MFA Graduate Exhibition opens May 11 at the Phoenix Hotel, with a special Preview Party on May 10 benefitting SFAI’s scholarship fund. Additional capstone events include MFA Film Screening at SFMOMA and MA Symposium.

The San Francisco Art Institute, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious contemporary art colleges, is proud to showcase an impressive body of student work during the 2012 Graduate Events. Continuing the school’s legacy of innovative thinking and experimentation, this year’s events offer an exciting opportunity for nearly 100 emerging fine artists to unveil publicly their work in painting, photography, printmaking, film, sculpture, installation, digital media, and performance.

SFAI will stage its Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Graduate Exhibition and Vernissage Preview Party at the historic Phoenix Hotel in the Tenderloin from May 10-13; the MFA Film Screening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on the afternoon of May 11; and its Master of Arts (MA) Thesis Symposium at SFAI’s historic Russian Hill campus on May 7. These unique events give the public a chance to engage with new talents in the Bay Area art scene at some of the most prominent art venues in the city.

MFA GRADUATE EXHIBITION

SFAI’s graduating MFA students will transform the iconic Phoenix Hotel for four days, displaying their art-including many site-specific pieces and collaborative installations-in guest rooms, poolside, and throughout the hotel. Their diverse, ambitious work will highlight distinct points of view as well as new, cutting-edge directions in art today.

“The MFA Graduate Exhibition is one of the most exciting times for SFAI’s Graduate Program, when we see in one place the manifestation of two years of labor, sacrifice, and commitment by a new generation of artists ready to contribute to the landscape of contemporary art and culture,” says Tony Labat, Director of MFA Programs. “The Bay Area has always been at the forefront of artists and curators seeking alternative spaces for exhibition and production, and this exhibition continues that important tradition.”

The public is invited to purchase tickets to SFAI’s exclusive Vernissage Preview Party, the premier annual fundraiser for the nonprofit institution, held in support of student scholarships. Guests will be the first to mingle with and view the work of the graduating artists, while also enjoying food, drinks, and live performance art.

Preview Party ticket-holders at the patron level will receive early entrance and a guided tour of the exhibition by a curatorial guest from one of the region’s top museums, including Lucinda Barnes, Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Collections at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Julian Cox, Founding Curator of Photography for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Chief Curator at the de Young Museum; Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Betti-Sue Hertz, Director of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and others.

Location:

The Phoenix Hotel
601 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA 94109

Preview Party:

Thursday, May 10, 6-10 pm
Tickets start at $200.
Call 415.749.4512 or visit www.sfai.edu/previewparty

Vernissage Opening Reception:

Friday, May 11, 6-8 pm
Free and open to the public

Exhibition Dates:

Friday, May 11 to Sunday, May 13
Open daily noon-10 pm
Free and open to the public

MFA FILM SCREENING

SFAI partners with the SFMOMA to showcase works by graduating MFA Film students. From an experimental documentary about the Occupy movement to an animated short starring an otter and lemur living in a submarine, the films highlight the artists’ engaged and idiosyncratic approaches.

“In the 21st century, it is our mandate to create groundbreaking, original, and hybrid storytelling,” says Lynn Hershman Leeson, Chair of the Film Department. “We are proud to screen works by students who incorporate the spirit of experimental cinema, which artists at the San Francisco Art Institute pioneered, into unique and compelling cinematic visions.”

Location:

SFMOMA
Phyllis Wattis Theater
151 3rd Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

Date:

Friday, May 11, 1-3 pm
Free and open to the public 

MA THESIS SYMPOSIUM

Graduating students in SFAI’s Master of Art Programs in Exhibition and Museum Studies, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, Urban Studies, and the MA/MFA Dual Degree will present selections of their completed theses in a day-long public event. Engaging a diverse range of topics across global contemporary art practices, the Thesis Symposium represents the capstone of a two-year process of research, critical inquiry, and writing. This year’s cohort has taken up such subjects as the place of the Iraqi National Museum in the public imaginary, the resituating of Ana Mendieta for contemporary Cuban artists, and the “crude politics” of aesthetic radicalism in the post-Soviet context.

Location:

San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94133

Date:

Monday, May 7, 10 am-5 pm
Free and open to the public

About San Francisco Art Institute

Founded in 1871, the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), a nonprofit art college, is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious schools of higher education in contemporary art. A small school with global impact-notable faculty and alumni include Richard Diebenkorn, Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz, Enrique Chagoya, Kathryn Bigelow, Peter Pau, Ruby Yang, Paul Kos, George Kuchar, Lance Acord, and Kehinde Wiley-SFAI enrolls approximately 650 students in undergraduate and graduate programs, and offers a wide range of continuing education courses and public programs. The historic Chestnut Street campus is located in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, and the Graduate Center is located in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood.

For more information about SFAI, please visit www.sfai.edu.

(For the original version on PRWeb visit: www.prweb.com/releases/prwebsfai/2012graduateevents/prweb9422433.htm)

For decades now, the Whitney Biennial has been pushing the envelope of art. Traditional forms like painting and sculpture long ago ceded the stage to site-specific installations. Some pieces poked through the wall. An artwork might actually be the hole itself. Sometimes, the art wasn’t even in the museum, but over in Central Park. The latest trend has been to get away from art that is strictly visual. Installations typically whirr, click, howl or vocalize. The last Biennial had a talking hearse.

