The Southern Graphics Conference is Chicago Bound

The Southern Graphics Conference is being hosted by Anchor Graphics at Columbia College Chicago on March 25 - 29. If you like printmaking, buying prints or just want to be around one thousand printmaking artists from around the country, come to this thing. You can buy prints, make prints and see demonstrations. See this video from last year's conference to give you an idea of how absolutely cool this is going to be. Come on Down.
See you there. Elizabeth
Watch this video and click here.
Southern Graphics Conference Video '08.

Maria Magda Campos-Pons is Making Art Right Now

image: Painting Lesson

With her swinging braids, statuesque physique and exotic Cuban accent, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is the first person seen in a crowded room. Her artwork is a testament to her magnanimous physical presence and character which is why she is the subject of her own art. All of her artwork reflects and explores her own experiences. It is a process of self-discovery. She is both object and subject of her life in art. Campos-Pons has also navigated her art career onto an international stage. She is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and many other important art collections around the world. She is currently exhibiting at Columbia College's Glass Curtain Gallery.

Born in Cuba, Campos-Pons has known her whole life that her great grandmother was a Chinese woman who came to work the fields of Cuba. This has been the subject of a number of the pieces in this current exhibition. At the turn-of-the-century many Chinese migrated to Cuba to find work. There is a large photograph on the main wall of exhibition space entitled, Painting Lesson, that shows Magda dressed as a Chinese woman in a red dress. All around her are small paintings made in the Chinese style. A few years ago Magda had an exhibition in China. It struck her as strange that many Cubans had migrated to China to work as unskilled labor while China has experienced it's current economic growth.

"We have come full circle," she said. "The Chinese went to Cuba to work the land and now Cubans are going to China. In the United States many Chinese came to assist the African labor force. Now the Chinese have established an economic force in Africa."

Magda was unable to vote in the last election. While she is a permanent resident, she is not a citizen. On election day, Magda went to her studio and made a series of photographs entitled, Prayer for Obama. Even though she was unable to vote for Obama, she made it her mission to get others out to vote. She arranged car service for many senior citizens who would not have gone to the polls.

image: Prayer for Obama

“I was frustrated that I could not vote,” says Campos-Pons. "I couldn't just sit there."

During the election while others were voting, Campos-Pons photographed herself while praying for the election’s outcome. She dressed in simple black and white and carries a bouquet of flowers. The photograph is a series of seven Polaroid prints. In three of the photos she is holding a small clay model of Obama in her palms.

“This was the first time that I made something this directly political,” she said. “Usually, I try to stay away from overtly political subjects, but I felt that this was my way of participating in his election. Obama makes us want to participate.”

It makes sense that Campos-Pons turned this election into something worthy of her artistic attention. The exhibition at Glass Curtain is entitled, Life Has Not Even Begun." When it does begin, I'm sure that she will find a way to show us how to live. Her exhibition will be up until March 6, 2009.

Beth Amphetamine vs. Malice in Chains - A Night of Cleavage and Cleats

I realize that going to see an all-female roller derby is not an art exhibition, but I couldn't not tell you about it. It was so cool. The girls were totally out for blood. The costumes were haute raunch-ay. On Saturday night I went to the UIC Pavillion to see the Windy City Rollers. I have heard about female roller derbies, but never thought I'd see one. I took a gazillion photos so that my readers could get a taste of what this thing was like. I loved the fishnets on Ruth in Asia (pictured above). The names of the skaters are almost better than the competition itself: Megan Formor, Sonya Mouthshut, Ava Sectomy, Eva Dead... I'm trying to come up with my own roller derby name. I thought of a few, but they are way too raunchy. See The Windy City Rollers website. There are many more pictures there. Below are some of mine.

