March Art Lecture Series at SUNY New Paltz

NEW PALTZ — March Art Lecture Series sponsored by the Student Art Alliance

Please join us for an exciting look at award-winning artists working in a broad spectrum of media, chosen by art students looking to learn from their contemporary peers. On selected Wednesdays during the academic year, distinguished artists or critics of national and international reputation are invited to give a presentation about their work, followed by questions from the audience. The Art Lecture Series is sponsored by the Student Art Alliance, a funded member of the Student Association.

The Art Lecture Series showcases the following two artists for the month of March, with another dynamic slate of artists scheduled for April, before the end of the academic term. All lectures are free and open to all.

Carson Fox
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
SUNY New Paltz Lecture Center, Room 102
7:30 pm

Carson Fox "Bad Mushrooms"

American printmaker Carson Fox originates from the small Southern hometown of William Faulkner, and was named for novelist Carson McCullers. Her work is produced from a heritage of American Southern gothic tradition that relies heavily on the imprint that individual experience has on the artist. Foxreceived her master of fine arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and her BFA from University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Working across media, Carson produces prints, installation, and sculpture. She is represented by Claire Oliver gallery in New York, Linda Warren gallery in Chicago, and has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, with her work being found in the permanent collections of many major museums. Fox has received grants from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, the Mid Atlantic Art Foundation, a Willem Emil Cresson Award, and a New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper.

Carson Fox works and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her teaching experience includes Harvard University, New York University, Rutgers University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before joining the faculty at Adelphi University. Carson Fox has lectured widely on printmaking and sculpture across the United States and abroad.

In an artist statement, Fox writes the following excerpt of her work. “By nature, printmaking lends itself well to the investment of labor, and my current prints support this edict, while stylistically referring to Victorian wood engravings. By scanning original images and extensively retooling them in Photoshop, I create bucolic landscapes of birds, butterflies, and flowers using the tropes of beauty, yet expressing an undercurrent of anxiety in the excesses and the crowding of the compositions. To compound this feeling, I have manipulated a number of these images by piercing them with thousands of holes, suggesting invisible routes made visible, a tangible history of my own industry, while transforming the paper into a lacy map. Other intaglio, screen print, and lithographic prints employ multiple layers of color printing, and were originally inspired in their use of straightforward, declarative text by illustration captions in the moralistic, “Royal Path of Life,” published in 1881.”

For more information, see: http://www.carsonfox.com

Luba Lukova
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
SUNY New Paltz Lecture Center, Room 102
7:30 pm

"Art is not a definition, it is an experience," Lukova says from her Long Island City studio. "If it moves you, to me it doesn’t matter how they call it. If I want to move people and make them think, that means I am doing art. Art with a capital A."

Luba Lukova is a renowned artist and designer working in New York. Her distinctive art utilizes metaphors, juxtaposition of symbols and economy of line and text to succinctly capture humanity’s elemental themes. She expertly blends human forms and objects to express elemental and universal themes that include love, envy, peace, war, hunger, and ecology. Whether by using an economy of line, color, and text to pinpoint essential themes of the human condition or to succinctly illustrate social commentary, her work is undeniably powerful and thought provoking. The rich simplicity of her images transcends language, culture, and politics.

Lukova points to her own experiences in communist Bulgaria, where she grew up and studied, as well as in other impoverished and struggling countries. Chinese artists in the nascent democratic movement, she observes by way of example, have produced a body of interesting and vigorous work. "Good design always comes from places where there are social changes," Lukova notes. "People use it to express themselves. As a poster designer for a theater company in Sofia, Bulgaria, Lukova worked among artists, writers, and actors who practiced their crafts despite a regime that prohibited free expression. "A lot of people wanted to change that, and they did it through their work," she recalls, "but unfortunately the work was not public." In that environment, Lukova adds, "people didn’t make such a distinction between design and art, so I was influenced not so much by design but by art in general. Very stimulating for me was to work in the theater and be among writers and directors and to make design which equals their work somehow, or enhances their work."

The Bulgarian born Lukova has won many awards including the Grand Prix Savignac at the International Poster Salon, Paris; the Golden Pencil Award at the One Club, New York; Honor Laureate at the International Poster Exhibition in Fort Collins, CO; and ICOGRADA Excellence Award at the International Poster Festival in Chaumont, France. She is widely regarded for her New York Times Op-Ed illustrations and has received commissions from the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Adobe Systems, Sony Music, Harvard University and The War Resisters League.

Visually engaging and powerful, Lukova’s work is exhibited around the world. Her solo exhibitions have been held at UNESCO, Paris, France; DDD Gallery, Osaka, Japan; La MaMa, New York. This year her work will be on display at Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali, Trento, Italy and in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Lukova’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Bibliotheque nationale de France. In 2007 Clay & Gold Editions will publish the first comprehensive book about her art.

For more information, see: www.lukova.net.

For more information:
www.newpaltz.edu/artsnews
(845)257-3844