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Spring 2008
De Anza College Student Art Show
May 19 - June 12, 2008
Closed Memorial Day, May 26
Sponsored by the De Anza Associated Student Body, the Euphrat Museum of Art, and the Creative Arts Division, this exhibition features paintings, drawings, mixed-media works, photography, graphic design, sculpture, and ceramics created by students at De Anza College.
The artworks reflect expertise in diverse media and varied interests and points of view. Jurors select artworks to be presented in the exhibition and those to receive awards.
The design for the exhibition announcement was created by
De Anza College graphic design student Ana Milosavljevic.
Special acknowledgement: Chancellor, Foothill-De Anza Community College District, Dr. Martha J. Kanter; President, De Anza College, Dr. Brian Murphy; Vice President, Instruction, John Swensson; Dean, Creative Arts Division, Dr. Nancy Canter; Art and Photography Faculty; Art on Campus Committee.
Graphic Storytelling as Activism
February 11 - April 17, 2008
Closed President's Day, February 18, and spring break, March 31 – April 4
Artists include:
Seyed Alavi, Oliver Chin, Charisse Domingo and De-Bug, Sharon Hing, Keith Knight, Lingshan, America Meredith, Favianna Rodriguez, Shorty Fatz
Graphic Storytelling as Activism presents a variety of art forms, including cartoons, political posters, digital art, book art, and more to explore a range of imagery with an activist bent. It began with graphic storyteller Keith Knight, who sees comics and cartooning as a powerful tool for social change. They have been “communicating information, concepts, and ideas since the days of hieroglyphics. They can transcend language, class, and race. Knowing the tools and concepts of cartooning allows anyone to be a mass communicator… You don’t need a million dollars. Just a pen and a piece of paper.” In this exhibition we took Knight’s ideas a bit farther, adding other tools to enable one to build communities through community-based arts, to address issues of the day, locally and globally, and to tell the personal story with the larger context, historically and culturally.
Graphic storyteller Keith Knight exhibits work from three series. One group of cartoons is from the book Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts, which features ten graphic stories about artists, educators, and activists across the U.S. Knight’s drawings bring alive people and stories, e.g. Lily Yeh, Founder of the Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia, and James “Big Man” Maxton, master mosaicist and former Operations Director at the Village. Other images on display are drawn from his nationally syndicated comic strips, “The K Chronicles” and “(th)ink.” Knight is an award-winning cartoonist, rapper, and hip-hop musician. www.kchronicles.com
Favianna Rodriguez exhibits colorful silkscreen and other prints, including political posters and personal art. Her silkscreen Designs on Democracy: Communication for Liberation shows the intersection between being a designer and an activist. The image is a self-portrait with a city landscape. “My intersecting identities as a poster artist, activist, designer, and woman of color all came together in this piece.” Rodriguez was schooled in East Oakland by Chicano political-poster artists. “My art pieces reflect national and international grassroots struggles, and tell a history of social justice through graphics.” Rodriguez is a founding member of the EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA), an Oakland-based collective of third world artists and community organizers. www.favianna.com
Oliver Chin uses comics to educate and promote discussion. Images and words from his graphic novel 9 of 1: A Window to the World deal with perspectives of many people around the time of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The format is of nine members of an eleventh grade class interviewing various members of their diverse community. Through creative use of drawings and text, he combines history, geography, personal perspectives of interviewer and interviewee, emotion and experience, and ways to learn from the past. Also on exhibit will be references to the Julie Black Belt and The Octonauts books, which he has published. Using contemporary cartooning styles, these books provide positive role models and messages for children.
Charisse Domingo’s photographic series on East Palo Alto and Gila River reveals a major untold story in Silicon Valley. We see the connections between distant locations, toxic waste, and the human determination to tell the story and activate the community. This series is one of a number Domingo has done for Silicon Valley De-Bug. De-Bug is a collective of writers, artists, organizers, and workers based in San Jose, California, and is a project of Pacific News Service. Founded by Raj Jayadev, De-Bug explores community issues in workplaces, schools, streets, relationships — telling stories from personal experiences, creating a platform for unheard stories — through De-Bug magazine and connecting projects, including a community darkroom, silkscreen workshops, and designing custom bikes. Other artists include arts director Adrian Avila, along with Shorty Fatz. The latter, Samuel Rodriguez and Matthew Rodriguez, create custom bikes, graffiti-like, with characters, a fictional world. www.siliconvalleydebug.org
Dirty Work. The original impetus for Sharon Hing’s recent gouache, mixed media, and conceptual artwork was derived from personal interviews with foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. In one interview a woman shared how her employer demanded that she number every square of toilet paper so the employer would be able to monitor her life. As Hing began this series, she synthesized these key life images of a rarely acknowledged but vital sector of Hong Kong society. Other works allude to the disparity of incomes between workers in the Philippines and Hong Kong, the demeaning working and living conditions for foreign domestic workers, such as sleeping on the floor. While studying in Hong Kong in 2006, she volunteered with the Hong Kong legal aid organization Helpers for Domestic Helpers (HDH). Learning about the widespread exploitation and severe abuse of foreign domestic helpers prompted her to create work to be sold for the benefit of HDH.
