Emory Visual Arts Program | Events and Exhibits

Events and Exhibits

Emory Visual Arts Gallery
Monday - Friday, 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Saturday, 12 noon - 4:00 pm
And by appointment

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Highlights of the 2008/2009 Calendar:

Nancy VanDevender: Picking Cotton…Mississippi to Detroit
Madison Dotson: Something the Same
Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home
Dance For Reel: An Evening of Dance on Camera
Jason Francisco: Recent Work
The Loseling Dolls and Traditional Costumes of the Tibetan World
Roger Dorset: Deadly Sins and Other Matters
Min Kim Park: Zummarella
Eve Andrée Laramée: The Future of Evolution
Diane Kempler: New Work
2009 Student Art Exhibition & Open Studios
Brent Fogt: Accrual Method

All events are FREE, open to the public, and held at the Visual Arts Building, 700 Peavine Creek Drive, on Emory's main campus, unless specified otherwise. Please check back often for additional listings as they become available.

Past Events:

Nancy VanDevender: Picking Cotton…Mississippi to Detroit
Exhibition Dates: June 20 – July 31, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, June 20, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday, July 23, 7:00 pm

Nancy VanDevender, Courtney & Rose, 2007; 34h X 32w; Lambda Print

This installation is the culmination of research that began as a look into the role of cotton and slavery in the historical and decorative evolution of the ruffle. Looking at how Victorian and European influences filtered into the Harlem Renaissance and how that era paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement, the artist is focusing on rearranging and recreating relationships through character development and set construction. Layering image upon image the entanglement suggests the intricacies in deciphering truth. Combining the designs as flattened marks on skin, cloth, and papered surfaces, new identifiers challenge old patterns of narrative. Installed as staged interiors, the print and the projection are investigated as backdrops for how image is transferred culturally through both fiction and history. The dual nature of the forum as a place for intimate reception and public presentation is constructed through the use of the parlour as a platform and setting for exchange.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
After spending a year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Sculpture and Fiber and Material Studies, Nancy VanDevender spent two years in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan at Cranbrook Academy of Art to complete the MFA program in Fiber. During the past year her work has been shown at the Anton Art Center in Mount Clemens, Michigan, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA, and at Daimler Chrysler, PotsdamerPlatz in Berlin, Germany. She is currently part of the Studio Artist program at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Madison Dotson: Something the Same

Exhibition Dates: August 11-22, 2008
Opening Reception: Monday, August 11, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

This photographic series explores how we create and experience memories and how myth relates to our understanding of humanity on both universal and individual levels.

Sponsored in part by a grant from the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Madison Dotson is a photographer who received her BA from Emory University in 2007. She is currently the Creativity & Arts Associate for the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts.

Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home

Martha Rosler, Hooded Captives, 2004; photomontage, 24x20"; from Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series; courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Exhibition Dates: September 11 – October 11, 2008

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 11, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

Closing Reception: Friday, October 10, 7:00 pm
A special event for Emory Friends of Visual Arts held in conjunction with [ACP 10], Atlanta Celebrates Photography's annual month-long city-wide festival; admission is free for Emory Friends of Visual Arts; all others: $35 pp or $50/couple includes dinner, live music, a lecture, and a 1-year membership in Emory Friends of Visual Arts.

On the eve of the 2008 Presidential election, Martha Rosler’s multifaceted work will pose thought provoking questions in reference to one of the election’s most pivotal issues: the war in Iraq. This exhibition will be the juxtaposition of two similar but also different bodies of work across the span of decades, Bringing the War Home (1967-1972) and Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series (2004). Produced as an outgrowth of Rosler's own involvement with anti-war activities, these photomontages are a response to the artist's "frustration with the images we saw in television and print media, even with anti-war flyers and posters. The images we saw were always very far away, in a place we couldn't imagine." In 1991 Laura Cottingham wrote in the catalog for ‘The War is Always Home: Martha Rosler’: “The consumer media avoids directly referring to political and economic connection between your cozy sofa and someone else's dead body: Rosler reveals the artificiality of this severed causality. The separation of us from them, here from there, is an illusion we want, as a war-profit society and as immediately war-free individuals, to maintain.” This exhibition is sponsored in part by a grant from the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts. The Bringing the War Home (1967-1972) series is courtesy of the Wieland Collection in Atlanta, GA and Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series (2004) is courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. She took her B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her M.F.A. from University of California, San Diego in 1974. She works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, and writes criticism. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally. Her work in the public sphere ranges from everyday life — often with an eye to women's experience — and the media to architecture and the built environment. She has published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and homelessness. Her work has been seen in the "Documenta" exhibition in Kassel, Germany; several Whitney Biennials; the Institute of Contemporary Art in London; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Dia Center for the Arts in New York; and many other international venues. A retrospective of her work has been shown in five European cities and in New York at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography (2000). An accompanying book has been published by MIT Press. Her writing has been published widely in catalogs and magazines, such as Artforum, Afterimage, and NU Magazine. Rosler has ten published books. She teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Dance for Reel: An Evening of Dance on Camera
Thursday, September 25 at 8:00 pm
Location: Performing Arts Studio @ Emory University, 1804 North Decatur Road, Atlanta