Emanuel Aguilar Rises Up Out of the Ashes

Emanuel Aguilar is a senior at Columbia College Chicago. He will graduate with an undergraduate degree in fine art and a minor in Marketing and Communications at the end of this year. Emanuel met Kevin Brown during Semester in Florence, one of Columbia College’s study abroad programs, who told him about a project that needed an artist to create something using ashtrays. Kevin didn’t have many details, but Emanuel was intrigued and said, “Sure, I’ll do it.” A month passed before he heard from Kevin again. He showed Emanuel the materials: boxes and boxes of ashtrays, some clean, some not. The project was a celebration of the one-year anniversary of the smoking ban in Chicago with the Respiratory Health Association who asked Larry Minsky, faculty in Columbia’s Marketing and Communications Department, to find a student who would want to make something beautiful from the ashtrays. Larry Minsky has worked on a number of exciting student collaborations with the Respiratory Health Association over the years.

Right after the ban on smoking, the Respiratory Health Association put out a call for ashtrays. There were some press hits that said “What do you do with ashtrays? You create art.” This idea interested the association and they decided to turn this into an idea for local artists.

“I remember looking at the ashtrays and thinking that there was nothing I could do that wasn’t going to be kitchsy,” says Emanuel. “Every choice seemed too obvious: stack the ashtrays, glue them together. I had to think about what would I do to just eliminate their original purpose…and that was to crush them. So we crushed them. All of them.”

Some of them were crushed down to sand and powder. The creative team, Emanuel, Vincent Finazzo and Eric Siegel, had buckets and buckets of smashed ashtrays to work with. There were two amber shades and a clear glass. At this point in the process there were no longer any ashtrays, just glass. The color of the glass was alluring and they decided to light it and make a display that would emphasize the shards. They decided on a minimal look in order to refrain from referencing the ashtrays and smoking as much as possible. They wanted people to have an open-ended experience.

"We wanted people to look at the shards as if the glass was part of some lost civilization, like artifacts from an archeological dig," said Emanuel. "We called the piece, 'The Phoenix.' We liked the fact that we came up with a mythological name to represent all that rises up out of the ashes as a symbol of hope."

The finished piece is now on display at The Thompson Center in downtown Chicago. Emanuel has a blog and an upcoming online magzine called jettisonquarterly.com. His blog is emanaguilar.blogspot.com.

The Creativity Don - Sir Ken Robinson

Image: Sir Ken Robinson (left) with Dr. Warwick Carter, President of Columbia College Chicago

Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, in innovation, education, and human resources. He has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, not-for-profit corporations, and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. For 10 years he was Professor of Education at the University of Warwick in England and is now Professor Emeritus.

Sir Robinson was invited to Columbia College to speak for their Founders Lectures on Tuesday, December 2, 2008. Here is my interview with him shortly before going on stage.

Elizabeth: Please talk about the traditional definition of success in higher education and how creativity is often overlooked in pursuit of traditional educational values.

Sir Ken Robinson: If you look at the dominant culture of education and had to ask what does one have to be good at in that culture in order to succeed you’d have to conclude that the whole process of public education is intended to produce university professors. I don’t think it is intentionally that way. The intellectual culture of education is predicated on a certain type of academic ability of the sort that people who teach in universities especially enjoy. If you ask the typical student what they do in school they say that they spend a lot of time writing essays and doing critiques and doing certain sorts of mathematics. There is a greater emphasis on a certain type of critical thinking. People talk about the ‘core’ academics. The whole thing is about academic ability and my point is that academic ability has become a synonym for intelligence and educational achievement. It’s a typical type of intellectual process.

E: Is this success model accidental by virtue of the fact that professors look for the same kind of intellectual process that they themselves possess?

SKR: I don’t think it’s accidental. I think it’s a story. It’s rooted in the formation of the educational system of the 18th and 19th centuries and is shaped much by the culture of the Enlightenment. Quite early on in the process, the universities sought to exert influence on the culture of education. I think of it as more ideological than accidental.

