NATIONAL GRADUATE SEMINAR
June 3-12, 2002

Monday, June 3
FELLOWS' ORIENTATION – 9:30 AM
 
SEMINAR INTRODUCTION –1:30 PM
Sarah Farsad and Cheryl Younger
Sarah Farsad born in 1967, Tehran, Iran, received her MFA from San Jose State University.  Sarah has been artistically collaborating with Richard A.  Wager since 1999 in the group Farsager.  A National Graduate Seminar Program Fellow in 1994, Sarah became Assistant  Director of the Photography Institute after leaving her post as Associate Educator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.  She is a board member of, and teaches at ABC No Rio, a non-profit gallery and community space on the Lower East Side of New York City.
 
Cheryl Younger, Director of The Photography Institute, conceived and initiated the National Graduate Seminar in 1991 at New York University.  Younger has created many programs for arts and education.  As the Director of Post-Secondary Education at Film In the Cities in Minneapolis/St. Paul she was responsible for initiating a collaborative Media Arts Program funded by an NEA Challenge Grant.  She was the first executive director of Region I Arts Council in Minnesota.  From 1982 to 1990 she was on the Executive Board of the Society for Photographic Education, serving as National Chair and Treasurer, and chairing two national conferences.  She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and has taught photography to students ranging from third grade to the graduate school.  Presently she teaches at  the International Center for Photography and New York University.  Her work has been exhibited and published internationally, including MS.  Magazine, Popular Photography Annual, Insights, New American Nudes, Individ og Autdritet (Denmark), and Pregnant Pictures: the Work of Women in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.  Currently she is working on a documentary movie about September 11.
 
LECTURE – 2:00 PM
Darsie Alexander: Slideshow: Photography and the Projected Image
This presentation will trace the evolution of slide works in Conceptual and Performance Art from the 1960s and traces its trajectory to the present day.  The presentation will focus on early uses of slides as an affordable and low-tech means of transforming space (either as a backdrop to performance works or as discrete installations) at a moment when artists sought to refute the traditions of “high art” by creating temporal and site-specific works.  Using the straightforward device of the slide projector, artists garnered a new means to explore the display and reception of photographically-based images.  In addition to addressing the question of “transparency”  that underlies all forms of projection, this presentation will examine slide works as a visual format uniquely suited to address the elusive nature of representation.
 
ARTIST PRESENTATION –  7:30 PM
John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda: Towers of Light
John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi in collaboration with Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda have created Towers of Light, a response to the September 11th attacks.  Shortly after the attack, each team had independently envisioned two beams of light rising from downtown NYC.  Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda are both former residents in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s World Views Artist Residency program, which was housed on the 91st floor of World Trade Center Tower One.  Responding to an invitation from The New York Times Magazine, the two artists proposed an image of two beacons of light called Phantom Towers.  They used light as a way of “sculpting the plumes of dust” hanging above Ground Zero the nights just after the attacks.  “It was an emotional response more than anything…the towers are like ghost limbs, we can feel them even though they are not there anymore.”  In the spirit of the recover and rescue effort the two teams joined forces to bring the project to fruition.   Designed to fill the void left in New York City’s skyline and spirit, the projections recreated the image of the lost towers with high-powered lights.  Not intended as a memorial, the project is a rebuilding of their city’s skyline and identity.  Towers of Light shone nightly March 13 to April 13, 2002.  The Municipal Art Society and Creative Time provided production support, with the assistance of Battery Park City Authority.
 
Tuesday, June  4
LECTURE – 9:30 AM
Jennifer Pearson Yamashiro, PhD:  Projecting and Collecting Erotica in the 1950s and the 1990s
One of the largest collections of erotica in the world, thanks to Alfred C.  Kinsey, is located at Indiana University in the heartland of American conservatism.  During the middle of the twentieth century,
Kinsey and a small team of researchers conducted the most comprehensive studies on human sexual behavior ever attempted.  Their pioneering sex research projects and famous publications, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), are world famous, but much less attention has been given to the outstanding and diverse archive of erotica they managed to accumulate.  This presentation will concentrate on the incredible collection of photography housed at the Kinsey Institute.  From this archive, we will view some photographs produced during the mid-twentieth century to compare reactions in the 1950s to some contemporary responses to the same images.  Fellows are invited to ask questions about the photographs, the erotica collection, the Institute, and the personal and political experiences this curator faced during her years at the Institute.   (PLEASE NOTE:  This presentation will present sexually explicit materials.)
 
