Outland Empyre

A listserve that rocks with guest artists, critical dialogue, international collegiality, and very rare instances of scholarly bullying. Empypre, online.

Long Hot Summer!

May
Latin American Film Fest @ UCR, 5/20 - 5/27
This year's program features award-winning films looking at socio-political developments in Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, and Venezuela. Films include: Against the Grain - An Artist's Survival Guide to Peru; Cartoneros; Los Ultimos zapatistas; State of Fear; Machuca; ¿Puedo Hablar? May I Speak?; Social Genocide. Contact: Daniel Polk (daniel.polk@ucr.edu)

Frances Negron-Muntaner, The Young Lords, 5/28
3:00-5:00pm Latin American Studies Department, UC Riverside
Contact: Marta Hernandez Salvan (mhernandezsalvan@yahoo.com)

June
Photo-Graphic 0.8, 6/5-7/2 Featuring graphic design, photo-based illustration and other works from students of the newly established Art Institute of California of the Inland Empire based in San Bernardino. Reception, 6/5/08 from 6:00-9:00pm. UCR/CMP Digital Studio Gallery.


How I See It, 6/16-8/5 The Riverside Public Library and UCR ARTSblock Digital Studio team up to present this unique photography-based summer session funded in-part by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities California Stories Fund. 1:00-3:00pm daily, RSPL & UCR/CMP. Contact: Alicia Doktor (adoktor@riversideca.gov)

July
MyGlobalVillage, 7/9-8/17
Our 2nd annual high school summer program presented with support from Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Students screen award-winning social issues films and respond with media messages of their own. 9:00am-1:00pm daily, UCR/CMP. Contact: UCR ARTSblock Ed (digitalstudioinfo@ucr.edu)

August
Sense of Place, 7/26-10/4
A series of workshops and historical reflections on Riverside's Chinatowns of the late 1800's run alongside the Sweeney Art Gallery exhibition, Absurd Recreation: Contemporary Art from China featuring artists Chen Chieh-jen, Hong Hao, Zhao Liang, Xu Ruotao, Chen Wei, Wang Wei, Ai Weiwei, Xiaoze Xie, and Xu Zhen. Contact: UCR ARTSblock Ed (digitalstudioinfo@ucr.edu)

Podcast Rat

ARTblock Live! podcast series features the work of three Riverside art center directors in May and June, starting with Jonathan Green, executive director of UCR/ARTSblock. Also featured are Tyler Stallings of UCR Sweeney Art Gallery and Cosme Cordova of Division 9 Gallery. In addition to el tres hombres, there is an interview with UCR professor of English Laila Lalami of Morocco, talking to host Gabriela Jauregui about her lastest book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.

LA Strips

Funny bizness is the focus of happenings over at KCET.org digital media department with their multimedia series on SoCal graphic novel and comix artists Jaime Hernandez, Carol Lay, Esther Watson with Mark Todd, and Johnny Ryan. You get video profiles, animations of actual strips, and a brief overview of the scene during the last 25 years. As always, of high rate. (www.kcet.org/explore-ca/web-stories/graphic_novels/)

Emerging Artists

Students from the University of Redlands digital photo and black & white film courses are presenting the best of their work in a year-end show at the Digital Studio Gallery of UCR/CMP entitled SELECTIONS. The courses were taught and the exhibition curated by Brit photographer Terry Long. Works in Selections follow personal themes as well as showcase commercial skills. The exhibition is on view from March 24 - May 30th. (www.artsblock.ucr.edu) Works here by Laura Argonza and Kiesten Kranberg.

Hollywood Swingers

List of Curators 2008

INTERNATIONAL
Magali Arriola is an art critic and independent curator sharing her time between Mexico City, Istanbul and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco.
Muu Blanco has been producing works that highlight performative multimedia arts since the mid Œ90s.
Suhjung Hur is a curator and writer based in Seoul, Korea.
Antonio Pasolini is a Brazilian film writer and video maker based in London as well as the editor of kamera.co.uk.
Jennifer Teets is an independent curator.

LOS ANGELES
Ciara Ennis (M.A., Royal College of Art, London, UK), is the Director/Curator, Pitzer Art Galleries at Pitzer College.
Kenneth Rogers has taught history of photography, experimental film, video art, and new media at New York University and UC Riverside and is the co-founder of Chatham Arts, a new exhibition space in Pittsburgh, PA.
Chris Scoates, Executive Director of CSULB University Art Museum, has focused on a wide variety of genres, artists and issues.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Executive Director of Third World Majority is a filmmaker, singer, grassroots media organizer, and second generation Tamil Untouchable Dalit woman striving for forums to widen their base of resistance.
Reggie Woolery, a visual artist and writer, is currently Curator of Education for the University of Riverside California Museum of Photography on ARTSblock.
Anne Bray is an artist, teacher and founding director of Freewaves, a media arts organization and biennial festival in Los Angeles.

Selected festival works in Hollywould... will be installed in LA's urban hall of mirrors as well as screening rooms, art centers, stores, vacant walls – intersecting with audiences where they live, recreate and shop.

Youth Voices

2nd Biennial 01SJ Festival

Based on the theories of Muhammad Yunus (Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, 1999) and with the generous support of Adobe Systems, Inc., ZERO1 is seizing the opportunity of the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Festival to facilitate a global youth digital arts production initiative via a micro-grant program. This project will fund 19 different international artists, arts collectives and established non-profit arts organizations and institutions to support the creation of new work by young digital artists (ages 11- 21 years) during the months leading up to the 01SJ Festival. “Youth International” will culminate in an exhibition at the Tech Museum of Innovation during the 01SJ Festival in June 2008, featuring the work generated by the youth, as well as the stories and process of each of the groups in receipt of their micro-grants.

