MAKE/DO Exhibition Catalog by NYPOP

MAKE DO

MAKE/DO: Contemporary Artists Perform Craft

Erin Dunn Rosemarie Fiore Alejandro Guzman Emily Noelle Lambert Saya Woofalk curated by Lauren Rosati

University of Massachusetts, Amherst Western Michigan University

CONTENTS 5 Foreword Amanda Tiller 6 The Make-Up of Make/Do Lauren Rosati 11 25 37 45 55

ARTISTS Lauren Rosati Rosemarie Fiore Emily Noelle Lambert Alejandro Guzman Erin Dunn Saya Woolfalk

64 66 68 70

Endnotes Exhibition Checklist Acknowledgments NYPOP

FOREWORD AMANDA TILLER Assistant Director of NYPOP Director of Exhibition Program College of Humanities and Fine Arts University of Massachusetts Amherst

For the past twenty years, the mission of the New York Professional Outreach Program (NYPOP) has been to introduce university students to the professional art world in New York, with the purpose of their learning how to begin a career in the profession. We have visited the studios of hundreds of artists, and met with dozens of curators and gallerists, giving students an inside perspective into the multiple challenges and rewards of a career in visual art. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in NYPOP as a graduate student and credit the program with giving me the courage and confidence to move to New York after graduation to pursue my art career. During my time in the program we met with a variety of artists — from “art stars” like Kiki Smith and Andres Serrano, to emerging artists just a few years out of school. While it was an amazing experience to sit down and meet with the established artists I had studied, it was the conversations with the younger emerging artists that inspired me, a girl from small-town Tennessee, to make the move to the city. Here were young artists, just a few years ahead of me, making a career and pursuing their dreams. It was a realistic possibility — that could be me. The NYPOP Exhibition Program was developed to continue our students’ engagement with New York’s emerging art scene once they return to campus. NYPOP’s curriculum is a continuous loop, ‘Bring Students to New York, and New York Back to Campus.’ To facilitate that goal, we are producing exhibitions featuring artists that students can relate to as contemporaries. One of NYPOP’s primary missions is to encourage students to begin thinking of themselves as artists, curators, writers, and gallerists – not just as students. To that end, these exhibitions reveal what their slightly older peers are currently creating in New York. Through these exhibitions, even students who have not made a NYPOP trip can learn from the emerging art scene and see possibilities for their own futures. The New York Professional Outreach Program is very pleased to launch our annual traveling Exhibition Program, with MAKE/DO. Guest Curator, Lauren Rosati, has organized a very exciting exhibition that taps into one of the current trends among emerging New York artists. The five artists in this exhibition have produced prime examples of the type of exciting work a young artist would encounter – right now – walking around the galleries of the Lower East Side or going to open studios in Brooklyn. 5

THE MAKE-UP OF MAKE/DO Creation is performance. —Mikel Dufrenne1 LAUREN ROSATI Curator

It is perhaps the most famous image of an artist at work: a painter with an arm and leg extended angles towards a canvas on the floor and flicks his wrist, leaving a skein of paint at his feet. Jackson Pollock’s unorthodox painting style, famously documented in both moving and still images by Hans Namuth in 1951, made visible the energy, movement, and intention of the artist and catapulted him to certain renown when Namuth’s photographs appeared as illustrations to Robert Goodnough’s essay in Art News, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” later that year.2 Pollock’s genius was further affirmed and perpetuated through innumerable critical essays thereafter, perhaps most notably in Harold Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” (1952). In that article, Rosenberg named Pollock’s dynamic approach “action painting,” and praised the artist’s reconsideration of the canvas as “an arena in which to act” rather than a mere surface.3 Nearly sixty years later, Namuth’s images and Rosenberg’s subsequent text remain critical art historical documents of Pollock’s painterly technique and the stylistic development of Abstract Expressionism. Yet they more potently illustrate the moment when the status of the artwork experienced a crucial shift: its meaning no longer resided only in its final, physical manifestation, but also in the process of its making.