WU TSANG

The group show includes Sam LeWitt’s ‘Untitled (material for Fluid Employment),’ a photograph of a magnetic liquid, and ’Wildness,’ (production still) by the popular drag artist Wu Tsang, whose work focuses on transgender Latinas in Los Angeles.

SAM LEWITT AND MIGUEL ABREU GALLERY

This year, co-curators Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussman take the Biennial a few more steps beyond the quaint idea that museums are places for “art objects,” with an exhibit that trumpets performance.

The entire fourth floor has been transformed into an enclosed theatrical space with bleacher seating. The show kicks off with four weeks of on-site rehearsals by choreographers Sarah Michelson and Michael Clark. On a recent day, a dancer in a horse’s head circled the space, poking her equine nose over the top of the fence to the accompaniment of a minimalist electronic soundtrack.

REVIEW: THE 2012 WHITNEY BIENNIAL

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street
212-570-3600 or whitney.org

Through May 27th 2012
11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday; 1 to 9 p.m. Friday.

Admission: $18, $12 over 62; free under 18.

Among the subsequent groups to perform will be the experimental rock band The Red Krayola, who will present an opera written in collaboration with the British conceptual art group Art & Language.

CONCEPTUAL WORKS

Behind the performance area, visitors can peer into the functioning dressing room, where performers do their makeup, don costumes and chatter, acting oblivious to the audience. Also accessible to visitors is a “green room” installation by the popular drag artist Wu Tsang, modeled on a Los Angeles bar called The Silver Platter that employs and caters to transgender Latinas.

In another nod to transparency and performance, L.A. artist Dawn Kasper has taken up residence in one of the galleries as part of what she calls her Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment. The artist has surrounded herself with books, tools, clothing, audio-visual equipment and a double bed, leaving barely enough room to stand. But Kasper, who converses with visitors, plans to live and work in the messy space for the duration of the show, at least during museum hours.

Documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog might seem a bit of a stretch for inclusion in this show, but stretch is what it’s all about here. Inside his spooky installation, he evokes the mood of a primeval world with a Dutch artist’s 350-year-old etchings and music from his award-winning documentary, “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

Collaboration is another buzzword this year. The more people involved, the more senses engaged, the better. Take Gisele Vienne’s creepy animatronic mannequin of a mumbling adolescent boy holding a bloody puppet. Credits are given for music, voices, lighting, wall drawing and the dialogue – a psychotic rant by Dennis Cooper, a writer notorious for sadistic stories about pedophilia, Satanism and torture.

A work in progress is Sam Lewitt’s installation, in which magnetic liquid has been poured over small objects and is being made to evaporate with electric fans.

STATIC MEDIA

With all the noise and activity here, you have to pity the artist who works in a traditional, silent, static medium like oil painting. But some have made it into this exhibit of contemporary art by virtue of one unusual attribute or another, including that of being dead. Inexplicably, there’s an oil of a bare-chested man by American modernist Marsden Hartley, who died in 1943, and a watercolor of two seminude figures by Charles Demuth, who died in 1935.

As always, the Biennial has a full program of films and videos. Included is work by the pioneering underground filmmaker of the ’60s, George Kuchar, who died in 2011 and whose “Weather Diaries” document annual visits to the shabby El Reno hotel in tornado-alley, Oklahoma.

SHOP DEBRA LA LOMIA ORIGINAL ARTWORK – HERE

SHOP CONTEMPORARY ARTIST DEBRA LA LOMIA – CLICK HERE

SHOP ALL ORIGINAL ARTWORK BY DEBRA LA LOMIA – CLICK HERE

This NY artist says be yourself and find your bliss. Debra La Lomia has found hers “being surrounded by vibrant colors combined with the tactile process of painting.  It is both quietly mindful and an excitement of expression all at the same time”.  Using acrylics and mixed media, she prefers to create abstracts to circumvent linguistic interpretations and shift toward a more visceral appreciation of her work.

Ever since Deitch Projects touched down in Queens two years ago, Long Island City has been one of the hottest art annexes in New York, evident by the abundance of programming today. Ride the train to Queens Plaza station where MTA Arts for Transit staff will be on hand to discuss Ellen Harvey’s sky-filled 2005 mural, Look Up, Not Down from 5 to 7pm. LIC Artists, who have been holding Open Studios exhibitions for more than 20 years, will launch their Armory Fest with a three-venue exhibition at the Clocktower Building, the Holiday Inn Manhattan View and the Space Realty Group. Other openings will take place at AES Gallery, Dean Project, climate/gallery and Dutch Kills Gallery. Elsewhere, P.S.1 hosts three ongoing exhibtions—Between Spaces, 1969 and 100 Years—and the Noguchi Museum will have its long-running Noguchi ReINstalled on display. Be sure to save room for the third annual showing of MoFA (aka the Museum of Fake Art), sponsored by LIC arts nonprofit The Space. The Chelsea satirists are offering “a unique opportunity to dress up and fake interest vis-à-vis the complex issues facing international Contemporary Art and simulate a direct involvement in the Curatorial and Exhibition process.” Only a square realist would miss it.

This NY artist says be yourself and find your bliss. Debra La Lomia has found hers “being surrounded by vibrant colors combined with the tactile process of painting.  It is both quietly mindful and an excitement of expression all at the same time”.

Using acrylics and mixed media, she prefers to create abstracts to circumvent linguistic interpretations and shift toward a more visceral appreciation of her work.

SHOP ALL DEBRA LALOMIA ARTWORK HERE

Quantum Cafe -

Original piece: 24 x 24 acrylic, stretched canvas/painted sides – can hang “as is”.