Graduate Program Update

Hello dear Art Alumni,

I'm writing to catch you up on the goings on of the Dept. of Art Practice.
As Graduate Adviser for the past three years, I'm particularly up to date on the status of our graduate program, so that is what I'll concentrate on sharing with you.

At present we run an MFA program with 13 or 14 graduate students per year. It's a two year program, and to achieve the degree, our students must produce an artistic thesis that is exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum in May. The 5.25 full-time faculty we currently have in the department all work with graduate students, but we have also been able to hire outside advisers to with with MFA students in their second year, serving as members of their thesis committee. This has been a terrific way for students to make contact with artists who operate outside academia, and who come to them with no agenda other than to help and push them toward their best working practice.
In recent years we've had Allan de Souza, Stephanie Syjuco, Sergio de la Torre, Trevor Paglen, Vincent Fecteau, Pamela Wilson, Kota Ezawa, Josephine Taylor, and other internationally-known artists working with our grads in this capacity.
Our visiting artist lecture series has also provided extra studio visits to MFA students. Each year we bring 6 or 7 artists to campus to give a lecture, and visit the Richmond Field Station studios. In this way we are able to keep a fresh set of eyes on our students work throughout the year, and expose those students to visiting artists. We've found that some of these visitors go on to curate our students' work into
exhibitions, and even help them create relationships with galleries and dealers.

Our graduate program is also extremely competitive to get into: we receive upwards of 200 applications per year for 7 places, which allows us to pick students of high caliber. Many of these MFA students do not come straight from their undergrad programs, but have been out in the world working for a few years, and bring with them their life and studio experience. Of utmost importance to our ability to attract good applicants is the fact that our grad program is fully funded. Students receive a stipend as well as having their tuition paid. In their second year, they teach Art 8 or Art 23AC, and earn money and really valuable teaching experience that way as well. So we're finding that our student "body" is mature and mostly very self-starting. We've created a media lab and a wood shop at the Richmond Field Station, as well as building our large media lab here at Kroeber, so there are ample tools and spaces for students to work in.

Our curriculum for graduate studies has changed somewhat, to emphasize the vast resources of the UCB community at large. MFA students take at least two courses from outside of the Art dept. during their time here, and we see the powerful impact of faculty from a broad range of disciplines on the students' work. They are studying philosophy, physics, rhetoric, computer science, sociology, art history, environmental science, history, performance studies, interactive design, and architecture, to give you a far from exhaustive list. The presence of the Berkeley Center for New Media also offers our students various fora for discussion with students from other disciplines, as well as a second busy lecture series to attend.

Our recent hire of Brody Reiman to teach sculpture and run the sculpture area has proved to be a very, very good one. Brody has the most astonishing ability to motivate good work from students that I have ever seen. The quality and quantity of 3D and installation work being produced by the department has grown hugely since she began as an Assistant Professor in 2007 (though she'd taught as a lecturer several times previous to 2007, and we were impressed with her then too). She is in the process of setting up a laser cutter for the department (our first!) and that represents an exciting new step forward for us. Brody and I hope to begin combining our curricula with a new course in video and sculpture as well.

At the undergrad level, we're seeing a growth of declared art majors. We now have something like 180 majors, which, distributed amongst only 5.25 full time faculty and 4 staff is a formidable work load. But we continue to have the help of our four devoted continuing lecturers - Randy Hussong, Kevin Radley, John McNamara and Craig Nagasawa, who do a yeoman's share of work. Our visiting lecturers have provided an ever-broadening range of courses to our curriculum for undergrads. We now offer courses with titles such as "Experimental Landscapes," "Issues in Multi-Cultural display," "Art, Medicine and Disability," (Katherine Sherwood's legendary course), "Art and Meditation," "Sound Art," "Game Design," and, in the summer time, Digital Photography. Students clamor for more classes, and when the University budget provides, we provide. We're eager to be able to offer more courses.

Many of the faculty continue to travel widely for exhibitions of their work, or for performances, or screenings of films and videos. Katherine Sherwood currently has a one-person show at Paule Anglim Gallery in San Francisco. Greg Niemeyer won a MacArthur Foundation-funded grant last summer to build a complex interactive project. We all treasure our studio time! We're lucky, also to have a new Chair at the helm: Hertha Sweet Wong, whose background is in Creative Writing, but whose research has focused mostly on Native American folk culture. She began her 3-year term this fall and we're VERY pleased to have her.

