AJ Feducia, Roxanne Chasle Ortiz, Matthew Ortiz, Dana Paresa at Mark's

Art at Marks Garage exhibition TRIP AROUND THE ISLAND includes a few alums: AJ Feducia, Roxy Chasle Ortiz, Matthew Ortiz, Dana Paresa.

February 7 through March 24
Artist Reception Friday, February 10, 2012 6-9pm

Wendy Kawabata News

Faculty member Wendy Kawabata included in RESTRAINT, an exhibition that examines the ways in which the 6 artists enforce limitation and restriction in their practice, through method, theme, scale and palette. The resulting work presents a restrained beauty borne of discipline and control.

Sanderson Contemporary Art (Auckland, New Zealand)
21 Feb to 04 Mar 2012

MFA alum Steve Coy News!

MFA alum Steve Coy has been awarded a Coleman Fellowship and Knight Foundation Grant to fund “Minipreneurs” in Detroit.

Students from Lawrence Technological University are paired with a group of youth from Detroit to explore principles of entrepreneurship in art and design disciplines. This will emphasize group-based interdisciplinary collaboration and model projects after real-world business scenarios. Projects are based around an entrepreneurial opportunity rooted in the many community needs of Detroit. Students are expected to promote and market their project and find the appropriate venue to deliver their product to market. Projects will be funded based upon business proposals.

The program operates out of PonyRide, a community creative business incubator space purchased by Detroit entrepreneur Phillip Cooley. The program space has been named, by the particpants, Nelo (short for Neon Lounge): Bright Ideas! Our mission statement reads: A creative collective empowering community through micro-entrepreneurship in the discipline of art and design. Through this creative collective, formed by the students and Detroit youth, new businesses will emerge.

Coy's project is also in a documentary entitled Detropia about Detroit that just premiered at Sundance.

Detropia is a cinematic tapestry that chronicles the lives of several Detroiters trying to survive the D and make sense of what is happening to their city. An owner of a blues bar, a young blogger, an auto union rep, a group of young artists, an opera impresario and a gang of illegal “scrappers” make up an unlikely chorus that illuminates the tale of both city and a country in a soul searching mood, desperate for a new identity.

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century— the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now . . . the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, DETROPIA sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution. As houses are demolished by the thousands, automobile-company wages plummet, institutions crumble, and tourists gawk at the “charming decay,” the film’s vibrant, gutsy characters glow and erupt like flames from the ashes. These soulful pragmatists and stalwart philosophers strive to make ends meet and make sense of it all, refusing to abandon hope or resistance. Their grit and pluck embody the spirit of the Motor City as it struggles to survive postindustrial America and begins to envision a radically different future.

Debra Drexler showing in New York again

Faculty member Debra Drexler showing with heavy hitters the likes of Sol Lewitt, William Kentridge, Yayoi Kusama in Getting From Here to There: Images In and About Transition at AFP Gallery. Fuller Building, 41 East 57th St., 7th floor / February 8 – March 20, opening reception February 15, 6 – 8 pm

Curated by Robert G. Edelman

Edelman writes, "This exhibition is conceived on the premise that representational and abstract art must not only co-exist; they can and should also have a conversation. The underlying or unifying premise for this show is that artists are always challenged by the process of bringing an image or composition to life, whether it’s what one expects when starting out or not, finally arriving at some resting, or unsettling, place. This sense of place, of a world in transition, can be expressed in ways that are more elusive than labels like representation and abstraction, so that a viewer can also get past these distinctions and their obvious limitations. A receptive viewer should also be able to see how each artist has taken liberties, or reinvented their imagery or iconography to make it work, despite moving toward or away from the limits of mere representation or post Abstract-Expressionist doctrine.

[image: Debra Drexler "Storm" oil on linen, 30" x 36"]

so many UHM-ers in HAWAII ART NOW

Many of the 58 artists who have taken part at The Contemporary Museum's Biennial of Hawai’i Artists in 1993 have been brought back for HAWAII ART NOW.

February 09 - April 22, 2012
Honolulu Museum of Art

At least 15 of participants are either UHM faculty or alums: Eli Baxter, Gaye Chan, Kaili Chun, Charles Cohan, Kloe Kang, Jacqueline Rush Lee, Mary Mitsuda, Deborah G. Nehmad, Abigail Romanchak, Suzanne Saylor, Marc Thomas, Maika‘i Tubbs, Yida Wang, Fae Yamaguchi, and Linda Yamamoto.