This transposition of meaning from product to process, from object to encounter, was ultimately foregrounded in the performative practices of the late-1950s and 1960s. The Japanese Gutai Group was directly inspired by Pollock’s dance-like movements around his canvas and sought to emphasize the role of the body in artistic production. For instance, in a 1957 work that betrays its lineage to that “action” painter, Gutai member Kazuo Shiraga was suspended from the ceiling of an Osaka gallery space and kicked oil paint onto a sheet of paper on the floor.4 Works such as this one underscore the notion that objects are animated by and contingent on the “act” of their creation. Other contemporaneous performance pieces, such as Yoko Ono’s famous Cut Piece (1965) and any number of the Fluxus Happenings, stressed the role of indeterminacy in shaping the final work and are remembered primarily through documentation rather than relics of the event. These and other works of performance often result in the production of objects, some of which are intended to be viewed as individual works of art (in the case of Shiraga) and some of which are mere “residues” of the live act (as in the fabric remainders of Ono’s costume). Yet regardless of artistic intent, these static objects refer back to the active manipulation of space and the active body that figured prominently in their creation. It is important to point out, however, that the “performative” does not refer to performance specifically, but designates a peculiar kind of engagement between the artist and artwork, in which the artist herself is an active and visible agent in the construction of the work and its meaning. This can also extend, I would argue, to the viewer who, in looking at an artwork—from tracing the lines of a drawing to watching video documentation of an action—actually participates in “re-performing” its creation. Independent curator Maria Lind has also identified curatorial practice, with its “elements of choreography, orchestration, and administrative logistics,” as performative.5

This “performative turn” has its conceptual and etymological origins in linguistics, specifically the publication of J.L. Austin’s influential philosophical tract “How to Do Things with Words” (1962), which introduced the concept of a “performative utterance.” Arguing against the notion that speech results in categorical statements, Austin posited instead that “to say something is to do something.”6 This had profound implications for artists who extended this concept to the realm of artistic production, demonstrating that to make something is to do something. MAKE/DO includes the work of five contemporary artists based in New York City who engage with the notion of performativity through the realm of craft. Whether building mobile habitats constructed from discarded supplies or paintings and totems crafted from layers of pigment, wood, and paper, the artists in this exhibition knit, assemble, scatter, paint, edit, transform, and mold materials into objects that retain traces of their creation.7 Rather than making this visible through interactive or socially engaged forms—the video game, the website, delegated performance—the “performative” is rendered through craft materials and techniques. The works included in the show are notable for their materials (shoddy and select) and quality of production (scrupulous and slapdash), which collapse the distinction between fine art and craft, and encourage us, as viewers, to participate in their re-production and reception, to their “making” and “doing.” What follows is a closer look at the five artists included in the exhibition.

ROSEMARIE FIORE The radiant plumes and soft arcs of color in Rosemarie Fiore’s works belie their source. Produced using commercial fireworks—which are either gently maneuvered, creating paths of swirling color, or carefully contained, producing solid circular forms—her work effectively performs itself. Fiore’s pieces are produced through a complex process of stasis and movement, cause and effect. For her “Firework Drawings” (and they are in fact drawings, comprised of pigment on paper), the artist uses an airborne material and literally grounds it, capturing the explosion in a coffee tin; for her more recent “Smoke Paintings,” she funnels the firework’s smoke and dye through a nozzle on one of several reusable, rolling devices crafted especially for this purpose. While indeterminate effects are inevitable, Fiore is in complete control of her medium. Portions of her works are meticulously collaged, a build-up of pyrotechnic bursts, while others are left alone, as when the sulfuric smear of a spent fuse is allowed to leave its mark. It can be said that the artist collaborates with objects to produce events. Indeed, the artist conceives of these projects as performances, the result of a process of mediation between the “inhuman mark” of a firecracker and the paper’s surface.8

ROSEMAIRE FIORE Smoke Painting #38 2013 color smoke firework residue on paper 50 x 60 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery 12

ROSEMAIRE FIORE Firework Drawing #61 2011 lit firework residue on Fabriano paper 82 x 69.75 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery 14

ROSEMAIRE FIORE Firework Drawing #68 2011 lit firework residue on Fabriano paper 61 x 82.5 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery 16

ROSEMAIRE FIORE Firework Drawing #23 2008 lit firework residue on Fabriano paper 45.75 x 60 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery 18

ROSEMAIRE FIORE Vortex 2013 smoke machine approx. 18 x 9 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery 20

