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 The opening reception for the FUSE/fureru exhibition at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. |
As part of the closing reception of FUSE/fureru exhibition in Tokyo, Crichton and Lee gave a talk to students and faculty titled "Digital Crossings: Between Art and Technology." That event was held on June 5 at the Zokei University Museum.
Crichton and Lee then traveled to Kyoto for the opening reception of the show at Kyoto University's Gallery Aube on June 11. There they gave a different version of the “Digital Crossings” talk and also participated in a panel discussion featuring faculty from the three participating universities talking about their work.
Crichton said that students and faculty at the two Japanese Universities were very curious about the UCSC Art Department, including the fact that most of its faculty are women. “Only two or three Japanese women were represented in FUSE, representative of their mostly male faculties,” she said. “At one point, we were told that professors at Zokei had just gotten word of an administrative decision to hire a woman painter -- and that it was partly our influence.”
The UC Santa Cruz portion of the exhibition was organized by Art Professors Crichton, Lee and Jennifer Parker, and curated by Shelby Graham, director of the Sesnon Gallery. Professor Gen Morimoto organized the Kyoto University of Art and Design part of the show, and Professor Ikushima the Tokyo Zokei portion.
For more information about their participation in the FUSE/fureru exhibition, contact E.G. Crichton at egc@ucsc.edu and Jimin Lee at jiminlee@ucsc.edu.
Sculptor who helped establish UCSC Art Department dies
Gurdon Woods, a visionary arts educator who helped design and create UC Santa Cruz's first curriculum and facilities in the arts, died July 31, 2007 at his Aptos home. He was 92.
Woods served as director of the California School of Fine Arts from 1955 to 1965 before he was recruited to the newly opened UCSC campus in 1966 to create and chair what would become the Art Department. Woods initiated and developed an innovative program of interdisciplinary art education at the campus, bringing to UCSC such revolutionary artists as composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Woods left UCSC in 1974 and went on to direct the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and work as deputy director of programs for the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. He retired in the 1980s to create sculptures in Aptos as a studio artist, regularly exhibiting his work, which can be found in Bay Area museums and private collections.
Watts, Locks featured in photo exhibition at Felix Kulpa Gallery
Chronotopographies: Remembering in Digital, an exhibition featuring photographic works digitally rendered by UCSC art professors Lewis Watts and Norman Locks, was featured this fall at the Felix Kulpa Gallery in downtown Santa Cruz.
Watts has been working professionally as a photographer, archivist, and curator since 1974, focusing on communities in the neighborhoods of Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco. He is co-author of the 2006 book, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, which features his restorations of salvaged photographs that portray musicians and patrons of the vibrant jazz scene in the Fillmore District during the 1940s and 50s.
Watts' digital works include photographs from the lower eastside of Manhattan, South-Central Los Angeles, and most notably, New Orleans -- both before and after Hurricane Katrina. He joined the UCSC art faculty in 2001.
Widely recognized for his experimentation with Polaroids and digital processes, Locks has been scanning photographs taken with the Polaroid I-Zone camera containing miniature details of everyday household experiences, and reconstructing them using digital imaging techniques. He has also been working with still images taken from digital hand-held video panning shots and rebuilding them into still panoramic landscapes of domestic life.
Locks studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University. In 1976, he worked as an assistant to Ansel Adams. Locks also directed the photography workshop at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite from 1973 to 1977. He joined the UCSC art faculty in 1977.
For more information about their recent exhibitions and research interests, please contact Lewis Watts at lewwatts@ucsc.edu or Norman Locks at norman@ucsc.edu.
Daniel named DANM chair
Sharon Daniel has been named chair of the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program. Daniel, who brings a great deal of expertise in digital media theory and art practice to the position, has been central to the development of the DANM program. She replaces Margaret Morse, who now serves as the Acting Dean of the UCSC Arts Division.
Sharon Daniel may be contacted at sdaniel@ucsc.edu.
