YO!

YO > Youth Media Showcase celebrates the stories, images, and graphic design work of talented teens within the IE who use their digital media art to make their communities come alive.


Event I: ARTSWalk Thursday, August 7th 6:00 - 8:00pm @ UCR/CMP, Main St at University Ave, downtown Riverside.
Event II: How I See It Saturday, August 16th, 1:00 - 3:00pm @ Riverside Public Library, Mission Inn Ave at Orange St, Riverside.

These projects, produced during the 2007-08 year, were sponsored by California State Library, Project BRIDGE, Califa, Eyebeam, Adobe Systems, O1SJ Festival, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, California Council for the Humanities, Gluck Foundation, Poly HS, JW North HS, Summit HS, and UCR CHASS. Download the invite > here< . For more info, check out the UCR ARTSblock website: www.artsblock.ucr.edu

Home & the World

Micro-Macro a new photo contest sponsored by the UCR ARTSblock Digital Studio Gallery has been announced.

"In this time of ours, things at once seem paradoxically out of control and out of reach, yet equally knowable, touchable, and observable. For this contest, we are hoping that the unique vision provided by the camera lens can bring specific meaning to this metaphor. We are seeking works by photographers who use the camera to capture what is near or far, documenting reality or constructing fictions, at the point of extreme. It is expected that some artists will achieve this outcome using a camera lens and someone else by using computer technique."

Deadline for entries is Friday August 15th, with winners announced on August 22nd. An exhibition of the 24 selected finalists will open on Thursday September 4th, @ 6pm at UCR California Museum of Photography. For more information, email: digitalstudioinfo@ucr.edu or call the ARTSblock Ed office at: 951.827.4796.

Riverside's History

Located just behind UCR Sweeney Art Gallery and California Museum of Photography is Riverside's original Chinatown established in the early 1880s. When the thriving bachelor community was forced out of downtown due to anti-immigrant sentiment, they eventually migrated west to a site on Brockton and Tequesquite Avenues. This location was excavated in 1985, providing remarkable artifacts as well as opening a window to a key period in Riverside's development. A third, smaller Chinese community was formed away from these sites at Magnolia and Adams. See Asian American Riverside.

Last month, The Grier Pavilion was inaugurated atop the Mayor's Office in downtown Riverside featuring short historical videos on prior residents of Riverside, including Chinatown's George Wong. To learn more, check out the exhibit: A Sense of Place - Remembering Riverside's Chinatowns at Sweeney Art Gallery running in conjunction with Absurb Recreation: New Art from China, July 26 - October 4. Also, on YouTube there are profiles of other important Riverside civil rights luminaries such as Johnny Sotelo, Oscar Medina, Dr. Barnett and Eleanor Jean Grier, Rupert and Jeannette Costo, among others.

0101 Youth 0101 Media 0101

FIELD TRIP!!! UCR Digital Studio mural crew took a trip to San Jose, June 5-7 to take part in the 01SJ Festival at The Tech Museum and surrounding arts sites, featuring new media works by established artists and emerging teens, sponsored by a micro-grant from Eyebeam and Adobe Systems. Students took in street festivals, art galleries, and special digital works by their peers. San Jose was a blast and the drive home down the scenic Hwy1 was also the ticket. Check out our pix on Flickr.

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.