LECTURE – 10:30 AM
Margot Lovejoy: Projections of Meaning: where content an context intertwine
Artist projects using new media have the potential to open up a discourse on community based systems which utilize processes of exchange, learning and adaptation.  These are built on the premise that meaning in a work of art is dependent upon dialogue and communication between individuals and groups.  Such relational systems provide a context for participants to reflect their personal understandings about their own social and political contexts. 

Lovejoy will discuss these issues, imperatives and methodologies in the creation of her work, ranging from early slide projection and installation works which also have installation aspects–TURNS and PARTHENIA.  She will use these works and others as a means of discussing her current research into how context and content react and intertwine in relation to constructing conditions of meaning.
 
LECTURE – 1:30 PM
Thomas Zummer:  Projection, Phantasm, and the Image of Light
Darkness, having no boundary, presses against us on all sides, a terrible absence of force or shape, erasing and muting the extent and limits of our being, a contraction of whatever the mind can hold as an image of the human.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition the very opening words of Genesis establish a relation between light, speech and form that remains paradigmatic for much consequent Western thought, from Plato to Leonardo to Kant, to the illumination of our cities and the projection of our dreams.
This presentation will consist of two parts: a detailed overview of the Whitney Museum of American Arts’ recent exhibition, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, beginning with a descriptive talk and slide presentation which places each of the works in an historical and theoretical context.  In the second part, we will re-read these works in a deeper theoretical register, taking up a discussion of the interrelationships between technology, media, aesthetics and philosophy.  We will examine some of the long-running discussions of ”projected light” in their historical specificity.  It will be the argument of this section of the seminar that the various technologies of light (public illumination, photography, cinema, video, digital and other forms of technical reproducibility, surveillance and telepresence), are coextensive with cultural figurations of light paradigms and metaphors, which continue to form and inform the interpenetration of technology and discourse.  We will look at how certain aesthetic practices adopt a reflexive stance with regard to projection-technologies, becoming in a sense a form of active/tacit interface, drawing out the implications of meaning in the interstices between spectator, context, discourse, technology, and artwork.
 
ARTIST PRESENTATION – 3:30 PM
Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944.  He has received international attention for his large body of work, which has included seminal work in photography, installation, and film, as well as artist’s books.  For the past decade and a half, he has been creating installations that explore his longstanding interest in identity, narrative and biography.  In these haunting installations which use light bulbs, shadows, blurred 2nd or 3rd-generation prints made from found or borrowed family photos, clothing, and linen, the artist presents personal histories which expose photography’s ties to memory, loss, and mourning, as well as its vulnerabilities to the claim of truth. 

ARTIST PRESENTATION – 7:30 PM (ROOM 413)
Do Ho Suh: Blurring Boundaries
A slide presentation on Do-Ho Suh’s recent works, the presentation will focus on the issues of the permeability of the boundaries between “the one” and “the other,” and between “the one” and “the many.”

Wednesday, June 5
LECTURE – 9:00 AM
Rebecca DeRoo: Cultural Projections of Race and Gender
Based on recent theories of photography and vision, this presentation will explore how projected images in culture and mass media affect our understanding of race and gender.  Further DeRoo will examine how photographers have manipulated and reframed projected images to challenge stereotypes.  In particular, it will examine how Lorna Simpson combines images and text in her work to create visual and verbal puns that reframe photographic images and challenge racial and gender stereotypes.
 
ARTIST PRESENTATION – 10:30 AM
Lisa Yuskavage
The artist, Lisa Yuskavage, and critic, Cary Lovelace, will have a conversation about the artist’s work.
 