America Meredith is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, hereditary member of the Red Paint Clan, of Swedish and Celtic descent — as she says, “pink.” Her Cherokee Spokespeople is an international exhibition of spokecards for bicycle wheels. Spokecards are laminated cards often created by bike messengers as souvenirs. Hers carry Cherokee words/phrases in syllabary and Roman letters to aid in pronunciation, and are joined with illustrative images. Cherokee, like other Native American languages is in danger of extinction. Meredith enlists cyclists in to collaborate, forming a moving exhibition around the world, which they photograph. Meredith’s Think Pink paintings remind us of history, glossed over and forgotten. She adds text, combining humor and insight, for example giving a little history lesson (with plus and minus points) about U.S. Vice President Charles Curtis (Kaw, Potawatomi, and Osage) under Herbert Hoover. www.ahalenia.com/america
Seyed Alavi’s book Frames of Reference presents visual story telling that lies between a photographic novel, movie, and storybook. This collection of photos documents a journey to Iran, and probes and educates beyond the charged Iranian political situation in the news. Frames of Reference is poetic, less didactic, allowing the reader/viewer to experience a vision of a country where tradition and modernity dance together in a fragile pas de deux. It is also filmic. Each photo merges with the next creating a river of images that carries the viewer/reader along on a multifaceted journey.
Lingshan’s social realist paintings expose us to overarching stories, along with stories within stories. His painting of John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin refers to the atrocity of the Nanking massacre. In December 1937, the Japanese army invaded, burned, and looted Nanking, killing 300,000 unarmed Chinese and raping 20,000. Like Otto Schindler during the Holocaust, Rabe and Vautrin saved many Chinese from execution. In conjunction, we show Lingshan’s portrait of Iris Chang, who lived nearby in Silicon Valley. For years she researched and brought to light the atrocities that occurred in Nanking, so we could learn from history. In that spirit, Lingshan also has helped organize a traveling exhibition.
Several publications will be on display, including New Creative Community, from New Village Press. www.newvillagepress.net The exhibition grew from Knight’s concept, was curated by Jan Rindfleisch, with Nancy Hom, Jianhua Shu, and Diana Argabrite.
Fall
2007
Moving
Cultures (...all over the map)
October 2 - November 21, 2007
Closed November 12, 2007
Reception with poet Norma Cantú October 1, 4-5pm,
with artists 5-6pm.
Artists include:
Michael Arcega, Vic De La Rosa, Kent Manske and
Nanette Wylde, Eugene Rodriguez, Marta Sanchez with
Norma Cantú, Christine Wong Yap
Moving Cultures
is an exhibition of art related to moving cultures,
whether from one location to another, changing/shifting
over time, or changing interpretations. Content
ranges from railroad culture in Texas to contemporary
views of artworld culture, activist culture, and
"American" culture. Artworks range from landscapes
and poetry to interventions, actions, satire, and
cultural Meaning Makers.
Railroad culture in Texas, the Mexican experience,
is the basis for the collaborative prints of artist
Marta Sanchez
and Chicana poet Norma Cantú. The Transcendental
Train Yard series, including serigraphs and
a large offset lithograph, address the history and
beauty of the train yards as a place of work, living
(cargo dwellings) and Vaudevillian troupes that
entertained the Mexican community in song, social
parodies, and circus acts. The colorful print R
cigarro R barril relates to a poem taken
from an old children's song about trains. The poem
was an offspring from the song and is still sung
by folklore singer Jose Luis Orozco. This piece
was one of the first Sanchez and Cantú worked on
and was printed at Philadelphia's Brandywine workshop.
The box set of serigraphs that they have been working
on is being printed by Coronado Studios in Austin,
Texas.
Texas railroad culture is also the basis of a mixed-media
Day of the Dead altar by Eugene
Rodriguez. Early in the 20th century Rodriguez's
grandparents traveled north to Chicago from Mexico,
worked on the railroads, then migrated west to California.
The Journey
pays homage to all who have come to this country
in search of a better life. And Rodriquez goes further.