Morale is good! We're delighted we've been able to build up a media lab that is the envy of many departments on campus. In room 285 we have a video shooting studio and lecture space, and in room 295 we have a computer lab with 20 dedicated stations for animation, game design, and video editing. It's a big change, and students hop on to the equipment as fast as we can train them on it.

I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, and grateful for your interest and continued dedication to the Department of Art Practice.

Sincerely,

Anne Walsh
Associate Professor for Video
Graduate Advisor

Karl Kasten Restropective at Worth Ryder Gallery

September 23 through October 24, 2008 the University of California's Department of Art Practice will present "Karl Kasten/UCB: the 70 year Journey" - a retrospective exhibition of the works of renowned artist and popular mentor, Professor Emeritus Karl Kasten. The show will cover Mr. Kasten's 70 year relationship with the university, and will also feature works created by colleagues and former students.

Kasten attended Cal in the mid- 1930’s and graduated in '38, and later returned to teach in 1950 at the request of Kastens' most influential mentor, Worth Ryder.
Another powerful influence in Mr. Kasten's early career was the influential Hans Hoffmann, who taught at UC from 1930 -31 and laid the groundwork for modernizing the newly formed department.

As part of the exhibition, the gallery will also feature a variety of artwork created by colleagues and fellow members of what has been referred to as "The Berkeley School". A select number of former students will also present their work.

Worth Ryder Gallery is located in Kroeber Hall opening hours Tuesday - Saturday 12 noon - 4 PM
Join the Alumni and the Department of Art Practice in celebrating the opening of this exhibit September 23rd, 4 - 7 PM.

Congratulations to the Class of 2008

It was my pleasure once again to attend the 2008 Commencment in the sculpture garden of BAM and personally welcome to the real world, these artists, our newest alumni:

Gabriel Agee, Christopher Alarie, Gilberto Armendariz, Stephanie Barringer, Erika Bird, Ben Bracamonte, Jessica Bracamonte, Shannon Braziel, Christopher Breithaupt, Erik Bro, Sarah Brock, Emily Brundige, Rebecca Bush, Crystal Carlson, Faheema Chaudhury, Crystal Chen, Jayson Cheung, Kristie Chow, Yve Laris Cohen, Cecilia Contreras, Madelyn Covey, Ashley Davidson, Natasha DeAlmeida, Laura DeNardo, Daniel Edery, Nathan Finney, Gabriel Fischer, Emily Frost, Aaron Fung, Katherine Greenman, Carson Grubach, Wen Dong, Tony Guan, Olga Gutierrez, A Han, Amber Handal, Karen Henderson, Anna Hoffman, Clare Hutchinson, Mattie Kahren, Bryan Kato, Tricia Kim, Ping Kuang, Lynn Seohong Lee, Adrienne Levoy, Shang-Wuen Liu, Edwin Lo, Brendan Luce, Steven Lybeck, Katherine Madrigal, Makai Magie, Jason Maze, Robert McCluskey, Zoilita McKeon, Kelda McKinney, Sonia McNally, Lucia Mendoza, Tina Moreno, Oliver Mork, Sheau-Wha Mou-Keefe, Amber Morrison, Amber Mueller, Jenifer Nelson, Jean Linh Chi Nguyen, Khang Nguyen, Hilary Pollack, Allison Porterfield, Joanne Rademacher, Nick Reid, Carolina Reyes, Rebecca Richards, Gabrielle Roussos, Hayley Rucker, Jon Running, Lillian Sabersky, Christina Salazar, Asaki Sano, Kelly Seldan, Youna Shin, Matthew Siemonsma, Jenny Song, Keiko Stong, Jingqin Su, Hongyun Suriwong, Jessica Tatara, Maile Thompson, Michelle Tingen, John Torrens, Sharita Towne, Elizabeth Tran, Justine Travers, Minisha Trivedi, Katy Tsai, Wan-Ling Tsai, Enrique Unzueta, Kate VandenBerghe, Greg VanHoesen, Julia Wiener, Stacy Wilkinson, Nicole Wilson, Eric Wong, Michael Wooten, and a special repeat performance from Sierra Helvey.