LECTURE – 2 PM
Ellen Tolmie: Visual Depictions of Children
Ellen Tolmie will review the premises of visual depictions of children with a close look at the range of implications and whose interests are being served.  A key point is that although images of children are ubiquitous, children are rarely consulted in the process.  This is an indication that there is an incomplete representation at work.  Within this larger context, the specifics of sexual projections can be understood.  Tolmie will also discuss her work in developing guidelines for the appropriate use of photographs of children within UNICEF.

ARTIST PRESENTATION – 3:30 PM
Donna De Cesare: Cultural Projections: Violence and Sexuality in depictions of Children
How does a photographer remain honest, respectful and sensitive to the vulnerability of children as subjects? DeCesare will show work from three different projects: a work which explores the ways that US gangs are spreading to Latin America told through the life stories of several young people, work done for UNICEF about the Columbian Children’s Peace Movement, and work done for UNICEF on the subject of sexual exploitation of children in Guatemala and Colombia.  She will talk about the importance of sensitivity to issues of identifying individual children who may be endangered by “overexposure,” sensitivity to portrayals that can play into cultural stereotypes or voyeurism, and the importance of collaborative strategies such as including the children’s own testimonies or narratives and getting responses from children to the work. 
 
LECTURE – 4:30 PM
Torrance York, Irene Villaseñor, Isaiah Miller: 
A Youth Perspective: Youth Produced Videos at the Educational Video Center
Giving youth the tools to speak for themselves represents the mission of the Educational Video Center (EVC).   Founded in 1984, EVC is a community based media center that teaches documentary video production and media analysis to youth and educators.  In the High School Documentary Workshop, youth receive course credit while making a documentary with their peers.  Through the Youth Organizers TV program, high school graduates earn a stipend while producing videos for clients, such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.  In November, EVC was one of ten organizations nationally to receive a Coming Up Taller Award  from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the NEA and the NEH for its cultural work with at-risk youth.  EVC films have provided opportunities for youth to address and examine political and personal concerns within their communities in such a way that holds a contemporary audience’s attention.  A discussion of EVC’s methodology and the value of the process of facilitating youth produced work,  will include viewing selections from EVC works and presentations from former youth producers about their experiences.
 
PANEL DISCUSSION – 7:30 PM
Moderator: Tanya Turkovich
                   Donna De Cesare
                   Ellen Tolmie
                   Torrance York
                   Irene Villaseñor
                   Isaiah Miller
 
Thursday, June 6
LECTURE – 10:30 AM
Sarah Hart: Augmented Reality
The interface between the real and the virtual is rich territory for artistic exploration and Augmented Reality (AR) is becoming an important element in contemporary artists’ work.  Many of the new electronic technologies encourage viewer participation and are further challenging the traditional boundaries  between the artist, the work itself, and the audience.  As high end Virtual Reality (VF) CAVES and simulators are rarely available for extensive creative exploration and offer limited exhibition opportunities, artists have turned to more accessible AR technologies.  Interactive projected pieces, long distance collaboration, and robotics are redefining both how artists make work and how their work is experienced.
 
ARTIST PRESENTATION – 2:00 PM
Heidi Kumao: Research as Art, Art as Research
Kumao will present an overview of the cultural and technical context from which her work emerged.  The presentation will cover four types of work: Cinema machines, Emotion machines, 2-D animations, and a collaborative project called Nomadika.  The artist will describe the benefits and misadventures that arise from working as an artist in a research environment, doing collaborative work with scientists, and starting an artists' and scientists' collective.  Additionally, Kumao will discuss use of the small projected image and its metaphors in her work.
 
ARTIST PRESENTATION – 4:00 PM
Stephen Marc: Soul Searching and Rendezvous with the Underground Railroad
Marc’s work is an exploration of personal identity, family and the African Diaspora through documentary photography and digital montage.  He will present work in both forms and discuss the transition from documentary to digital, which allows more complex layering and connections to be constructed, extending the range of storytelling.
          
