Robert C May Lecture series 09-10

With school about to kick of again the university of kentucky has announced the photographers visiting for the Robert C. May Lecture Series (each lecture has a corresponding exhibition in the photo wing of the university museum) . . . this series is one of the hidden treasures associated with The University of Kentucky

JAHI CHIKWENDIU
Lecture: Friday, October 23, 2009, 4:00 pm
Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.
Exhibition: October 3 - November 1, 2009
Art Museum Gallery

MIKE SMITH
Lecture: Friday, November 13, 2009, 4:00 pm
Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.
Exhibition: November 7 - December 13, 2009
Art Museum Gallery

LILY ALMOG
Lecture: Friday, January 29, 2010, 4:00 pm
Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.
Exhibition: January 5 - February 28, 2010
Art Museum Gallery

SARAH HOSKINS
Lecture: Friday, March 26, 2010, 4:00 pm
Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.
Exhibition: March 6 - April 11, 2010
Art Museum Gallery

Joe Johnson "Mega Churches"

Artist Joe Johnson, current assistant professor of photography @ the university of missouri has a series of photographs titled "mega churches" of course this is something that makes me quite excited, given my interest in the subject... you can view the whole series @ joejohnsonphoto.com.

ART MARKET.... bizarre

I Sold ANDY WARHOL (too soon) by Richard Polsky

I am almost finished with this book, I got it free (official book doesn't release until September '09) at a book store on vacation in the Outer Banks, NC. It is essential this dealer's take on the Art Market, etc. The moral of the story is don't sell your Andy Warhol (if you have one) Because you need the cash for your new wife... He sold his "fright wig" for just under 400K in 2006, and it is now worth upwards of 1mil. So if you happen to possess a Warhol. Which i can assume no one reading this will. Don't Sell it. Or do but be prepared to kick yourself as it i will continue to be worth more and more money. Until there are no more uber rich people. Which i suspect will never happen.



I got this book on the day i planned on buying "The 12 million dollar stuffed shark".
It is in my opinion a different take on most of the same information. The Shark book is written by an Economist, so it presents a less personal, more statistic look at the market and its absurdities.

I recommend Either book (or both).

In regards to the other Stuff I choose to read, for example "APPROPRIATION" a collection of
essays edited by David Evans, including authors including, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and other
more difficult thinkers. These two books have been a relaxing and comical (and slightly depressing) look into the
big money behind ART WORLD PROPER!

Enjoy!

MASTER PIECES

two works selected, ready to hang...

3rd Annual
MASTER PIECES


Building upon the philosophy and success of the Rites of Passage exhibits for undergrads, Manifest offers a similar opportunity to graduate students for exhibiting at Manifest.

An annual offering, this third installment of the Master Pieces project will continue to reveal the intensity and professionalism of students working towards their terminal academic degree in the field of art or design.

Often the most exceptional work comes out of these artists’ immersion in their culture of study and intellectual pursuit. Manifest’s goal, therefore, is to select works that in the truest sense of the word are contemporary masterpieces – works that set the standard of quality that the artist is expected to maintain throughout his or her professional career. The exhibit catalog for this show will serve as a visual documentation of these artists’ own benchmarks for years to come.

This third annual Master Pieces project received 400 entries from 139 artists. The final selection includes 16 works by the following thirteen new masters:

Meredith Adamisin (Northville, Michigan)

John Carrasco, III (Lincoln, Nebraska)

Kyle Chaput (Corpus Christi, Texas)

Hima Chennamaraju (Indianapolis, Indiana)

Benjamin Clore (East Lansing, Michigan)

Rachel Heberling (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania)

Robert Hernandez (Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts)

Josh Johnson (Lincoln, Nebraska)

Sonia Lea (Bloomington, Indiana)

Robert Minervini (San Francisco, California)

Travis Shaffer (Nicholasville, Kentucky)

Japheth Storlie (Maquoketa, Iowa)