E: One of the examples you use to illustrate the creative mind is a young girl who had been a disruptive force in the classroom. The young girl went on to become a very famous choreographer as an adult. The parents and the school sought the expertise of a psychologist because the girl was not progressing in the classroom environment. During a meeting with the family, the psychologist asked the parents to leave the office with him while the little girl stayed behind in the office. Before the psychologist left with the parents, he turned on the radio to a music station. Outside the office door, the psychologist asked the parents to look through the small window on his door and tell him what the little girl was doing.
“She’s dancing,” they said.
“Do you know why she’s dancing?” he asked.
“She’s always dancing,” they replied.
“She’s dancing because she is a dancer,” the psychologist returned.

SKR: The school thought she had a learning disability because she couldn’t sit still or pay attention. The psychologist that the mother took her to see was fantastically insightful. It was he who said, she isn’t sick, she’s a dancer. Take her to dance school. He was exemplifying that there are other ways of being intelligent. Julian Lyne (the now famous choreographer) said to me that she has to move to think. My wife is like that. She hates going to the theater because she has to sit there for two hours. It drives her mad. Education for the most part is designed for people who like to sit still.

E: In business, I think there is an increasing respect for creative people, but I still see that these people are siloed by upper management. The people who make the big bucks, the corner office crowd, are not the out-of-the-box thinkers. Do you think there is an impenetrable wall between creative people and those who have the bigger jobs and make more money?

SKR: Firstly, it’s difficult to talk about business in general. You look at companies like Pixar or Google or Apple or you look at some of the leading design and architectural companies. They have extraordinary cultures, but so do Proctor & Gamble and GE. Some of their CEOs are fantastically creative people. It takes a lot to run a multi-billion dollar company and to keep it moving upwards. I think that part of the problem is that we tend to caricature creativity and associate it with certain types of activity. Companies do that all the time. They think that creativity is primarily about advertising, marketing or design. What much of my work has been about is to redefine and recalibrate the idea of creativity and the creative mind. People think creativity is about special things or special people, which they are, but there are so many ways in which one can be creative. If you look at some of the great companies like Apple or Google, they’ve been very creative in producing products. Walmart is a much bigger company and they haven’t produced any products at all. Their real creative skill has been in systems in supply chain management. Then you have other companies like Starbucks who didn’t invent coffee, but invented a kind of culture to go with it. They are all examples of very different creative approaches and innovation. But I think that there are some companies who tend to ghettoize the people who are thought of as the ‘creatives’. Sometimes these people make their way to top management, but I think it has to do with them very often. It often happens that people who are in the creative sector, the arts, design, etc.; they don’t all want to be running organizations. The don’t have the mind or the facility for that. That’s part of my argument; in order to run any great organization whether it’s a business, a school or a family there has to be diversity. One of my objections to education is the tendency to want to homogenize everything. It’s why kids who may well be brilliant are being anesthetized with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) drugs. It’s all about conformity and some children don’t fit the mold. I’m very skeptical about the prevalence of ADHD. I don’t mean that there is no such thing. Clearly there are some children who have real problems, but I’m not a doctor and therefore not qualified to say that there is or isn’t such a thing. I do think it’s out of control. I think all kinds of people are being medicated because they just think differently. I’m publishing a book in January entitled, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. The whole book is filled with stories of people who have achieved enormous things creatively. Not all are well-known, but most of them are. I think a number of these people we would never have heard of if they had taken Aderol or Ritalin in the 70s and 80s. Many of them were bucking the system. It really outrages me. I will say that some children have real clinical issues, but from all the people whom I have talked to about this, even doctors, have said that the tendency to medicate children because they’re being mildly disruptive or not paying attention or are bored or distracted or generally are not getting with the program is spreading like wildfire. In the 80s there were half a million kids with ADHD, but right now in 2008 the numbers have reach 8 million. It’s a three billion dollar drug industry. It’s like depression. The drug companies are not trying to cure depression. Once this condition is out there, you see it everywhere. I don’t believe it. I think an awful lot of kids are expressing a kind of vibrant creative energy that is not being channeled. I do know many people who would not be achieving now if they had been medicated as children.