MFA graduates: Adrianne Crane; Renee Davis- awarded a UAM Council Founders Prize and an Eisner Prize; Rosalyn Khor-Eisner Prize; Emily Prince - awarded a Headlands Graduate Fellowship Program (1yr. residency 2008-2009); Wenhua Shi- awarded a Javits Fellowship; Sunny Taylor awarded the Kelsey Travel Award and an Eisner Prize; Indira Morre left us with the Harry Ford Lord Award.


Shannon Jewel Braziel was the recipient of this year's Art Alumni Award for the Leadership in the Art Community. Shannon also garnered the Doris Nichols Sculpture Award.
The Theresa Hak Kyung CHA prize was awarded to Jingqin Su.



~Lynne Rutter, BA 1985

Fall Faculty News

“A Strong Vision: Three Decades of Exhibitions” included ceramics by James Melchert at Wiegand Gallery at Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, CA last spring ’07.
Prints by Katherine Sherwood were exhibited at Electric Works in San Francisco in May and her paintings were on exhibit at The Townsend Center on the UCB campus.

Richard Shaw’s sculpture was on exhibit at Braunstein Quay Gallery in SF this past summer.
New work by Randy Hussong MFA ’80 was shown at Gallery Paule Anglim in SF.
Drawings and sculpture by Jane Rosen were shown at Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago and Sears-Payton Gallery, New York; her work can be seen at the Friesen Gallery in Seattle and Sun Valley.

The Department of Art Practice has a new website! check it out!

ArtLetter on-line!!

Starting this year the ArtLetter has been moved to this blog. In this way we can keep making continuous announcements of alumni news and interesting art happenings and help keep in touch all year round.

We have been collecting the alumni news to publish, and will do so in this space in September 2007.
After that, we will make periodic, regular updates here, so do keep sending us your news, announcements, etc.

Why are we not printing the ArtLetter anymore?
In the past we have had financial assistance from CAA to help pay for postage, and the generous donation of printing to help offset the cost of publication. As of this year our printer is no longer available, and due to funding cuts CAA has withdrawn postage support to clubs. In the last two years, over 80% of all of our funds were spent on the ArtLetter. We do not collect enough in dues or donations to continue to pay for this increasingly expensive publication.
Publishing on the internet is affordable, fast, and reaches a wider audience, especially among our younger alumni who are so difficult to reach by mail.

Benefits of web publishing for Art Alumni Members.
The calartalumni.org website receives a fair amount of traffic already, and has a very high pagerank with search engines. This is due in part to the concentrated number of artists names appearing on the site in connection with each other. For those of you trying to get some name recognition or visibility, being mentioned on this site is of enormous value. This is just one of the ways we can use the strength of our community to help get positive attention for the department, and each other.

Thanks... to Lettie McGuire '07 of the student-run Art Group at Berkeley for her help in enabling this blog, Lisa Krieshok for graphic assistance, and to Stephanie Peek, who edited the news this year.

--- Lynne Rutter 9.07

“One True Art World”

Berkeley Commencement 2005
“One True Art World”
by Lawrence Rinder

I recently conducted a search for the Chair of CCA’s grad fine art program. In the course of the interviews one of the leading candidates stated that he believed that there is ‘one true art world,’ embodied by the leading international galleries, the major art
magazines, and, above all, the international biennial circuit. The
lingua franca of this art world, in his opinion, is conceptualism in
all its various manifestations. In his view, an art school that does
not prepare students to compete in this world is doomed to
irrelevance.


There is something appealing about this perspective. For one
thing, it has the virtue of clarity. These days—thanks to President
Bush’s no-child-left-behind initiative--educational institutions are
being held ever more accountable for their goals, objectives, and
above all, metrics. This mandate is spilling over from federally
funded institutions into privately funded institutions like CCA. I
was, for example, recently asked to fill out a form titled
“Educational Effectiveness Indicators,” as part of our accreditation
process. The big question is how do we know that our students are
learning what they are supposed to be learning? First, though, one
has to know what they are supposed to be learning. Which is where
the ‘one true art world’ comes in handy. To compete in the ‘one
true art world’ one needs to know about a relatively fixed set of
methods, artists, institutions, writers, and curators. The knowledge
and skills a student obtains in art school can become tools to enter
into and succeed in this world.