Work that will be addressed include the Soul Searching digital montage series about family and extended family, that merge his photographs, drawings, family snapshots, antique photographs, and found objects into pattern based environments where cultural documentation and personal history are woven together.  The montages are a visual crossroads that combine a sense of implied narrative with the presence of ritual.  His investigation of the Underground Railroad which began during an artist residency at CEPA Gallery, 2000, is where he created a series of montages that combine photographs of people and places in Buffalo, NY with sites connected to the Underground Railroad in the Buffalo/Niagara region.  Since then Marc has conducted extensive research on the subject and has visited additional sites in New York and Ohio in order to create photographs for current works in progress.  The montage work will be explained in relationship to the earlier documentary work in Urban Notions which portrays his home in the midwest and The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience which compares and contrasts the black communities in different countries.
 
LECTURE –  8PM  (ROOM 413)
James Smalls:  Black Men and Interracial Homoeroticism in the Photography of Carl Van Vechten
 
This lecture will focus on a series of previously inaccessible male nude photographs by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) produced in the 1930s and 1940s.  The images show black men and interracial male couples set in highly contrived scenarios in which elements of interracial homoeroticism, modernist primitivism, and camp sensibilities intersect.  I want to consider selected images from this archive in terms of how they might challenge, complicate, or transform what we already know about Van Vechten's relationship with the Harlem Renaissance, the history of homoerotic photography, and representations of interracial homoeroticism.  In this process, I want to engage some theoretical concepts around fetishism, spectatorship, the veil, and the mask. 
 
Friday, June 7
ARTIST PRESENTATION – 9 AM
Charlene Teters: Prisons of Image
Multimedia artist and activist Charlene Teters is known for challenging the inappropriate use of American Indian images, cultures and spirituality.  Teters’ medium is popular culture itself.  Through her artwork Charlene exposes misperceptions of what it is to be Indian and positions the work to express the reality of being Indigenous in America. 
 
LECTURE – 10:30 AM
Deborah Willis and Carla Williams: Imaging The Black Female Body
In the 19th century, black women were rarely subjects for artistic studies but posed before the camera for social scientific investigation and as exotic representations of the “Other.”  In the 20th century the images of black women consisted of self-conscious portraits and self-portraits that depicted a much broader interpretation of the black female as subject.  We will discuss the photographs we found in collections, public and private, as well as look at the work of contemporary women photographers who reclaim their visual representation and often refute the representation of the past.  Photographers discussed include Bravo, Edward Weston, James VanDerZee, Carrie Mae Weems, Joy Gregory, Renee Cox, Lorna Simpson, Cathy Opie, and Gordon Parks.
 
ARTIST PRESENTATION – 2 PM
Lynn Marshal-Linnemeier: The Language of Silence
The presentation will include a discussion of early, recent and  work-in-progress including, A Slave Speaks in Silence – a 2001 photo-based installation presented at Clark/Atlanta University Galleries in Atlanta Georgia; and Infrangible Nexus—The Laura Nelson Project,  a photo-based installation that examines the psychology of lynch mob mentality,  its effects on lynching victims and the residual and underlying effects on contemporary America.

“Illiteracy = silence” means lack of documentation.  “Lack of documentation” in Western society means “lack of legitimization” and lack of legitimization = an invisible presence.  The projects explore the critical issue of oral documentation and how that documentation can be validated in a society that leans heavily on written communication.  Blurring the lines between fact and fiction will be discussed as variables of truth and validity.  She will discuss selections from Harriett Beacher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, photographs from James Allen’s Without Sanctuary, and essays that explore oral histories and alternative record keeping methods. 

ARTIST PRESENTATION - 3:15 PM
Roshini Kempadoo: Differences Electronic
Cultural difference, definitions of nationalism and race matters are inextricably bound-up with the way we engage with contemporary visual culture and “cyberculture” - the contemporary cultural experience linked to notions of cyberspace as an electronic networked environment.  Increased digitalization and enhanced electronic communication is impacting on almost every definition of our cultural selves–from the public sphere of collective, social activism and citizenry through to the notion and defining of the private, individual self.

