Art riches abound

Studio art is the focus during the week of July 14, courtesy of the Summer Studio Art Program at Skidmore, which will host a number of events as follows:

--An illustrated artist talk by Nicola López, featured visiting artist, at 7 p.m. Thursday, July 17, in Filene Recital Hall of the Filene Building

--“com•po•si•tion” is a panel talk featuring visual artists Kay Rosen and Fred Tomaselli, and writer/composer Rick Moody, moderated by Ian Berry, Dayton director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. Friday, July 18, 6 p.m., Payne Presentation Room, Tang Museum

--“PrintNation,” a daylong printmaking event featuring visiting artists and demonstrations in the print shop of the Saisselin Art building, Friday, July 18, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

In addition, the 2014 Skidmore Summer Art Faculty Exhibition officially opens July 17 in the Schick Art Gallery, with an opening reception scheduled at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, July 24.

All events are free and open to the public.

Known for her installations, drawings, and prints, López’s work describes and reconfigures contemporary (primarily urban) landscape. Her focus on describing ‘place’ stems from an interest in urban planning, architecture and anthropology, fueled by time spent working and traveling in different landscapes. She once told interviewer Phong Bui (Rail) that her work “is more about a physical—although often very skewed—reality.”

López draws upon cartography and uses printmaking, drawing, collages, and installation to create maps of the physical and psychological experience of contemporary cityscapes. She has said, “I draw on the visual language of cartography in order to evoke the idea of mapping, although my maps do to refer to actual places. Neither are they depictions of utopias or dystopias; they are maps that represent how our actual world is structured, not on a literally geographical, but on an experiential, level.”

As an undergraduate she majored in anthropology at Columbia University, because, she told Rail, “it was a field where so many interesting things crossed paths, including history, arts, art history, cultural studies, linguistics.” López also earned an M.F.A. degree at Columbia and is now a member of the university’s faculty.

López’s work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally, and included in group exhibitions at a number of museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, and a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York.  She has received support for her work though a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Drawing/printmaking/book arts, and a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

She is a native of Santa Fe, N.M., who now lives in Brooklyn.

“com•po•si•tion” is a panel discussion on July 18 featuring the visual artists Kay Rosen and Fred Tomaselli, and writer and composer Rick Moody, moderated by Ian Berry, Tang director. A reception will follow.

Tomaselli combines explosive color with a basis in art history. His style usually involves collage, painting, and/or glazing. Tomaselli sees his paintings and their compendium of data as windows into a surreal, hallucinatory universe. “It is my ultimate aim,” he has said, “to seduce and transport the viewer into space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.”

Rosen, who has a background in linguistics, uses language as her primary material and subject, creating text-based works that explore the ways that language can be represented visually. Using different approaches to typography and layout, Rosen often employs puns, anagrams, and textual puzzles, forcing the viewer to consider new ways of reading and approaching language. Her work has been exhibited internationally and included in such notable group exhibitions as Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012.

Moody is “one of our best writers,” according to a reviewer with The Washington Post. Author of the novels The Ice Storm, Purple America, and Garden State, Moody has also written two acclaimed volumes of short fiction, Demonology and The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven. His recent memoir is The Black Veil and his latest novels are The Diviners (2005) and The Four Fingers of Death (2010).

The daylong July 18 “PrintNation” is a celebration of the communal spirit of printmaking, according to Summer Studio Art Director Katie DeGroot.

“Printmaking is an unusual practice for artists because it is rarely done by the artist alone in a studio. Print shops are communal places, equipment is expensive and usually shared. There is a lot of time spent on plate preparation and proofing activities that are more enjoyable in the company of others,” she added.

The day will feature highlights of a few of the many printmaking practices with invited artists and printmakers.Two three-hour sessions – 9 a.m. to noon and 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. — will be spent in the print shop. A lunch talk with artists Phil Sanders and Terry Conrad begins at 12:30 p.m. in Room 307. Additional activities are planed in the evening.

“Skidmore’s printmaking shop is a fantastic facility and we’re looking forward to showing the many possibilities available to art students here,” said DeGroot.