One of these people is Mick Fleetwood. He would have undoubtedly been put on Aderol because he was constantly beating out rhythms on everything. He hated school. Later on in his life it turned out that he was dyslexic. He was angry and frustrated and he begged his parents to let him leave school at the age of sixteen and they let him. The only thing he ever wanted to do was to play the drums. His father had the common sense to buy him a set of drums and at sixteen he set off to London to live with his sister and set his drum kit up in a garage. His father, who was a poet, wrote a poem about him. The last line of the poem was: “He set off to conquer the world with two sticks and a drum.” He’s twice been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Fleetwood Mac has sold millions of albums. They are one of the most successful bands in history. At sixteen he had his first gig with a blues band. What I’m trying to say is that if those drugs had been available, doctors would have given them to him


E: I think Columbia has a lot of kids that also fit this category. They want to pursue creative careers, but they may not have done well in the hard academic core subjects.

SKR: We subject kids to all kinds of academic disciplines regardless of whether they have any interest or aptitude for them. It doesn’t mean that they should not be exposed to these disciplines, but I resist the idea that there are ‘hard’ subjects and ‘soft’ ones. People achieve at the highest levels whether it’s in the arts or the sciences. I don’t think there is such a thing as an academic subject. There are just academic processes.

From Cab Fare to Book Fair - Steve Woodall at Center for Book and Paper Arts

If you ever hailed a cab in San Francisco and saw that your driver had a dog-eared copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos on the passenger side, you may have gotten a ride from Steve Woodall. Woodall won’t be driving cabs again. Many of us, especially those of us who have reached a certain age, wish that we could take the narrative line of our own life story and arc it in the way Woodall has.

Now 60, Steve Woodall joined Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Book & Paper Arts (CBPA) as the Director in early November. Prior to this leg of his professional journey, he was the Education Director and then the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Center for the Book (SFCB) at the age of 48. Not bad work if you can get it. Before that he was driving a cab in San Francisco for over twenty years.

“A lot of artists in San Francisco drive cabs,” says Woodall. “But it is often a trap that they can’t get free of. While driving a cab, I perfected the bohemian, slacker lifestyle, but it never felt like an authentic life choice for me.”

As Education Director, Woodall was instrumental in building the SFCB from a community center that offered twelve classes in 1996 to a major arts center that offers over 300 classes and boasts a 2008 mailing list of 18,000.

“I started the job in 1996,” says Woodall. “And in one year I was married, had a child and became a workaholic.”

Woodall’s love of the book arts began as a poetry student at San Francisco State. In an effort to read all the great poets, he read Ezra Pound. Pound’s genius caused Woodall to give up trying his hand at poetry.

“If I was going to write, that was what I wanted to write and there was no way I was ever going to write like that.”

Instead of writing poetry, Woodall decided to create handmade photocopied books that included the words of Pound and other poets. Woodall continued to make and improve upon these books with the use of found text, collage and the words of poets he admired. Little did he know that these photocopied publications were part of an art form that was emerging out of the contemporary art movement of the 1970s.

“Right around that time I happened upon a book by the book artist, Joan Lyons and said, “Oh, this is what I’ve been making.”

His photocopy press was called SameAsDat Press which was a word play on the title, Samizdat, a 1960s term for clandestine black market publishing in the Soviet bloc.

Woodall does not make art as much as he used to since turning a fledgling art group into a major player in San Francisco’s art scene in just twelve years. Founded in 1996 by book artists Mary Austin and Kathleen Burch, the SFCB is now a nationally recognized arts center due in great part to Woodall’s efforts. Woodall worked tirelessly to attract book arts enthusiasts to the Center and to educate the public about the history and relevancy of the book arts. SFCB now has a loyal and national following with graphic designers and artists who want to learn letterpress, bookbinding, artists’ books and printmaking.

“Creative people are hungry to use their hands in an age when computers do most of the work for us,” says Woodall. “When students come into the Center and set metal type it’s very exciting for them. Using our hands activates parts of our brains that don’t get used with the computer.”