Using my own work, the presentation will explore three areas  that contribute to some of the debates surrounding the digital experience and definitions of race.  It will explore our relationship to the colonial documentation of the past and how this is reformulated into a contemporary electronic context.  Notions of individual and collective definitions of migration, identity and transnationalism are applied to a digital and networked environment.  The presentation will also raise specific aspects of post-photographic electronic media and enhance notions of virtuality, which impact on our experience and understanding of notions of difference and issues of race. 
 
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION –  4:15 PM

The roundtable will consist of an open discussion between panelists and audience.  Questions about about collective memory and cultural practices in photography will be explored.
 
Saturday, June 8
FILMS – 10 AM
Melissa Hibbard and Hamid Rahmanian: Conceptions of Identity
Sir Alfred of Charles de Gaulle Airport
Mehran Karemi Nasseri, who now goes be the name "Sir Alfred", has been living in the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France.  For the past twelve years he has been waiting for the document that would allow him to leave.  Unlike the story that has been told in the world press of a man trapped in the underground terminals of an airport, dubbed the, "strangest case in immigration history,” this documentary examines the life of a man whose only aspiration is to be somebody else.
Shahrbanoo
Hibbard and Rahmanian will present the documentary Shahrbanoo and follow up with a discussion about the representation of women in the Middle East.  By comparing the concept of feminism in the West to that of the East, they will look at Muslim women from a different, more empowering perspective and bring up alternatives to the stereotypes that exoticize and demote Muslim women through Western media. 

LECTURE – 1:30 PM
Mark Crispin Miller: Context
Although we rightly cherish “freedom of the press” in the United States, that crucial freedom seems to be at risk today, because of the unprecedented size and influence of the great media cartel that now includes the nation's mainstream news organizations.  With their penchant for sensational stories, their tendency to slash news budgets, their implication in a range of other, controversial industries, their dependence on large advertisers and their inordinate closeness to the White House, the media corporations appear to work consistently against their most committed journalists–and, therefore, against the public interest.
 
How did this situation come about?  How might it be transformed for the better?  In such a system, what is the place for dissenting views, unpopular reports, and other revelations that may go against the grain?  In attempting answers to these questions, this should provide some context for the other talks featured at this seminar.
 
LECTURE – 3 PM
Danny Schechter: Network Refugee
Danny Schechter will be discussing his experience in Dissecting the Media and producing programming that marches to a different drummer.  He is a network refugee, dubbed a "hero of downward mobility" TV producer and film maker who will discuss “how another approach to media is possible.”
 
Danny Schechter, MediaChannel Director and Executive Director, is also a founder and Vice President/Executive Producer of Globalvision, Inc., an award-winning media company formed in 1987.  Mr.  Schechter has been a broadcast and print journalist and is an internationally recognized speaker and writer on media issues.  He was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University and his work has been honored with, among other recognitions, Emmy awards, the IRIS award, the George Polk Award, the Major Armstrong Award, and honors from the National Association of Black Journalists.  Additionally, Mr.  Schechter  was the news director and principal newscaster  for WBCN-FM, an on-air reporter for WBGH, and news program producer and  investigative reporter  for  CNN and ABC.  Mr.  Schechter’s print journalism career has included serving as the London editor for Ramparts Magazine. His articles have appeared in Newsday, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, Detroit Free Press, Village Voice, Media Studies Journal, and Zing Magazine, among others.  Mr.  Schechter is the author of The More You Watch, The Less You Know (Seven Stories Press) and News Dissector: Passions, Pieces, and Polemics (Electron Press). 
 
LECTURE - 4:30 PM
Brian Palmer:
“I have worked outside the mainstream press and smack in the middle of it.  I’ll offer a firsthand view from both perspectives and provide some background on the factors that drive decision making in each.”
 