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND! After a highly successful Dance for Reel event in January 2008, we are bringing it back in September. Dance for Reel is an evening of short films from The Dance Films Association, based in New York City. Ranging in length from 5 to 30 minutes, the films reveal the moving body in new places, surprising contexts, and from inspired viewpoints. Dance for Reel is co-presented by Emory's Dance and Visual Arts Programs, and curated by Emory dance alumna Blake Beckham. For more information, please call 404-727-7266, email dance@emory.edu, or visit www.dance.emory.edu.

Jason Francisco: Recent Work
Exhibition Dates: October 16 - December 18, 2008
Visual Arts Building Reception Lobby

Welcome Reception for Jason Francisco
Thursday, October 16, 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Please join the Visual Arts Program to celebrate the appointment of Jason Francisco as Associate Professor of Visual Arts (Photography). The reception will feature wine, hors d'oeuvres, and an opportunity to meet Francisco and hear some brief remarks about his background and work. A selection of Francisco's photographs will be on view in the Emory Visual Arts Building Reception Lobby from October 16 - December 18, 2008. The Welcome Reception is being held in conjunction with [ACP 10], Atlanta Celebrates Photography's annual month-long, city-wide photography festival.

Jason Francisco, Behind the Mechitzah

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jason Francisco is an acclaimed photographer, writer, and book artist. Working critically and creatively with photographs as documents, Francisco extends and deepens one of photography's most accessible and also most complex traditions. Several of his projects concern problems of visualizing historical memory. Born and raised in California, he will begin teaching at Emory University in the fall of 2008, leaving a faculty position in photography and critical studies at Rutgers University. He also teaches at Stanford University.

The Loseling Dolls and Traditional Costumes of the Tibetan World

Opening Reception: Monday, October 20, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Demonstration/Exhibition Dates:
October 21 - 24, daily, 10 am – 4 pm
Saturday, October 25, 12 noon – 4 pm, with a docent tour at 2 pm

This week-long event will feature an amazing set of dolls created by the master dollmakers of Drepung Loseling monastery and illustrating traditional lay and monastic costumes of old Tibet. Dollmakers Ven. Geshe Pema Ludrup and Ven. Geshe Yeshe Thokme will be demonstrating their art daily during the exhibition. This is the first major event for Emory University’s new Himalayan Arts Program sponsored by a Rubin Foundation grant. Presented in conjunction with the Emory-Tibet Partnership.

Roger Dorset: Deadly Sins and Other Matters

Exhibition Dates: October 30 – November 29, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 30, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

Roger Dorset is an extraordinary and too-often overlooked artist whose work reflects profoundly personal, often anguished, responses to questions of good and evil, sin, guilt, sexuality, religion, and the psychological traumas brought on by the human struggle to come to terms with these concepts. Curated by Katherine Mitchell of the Emory Visual Arts faculty, who has known Dorset since their student days in the 1960s at the Atlanta College of Art, this exhibition will include more than 30 works on paper spanning from 1968 to 2004. This exhibition is sponsored in part by a grant from the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Roger Dorset received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1967, and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1969. Dorset also attended Emory University from 1959-1963. His solo exhibitions include the Blue Spiral Gallery, Asheville NC; Connell Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Sarratt Gallery, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; The Atchinson Gallery, Birmingham, AL; and the Atlanta College of Art Gallery. His group and juried exhibitions include LaGrange College, LaGrange, GA; Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA; Frankenburg Guthrie Gallery, Athens, GA; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; Arts Festival of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA; Poesia e Realta, Salerno, Italy; Artists in Georgia, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; and The Hunter Annual Competition, The Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN. Around 1997, Roger’s health began to deteriorate, and he ceased to exhibit. However he continued to make art when he was able. 2004 was a particularly good period during which he produced a long series of works, nine of which will premiere in the Visual Arts Gallery exhibition, along with works from other series.