Woodall thinks that the book arts is one of the most exciting contemporary genres coming out of the art world today. While he maintains that the book arts often get lumped in with craft-identified works like fiber and ceramics, he believes that book arts requires more conceptual thought, time, skill and in some cases, more expensive materials than other art forms like painting and photography.

“Sometimes it takes a break-out artist for people to change their minds about certain art forms,” says Woodall. “Alfred Steiglitz paved the way for generations of photographers to enter the art canon and recently, Dale Chihuly, though I am not a fan, I do admit that he has paved the way for glass artists to be taken more seriously and to get higher prices for their work.”

Woodall claims that as a cab driver he was a self-declared “cabdriver socialite.” He knew many people across many social and economic demographics in San Francisco. He counts himself very fortunate to have found a dedicated group of people who also had a passion for the book arts. Kathy Walkup, the program director at Mills College, called him one of the most important people in creating community around the book arts in the Bay Area.

“Steve was a community building genius in the Bay area,” says Clif Meador, Department Chair for Columbia College’s Book & Paper Arts. “He curated a lot of important shows that brought together disparate communities there, and built SFCB into a national-level institution. He was active in many of the organizations on the west coast that promoted the book arts. One of the things that characterizes Steve’s work is his ability to bring people together, to bridge different audiences with new understanding of their common interests, usually in the book arts. I hope that he will bring some of his audience-development magic to the center.”

It didn’t take much convincing for Woodall to accept the position of Director from Michelle Citron, Chairperson for Interdisciplinary Arts. Woodall plans to increase the publishing efforts here and he would also like to tap into the cultural community in Chicago and to engage new and increased participation with the book arts which was his bailiwick at the SFCB.

“I think Columbia College’s Center for Book & Paper Arts is an already formidable institution with tremendous potential,” says Woodall. “I am honored to be here.”

Photo by Sara McKemie

Mr. Illustrious - Ivan Brunetti

Here is a photo of Ivan Brunetti. Normally, I would do an interview much as I have done with other past and future interviewees, but Ivan beat me to the punch. He sent me a cartoon interview (see below). My interview, fascinating though it may be, can be supplemented by this interview with Ivan on youtube.

Ivan worked in my department, Marketing and Communications, as the webmaster for a number of months (previously he had the same job, but in a different department, for many years) and is now a full-time faculty member in the Art + Design Department at Columbia College. Clearly this demotion must have been devastating for Ivan. I'm sure that the loss of the word 'master' in his title took some getting used to. At staff meetings he was very quiet. I mean to the point that we hardly noticed he was there kind of quiet. If truth be told, he did make a very good coatrack. After his first volume of Anthology of Graphic Fiction, we congratulated him on this amazing accomplishment and then began to browbeat him which gave us all a sense of purpose. When I saw a review of this same book in the Sunday book section of the New York Times I was drinking soup which started coming out of my nose. This was due to my shock, surprise and delight, mind you, and not the seething jealousy that I felt rising up from my loins. Thank God I wasn't eating when I saw one of his cartoons on the cover of The New Yorker because I wouldn't have wanted to ruin a perfectly good magazine. After tearing the cover image with my teeth, I sat down for a good read all of a Sunday afternoon.

When I first met Ivan he was in an office on the fifth floor of the 600 S. Michigan Avenue building in an office that was no larger than a closet with smeary windows that looked out onto a fire escape. Since natural light couldn't possibly penetrate the blur of soot and grime that covered the window, the florescent lighting flickered above his head revealing tobacco-steeped walls and ceiling tiles from a time when employees used to type with cigarettes hanging between their lips. The decrepitude of this bygone era would have served Ivan well or it could have catapulted him out of the greasy window and onto the alley rats below.

Once again...congratulations Ivan from all of us chickens back in Marketing Communications. We think you're the ginchiest.

This is the cover of Ivan's new anthology of graphic fiction. You can purchase it on amazon.