Brian Palmer is a New York-based general news correspondent for CNN/US.  He joined CNN in 2000 from Fortune magazine, where he covered a wide range of topics, including the Fortune Global Forum in Shanghai, small business and the defense and photography industries.
Prior to his tenure at Fortune, Palmer was the Beijing bureau chief for US News & World Report.  Before switching to the editorial side at US News& World Report in 1996, he was a staff photographer at the magazine.  In addition to being a general assignment photographer, he was a member of the White House traveling pool and deployed with the Department of Defense media pool.       
       From 1990-1993, he served as an assistant editor of The Village Voice, where he wrote book reviews and pieces on race and politics.  Palmer also worked as a freelance photojournalist and writer. 
     Palmer earned a Bachelor's degree in East Asian studies from Brown University and a Masters in Photography from the School of Visual Arts.  He also studied Chinese language and history in the mid-1980s at Nanjing University in the People's Republic of China.

LECTURE – 9 AM
Jon Alpert: Community Television
Jon Alpert will speak about the history of Downtown TV (DCTV): how it was started, how it has survived and how it has grown into the multi-faceted organization that it is today.
 
Jon Alpert is Co-Director/Founder of DCTV, Video Producer/ Reporter.  He has traveled the world as a one-man production team for over 27 years.  His work has helped build DCTV into one of the most prestigious institutions in Chinatown.  When he is not lugging a betacam on his shoulders, Jon plays on his ice hockey team winning championships year after year.  Jon studies Karate, plays soccer, weightlifts, does aerobics, rides horses, roller-skates, and occasionally rides his motorcycle.  He has also won countless Emmys and awards and currently is working on a documentary about the Latin Kings!
 
 
LECTURE – 10 AM
Philip Gefter will discuss the process of choosing pictures (and stories) for the front page of The New York Times.
 
Philip Gefter is the Page One Picture Editor of The New York Times.  Before coming to the paper ten years ago, he was a picture editor, respectively, at Fortune, Geo, Aperture, and The San Francisco Examiner's Sunday Magazine.  He has taught photography at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and at the San Francisco Art Institute.  He has a BFA from Pratt Institute and did graduate work at NYU.
 
Ira Rosen from his experience. Ira will discuss how decision are made about what goes on TV news programs and what doesn’t.
 
Ira Rosen is presently  the senior producer for Prime Time Live, and executive producer for ABC Magazine Webcasts for ABCNEWS.com (part of Walt Disney Internet Group (NYSE:DIG).   He has been a senior producer for ABC News for the past 11 years.  Earlier in his career, Rosen worked at 60 Minutes for nine years, where he produced segments primarily for co-editor Mike Wallace.  Rosen won an Alfred DuPont-Columbia Award in 1982 for “Good Cop, Bad Cop”, which focused on police protection of Chicago drug dealers.  In 1983, he won an investigative Emmy for “The Nazi Connection”, an investigation of how US officials granted sanctuary to Nazis in return for information about the Soviet Union.  In all he has won 20 National Emmys.
In 1987 Rosen received a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard.  Two years later he moved to ABC News with the founding of PrimeTime Live.  The show has since won numerous prizes for distinguished investigative reporting, including three RFK Awards, two Alfred DuPont-Columbia Awards, four National Press Club Awards, and three Overseas Press Club Awards.  Under Rosen’s leadership, PrimeTime Live won the top citation from Investigative Reporters and Editors for an unprecedented six times in eight years.
 
 
LECTURE – 11AM
Tom Rosenstiel will discuss The Project For Excellence in Journalism and a recent study completed by The Project analyzing  the media covered the “War on Terrorism.”
 