Imagine how simple it would be if we really could identify
some set of galleries, alternative spaces, museums, biennials, and
art magazines which could then be calibrated according to the
degree of ‘success’ participation in each conferred. We might
identify, for example, 100 galleries that legitimately signal an
artist’s entry into ‘emerging artist’ status—‘emerging,’ that is, into
the ‘one true art world.’ Another much smaller set of, say, 25
galleries could be used to identify artists who had attained ‘one
true art world’ citizenship. Each art magazine, meanwhile, would
carry a numerical weight: being mentioned in Artforum would
carry the highest reward, followed by Frieze, Art in America, and
so on, down to Coagula, for which points would be deducted. To
make the system even richer and more statistically meaningful,
imagine that every curator, too, came with a certain numerical
rating. To be curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist might get you a score
of 100; to be put in a show by me, for example, perhaps only 50.
Using this matrix, one could, hypothetically, arrive at a quasi-
mathematical means of calculating an artist’s success at various
stages of their career after graduation. By pooling such information
from a cohort of graduates one could accurately gauge the
effectiveness of an art school’s educational program.
Besides providing a clearly measurable standard of success,
the ‘one true art world’ has other things going for it. Fame and
fortune, for example. Contemporary art has become a hot
commodity. My father regularly sends me articles from Barron’s
and other financial journals extolling the rise of art as a sound
investment vehicle. Having attended several leading art fairs over
the past year, I can honestly say that what I witnessed was a
‘feeding frenzy.’ The prices of even entry-level artists were double
or triple what they might have been a year or two ago. Although
speculation on contemporary art has extended beyond the handful
of well-known names—Matthew Barney, Jeff Koons, Cindy
Sherman, and so on—it must be said that the boost in prices is
circumscribed within a tightly ordered institutional frame. What
matters most is which gallery you show with and your gallery’s
ability to be selected—and it is a highly competitive selection
process—into one of the handful of leading international art fairs
such as New York’s Armory art fair (which is, confusingly, not
held at the Armory), or the Basel Art Fair (the one, even more
confusingly, held in Miami). The parents in the audience will be
pleased to know that artists who successfully enter into this world
have a very good chance of being able to pay off their student
loans.


Participating in the ‘one true art world’ also has the virtue of
drawing one into a global conversation. Because, as my fine arts
chair candidate observed, the ‘one true art world’ shares a common
language, those who participate are naturally invited into a
dialogue with others who share that language. Indeed, the mode of
conceptualism—characterized today by an interplay of text
(English only please) and image and an emphasis on content over
form--has reached even the most remote territories of the world. A
few years ago I traveled to 25 countries on four continents, doing
research for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum. I found that
artists in places as remote as Cuba, Vietnam, Colombia, and the
Philippines were doing work that would be as easily accessible to
an American art audience as to audiences of artists in their own
countries. Working with conceptual methods per se is not what
makes this art world so unified as much as simply the fact of a
shared vocabulary of forms, methods, and references. To avoid
working with these means is to effectively shut oneself off from an
extremely engaging global dialogue.


The apotheosis of the ‘one true art world’ is the international
biennial exhibition. Such exhibitions, which have proliferated
extraordinarily over the past decade, are global round-ups of work
identified by a coterie of peripatetic curators who scour the globe
for the most engaging new art. Seeing works of art in various
global contexts has the benefit of exposing images and ideas to
broad audiences as well as testing the relevance of works of art in
various cultural contexts. Furthermore, we have clearly entered an
age where everyone on the globe is engaged in common concerns,
from climate change, to terrorism, to mass migration, to the spread
of infectious disease. International biennials have become, in part,
forums for engaging in debate on such timely themes. In some
cases, as with the recent Documenta, such discussions nearly
eclipse the presentation of the artworks themselves. As has been
frequently observed, one shortcoming of the current international
exhibition system is that, for reasons of efficiency—the world is a
very big place--curators’ searches for art works often takes place in
biennials themselves, leading to a rather incestuous condition in
which a limited set of artists and even artworks cycle again and
again through this international exhibition circuit. Yet, it is clear
that the compounding effect of such multiple exposure has a
salutary impact of the careers of those who are welcomed into the
‘one true art world.’