This year UCR/CMP Digital Studio has been working with six teens from Riverside and affiliated with gang interventionists Project B.R.I.D.G.E. to produce digital murals. In November, the students travelled to LA and Crewest Gallery to check out panel discussions and work by ground-breaking muralists from the 1970s and 80s. They then set about documenting their community, scanning, and assembling. The final works, supported by a micro-grant from Eyebeam.org will show at O1SJ Festival in San Jose at the Youth Voices exhibition, June 7th.

24 hrs @ 24 fps

UCR ARTSblock is seeking photographers for its annual Photographic Excursion into Joshua Tree National Park in Twentynine Palms. 24 hrs @ 24 fps Over Joshua Tree takes place on Saturday May 3rd through Sunday, May 4th. This year's project emphasizes time-based collaboration and experimentation as an estimated five hundred photographers are being recruited to this desert wilderness to shoot discrete three-minute segments of a twenty-four hour day, or a record 2,073,600 photographic images.

24 hrs @ 24 fps Over Joshua Tree draws inspiration from photographer Eadweard Muybridge, specifically his groundbreaking work with motion studies, capturing mechanically what the human eye could only roughly perceive. These early experiments were foundational to the invention of what we now know today as cinema. In order for 24 fps to achieve such an ambitious goal, a number of southern California arts institutions are partnering with ARTSblock to recruit artists and share in the editing and screening of the final video.

Participants in 24 hrs @ 24 fps Over Joshua Tree must register with ARTSblock Ed (www.artsblock.ucr.edu) in order to receive their photo assignment, park pass, and recommended supplies list. those wishing to shoot at Joshua Tree separate from the film project, should check in as well. For info, email: digitalstudioinfo@gmail.com. To check out Joshua Tree click here. Photo by Sandi Wheaton.

Eclecticism

Eclectic People 2008 - organized from submissions to an international open call, celebrates images by artists working in portraiture, and whose lens focus on people that are individuals -- the quirky, the unique, the offbeat, the exotic, the rebel, and the loner. 

Artists featured include Mao Yu of China, Corrine Cardenas, Carolyn Schutten, Michael J. Elderman, Kenny James, Heather Sten, Ilse Ungeheuer of Germany, Agina Sedler, Sarah Nodelman, Lis J. Schwitters, David Stumpp, Mike O'Brien, Julia Granton Buckley, Brian VanderVeen, Jose Beruvides and G. Wigler.  The exhibition takes place in the Digital Studio Gallery at UCR/CMP from 3/22 - 4/24.  There is an opening reception on 4/3 from 6-7:00pm.  Eclectic People - online.

Digital + Portrait + Studio

Saturday and Sunday, Feb 2-3 were official dress-up days in downtown Riverside. First, the annual Dickens Festival along Mission Inn Avenue encouraged participants to role-play in full 19th century period ware -- then take part in short plays and re-creations. A tent with backdrop for portrait sittings was hosted by UCR Artsblock and Riverside Public Library along Oliver's Alley. While Sunday's Dickens event was rained out, UCR/CMP planned ahead for 1st Sunday Family Fun Day and invited Santa Barbara photographer Bob Debris to snap pix in the style of his current show at the museum, Trans-Personae. Think boas and glitter!

About Town

Gabriela Jauregui is a woman about town these days.  Well, maybe not about Riverside, as she spent most of the summer in Mexico City completing a book of poetry, CONTROLLED DECAY to be published in June 2008.  Rather than being here in-studio at CMP recording the next KCET.org hosted ARTSblock Live! monthly podcast, which Gaby happens to co-produce and moderate, the creative writing grad student is away gaining inspiration in Deutschland. The only way to catch up with her is online, as in her recent Bomb Online interview with novelist Daniel Alarcon about LOST CITY RADIO. We will just have to wait I guess. You can check out past ARTSblock Live podcasts featuring Rickerby Hinds, Nicole Entebi, Juan Felipe Herrera, Chris Metzler, Ky-Phong Tran, Chris Abani, Alex Espinoza, Paulo Chagas, and Susan Straight -- until sista' returns.

Art Avant-Garde @ Getty

Was a big week for seeing art. On 1/16, I weathered 2.5 hours of traffic from the IE to the LA for African-American Avant Garde, 1965 - 1990 at the Getty Center. The panel featured west coast experimental artists working in sculpture, performance, and video during the 1960s and 70s -- Maren Hassinger, artist and director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture; Ulysses Jenkins, artist and associate professor of art, UC Irvine; Barbara McCullough, artist and filmmaker; and Senga Nengudi, artist and lecturer in the Department of Visual and Performing
Arts, University of Colorado. The panel was co-moderated by Kelli Jones, associate professor of art history, Columbia University; and independent curator and historian, Judith Wilson, PhD. The audience was peppered with many individuals and artists who were around during this turbulent period and took part in many of the experimental happenings with the panelists.

Thus the panel was more of a homecoming and celebration of visibility then a theoretic untangling of seemingly contradictory visual arts practices taking place in the Black community during the 1960s and 70s. Afterall, what were these folks doing not making (obvious) "protest art" when the rest of Black American sought to set communities ablaze. Yet, to paraphrase Jenkins, "we embodied that same desire for personal freedom, that was being expressed collectively in the streets." A book project is surely in the works!