Since 1996, Tom Rosenstiel has been the Director for The Project For Excellence in Journalism - a program initiative financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts to clarify and improve journalism standards.  From 1996-97, Rosenstiel also served as Media Critic for MSNBC.  As Vice Chairman of Committee of Concerned Journalist since 1997, Rosenstiel manages a consortium of more than 1,000 journalist engaged in reflection about the values of journalism.  As the Chief Congressional Correspondent for Newsweek, 1995 - 1996, he covered the Republican Congressional revolution of 1995 and the Dole presidential election campaign of 1996.  From 1983-95 Mr.  Rosenstiel worked for The Los Angeles Times as a Media Critic, a Washington correspondent, national correspondent and financial writer.  His publications include The Elements of Journalism:  What Newspeople Should Expect, Crown Publishers, April 2001; Warp Speed:  America In The Age Of Mixed Media, The Century Foundation, May 1991; and Strange Bedfellows:  How Televisions And The Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics, 1992, Hyperison Press, 1993.  Born 1956 in California, Mr.  Rosenstiel received his MS in Journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, 1980.  
 

LECTURE – 2 PM
Nadema Agard:  Who is the Virgin of Guadalupe? Women Artists Crossing Borders
Who is the Virgin of Guadalupe? Women Artists Crossing Borders is an exhibition of work by women visual artists who make claim to the Virgin not only as a Catholic and Mexican icon, but as an indigenous symbol of the earth for all the Americas and perhaps the world. 
 
Agard  will offer a presentation with music, slides, and video clips to show how the works of these women are catalysts for thoughts and discussions about crossing borders that are spiritual and mapping boundaries that are indigenous.  She will discuss how the works of Native women artists from the Americas and Hawaii will bring a particularly indigenous perspective and reflect how the Virgin of Guadalupe has many names but one essence—Mexican Icon, Aztec Goddess/Mother of God, Catholic Spanish Virgin, Cherokee Corn Mother “Selu,” Pueblo Corn Maiden, Lakota White Buffalo Calf Woman, Haudenosaunee Giver of Life or Pachamama of the Andes.  She will conclude with an explanation of how all artists reflect upon this Virgin from their particular cultural windows and how this American Goddess is a manifestation of a global spiritual feminine presence, which ultimately represents aspects of the life giving powers of the earth.

ARTIST PRESENTATION – 4 PM
Margaret Stratton: Miracle
Miracle is a thirty-three minute video odyssey documenting one woman’s search for the miracles of the Virgin Mary.  A must see for recovering Catholics their families and friends worldwide.  From Italy to Portugal, France to Georgia, and Iowa City to Peru, this work recovers a newly minted set of the Seven Deadly Sins on the way to immortalizing the latest in modern religious trends: “Spiritual Tourism.” Rated “S” for satirical. 
 
LECTURE – 7 PM
Amy Goodman: Democracy Now!
Democracy Now!, one of the country's most important forums for progressive political views, has been the most popular program on the independent Pacifica Radio network for years.  Over the last few years Pacifica has been engaged in fierce internal struggles, which among other things, resulted in Goodman being suspended without pay in August when she and the rest of her Democracy Now! staff went into exile, moving to a firehouse garret only a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
      Then came 9/11.  Democracy Now! was on the scene at a time when there were few dissenting voices in the mainstream.  A televised version became available on public access TV, and in January 2002, Democracy Now! returned to Pacifica.  Amy will talk about the lack of a forum for dissent in America, the Pacifica wars, and about how the mainstream networks not only aggressively cheerlead for war, but blocked out all those who questioned it.  What does this mean for America's future and young media makers?

Tuesday, June 11
WELCOME – 9 AM
Janet Wolff, School of the Arts at Columbia University
 
WORKSHOP – 9:30 AM
Mary Virginia Swanson:  Opportunities for Photographers In Today’s Marketplace
During this session, Mary Virginia Swanson will present an overview of opportunities that photographers should be aware of within the following areas:
The fine art market:  entering the gallery arena, juried shows, portfolio review events, dealer expos, internet opportunities for presentation and sale of work.
Licensing:  allowing placement of your existing materials for commercial use as illustration on book jackets and music packages, annual reports, advertising and other placements. 
     These market areas will be discussed thoroughly, including such issues as contracts, pricing, self-promotion, professional marketing partners (i.e.  Galleries, Representatives, Stock Agencies).  Related business practices will be discussed, as well as ideas about publishing your work and securing funding for the continuation of long-term personal projects.  A comprehensive handout with resources related to this presentation will be provided.
 
