Gay Block - 2/9, Camp Girls screening
As a portrait photographer, Gay Block began in 1973 with portraits of her own affluent Jewish community in Houston and later expanded this study to include South Miami Beach and girls at summer camp. Her 1992 landmark work with writer Malka Drucker, RESCUERS: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, both a book and traveling exhibit, has been seen in over fifty venues in the US and abroad. In 2003 Block's 30-year portrait of her mother in photographs, video, and words, Bertha Alyce: Mother exPosed, was published and began as a traveling exhibit. Also published in 2003 was another collaboration with Drucker, White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America. In 2006, Block re-photographed women who were girls in her 1981 series from Camp Pinecliffe, twenty-five years before.

Godfrey Reggio - 3/9 Lecture, 3/10 - 11 Workshop
Godfrey Reggio is a pioneer of a film form that creates poetic images of extraordinary emotional impact for audiences worldwide. Reggio is prominent in the film world for his QATSI trilogy. (In July of 2009, Koyaanisqatsi will be performed LIVE at the Hollywood Bowl by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble.) His essays of image and music present in his words an artopsy of that which is hidden in plain sight, ordinary daily living. His cinematic collaboration with Philip Glass has extended over a period of thirty years. Currently they are working on an anarchic-comedic film set in the ruins of modernity. Reggio has a history of service not only to the environment, but with street gangs and community organization. Born in 1940, he is a seventh generation New Orleanean. He entered the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic Order, at age fourteen and was relieved from his final vows at age twenty-eight. He is a frequent lecturer on art, cinema, philosophy and technology. His filmography additionally includes Anima Mundi (1992) and Evidence (1995)

Dark Memory: Rudolf Baranik and Art about History - 4/6 Panel Discussion
With David Craven, Jim Drobnick, Lucy Lippard, May Stevens
Tipton Hall, 6pm
$5 General Public, $2.50 students/seniors/SFAI members

We are pleased to present, as part of our 2009 visiting artist season, a discussion panel about the life and work of the late Rudolf Baranik.
Painter, Rudolf Baranik, was a rare character in the art world of the 1970’s and 80’s, refusing to choose between making work that was beautiful and work that was political in an environment that was not keen to blur the line between the two. Although well-known amongst the activist communities of the late 60’s and early 70’s, Baranik continues to be strangely absent from the histories and collections of
the mainstream art world. Richard Leslie wrote in 1998 a few months after Baranik’s death, “One of the dirty little secrets of the more canonical art world is that it continues to claim for art the ‘aura’ of social relevance derived from the early politicized history of the avant-garde while at the same time it marginalizes art forms such as Baranik’s that are developed from fully-committed political positions.”
Our four esteemed panelists will discuss Baranik’s role in art history in addition to his art about history, and how art serves as a way of memorializing, in the strictest sense of the word, the past. More(pdf)>

David Maisel - 5/11 Lecture, 5/12 Workshop
For more than twenty years, photographer David Maisel has chronicled the tensions between nature and culture in his large-scaled photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes. In the multi-chaptered series Black Maps, Maisel’s aerial images become sublime meditations on what the curator Anne Tucker has termed ‘the engaging duality between beauty and repulsion.’ In Maisel’s recent project, Library of Dust, he continues to investigate a zone bordered by aesthetics and ethics. The series depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patients from a state-run psychiatric hospital, whose bodies have been unclaimed by their families. Maisel has recently been an Artist in Residence at both the Getty Research Institute and at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Laurie Anderson - 6/8 Performance, 6/9 Lecture and Q & A
Burning Leaves: A Retrospective of Song and Stories

6/8 Performance, Lensic Performing Arts Center, 7:30pm
$35, $50, $95*
*These special $95 fundraising tickets include a cocktail party, priority seating, and a special edition SFAI/Laurie Anderson T-Shirt

6/9 Lecture and Q&A with Laurie Anderson, 11.00am
Lensic Performing Arts Cente, $10

Tickets for the Performance and the Lecture will be available through the Lensic Box Office at 505.988.1234.