ROSEMAIRE FIORE Smoke Painting: Process Documentation 2012 video still 10:12:16 looped ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery 22

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT Emily Noelle Lambert’s works are the result of the artist’s engagement in a kind of creative fieldwork. She sources many of her materials—wood, bricks, stones, and buoys—from construction sites or places of personal significance, and then intuitively transforms them into objects with new meaning. This procedure has been self-imposed, as in the artist’s debut exhibition at the gallery Lu Magnus in New York for which she constructed everything on site from scratch, and also unintentional, as when a shipment for the artist’s installation at the Untitled Art Fair in Miami failed to arrive, leaving Lambert 48 hours to improvise supplies for a sculpture. Whatever the creative impulse, Lambert’s hybrid works are produced through a rigorous additive process: materials are stacked into teetering totems, sculptures become extensions of paintings, and imagery is built up in layers. Some of her paintings betray an allegiance to Philip Guston (particularly the rotund form and color of Rose Mountain), and others contain icons of flags or mounds that hark back to the work of Kandinsky. Though Lambert’s work can be linked to these historic traditions, the artist insists that her objects are also “of the body” either in terms of their scale or the performative gestures that produce them.9 25

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT Fortress 2012 wood, plaster, acrylic, found materials dimensions variable ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York 26

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT The Clearing 2011 acrylic and wood with canvas 94 x 90 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York 28

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT Tongue Between Teeth 2012 mixed media 109 x 46 x 16 inches

Yoke 2012 acrylic on canvas 116.5 x 111.5 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York 30

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT Break In 2011 acrylic on canvas with wood 32 x 22 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York 32

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT Climbing 2011 acrylic and collage on paper 46 x 38 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York 34

ALEJANDRO GUZMAN Alejandro Guzman’s exuberant, jangling sculptures are also costumes, in a sense, for performances that draw on shamanistic ritual, storytelling, and street theater. Covered in diverse materials from trash bags to shards of broken mirrors and plastic flowers, these life-size sculptures are built on top of wheeled platforms typically used for transporting heavy objects. The sculptures, which can be inhabited and “activated” by a performer within, are in this sense reminiscent of Nick Cave’s Sound Suits, but also recall Afro-Caribbean art of the barrio in their flamboyance and deliberate use of crude materials.10 Unlike the aforementioned Sound Suits, however, which are always shown as static “suits” in an exhibition context, Guzman’s works often come to life in unannounced street performances and organized gallery events. His sculptures have been sunk into lakes; frozen in blocks of ice; whirled into a dizzying frenzy; incinerated; and paraded through the streets of New York. Though a live performance was not arranged for this exhibition, a video of one such event is included to convey the dynamic movement, scale, and versatility of Guzman’s objects.

ALEJANDRO GUZMAN El Guaraguao in the Barrio mixed media dimensions variable ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist 38

2011

ALEJANDRO GUZMAN Intellectual Derelict: The Meltdown mixed media 44 x 26 x 82 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist 40

2012

ALEJANDRO GUZMAN Creative Misunderstandings (Performance Sculpture Series) sixteen ink drawings on Super Deluxe Paper 9 x 9 inches each (36 x 36 inches total) ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist 42

2013

ERIN DUNN The artistic practice of Erin Dunn extends from hand-held puppets to animation; from embroidered tapestries to airbrushed stencils; from heavily impastoed paintings to miniature set pieces. Indeed, the artist is comfortable in a wide-range of media, which she often combines to great effect in installations and elaborate sets for video pieces. This adaptability extends to the objects she produces, which fluidly transform and find new expression: a painting becomes a theatrical backdrop; a sculpture becomes a movable puppet. Dunn’s work is full of surprising juxtapositions. The drooping, semi-viscous surface of one oil painting is interrupted by light wisps of an airbrush; in her video work Red Monkey, ignoble materials such as pipe cleaners, foam, and foil streamers are vivified through the precise, skilled editing of stop-motion animation. These dualities have been analyzed in terms of gender; in one review of Dunn’s work, the artist’s “feminine” diligence and manual dexterity was contrasted with the implicitly masculine qualities of expressiveness and ambition.11 Dunn’s work is nonetheless enlivened by these binaries and the knowledge that her hands have touched every aspect of production—from the molding of hand puppets to the composition of video soundtracks. 45

