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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL
generation demands a more intimate and immersive audience experience. “Most young people don’t want to go to an opera house,” he said in a recent speech, “and it’s not how those people want to have a good time, to sit with 5,000 other people.” Last year he helped launch a study to explore how artists, academics and scientists can come together to address the future of live performance. In his view, “New technology means you don’t have to have an opera house to do an opera.” Named Musical America’s 2014 Artist of the Year, Sellars’ other honors include an Erasmus Prize, a Gish Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Polar Music Prize and a Sundance Institute RiskTakers Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a professor at University of California, Los Angeles, and resident curator of the Telluride Film Festival. Following his addresses to SVA’s class of 2015, Sellars will receive an honorary degree from the College. [LB]
“The whole series was shot on film, and I believe it may be the last show that ever will be.” Tim Van Patten, director and executive producer of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. From a talk hosted by MPS Live Action Short Film.
Annual Migration This summer, SVA’s Chilean Summer Workshops, a program that hosts art and design students from Chile for intensive workshops at the College, celebrates its 10th anniversary. In 2005 Rosemarie Viggiano, chair of SVA’s MAT Art Education program, traveled to Chile to visit a former student and give a talk at DUOC University, in the coastal city of Viña Del Mar. While there she met Andrés Besa, then the head of the university’s advertising department. Besa had studied in the U.S. and wanted to give his students the same opportunity. Viggiano offered to try to generate interest in such a project from her colleagues at SVA. An inaugural group of 20 students traveled to New York that year and took a two-week advertising workshop with SVA faculty member Jack Mariucci and Richard Wilde, chair of BFA Advertising and BFA Design. Today, the program brings nearly 130 students to SVA each summer from DUOC and other Chilean institutions, including Desarrollo University and Andrés Bello University, where Besa is now director of the school of advertising. Students from
HEARD AT SVA
This spring, SVA begins renovation work at its 133/141 West 21st Street building, converting a currently unused space on the ground floor into the Visual & Critical Studies Gallery, which will be dedicated to showing work by the BFA program’s students, alumni, faculty and staff. Among other improvements, the existing doorway will be replaced with a large window, to make exhibitions visible from the street. The gallery, due to be completed in time for the fall 2015 semester, was proposed by Tom Huhn, chair of BFA Visual & Critical Studies; faculty member Peter Hristoff will serve as its director. “Carefully selected monthly exhibitions that reflect the inquisitive and multifaceted nature of the department will be our priority,” Hristoff says. “The space will also be used for the department’s annual ‘Senior Studio’ exhibition and end-of-year show.” In addition to featuring their work, the gallery will invite BFA Visual & Critical Studies students and faculty to mount their own curatorial projects. “We have students who are interested in curating, performance, installation and education,” Huhn says. “So I expect this to become a very dynamic space.” [Jamie Keesling]
HEARD AT SVA
Show Room
On Thursday, May 14, SVA will hold two commencement exercises, one each for its graduate and undergraduate degree candidates, in the Theater at Madison Square Garden. Regardless of which ceremony students and their families attend, all are in for an inspirational send-off when visionary opera, theater and festival director Peter Sellars delivers this year’s addresses. Sellars has been on the cutting edge of cultural activism for more than three decades, acclaimed for his unconventional projects and collaborations with other well-known artists. He has staged a version of Richard Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” for puppets. His Don Giovanni was a drug addict; his King Lear drove a convertible. His partnerships with composer John Adams have resulted in some of the most highly praised and controversial operas of our time, such as Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). Other recent endeavors include Desdemona (2011), a collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and Malian singercomposer Rokia Traoré, and FLEXN (2015), a collaboration with flex dance pioneer Reggie “Roc” Gray and 21 street dancers from East New York. Yet even as his productions are mounted for large crowds all over the world, Sellars—currently director in residence at the English National Opera—concedes that the new
photo by Ruth Walz
photo by Samuel Morgan
Director’s Commentary
Chilean Summer Workshop students with BFA Design faculty member Skip Sorvino (BFA 1994 Graphic Design) in Central Park.
the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, also participate. Viggiano’s program now offers workshops in graphic design, interior design and fashion photography, among other subjects. Each two-week-long course consists of hands-on exercises and assignments, and students are encouraged to take advantage of New York City’s many resources. “It is an intensive academic and creative experience, with outstanding facilities and services and experienced faculty,” says Joaquin Bejares, international relations manager at Andrés Bello University. “It is a ‘start-up’ for new bright minds.” Participants study from 9:00am to 4:00pm each day, and by the end of their stay complete at least one finished portfolio piece—an advertising campaign or an artist’s accordion book, for example. The program culminates with
an event at the SVA Theatre, where the students gather with faculty to celebrate and present their work. “It’s rewarding to see how students are challenged, and to see how much enthusiasm and passion they put into their projects and the high level of the work they produce,” says Alexandra Faille, international coordinator for DUOC University’s School of Design. And it’s not just the students who benefit. “Chileans are very demonstrative of their appreciation,” says Viggiano. “So SVA faculty members get a lot of hugs.” “Year after year, they continually remind me of why I teach,” Wilde says. “Their openness, their risk-taking and their love of process has in turn energized me and nourished me in ways that that are difficult to describe.” [Kate Styer]
“Once you have [found] people that you can trust, you need to actually trust them. . . . If you can do that, that kind of collaboration is going to bring out the best in you and everybody else. For me, it’s the most exhilarating, most liberating, fantastic way to make work. Everything I do now, creatively, is all about relationships.” Lynn Shelton (MFA 1995 Photography and Related Media), director. From a Q&A at After-School Special, SVA’s first alumni film and animation festival.
SPRING 2015