Between You and ME, Mills College MFA Thesis Exhibition 2010

BETWEEN YOU AND ME

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 1, 2010, 6-9 pm

Exhibition Dates: Sunday, May 2 to Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Mills College Art Museum is proud to present Between You and Me, the thesis exhibition for the 2010 Master of Fine Arts degree recipients. The exhibition showcases works by a promising group of emerging artists created during their graduate program in the Mills College MFA studio program. The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Hanor, Director of the Mills College Art Museum.

Between You and Me features work by Nic Buron, Joey Castor, Chris Fraser, Dana Hemenway, Kija Lucas, Bobby Lukas, Monica Lundy, Kate Stirr, Adam Vermeire and Doug G. Williams.

Driven by the desire to cultivate a sense of wonder, Kate Stirr creates otherworldly creatures, portrayed through drawings, video, and as sculpture, which explore the mysterious place between nature and artifice. Chris Fraser creates situations that address the links between light, pictures and experience. His installations isolate and idealize everyday occurrences: an open door, a curtain, the way the sunlight projects through the branches of a tree.

Nic Buron uses photography to examine the complexities of "place" and "placelessness,” focusing on Treasure Island, a location with a long history of transformation. Alternately, Bobby Lukas' sculptural work provides an avenue for voluntary simplicity and quiet romance, creating a contrast to the excesses of everyday
life.

Dana Hemenway is interested in how we understand and frame objects and experiences. She is fascinated with forms of aesthetic display. The resulting work ranges from video to sculpture to site-specific installation.

Kija Lucas uses the home environment as a setting to investigate the personal fairytale, stories that we tell in order to explain who we are. Her large-scale photographs are recreations of seemingly inconsequential moments that have changed the course of a
single lifetime or impacted several generations. With a similar interest in autobiography, Adam Vermeire explores how race continues to impact his life, searching for answers that cannot be found.

Joey Castor addresses various aspects of physical labor, focusing on how the repetitive, meditative and physical motions affect the body and mind. Monica Lundy's investigations of historical California criminals manifest in a series of paintings and sculpture that explore identity perception in relation to systems of social classification.

Doug G. Williams investigates the psychology of perception and persuasion in videos and interactive installations that are at once uncanny, humorous, and intimate.

The Mills College Art Museum, founded in 1925, is a dynamic center for art that focuses on the creative work of women as artists and curators. The Museum strives to engage and inspire the diverse and distinctive cultures of the Bay Area by presenting innovative exhibitions by emerging and established national and international artists. Exhibitions are designed to challenge and invite reflection upon the profound complexities of contemporary culture.

Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Boulevard
Oakland, CA 94613

510.430.2164

http://www.mills.edu/museum

Museum Hours:
Tuesday-Sunday 11:00-4:00pm
Wednesday 11:00-7:30pm
Closed Mondays

Admission is free for all exhibitions and programs.

MILLS COLLEGE ART MUSEUM
DATE: March 31, 2010

PRESS CONTACTS:
Lori Chinn, Program Manager, lchinn@mills.edu
Chris Fraser, Press Contact, cfraser@mills.edu
Abby Lebbert, Publicity Assistant, alebbert@mills.edu

Mary Heilmann - Thursday April 16, 2009

The Mills College Art Department's annual Correnah Wright art lecture will feature artist Mary Heilmann on April 16 at 7:30 pm at the Littlefield Concert Hall, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613. The event is free and all members of the public are invited.

The New York Times describes Heilmann's work as "wildly colorful abstractions that riff with irreverent verve on basic elements of Modernist painting: the grid, the monochromatic rectangle, stripes, organic forms, linear webs, spots, checks, and drips...She makes it look easy and fun...the final picture almost always seems spontaneous, and her lively touch gives her works a sensuous intimacy."

The New Yorker said she is "a formalist impatient with formal consistency" and describes her technique as "Big, fluid strokes often seem to sail, albeit invisibly, into surrounding space. When she does emphasize the edge, it's as if she were observing the arbitrary rules of a rather silly but interesting game."

Heilmann will present Her Life which is a multimedia presentation she said is arranged in a poetic rather than linear narrative tale. "I'd like the people that are watching it to get a feeling for how it felt to be making that work," she said.

Her recent exhibition Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone was at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.

Heilmann, 68, is a California native who grew up in San Francisco. She received a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1962, and a MA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. In 1968, Heilmann went to New York City to try to break into the minimalism and post-minimalism art scene dominated by male artists. She came as a woman, a Californian, and a painter and with that she faced challenges from the art establishment.

"She's an inspiration," said Mills College art professor and head of the department Ron Nagle, "She stuck to her guns, got into fights with the art world, but didn't change her style."

Nagle, who knew Heilmann when they were at UC Berkeley together where she originally trained in ceramics, calls Heilmann a "minimalist with a funky edge."

Her colorful, playful, and abstract painted works range from truncated drips of paint to nesting canvases and looping brushstrokes, but she also creates chairs and ceramics.

While her works have been in major galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, for more than three decades, their price have only recently escalated with the demand from collectors clamoring for them. In the late 1990s, the Hauser & Wirth gallery in London, which represents her, also began cultivating an audience for her in Europe.

Heilmann's current auction record for a single work is $169,000, set at Sotheby's in May 2008 for The Yellow Blue of the Square Pair, 1976, which sold for $38,4000 only four years earlier. However, 303 Gallery in New York, which also represents Heilmann, said her large paintings sell for about $300,000.

Each year the Mills College Art Department sponsors a practicing artist for the Correnah Wright lecture. The annual event gives graduate studio art students access to some of the top artists in the country. More information about this selective art program is available at www.mills.edu/art.

Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering a dynamic progressive education that fosters leadership, social responsibility, and creativity to approximately 950 undergraduate women and 500 graduate women and men. Since 2000, applications to Mills College have more than doubled. The College is one of the top colleges in the West by U.S. News & World Report, one of the Best 368 Colleges by the Princeton Review, and ranks 75th among America's best colleges by Forbes.com. Visit us at www.mills.edu.

Mills College Senior Thesis Show 2009: Meridian

April 1 to April 19, 2009.  Mills College Art Museum.

The Mills College Art Museum announces Meridian, the 2009 Mills College Senior Exhibition. Meridian features work by 15 undergraduate students who have studied with Mills College art faculty - Jesus Aguilar, Jennifer Brandon, Ken Burke, Freddy Chandra, Julie Chen, James Fei, Michael Hall, Samara Halperin, Hung Liu, Robin McDonnell, Anna Valentina Murch, Ron Nagle, Sean Olson, Dharma Strasser MacColl, Michael Temperio, Deirdre Visser, Catherine Wagner, and Ethan Worden.

Alison Ashcraft layers photographs of the American landscape with drawings that question the psychology of the national culture.

Cherise Bentosino uses ready-made materials in modular sculptures to bring a renewed scientific and artistic perspective on the unnoticed patterns of our universe.

Danica Collins works with clay and other materials to abstract memories and history.

Cocoa Costales confronts and dissects trends of addiction and methods of consumption in her work. Using painting and photography, she navigates the complex relationship between person and product.

Amanda Cronkright works with oil paint to come face to face with herself.

Maryam Epting works with photography and video to consider and accommodate contradictions.

Kathalina Ho's paintings explore the particulars of the ways we live as individuals and as a community.

Amelia Hogan's work consists of mixed media pine boxes referencing the tenuous subject of child abuse and the internal dialogue that is often forgotten in external discussions.

Eunjee Lee paints with charcoal and oil pastels on paper and mylar about the restoration of destroyed buildings to console people in their sorrow.

Sophie Leininger creates large scale paintings to explore how metaphor may construct myth and humanness.

Anne Magratten is a painter with an obsession for the body as a medium of emotion.

Jennifer Martin explores color relationships, the viewer's interaction with them, and emphasizes the creative process through using randomization and chance as a determining factor in her work.

Lily Ann Page creates fashion-inspired, ambiguous narratives through photography.

Vivianna Peña shares her history and personal experiences, which root from her Mexican and Chicano upbringing, through illustration in ink and paint.

Meryl Rose Phillips uses video installation to tackle the longstanding issues and connotations that come along with living above or below the social and federal boundary of the U.S. Interstate 580 in Oakland, California.


Public Program

Special Event with Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company
Wednesday, April 15, 2009, 7:00-9:00pm
Mills College Art Museum
Suggested donation $5.00 (sliding scale)

The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (DAYPC) is a multicultural group of teens who create original performance art pieces, in collaboration with professional artists, that combine hip-hop, modern, and aerial dance, theater, martial arts, song and rap. DAYPC comes out of Destiny Arts Center, an Oakland-based nonprofit violence prevention and arts education organization that has been serving youth for over 20 years, through after-school, summer and weekend programs in dance, theater, martial arts, conflict resolution, self-defense, and youth leadership at our Oakland center and in over 25 East Bay public schools and other community centers.

Click here for more information.

Thank You Clare!

On behalf of all the grads in the Art Department here at Mills, thank you Clare Rojas!

We had a great day, and your lecture was the most eloquent and perfect way to end our lecture series for 2008-2009.

For those who missed it, check out her tunes here:  Peggy Honeywell

It was like honey for dinner, indeed!

Love, the MFAs in Studio Art at Mills College, 2008-2009  (aka the 10 + 12).

Clare Rojas - Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Untitled, 2007

gouache and latex on canvas

Artist Lecture by Clare Rojas

Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 7:30 pm

Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Center, Mills College Campus

In Clare Rojas' works, women, men, nature and animals are strong and weak caring and connected to one another in their struggle to find harmony and balance. She celebrates women for their traditional and most basic differences and strengths. While the characters are often imbued with feelings of loss and nostalgia, one gets the sense that they will not back down. They will ultimately beat their predators at their own game.

At Gallery Paule Anglim, Clare Rojas recently exhibited new paintings in her signature gouache technique placing figures in a crisp and colorful landscape. Combining features of cartoon and folk art, her paintings depict sexual role reversals with the male as the object of a critical (and mocking!) female gaze. Rojas blends ironic spice into the expected charm of her visual treats.

Clare Rojas has shown widely in the United States and abroad.  She has enjoyed major solo exhibitions at Deitch Projects in New York and the MCA Chicago.  A seminal figure in the "Mission School," Rojas remains a major influence in the Bay Area and performs regularly as the musician Peggy Honeywell.

This is the final lecture in the MFA Lecture series for 2008-2009.

This lecture is made possible by the Herringer Family Foundation.

Angela Dufresne

Imitation of Life, or why Queen Jane Should be Approximately

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

7:30 pm

Danforth Lecture Hall

In her paintings, New York-based Angela Dufresne irreverently concocts imaginary communities that satisfy her vision for the world.  She describes her paintings, which bring together disparate sources from film, music, architecture, and the history of painting, as "mashups"--hybrids.  Dufresne has also had recent solo exhibitions at Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.  

Angela Dufresne's lecture is presented in conjunction with Painting the Glass House, currently on view at the Mills College Art Museum through March 22, 2009.

A Message to Keith Boadwee...

Dearest Keith, the graduates at Mills feel the same way.   What a fantastic day it was, indeed.  We clink our beer and wine glasses with your gimlet glass .  "CLINK"

(From Keith Boadwee's Blog...click here)