Fall 2003

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Contents

Features

Letters

Observations

Centennial spotlight

On campus

Faculty focus

Arts on view

Sports

Advancement

Class notes

Upcoming at the Tang

Opener 4: Some Kind of Love: Nayland Blake Performance Video, 1989–2002. Through December 31. Nayland Blake creates performance, video, sculpture, and drawings to address cultural and sexual identity with humor and intellectual rigor. Art historian David Deitcher has written that Blake’s work reveals “a wide range of interests, from popular culture to vanguard subversion; from Camp to the queer body in the age of AIDS; from Sadean and psychoanalytic texts to the toxic legacy of American racism.” The Tang exhibition comes from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where it was on view this past spring.

Zou Guanping’s Song of Dunhuang No. 4

     Brushing the Present: Contemporary Academy Painting from China. October 17–December 31. The show includes some forty works by twenty-eight contemporary Chinese artists who, through their affiliations with universities and art academies, are teaching the next generation of Chinese visual artists. In the more open culture of China today, a growing number of artists who are skilled in traditional Chinese art are also exploring ideas of contemporary Western art. The works in this show address Chinese social issues from population pressure and urban pollution to consumer culture and the roles of women and family. The show is organized by Doretta Miller, professor of art, and funded in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, which will help two of the artists to travel to Skidmore.
     Opener 5: Alyson Shotz: A Slight Magnification of Altered Things. October 17–December 31. Alyson Shotz creates works in media from large-scale sculpture to digital imagery. In her “bio-inspired” artwork, she asks, “What is the natural world? Is the concept just a human construction? The word ‘nature’ changes its tone and implication in different eras.… I try to visualize how we perceive of nature at this point in history. My imaginary structures also look simultaneously natural and artificial and are intended to impel the viewer to confront his or her preconceptions about notions of organic versus artificial creation. My structures are impossible structures—dream plants of the imagination.”
     Admission to the Tang is free. Regular museum hours are Tuesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; closed major holidays. For information about curator’s tours, children’s programs, and other events, call 518-580-8080 or check www.skidmore.edu/tang.