WORKSHOP – 2 PM
Susan Kae Grant: Strategizing a Career as an Artist
Grant considers graduate school a place to explore insights, develop skills, evolve as artists, and learn to articulate ideas, construct networks, and discuss teaching philosophies.  It is also a place where students are encouraged to take risks, establish a broad vision of the field, and develop a personal voice and working method through intellectual activity and creative work.

This lecture will outline seven significant areas that Grant believes are crucial to strategizing a successful and satisfying career as an artist.  These seven strategies include: seeing the world as inspiration, developing courage and experimentation in creating new work, designing structures for studio production and self discipline, developing self confidence, generating a portfolio for targeted audiences, establishing networks for support and accountability, and utilizing professional practices.      

For this discussion, Grant gathered her own quotes from the graduate photography students in her program at Texas Woman's University.  She requested they each send her two empowering quotes that inspired their development.  These quotes will be used to articulate and outline seven strategies for developing a career as an artist.
 
 
ARTIST PRESENTATION –  3:15 PM
Susan Kae Grant:  Night Journey is an artistic and scientific inquiry into the nature of dreams, memory, and the unconscious.  It is a room sized installation  that re-creates the experience of dreaming by combining large-scale photographic murals printed on sheer fabric with audio recordings of whispered dream phrases.  In this presentation, Grant will discuss her experience sleeping, as a subject, at the UT Southwestern Medical Center and working with noted sleep researcher, Dr.  John Herman, to access the visual imagery of her dreams.  This project raises universal questions among viewers about the process of dreaming and  re-creates an unexplainable experience we all share. 
 
STUDIO VISIT – 5:30 PM  (548 BROADWAY)
Sandi Fellman
We will visit the Soho studio of Sandi Fellman, an artist who enjoys both a successful commercial and fine art career.  She taught at Bemidji State University, University of New Mexico and Rutgers University before her entre into New York City’s photographic world.  Sandi will share examples of both her commercial and fine art work and discuss with the Fellows how one maintains both ventures in one’s life. 

Wednesday, June 12
ARTIST PRESENTATION – 9:15 AM
Lorie Novak
Since the early 1980s, Lorie Novak has worked with projected images to create photographs and installations meant to be experienced in their projected form.  Superimposed "projections" form the visual analogue for psychological and emotional states.  In all her work, she is interested in the relationship between personal and collective memory.  In her photographs, darkened studios and the night landscape function as the stage with projections of her family photographs acting as the players.  Her Collected Visions installations and net art  project (www.cvisions.cat.nyu.edu) use family photographs collected from hundreds of people to explore how photographs shape our memory.  In this talk, Novak will give an overview of her photographic and installation works
 
LECTURE – 10:30 AM
Christopher Phillips:  Bookmobile
Phillips will present a review of the year’s most provocative publications in photography and related visual arts. 

LECTURE – 2:00 PM
Charles Traub: Here is New York
Here is New York is an exhibition project created in response to the tragedy of 9/11. It provides a place for a wide spectrum of people to give testament to their experiences in the aftermath of this momentous event. Its simple aim is to collect, organize, display and preserve for public witness and historical purpose, the broadest possible view of events and their aftermath for the widest possible audience.
      
Here is New York came about because one of the organizers, Michael Shulan, is an owner of a building in Soho where a store was vacant.   Mr. Shulan, a writer, along with Gilles Peress, a photographer, Alice Rose George, a curator and editor, and Charles Traub, a photographer and Chair of the MFA Photography Department of the School of Visual Arts, and SVA’s staff and students organized the exhibition.
      
Here is New York is a democratic nexus which is as free of conventional filtering and editing as possible. The goal is to empower those in the affected community to make their own statement by assisting the development of either real spaces and/or virtual ones to collect imagery from anyone, amateur or professional, who wishes to donate their work.  This synergistic experience, publicly accessible, is as unfettered as possible by ideologies, political agendas, or prejudice of view.  The net proceeds from endeavor go to assist charities that aid those affected by the events chronicled.