Kimberly Strom (DeKalb, Illinois)

11 Megachurches

This is a recently completed series of images to be exhibited for the fall semester @ Asbury College in conjunction with:

Bringing Creation to Praise:

The Arts and Faith

A two-day conference organized by Asbury College

Plenary speaker: Jeremy Begbie, Ph.D., Duke Divinity School; formerly University of Cambridge and University of St. Andrews

Thursday and Friday November 12 and 13, 2009

This conference was organized to deal with issues of relationship between art and religion: primarily as it regards to environmental concerns.

panelists

Mathew Sleeth, M.D., author, Serve God, Save the Planet

Cameron Anderson, M.F.A.,Executive Director, Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA)

Patrick Adams, M.F.A. , exhibit and Artist’s Talk, “Heaven and Earth”

Campus Exhibits organized by the Asbury College Art Department

including artists:

Keith Barker

Rondall Reynoso

Laura O’Neal

Chris Segre-Lewis

Travis Shaffer

Sarah Jane Gray

Branded Nation: The Marketing of the Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld

I just finished reading this great book by James B. Twitchell, a professor at U of F.

For anyone interested in the branding/marking of the culture industries (art, religion, education...) this is a very interesting book. Which supports my theories on the impact of fashion (lowercase "f"), trend, and social status on these "truth seeking institutions".

It's dry, but fascinating.

This book was published in 2004, and it is interesting to see the things Twitchell is talking about becoming more common and explicit now.

26 ---fill in the blank---

jeff brouws - twentysix abandoned gasoline stations (after ed ruscha)

jeff brouws

eric tabuci - twentysix abandoned gasoline stations (after ed ruscha)

I Touched it...

Recently while making a routine trip to the UK Fine Arts Library I decided to check info-cat (the uk online catalog) again to see if UK housed a copy of one of my current inspirations... and to my surprise they did.  Lucky for me as a Graduate Student/ Instructor i have access to the closed stacks.  I can't believe they plastered this thing with stickers.  It makes me want to punch them.

Here is the title page... for those of you unfamiliar with Ed Ruscha's books, if this is a first edition, which i doubt, it has a value of a few K,  although some Kentucky douche thought it appropriate to place an ellipsis after the title on this page, and the library plastered it with their logo and stickers so it's likely not worth anything.  Of course that would make Ruscha proud as he made so many as a means of keeping the books from becoming a commodity.

Just a view of the inside of the book, it consists of 31 offset press prints of images he commissioned to be photographed by an LA commercial photographer from a helicopter.  I am currently in the process of finishing my adaptation of this book which has a flexible title (currently 204 parking lots) it is a stack of 6 reproductions using screen captures from google maps of the same parking lots.

A Website... Finally ( www.travisshaffer.com )

fourty-one walmart supercenters # 31
8" x 8" silver gelatin print

After a visiting some friends in Lvl (louisville, ky) I have found a simple and clean means of managing my website that actually has resulted in it having content.....

My designer friend Ricky (www.dressedinvalue.com) led me to quite an awesome site builder of sorts... and set it up for me as i am web/code illiterate.

On it you can find my recent and not so recent Artwork and CV.

An-My Lê (Robert C. May Lecture Series)

An-My Lê
M-246 Semi Automatic Weapon, Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal, Iraq, 2007
archival pigment prints
Edition of 5
40 x 56 1/2 inches

At the University of Kentucky we are privileged with the funds to bring four contemporary photographers in each semester to present a lecture on their work and hang a small show in the University Museum.

An-My Lê was the first of the two spring semester lectures...
She recieved her MFA From Yale in the 90's and has shown everywere including the coveted MOMA!

As an artist, and not a critic... i'll spare you my opinion of the quality of her work and just say that the obvious Hiroshi Sugimoto reference was an interesting one to me, and conceptually this work and his seascapes are so very different. Check her work out via the g-OO-gle.