ERIN DUNN Untitled 2012 oil and encaustic on canvas 60 x 74 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist 46

ERIN DUNN Poseys 2010 oil on canvas 16 x 19 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist 48

ERIN DUNN Red Monkey 2010 doll, video, and installation of materials dimensions variable ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist 50

ERIN DUNN Green Landscape 2010 oil and acrylic on canvas 30 x 41 inches ÂŠ Courtesy of the artist 52

SAYA WOOLFALK Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of The New York Times, once described the indescribable work of Saya Woolfalk as “a little tour de force of performance, animation, born-again Pattern and Decoration, soft sculpture and anthropological satire.”12 Indeed, Woolfalk’s work is playful and childlike in some respects, but also impossibly complex. Much of her artistic oeuvre consists of “products” created in imaginary countries (such as No Place) by mythological beings (such as the Empathics). The whimsical output of these cultures—which ranges from festooned costumes to plush, knitted toys—are meticulously crafted by Woolfalk using a variety of media, from video to drawing, painting, and sculpture, and exhibited in a form that resembles anthropological display. Yet the humble materials from which much of the work is constructed contradict the elaborate, Tolkeinesque milieu in which they are situated. Grounded in folklore and ethnographic studies, Woolfalk has bestowed the Empathics and the inhabitants of No Place with a history, a language, and a cultural past. Ultimately, the work she makes not only says something—about transcultural identity, colonial power, cultural politics, etc.—but also does something. It performs its own history.

SAYA WOOLFALK No Place: (pre)Constructed: Self (adolescent – blue) Self (adolescent – pink) Self (female) Self (landscape), 2008 Ancestor 1 Ancestor 2, 2005 cotton fabric, silk fabric, spandex, Poly-Fil, doll head, fake hair, latex paint, acetate, cotton and synthetic thread, ribbon, synthetic felt, vinyl, fleece, acrylic yarn over foam mannequin with synthetic sheath, spandex body suit and metal stand and base, plastic and ceramic beads, plastic sequins, plastic egg cartons, plastic food containers, plastic bottles, plastic spools, acrylic, wool yarn, synthetic fleece, foam dimensions variable © Courtesy of the artist 56

ENDNOTES 1.

Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953), trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 30.

Pollock wrote about his process in a statement of 1950: “Technic is the result of need – new needs demand new technics – total control – denial of the accident – States of order – organic intensity – energy and motion made visible – memories arrested in space, human needs and motive – acceptance – Jackson Pollock.” See “Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work,” in Jackson Pollock, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 15-85.

Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51, no. 8 (December 1952): 22.

The influence apparently went both ways: an English-language copy of the Gutai manifesto was found in Pollock’s library after his death. See Charles Darwent, “Obituary: Kazuo Shiraga: Avant-garde artist who painted barefoot and hanging from a rope,“ The Independent, April 25, 2008, accessed November 1, 2013.

Maria Lind, ed., Performing the Curatorial With and Beyond Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).

J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 12.

“If we see a woven basket, we imagine its weaving. If we see a thrown pot, we imagine its throwing.” Bill Arning, “Foreword,” in Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft, by Valerie Cassel Oliver (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2010), 6.

Stephen Maine, “Rosemarie Fiore: Pyrotechnics at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art,” artcritical.com, May 8, 2009, http:// www.artcritical.com/2009/05/08/rosemarie-fiore-pyrotechnics-at-priska-c-juschka-fine-art/#sthash.IJdhePKU. dpuf, accessed September 17, 2013. For more information, see Marshall N. Price, “Incendiary Endeavors,” catalogue essay, Artificiere (New York: Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, 2011).

Kendra Patrick, “A Studio Visit with Emily Noelle Lambert,” Muse Magazine, June 3, 2013, http://www. musemagazine.it/it/blog/art/a-studio-visit-with-emily-noelle-lambert.html, accessed September 4, 2013.

