Lisa Ludwig:The Scab Nation Project

Working from her dream journals and historical/pop cultural symbols, she creates works that stir up something familiar and already know within us. Layering mixed mediums and media, she reflects the dark and quirky world around us and illuminates it.
Ludwig’s work is included in Cribs to Cribbage at Mass MoCA and her Scab Nation related works will be featured in a solo exhibition in NYC at Jack The Pelicans in October

When:
Thursday, October 15 – Thursday, November 12
Free and open to the public

OPENING RECEPTION Thursday, October 15 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm

Let me know what you thought of it!

Yusef Lateef/Adam Rudolph Duo: A musical association that stretches back to 1988

Thursday, October 15
Bowker Auditorium 8:00 pm
$10 General Public, $5 Students

Their musical association stretches back to 1988, and includes 14 albums and concerts ranging from duos, to work with the Koln, Atlanta and Detroit Symphony Orchestras. A virtuoso on a broad spectrum of reed instruments, Yusef Lateef is universally acknowledged as one of the great living masters and innovators in the African-American musical tradition. “Yusef Lateef is an artist in the purest form of the word,” says Jazz Weekly. Adam Rudolph has been developing his unique approach to hand drums in creative collaboration with such masters of improvised music as Sam Rivers, Pharaoh Sanders, L. Shankar, and Fred Anderson. “Rudolph reinvents world music for sophisticated listeners…he fuses many world musics into a very artful and keenly constructed whole,” writes EAR.

What did you think of it… ?

Who Does She Think She Is?

Wednesday, September 30
7:00 pm
Screening of the film “Who Does She Think She Is?” cosponsored by Everywoman’s Center and Women of Color Leadership Network. For more information call (413) 545-0883.

Let us know what you thought about it!

…an endless note galloping longingly over imagination…

An exhibition of student works from the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts in South Hadley, MA
Organized and curated by PVPA Art Instructor, Petula Bloomfield
Tuesday, September 29 – Thursday, October 29
Central Gallery

Curator’s Statement: For the last six years, I have had the great pleasure and privilege to teach and work with an extraordinary group of young people from 7th to 12th grade at PVPA. During this time, I have watched students who claimed to have no creative ability or who lacked confidence, progress to find ways to express themselves with astonishing visual eloquence. It is a testament to the discovery of the rich and rewarding efforts of people working together with the creative process.

About the curator: Petula Bloomfield has been an exhibiting artist in galleries and museums since 1990. She has a Master of Science in Art from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from Clark University, Worcester. She has taught art classes and designed and presented workshops in schools and her studio since 1996. She has been an art instructor at the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School since 2003. Her work may be viewed at www.petulabloomfield.com

Free and open to the public

Let us know what you thought about it!

Evan Parker/Ned Rothenberg Duo: Two of the greatest reed players of our time.

Thursday, September 24
Bezanson Recital Hall 8:00 pm
$10, General Public; $5 students

Two of the greatest reed players of our time. Ben Ratliff in The NY Times, called the pairing, “an ideal partnership.” Downbeat described their 2006 Live at Roulette recording as “a hugely exciting encounter that should utterly floor fellow saxophonists.” Evan Parker may be the most formidable saxophonist since John Coltrane. “If genius is the sustained application of intelligence,” writes Richard Cook, “then Evan Parker merits the epitaph.” Born in Bristol, England in 1944, Parker has developed the possibilities of unpremeditated music more deeply than almost anyone. “Other kinds of music might entertain you, cheer you up or pump the blood,” writes Manfred Pabst, “but Rothenberg’s clarifies the mind and throws your soul wide open.”

Tell us what you think.. 🙂

Connecting the Dots… The Warhol Legacy: Tom Friedman, Ellen Gallagher, Vik Muniz, Rob Pruitt

WHEN? Wednesday, September 23 – Sunday, December 13
WHERE? University Gallery

An exhibition of work by four acclaimed contemporary artists who explore themes and ideas central to Andy Warhol’s artistic practice, demonstrating how Warhol’s legacy continues to influence and shape the content of the work of a new generation of artists. Rather than look strictly at artists who have been stylistically influenced by Warhol, this exhibition focuses on the work of four leading artists where the Warholian impulse is more conceptual and subtle.

Tom Friedman, Mandala Tom Friedman transforms mundane consumer products into playful yet meticulously crafted artworks of almost obsessive intricacy. Friedman’s art is characterized by its attention to process and use of modest, ephemeral materials. Friedman also displays a sly, almost scientific interest in systems of representation. Works in the exhibition will include the serial sculpture 9 Lives and two digital prints, Dollar Bill (2000) and Mandala (2008), commissioned by University Gallery and UMass Art Dept.

Repetition and revision are central to Ellen Gallagher’s treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines such as Ebony, Our World, and Sepia. Her medium of printmaking, immersed in ideas about process and the mechanics of transformation, echoes some of Warhol’s themes. However her aesthetic strategy differs from her predecessor in its autobiographical dimension and focus on the issue of racial identity, while at the same time suggesting a more formal reading with respect to materials, processes, and altered states.

Vik Muniz defies traditional concerns over appropriation and authorship to reveal the power of images in our collective memory. Creating images made of dust, chocolate sauce, sugar, or thread, his work is informed by media and popular culture. This exhibition will include The Best of Life (1989 – 2000), a portfolio of ten Memory Renderings, which are photographs of drawings he drew from his recollection of photographs from Life magazine between 1936 and 1972.

Rob Pruitt’s work is rooted in a pop sensibility and a playful critique of art world structures. His conceptual projects have encompassed sensational staged events as well as simple gestures that promote possibilities for creativity in everyday life. Pruitt’s work is always characterized by an incisive humor and exuberant visual flair. This exhibition will focus on iPruitt (2008), snapshots taken with his mobile camera.

Tell us what you think.. 🙂

The Minox and the Big Shot

Andy Warhol’s Photography (1970-87)
Wednesday, September 23 – Sunday, December 13
The University Gallery

This exhibition of Andy Warhol’s photographs is culled from over 100 Polaroids and black and white silver gelatin prints granted to the University Gallery by the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Program aims to provide greater access to Warhol’s creative process and to enable a wide range of people to view the important yet relatively unknown body of Warhol’s photography.

The Minox & the Big Shot explores the significance of Warhol’s photography in relation to his larger artistic practice. The works on view in this exhibition provide a counterpoint to the artist’s better known Pop paintings and films from the 1960’s in their diminutive size and non-iconic quality. Numerous Polaroids of unknown sitters and candid black and white shots of friends are mixed with photos of the famous company Warhol kept. Together, they offer the opportunity to see through Warhol’s eyes, the individuals and objects which fascinated him, and they become icons in their own right, of the quest for fame with which Warhol was always preoccupied.

As the University Gallery’s first Curatorial Fellow, Kathleen Banach (M.A. candidate in Art History ’09) will work in consultation with the staff of the University Gallery and art history professor Mario Ontiveros to focus her research on these photographs. She will be the first to study this body of Warhol’s work, culminating in an exhibition and curatorial essay which will provide a wealth of information about the artist’s process and interaction with his subjects.

Related programming will include panel discussions, guest speakers, and film screenings.

THE OPENING RECEPTION is TONIGHT!!! 😀 from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm

See you there and tell us what you think!