Laurie Anderson is an American experimental performance artist and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s. The art scene of the early 1970s fostered an experimental attitude among many young artists in downtown New York that attracted Anderson, and some of her earliest performances as an artist took place on the street or in informal art spaces. In the most memorable of these, she stood on a block of ice, playing her violin while wearing her ice skates. When the ice melted, the performance ended. She became widely known in 1981 when her single ‘O Superman’ reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. More(pdf)>

Tom Joyce - 7/13 Lecture, 7/14 Forge demonstration and Bastille Day celebration
Tom Joyce is an artist, designer, and blacksmith, who since 1977 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has forged sculpture, architectural ironwork and public art for projects throughout the United States. Joyce infuses many of these works with meaning by celebrating the inherited histories represented by the material he uses. In both public and private commissions, he encourages community members to participate in the making process by donating ferrous materials discarded in and collected from the landscape or particular iron objects that hold significance to the owner. From the Rio Grande Gates, forged from refuse retrieved from the river for the Albuquerque Museum of Art, to massive iron sculptures forged from industrial scrap, Joyce continues to re-examine the social, political, economic and historical implications of using iron in his work.

Blake Gopnik - 8/3 Lecture, 8/4 Workshop
Blake Gopnik is the chief art critic of the Washington Post, where he publishes regular reviews and features on all aspects of fine art and visual culture. He has also published scholarly articles on Renaissance notions of pictorial mimesis, and is currently doing research on Dutch painting and the psychology of perspective. He holds a doctorate in art history from Oxford University.

James Drake - 9/14, Lecture, 9/15 - 16, Workshop
Renowned artist James Drake has presented his figurative, narrative art internationally, receiving early critical praise for his dramatic steel sculptures, drawings and video installations. Drake is one of those astoundingly versatile artists who has managed to create accomplished, distinctive work in a number of media. In the process, he has deployed a consistent vocabulary of images relating to art history, weaponry, the fine line between savagery and civilization, and life on the densely populated bilingual Juarez-El Paso border. James Drake characterizes himself as a narrative artist, albeit one who is more interested in vignettes and fragments than in storytelling.’

Rackstraw Downes - 10/26 Lecture
Rackstraw Downes is a British-born realist painter and author. Downes' work combines the familiar with a sense of minimalism. His long, sprawling landscapes lack human subjects, yet they hint at man's interaction with the environment. The large public spaces in his work explore the effects of light and atmosphere and look to capture a specific moment in time. Downes' paintings are full of meticulous detail gained from months of regular plein-air sessions. Downes' work is in the collections of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Susan York - 11/9 Lecture, 11/12 – 13 Workshop
Sculptor Susan York represents the new generation of minimal artists. Every aspect of her life demonstrates a spiritual determination to pare down to the essentials: the way she speaks and engages with issues, her studio practice, and her art reflect her strength of vision. York is an artist-alchemist who transforms basic carbon in the form of graphite into something silvery and magical. As has been York’s practice since she was young, her ideas reveal themselves slowly. Time is an important part of the process and the result is powerful and engaging art that takes the viewer to a place of immense calm and subtle tension.

Susan Meiselas - 12/7 Lecture, 12/8 Workshop
Susan Meiselas is an American photographer best known for her work covering the political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and '80s. Meiselas' process has evolved in radical and challenging ways as she has grappled with pivotal questions about her relationship to her subjects, the use and circulation of her images in the media, and the relationship of images to history and memory. Since the 1970s, questions of ethics raised by documentary practice have been central to debates in photography. Perhaps no other photographer has so closely and consistently represented and participated in these debates than Meiselas. Her insistent engagement with these concerns has positioned her as a leading voice in the debate on contemporary documentary practice.

Estevan Rael-Gálvez - TBD
In 2001, Estevan Rael-Gálvez was named the 7th State Historian for New Mexico. Rael-Gálvez was born into the New Mexico landscape and is the heir of the long stories of its people. Raised herding sheep and moving waters in northern New Mexico, his imagination was nourished somewhere between the delicacy of what was spoken by his elders and the strength of the written word. It was this ability to see through the mountain while never losing sight of it that sustained him when he decided to break tradition and leave home. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. in Literature and Ethnic Studies. He went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Cultures at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His doctoral dissertation, ‘Identifying Captivity and Capturing Identity: Narratives of American Indian Slavery’ focused on the meanings of American Indian slavery and a unique legacy and identity in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.