Daniel receives Webby honor
 Public Secrets, an interactive website featuring testimonials of incarcerated women, was named an Official Honoree at the 2007 Webby Awards. |
Public Secrets, an online art project created by film and digital media professor Sharon Daniel, was named an Official Honoree in the Activism category at the 2007 Webby Awards.
Public Secrets is an interactive website featuring testimonials of women incarcerated in the California State Prison System that reveal the secret injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the prison industrial complex. Daniel, who is also chair of the Digital Arts and New Media program, produced the project in collaboration with the nonprofit human rights organization Justice Now. The project can be viewed at http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/04_issue/publicsecrets/.
Hailed as the "Oscars of the Internet" by the New York Times, The Webby Awards are the leading international award honoring excellence on the internet. The awards are judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences.
"The Webby Awards honors the outstanding work that is setting the standards for the Internet," said David-Michel Davies, executive director of The Webby Awards. “Official Honoree selection is a testament to the skill, ingenuity, and vision of its creators."
For more information about Sharon Daniel's recent award or her Public Secrets project, please contact her at sdaniel@ucsc.edu.
Kim participates in Ms. advisory meeting, contributes to anniversary issue
L.S. Kim, film and digital media and digital arts and new media professor, traveled to Washington, D.C., to participate in a meeting to help shape the editorial focus of Ms. magazine. She also contributed an essay to the special 35th anniversary issue of Ms., which was released this fall.
 An essay by L.S. Kim appeared in Ms. magazine’s 35th anniversary issue. |
Last year Kim joined the magazine’s Committee of Scholars, an advisory group made up of 20 feminist scholars from universities throughout the country. At the recent meeting, Kim and other members of the Committee of Scholars met to discuss topics that they believe should be covered by the magazine. The non-profit magazine created the Committee of Scholars to reach out to the academic community and provide a forum to bring more attention to feminist issues.
Kim's feature article in the magazine’s anniversary issue traces the impact feminists have had on mainstream media over the past three and a half decades. "Although still grossly underrepresented in many areas, women now often decide what becomes news, what goes on the front page, who is given a voice and which stories form the nation's political and cultural narrative," Kim noted in the article
The anniversary issue also featured comments from a wide variety of feminists, including Gloria Steinem, Margaret Cho, Whoopi Goldberg, and Billie Jean King, as well as UCSC's professor of community studies B. Ruby Rich and alumna author bell hooks.
For more information, please contact Assistant Professor L.S. Kim at lskim@ucsc.edu.
Vazquez’s film debuts in the U.S. and Mexico
Que Viva La Lucha: Wrestling in Tijuana, a new film by film and digital media professor Gustavo Vazquez, premiered simultaneously at the 30th Annual Mill Valley Film Festival and at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia in Mexico this October.
 Que Viva La Lucha: Wrestling in Tijuana, a new film by Gustavo Vazquez, premiered in the U.S. and Mexico in October. |
The film had its European premiere one month later at the Filmstock-Luton International Film Festival in the UK.
Vazquez has long been fascinated by the double identity of Mexican wrestlers--ordinary people who transform themselves on weekends into larger-than-life characters. He spent three years working on Que Viva La Lucha: Wrestling in Tijuana.
"I'm interested in this social ritual in what I call the 'therapy of the poor,'" said Vazquez. "The arena is the forum where everyone—wrestlers and public alike—are allowed to unleash their demons. They're re-enacting mythological battles between good and evil."
Vazquez grew up in Tijuana and was a big fan of the Mexican wrestlers in his early years. Coincidentally, the most famous wrestler in Tijuana—"Rey Misterio"—was a childhood friend, but Vazquez never knew it because the mask he wore kept it a secret.
"For years I'd seen him in the ring, but until I did this piece and met him in person, I didn't know he was a kid I grew up with in the neighborhood," said Vazquez. "This connection opened a lot of doors."
For more information, please contact Assistant Professor Gustavo Vasquez at gvasquez@ucsc.edu.
Stamp provides DVD commentary for early birth control film
Shelley Stamp, film and digital media professor, provides detailed audio commentary for the DVD release of Where Are My Children?, a rare 1916 film on birth control and abortion. Stamp is a top expert on social problems and Lois Weber, the silent era’s leading female filmmaker who wrote and directed Where are My Children?
