From small to well-equipped shops accidents “happen.” Unlike a production factory where workers are trained on safety for a specific task, artist/students often change how they work and what they work with, making task training difficult. How do you nurture creativity and exploration in art while fostering safe working habits?

Come share your thoughts and ideas on studio safety and how to minimize health hazards when making art. Please bring any material you may wish to share with the group – safety handbooks, etc.

College for Creative Studies

Glass Studio

October 6, 2012

9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Glass, a viscous and versatile material of design, celebrates its 50^th anniversary as the Studio Glass Movement. The proliferation of college and university glass studios has brought the medium into the mainstream craft, art and design.

This 3-hour workshop introduces the basic glass casting processes of sand, graphite and steel, making cast elements to be singular, multiple and/or combined with other materials.

Additional kiln casting processes that can work in your studio will be discussed.

Expect to create 2 to 4 pieces that you will keep.

Instructors include:

Herb Babcock, College for Creative Studies

Brent Cole, Ball State University

Alice Smith, Wayne State University

A $20- material fee will apply.

Workshop limited to 12 participants.

In 1971 Linda Nochlin posed a question that would spearhead an entirely new branch of art history: Why have there been no great women artists? Forty years later feminist art has emerged as an important area of study in museums and universities across the globe, highlighted by the founding of the Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and the ground breaking exhibition “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.”

Feminist art production can be traced to the early 1960s as an outgrowth of the second wave of feminism. It centered on reflecting women's lives and experiences, as well as being a rallying call to subvert the foundations of the art establishment. These early pioneers developed a visual rhetoric focused on the female body as a site for social and cultural commentary and reassessing the erotic, the sacred, and the taboo – these pioneers included, Ida Applebroog, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, Lorraine O’Grady, Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and Martha Wilson, amongst others. This panel will assess the art practices of younger generations of artists and their relationship to the feminist art practices of the 1960s and 70s. Of interest is the visual rhetoric of feminist art from the past and how it has developed and changed over the decades. What issues continue to dominate the field of feminist art? What has happened to the female body in art, where has it gone and what are its political and social implications today? Of particular interest are presentations addressing the work of feminist artists, or artists “read” as feminist, who have been marginalized or underrepresented: women of color, Latin- and Asian-American artists, LGBT artists. Exploratory themes will be presented by art historians, curators, and interdisciplinary scholars.

This concept also occurs in critical theory, such as Henri Lefebvre’s volume II of the Critique of Everyday Life, where he suggests that art and play are linked through their ‘transfuctional’ nature (that is, to have may uses, and at the same time none at all).

These concepts are not new: they are phenomena that occur during the natural development of social creatures. As artists and educators, it is important to nurture ‘serious play’ as an integral component of our practice, creating environments that are open to experimentation and in which failure is a non-issue.

Making Bullshit is aimed at creating an open discussion between educators within all artistic disciplines — traditional and new media arts, design, art history, etc. Potential topics include techniques for integrating serious play in the classroom, debate about when to implement serious play vs. solemnity, historical context, comparisons with other artistic and educational tools, case studies: recollections of serious play in action (practiced or observed), the relationship between play and failure, artistic practices embracing play, critical theory on the topics of play and/or failure in artistic practice.

Toward arriving at an intersection of these interests, and being awarded tenure, it makes good sense for faculty members to develop and employ a roadmap for success. This is especially important given that mind reading is an imperfect form of communication and you wish to communicate clearly with your peer committees and unit administrators. This session will address strategies for faculty to advance, communicate, and navigate along this path.

While American art history tends to be fairly parochial with its emphasis on East Coast artists, African American art history seems to suffer even more strongly from this bias. This session will be devoted to African-American artists or art institutions in the Midwest. The Great Migration from 1913-1949 brought hundreds of thousands of black Americans to Midwest industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. And some of these people and their descendents made art. Indeed on a trip to Detroit in 1964, Langston Hughes said, “Harlem used to be the Negro cultural center of America. If Detroit has not already become so, it is well on its way to becoming it.” Literary historians have frequently taken up the topic of Midwestern African-American writers, but this is far less true in the case of black visual artists. In line with the conference's content session of Community and Collaboration, papers treating African American mural projects in the Midwest are especially encouraged, as are papers dealing with the educational outreach activities of artists and art institutions. However, all papers dealing with Midwestern African-American art from all time periods, colonial to the present, are welcomed for consideration.

How do new media and old media compare as platforms of collaboration?

How have attitudes toward craft changed (or been restored) with collaborative involvement in residual media?

How do the use of found materials in art motivate collaboration in production as well as in the appreciation of collective memory?

What are the changing attitudes toward obsolescence and ruins, and how are they shifting from isolation and nostalgia to more dynamic, collective associations?

What opportunities are there for landscape architects and artists to rebuild community as they reconstruct residual public spaces and parks?

Whether neglected, abandoned, or trashed, this session invites proposals that explore how artistic collaboration can recycle, reconfigure, and renew a practical sense of community itself.

Might concepts even take on the nature of material?

In contrast to such ambivalent assessments, Vilém Flusser argues that photographs are technical images, surfaces enabled and determined by the apparatus that open up an unanticipated power of invention, a hallucinatory power springing from the "absence of a point of reference." The universe of technical images, he suggests, produces a “mutation of experiences, perceptions, values, and modes of behavior, a mutation of our being-in-the-world.”

Inspired by Flusser’s alternative account, this panel reconsiders the relation between the technicity and the aesthetics of photographic images. What aesthetic effects might photographs have in the “absence of a point of reference”? Or, must we re-imagine what the organization by reference means? Can we still think photography as medium, when every photograph is, in Flusser’s words, a ”realization of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera”? Can we re-conceive photography, in its very technicity, as a power to organize emergent, differing aesthetics?

How do outsiders become insiders? What are strategies for evoking collaborative, sustained and meaningful work that will bridge University communities with local and regional communities? How do we encourage University administrators to recognize the value of community engagement courses through a commitment to funding and resources? How can we strengthen the partnership between local and regional organizations (schools, community centers, museums, businesses) and institutions of higher education to insure student involvement beyond the classroom, beyond graduation? We will look at the Detroit Connections Engagement courses at University of Michigan School of Art & Design, ongoing projects between Marygrove College and Detroit Public Schools, the Detroit-based organizations Access Arts and Summer in the City, as well as other efforts underway in Southeast Michigan engaging in inter-generational, multi-cultural, multi-community art-based projects. Guests will include members of Detroit’s curatorial community, business community, educators, artists and arts organizers.

Through presentations by artists, curators and other scholars that work under the diverse rubric of “social engagement”, encouraging greater awareness of political and social issues through their practices, this panel explores the nature and importance of the process of collaboration in and of itself. Conversations will provoke a new thoughtfulness on why this way of working yields results quite different from solitary artistic practices. It also explores how this way of working achieves superior results from every aspect of producing work: planning, making and exhibiting as well as the disadvantages that can also result.

To augment a visual arts education is a student run gallery becoming more of a necessity in the curriculum? How can this experience be included without increasing time to graduation? How can this be added to the departmental program without increasing work loads or need for a new budget line? Can it be self sustaining?

This session will present start up programs and cite galleries that have been successful. Materials will be discussed to begin or expand a gallery experience for undergraduate art majors.