10. Holland Cotter, “A Constellation of Identities, Winking and Shifting: Museo del Barrio’s ‘Bienal 2013’ Explores Self and Origins,” New York Times, June 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/arts/design/museo-delbarrios-bienal-2013-explores-self-and-origins.html?pagewanted=all. 11. Residency Unlimited, “2012 Residencies,” residencyunlimited.org, accessed October 29, 2013. 12. Roberta Smith, “A Hot Conceptualist Finds the Secret of Skin,” The New York Times, September 9, 2008, http:// www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/arts/design/05stud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, accessed November 1, 2013.

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST ROSEMAIRE FIORE Smoke Painting #38 2013 color smoke firework residue on paper 50 x 60 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery Firework Drawing #61 2011 lit firework residue on Fabriano paper 82 x 69.75 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery Firework Drawing #68 2011 lit firework residue on Fabriano paper 61 x 82.5 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery Firework Drawing #23 2008 lit firework residue on Fabriano paper 45.75 x 60 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery Vortex 2013 smoke machine approx. 18 x 9 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery Smoke Painting: Process Documentation 2012 video 10:12:16 looped © Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT Fortress 2012 wood, plaster, acrylic, found materials dimensions variable © Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York The Clearing 2011 acrylic and wood with canvas 94 x 90 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York

Yoke 2012 acrylic on canvas 116.5 x 111.5 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York Tongue Between Teeth 2012 mixed media 109 x 46 x 16 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York Break In 2011 acrylic on canvas with wood 32 x 22 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York Climbing 2011 acrylic and collage on paper 46 x 38 inches © Courtesy of the artist and Lu Magnus, New York

2012

Creative Misunderstandings (Performance Sculpture Series) 2013 sixteen ink drawings on Super Deluxe Paper 9 x 9 inches each (36 x 36 inches total) © Courtesy of the artist Creative Misunderstandings video © Courtesy of the artist

2013

Untitled 2012 oil and encaustic on canvas 60 x 74 inches © Courtesy of the artist Poseys 2010 oil on canvas 16 x 19 inches © Courtesy of the artist Red Monkey 2010 doll, video, and installation of materials dimensions variable © Courtesy of the artist Green Landscape 2010 oil and acrylic on canvas 30 x 41 inches © Courtesy of the artist

SAYA WOOLFALK

2011

ERIN DUNN

No Place: (pre)Constructed: Self (adolescent – blue) Self (adolescent – pink) Self (female) Self (landscape), 2008 Ancestor 1 Ancestor 2, 2005 cotton fabric, silk fabric, spandex, Poly-Fil, doll head, fake hair, latex paint, acetate, cotton and synthetic thread, ribbon, synthetic felt, vinyl, fleece, acrylic yarn over foam mannequin with synthetic sheath, spandex body suit and metal stand and base, plastic and ceramic beads, plastic sequins, plastic egg cartons, plastic food containers, plastic bottles, plastic spools, acrylic, wool yarn, synthetic fleece, foam dimensions variable © Courtesy of the artist

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The New York Professional Outreach Program (NYPOP) has succeeded because of the long-term commitment

JERRY KEARNS

NYPOP Director College of Humanities and Fine Arts University of Massachusetts Amherst

of many people. Foremost among those are the more than 1,600 UMass Amherst art students who have studied in the program over the past twenty-plus years. Alongside the students stand the more than 300 New York art professionals who have presented lectures in their work places around the city. Like many educational programs, NYPOP has struggled with difficult economic circumstances over the past ten years. We have been able to survive, and continue to, only because of the generous financial and philosophical support of the Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, Julie Hayes. William Oedel, the Chair of the Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History, has also been exceptional in his support and recognition of NYPOP’s contribution the Department. Lauren Rosati, is a curator at the National Academy Museum in Manhattan. She organized MAKE/DO as the inaugural presentation of NYPOP’s Exhibition Program. Working with the artists she selected for MAKE/DO, Ms. Rosati has presented an exciting and insightful examination of five new artists currently emerging in the New York scene. Don Desmett, Director of Exhibitions for The James W. and Lois I. Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University, is hosting MAKE/DO at the RCVA. During the past three years, Mr. Desmett has incorporated the NYPOP concept into the curriculum at Western Michigan University with great success. He has been an invaluable partner and colleague in several aspects of NYPOP. Amanda Tiller is the Assistant Director of NYPOP, and the Director of the Exhibition Program. Ms. Tiller is highly valued, an essential contributor to the program. Her thoughtful dedication to NYPOP has been a key factor in the program’s success.