 Shelley Stamp provides detailed audio commentary for a recently released box set from the National Film Preservation Foundation. |
The film was recently released as part of a new DVD box set from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Treasures from the American Film Archives III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. The collection highlights activist filmmaking in cinema’s early years, when filmmakers took on such issues as prohibition, race relations, union activism, homelessness, women’s suffrage, immigration and police corruption.
“In film’s first decades, activists from every political stripe used movies to advance their agenda,” noted Martin Scorsese, who serves on the NFPF Board of Directors. “These films are an important and fascinating glimpse of history. They changed American and still inspire today.”
For more information about Shelley Stamp’s work, please contact her at stamp@ucsc.edu or visit http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/stamp/.
Daniel, Sack featured in Database Aesthetics essay collection
Film and digital media professors Sharon Daniel and Warren Sack are featured in a new essay collection titled Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow.
 Essays by Sharon Daniel and Warren Sack are featured in Database Aesthetics. |
Essays in the collection examine the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The collection looks at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.
Daniel’s essay examines “The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity” and Sack’s piece considers “Network Aesthetics.” The collection was edited by Victoria Vesna, media artist and chair of the Department of Design and Media Arts at UCLA.
To learn more about their contributions to this collection, please contact Warren Sack at wsack@ucsc.edu or Sharon Daniel at sdaniel@ucsc.edu.
History of Art and Visual Culture
 A photo taken by Carolyn Dean appeared on the cover of the September 2007 issue of Art Bulletin. That same issue also featured an article by Dean. |
Dean’s work featured in Art Bulletin
The work of Carolyn Dean, a history of art and visual culture professor, was featured in the September 2007 issue of Art Bulletin. The cover of that issue featured a photo of the Royal Mausoleum of the Inka at Machu Picchu (Peru), 1438-1530 CE taken by Dean in 2006. "The Inka married the Earth: Integrated Outcrops and the Making of Place," an article written by Dean, appeared in the same issue.
To learn more about Carolyn Dean’s work, please contact her at csdean@ucsc.edu.
Miller named editor of Society for American Music journal
Music professor Leta Miller has been appointed editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music, beginning in fall 2008, for a four-year term. Published quarterly, the journal is the leading periodical for studies in American music.
The Society for American Music was founded in 1975 and is a non-profit scholarly and educational organization with a mission "to stimulate the appreciation, performance, creation, and study of American music in all its diversity, and the full range of activities and institutions associated with that music."
For more information about Leta Miller's recent appointment, please contact her at leta@ucsc.edu.
Martinez reappointed to NTC board of trustees
Alma Martinez, associate professor of theater arts, has been reappointed to the Board of Trustees of the National Theater Conference, an organization founded in 1932 to bring together theater professionals and scholars. She also has been invited to serve on the Board of Directors of Trustees of the Claremont Museum of Art.
Martinez has also participated in conferences in Paris and Buenos Aries. At the New Directions in Humanities Conference in Paris on July 20, she presented "Quetzalcoatl & Marx: the Dialectic for a United Chicano and Latin American Popular/Political Theater Front, Mexico, 1974." She also was Invited to participate in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics sixth annual seminar and conference, "Corpoliticas/Body Politics in he Americas: Formation of Race, Class and Gender," in Buenos Aires in June.
In September, Martinez spoke at Arapahoe Community College on the subject of Latina/o representations in film. Her lecture was titled "Spitfires, Bandidos and Latin Lovers: the evolution of the Latina/o stereotype in film."
Recent acting credits include a supporting role in the forthcoming feature film Crossing Over. Starring Harrison Ford and Sean Penn, the film was written and directed by Wayne Kramer and produced by The Weinstein Company. Martinez also performed a guest star role in the closing episode of the CBS television
dramatic series The Unit.
To learn more about Alma Martinez's recent accomplishments, please contact her at almamar@ucsc.edu.