Min Kim Park: Zummarella

Exhibition Dates: December 4, 2008 – January 24, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 4, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

[PLEASE NOTE THAT THE GALLERY WILL BE CLOSED FROM DECEMBER 18 – JANUARY 4]

Zummarella deals with the notion of the ideal woman in contemporary society. To create the title the artist combined the Korean word azuma (the closest translation in English would be housewife) and the last part of Cinderella. Traditionally, azumas were the symbol of self-sacrifice and humility, but modern azumas are well-educated and pragmatic high-achievers who believe they can have it all. When their desires to be unique super-moms, super-career women, and super-wives, are not fulfilled, they are deeply frustrated. Zummarella will examine this tragicomic impossible situation, the isolation stemming from the conceitedness of feeling different and better than anybody else, and the agony of contemporary women unable to escape from self-made predicament and social mores in the land of entitlement.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in South Korea, Min Kim Park has been exploring the issues revolving around gender, ethnicity and identity using performance, video, photography, sound and site installation. Her work draws much from her experience as a journalist in Korea News Daily and Korean American Broadcasting Co. in Chicago. She has been exhibiting and performing nationally and internationally. She has performed at the 2nd Biennial International Juried exhibition in San Francisco, Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque and Lombach and Lionel Gallery in Tucson. Her recent video work, ‘Perfect Asian Woman’ is included in ‘ArtDisk’ a DVD magazine, which was screened at two venues; Miami MOCA at Goldman Warehouse and Artificial Light 2006 during Art Basel Miami 2006. In addition she has exhibited a collaborative interactive video installation in a group exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe in Spring 2007. She received a MFA degree in Photography from University of New Mexico in 2007 and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University.

Eve Andrée Laramée: The Future of Evolution

Exhibition Dates: February 5 – March 6, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 5, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

Eve Andrée Laramée has been invited to develop an exhibition for the Visual Arts Gallery that will be inspired by her attendance at Emory University’s conference, The Future of Evolution: From Natural Diversity to Directed Selection (October 23-24, 2008), which will be a presentation of the outstanding research of Emory faculty in Darwinian evolution and how new understandings of natural diversity and directed selection may transform our lives. This event anticipates the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth in February 2009 and the 150th anniversary in 2009 of the publication of the first edition of On the Origins of Species. This exhibition is sponsored in part by a grant from the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts.

Eve Andrée Laramée / Photo: Shimon Attie

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Eve Andrée Laramée has been exploring the mutable, triadic relationship between art, science, and nature for over twenty years. For her lecture at Emory University she will explore her interest in the ways in which cultures use science and art as devices or maps to construct belief systems. Through the examples of her extensive art projects, she will draw attention to areas of overlap and interconnection between artistic exploration and scientific investigation, and to the slippery human subjectivity underlying both processes.

Diane Kempler: New Work

Exhibition Dates: March 19 – April 24, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 19, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

New ceramic sculpture by Emory Visual Arts faculty Diane Kempler.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Diane Solomon Kempler was born in New York City and graduated with a degree in philosophy from Brandeis University. She has studied with numerous ceramic artists and has received grants, awards and residencies. She has been active as an artist and teacher for over twenty years. She has won numerous awards, grants and residencies. She has had numerous one-woman exhibitions in Georgia, New York, Charlotte, and Richmond, to mention only a few. She participates in national exhibitions, including the touring exhibition “Body and Soul: Contemporary Southern Figures,” curated by the Columbus Museum. As a project of the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta (CODA), she created and installed a permanent bronze fountain sculpture in downtown Atlanta in 1996. Her work deals with transformations and transitions as they exist in nature and human beings.

2009 Student Art Exhibition & Open Studios

Exhibition Dates: April 30 – May 11, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 30, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Graduation Champagne Reception (open to everyone):
Monday, May 11, 12 noon - 4 pm

Work by Emory University Class of 2009 Art History/Visual Arts Joint Majors, Visual Arts Program Honors Students, and Other Select Students of the Visual Arts Program

Brent Fogt: Accrual Method

Exhibition Dates: June 18 – July 31, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 18, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Brent Fogt will present a series of large-scale, highly detailed drawings of abstract forms that vary from the topographic to the decorative, referring to, among other things, aerial photography, maps, turbulent water, live oak trees, coral reefs, ant farms, and paisleys.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Brent Fogt received an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2007. He has exhibited throughout the world, including The Dalton Gallery, Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Georgia; Sonar Festival, Barcelona, Spain (with Blue Puddle cooperative); Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, Washington, DC; Contemporaine Kunst, Paramaribo, Surinam, South America; Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, New York; and the Penland School of Crafts, Penland, NC. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a School of Art & Design Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; a Teaching Assistantship at Duke University, and a full scholarship to Georgetown University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art (tenure track) at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS.

For more details on exhibitions and lectures, please contact:
Mary Catherine Johnson, mcjohn7@emory.edu or 404-712-4390.

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