments.

"Educating a New Generation of Artists" focused on how well art schools are or are not preparing young artists to work with and within communities and to work collaboratively. Artists Judy Baca, Suzanne Lacy, and Amalia Mesa-Bains shared an in-depth look at the academic program they created which offers training in these specific skills.

The final sessions focused on public money and its role in defining public art, the values being perpetuated by art and artists' considerations and compromises made when working in a public art context.
As in the past this year's seminar provided a variety of exciting and stimulating ideas, and it is important to offer special thanks to Cheryl Younger and her hard working staff who made the seminar and publication of this journal possible.

The following pages present transcriptions of the presentations and the synopses and analyses prepared by the twenty National Graduate Fellows. The transcriptions include discourse by thirty-seven artists, historians, curators and critics invited to the seminar as well as commentary by the guests who joined us for the 1998 session.