It takes many people to realize an exhibition, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to acknowledge them

LAUREN ROSATI Curator

here. Sincere thanks are due to Jerry Kearns, Director of the New York Professional Outreach Program (NYPOP) at UMass Amherst, and Don Desmett, Founding Director of Exhibitions for the Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Western Michigan University, who generously gave me the opportunity to organize the first exhibition in the NYPOP Emerging Curators series. Their guidance and support has been invaluable. Amanda Tiller, Assistant Director of NYPOP at UMass Amherst, designed program brochures and the exhibition catalogue and provided critical administrative support. Mindi K. Bagnall, Exhibitions Registrar at Western Michigan University, coordinated the exhibition loans and safely organized the packing and shipping of the artworks from New York to Kalamazoo. I appreciate the assistance and support of Amy Sande-Friedman, Director, and Aaron Simonton, Registrar, of Von Lintel Gallery and also Amelia Abdullahsani, Co-Founder; Janie Hanson, Partner; Lauren Scott Miller, CoFounder & Director; and Mary Rynasko, Gallery Manager of Lu Magnus, New York. I benefited greatly from conversations with friends and colleagues who offered advice and suggestions that helped me to shape this exhibition. They include Chad Alligood, Assistant Curator for Special Projects, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Seth Cohen, artist; Meredith Mowder, Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Graduate Teaching Fellow at Hunter College; Natalie Musteata, PhD Candidate in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center; Marshall Price, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, National Academy Museum; Jacolby Satterwhite, artist; Hallie Scott, Education Program Director, Wassaic Project; Herb Tam, Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Museum of Chinese in America; Damian Volpe; and Rachel Wetzler, PhD Student, CUNY Graduate Center. The artists included in Make/Doâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Erin Dunn, Rosemarie Fiore, Alejandro Guzman, Emily Noelle Lambert, and Saya Woolfalkâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;opened up their studios and sometimes their homes to show me their work and discuss their practices. Conversations with them helped to shape this exhibition, and I am thankful for their time, energy, and efforts in making it possible. They are infinitely creative and deeply engaged artists, whose work represents a small segment of the art currently being made in New York City; I am grateful for the opportunity to present their work to you. 69

Jerry Kearns founded the New York Professional Outreach Program (NYPOP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in 1990. For over twenty years, NYPOP has been making connections that lead to careers in the visual arts. In that time, more than 1,200 UMass students have traveled nearly 100,000 miles to study the profession in New York. The NYPOP Partner Program, founded in 2010, brings university students from across the nation to the work places of contemporary professionals in New York City. The experience encourages students to believe in the possibility of a career in the arts. On-site sessions examine contemporary aesthetics in concert with an inside perspective on the current professional scene. We offer answers to the many practical questions that stem from a studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desire to become an artist, curator, art writer, and museum or gallery worker. The NYPOP Exhibition Program, founded in 2013, brings the excitement of New York contemporary art back to college campuses. Furthering our overarching goal of providing students with insights into what they could anticipate were they to move to a major art center over the next few years, the exhibition series features emerging curators and artists. By introducing students to young curators and artists already at work in the city, we stress networking with peers as a crucial element of building a career. The NYPOP exhibitions will bring the New York scene full circle by hosting curators and artists at the Frostic School of Art and the UMass Amherst campus, among other institutions, for exhibitions, lectures, workshops and studio visits. By combining visits to the New York experience, with campus exhibitions from the current scene, participating universities will bring career dreams to reality for their students. For more information about NYPOP, please visit www.umass.edu/nypop

MAKE/DO is published to accompany the exhibition Make/Do: Contemporary Artists Perform Craft (January 9 - February 14, 2014, organized by the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s New York Professional Outreach Program and Western Michigan University’s James W. & Lois I. Richmond Center for Visual Arts, Gwen Frostic School of Art, Kalamazoo, Michigan.

(front cover) ROSEMAIRE FIORE Smoke Painting: Process Documentation 2012 video still 10:12:16 looped © Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery

The New York Professional Outreach Program College of Humanities and Fine Arts University of Massachusetts Amherst