Why, then, did I not hire this particular candidate? What art
school would not want to prepare its students to compete in such a
cosmopolitan, remunerative, and intellectually stimulating mileau?
To begin with, the ‘one true art world’ is a lie. There is no
more ‘one true art world’ than there is ‘one true music world’ or
‘one true writing world.’ Certainly there are many whose financial
and professional interests compel them to profess such a thing, yet,
thankfully, despite appearances, the scope of global creativity has
not yet narrowed to such a radical point. While I think there are
dangers in making analogies between politics and artistic practice,
I can’t help but note the similarities between the ‘one true art
world’ doctrine and that of America’s triumphalist neo-
conservatives.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, when it seemed that the
world was on the verge of at last obtaining a peaceful, multilateral
status, American neo-cons laid the foundation for what has become
the age of American Empire. At the heart of neo-conservative
ideology is the notion that America’s ‘way of life’ is the best in the
world and that no one in their right mind would not want to live the
way we do. At least in principle, this doctrine asks us to imagine a
world that enjoys all the freedoms and economic opportunities that
we enjoy right here at home. However, evidence suggests that this
appeal to global equality cynically masks a more rapacious agenda.
In fact, neo-conservative doctrine is based on the unassailable
superiority of America’s military (including the once repugnant,
now-official policy of pre-emptive military strikes), neo-liberal
economic theory (the selective application of which has greatly
benefited American businesses while ruining the economies of
poorer countries around the world), and the international export of
American-style democracy (a praiseworthy ideal that seems to be
executed only whenever it is immediately beneficial to American
business or strategic interests.) The Bush administration’s support
for Uzbekistan’s brutal regime alone indicates the hypocritical
selectivity of our country’s ‘democratizing’ agenda. At heart, the
neo-con game is to dress the wolf of American hegemony in the
sheep’s clothing of equality, democracy, and free-trade for all.
The neo-con American triumphalism that emerged in the
aftermath of the Cold War as an alternative to multilateralism,
finds an aesthetic echo in the ‘one true art world.’ Both phenomena
are marked by a profound narrowing of options at precisely the
moment when a radical openness seemed newly possible. In the
case of the neo-con agenda, the need for an American Empire
crowded out diverse opportunities offered by the end of the Cold
War. The ‘one true art world’ on the other hand has crowded out
the array of diverse possibilities that emerged at the fall of
Modernism. These possibilities are not just aesthetic—the diversity
of practices suggested by the once-fashionable term
Pluralism—but also institutional. The questioning of the single
aesthetic standard and historical trajectory that defined Modernism
brought about the creation of hundreds of so-called alternative
spaces, dedicated precisely to cultivating alternative visions of the
arts. The term post-Modern meanwhile came--initially in the field
of architecture--to stand for this new sense of openness and
possibility. With the emergence of new opportunities for
historically excluded populations such as women and artists of
color as well as an increasing interest in the arts of contemporary
non-Western cultures, it seemed to some as if we were on the
verge of a new age, vastly more dynamic and inspiring than what
had come before.


Yet where do we find ourselves today? Do we live in a world
where, liberated from the restrictions of ideological boundaries and
inspired by cultural difference artists are celebrated for the sheer
creativity and diversity of their work? Sadly, not. It seems we
have, instead, traded one set of restrictions for another. In today’s
‘one true art world,’ you are not welcome unless you speak the
common conceptual tongue, a tongue that is not as universal as its
champions would have. Indeed, while international biennials now
take place in Pusan, Dakar, Sharjah, and Shanghai, the works of art
one finds in them depend on a set of styles, methods, and themes
that are largely the product of Western, especially American
cultural institutions (i.e. schools, galleries, magazines, etc.). What
is this if not another form of neo-conservativism in which the wolf
of American hegemony and economic advantage is guised in the
sheep’s clothing of free-trade and cosmopolitanism? Just because
McDonald’s is everywhere doesn’t mean its good for you.
Is this really the art world we want to inhabit? Are the
measures of accomplishment in this ‘one true art world’ truly the
‘educational effectiveness indicators’ we should aspire to fulfill? In
my role as an art school administrator I will be dwelling on these
question for some time to come and, I trust, imagining alternatives.
As artists who are about to begin your professional careers, you too
may choose to resist the narcotic allure of the ‘one true art world.’
Unlike curators, dealers, collectors, and critics, you have the power
to create, and in your creativity lies the possibility for imagining
not one but countless diverse and dynamic art worlds.
I encourage you to confound expectations, make your own
rules, make your own institutions, and thrive in the margins. Show
the ‘one true art world’ a thing or two. And have a wonderful time
doing it.


posted with Mr. Rinder's permission