Through text, he connects immigration and family,
corporate media and globalization, to address "transnational
citizenship, labor practices, and human rights".
Vic De La Rosa,
who innovates with technology and textiles, exhibits
provocative sarapes. His Verbal
Sarape series is jacquard woven. One sarape
reads: "is it
me? or just what I am wearing," words generally
applicable to our times of quick cultural assumptions.
While De La Rosa looks at Texas and other southwest
Mexican migrant populations, he focuses on cultural
assumptions, communication between cultures. Sometimes
cultures cross borders and other times the borders
themselves move, so De La Rosa also considers relationships
to land grabs, reparations, and turf wars.
Michael Arcega
exhibits work from his El
Conquistadork series, a humorous critique
on contemporary and historic issues of colonialism
and cultural exchange. Included are maquettes for
his 10' Manila galleon, made primarily of Manila
folders and successful sailed in Tomales Bay to
commemorate the famed intercontinental trade route
of 1565 through 1815 between Mexico City, Manila,
and California. Also on display is a huge map that
Arcega frames as a tool for conquest. "Historically,
the inhabitants of the drawn maps were unaware that
they have been subjected to one kingdom or another."
And flags, such as a Bear
Arms flag: "an essential tool in identifying
a group from other groups. It serves as a unifying
tool for the group under its banner, but it is divisive
in the same way." Arcega is one of a group of artists
participating in Galleon
Trade, a series of international arts exhibitions
(organized by Jenifer Wofford and Lucy Mae San Pablo
Burns, PhD), seeking to create new routes of cultural
exchange along old routes of commerce and trade.
Christine Wong
Yap also participated in Galleon
Trade. Regalos
is a transit-specific work involving "the shipment
of two empty, glitter-covered balikbayan boxes to
Manila. 'Balikbayan' is Tagalog for 'going home,'
and can refer to overseas Filipinos returning to
the mother country, or the large boxes of gifts
they customarily bring home." Wong Yap relates that
in transit to Manila the glitter eroded from the
boxes, suggesting a trail to home. Also during reentry
to the U.S., the boxes received new markings of
transit, including Homeland Security stickers. "Regalos"
is Tagalog (from Spanish) for "gift". Wong Yap reminds
us that art is a gift, even as she calls attention
to the heartfelt regalos
of the Filipino overseas labor force.
Kent Manske
and Nanette Wylde create a wonderful Meaning
Maker installation with pamphlets to make
sense of our changing culture(s). The American Citizenship
Edition provides a structure for "making the most
of your American experience." "Good for international
travel preparation; mental gymnastics; inspecting
bandwagons; endearing oneself to like-minded cronies;
reinforcing fear, loathing, and patriotism; and
adding spice to conversations." The Art Viewing
Edition and Academic Conference Edition give similar
insights into the art and academic worlds. And this
is just the beginning. The humorous and insightful
works are powerful tools for understanding and evaluating
our experiences.
What began with a story of migration grew to reflect
the cultural complexities of today - where many
of us are have family and connections "all over
the map" - and the resultant questioning of communication,
meaning, and values.
The exhibition was curated by Jan Rindfleisch working
with Nancy Hom, Consuelo Underwood, Christine Wong
Yap, with assistance from Diana Argabrite.
Spring
2007
Material
Culture
March 7 - April 19, 2007
Artists shown:
Reneé Billingslea,
Hector Dio Mendoza, Corinne Okada, Nazanin Shenasa,
Kerry Vander Meer
Artist community collaborators include Chike
Nwoffiah, Oriki Theater
Material
Culture connects a focus on textiles, both
traditional and contemporary practice, with a focus
on our culture of materials/materialism. In anthropology
and archaeology, material culture (physical objects
as opposed to documents) enables researchers to
better understand a culture. Playing off several
different title interpretations, we highlight six
artists with content relevant to the times and the
community.
Contemporary textile art is wide ranging. Artist
Reneé Billingslea
uses clothing to create an impact in her installation
Fabric of Race:
Lynching in America. Stained shirts, hanging,
with hand-embroidered nametags, represent cases
she researched. A hand-sewn quilt includes appropriated
images from "lynching postcards." Here clothing/textiles
stand in for the person and draws one into an important
but rarely discussed part of U.S. history and a
horrific part of human interactions that continues.
Billingslea teaches at Santa Clara University.
Artist Corinne
Okada creates wearable art and other art
objects from recycled candy wrappers from other
cultures, providing cultural links for different
generations. Her beautiful Nutcracker
Dress is constructed from Russian, Chinese,
Japanese, Brazilian, and Italian candy wrappers
along with produce bag netting, and bag ties. Her
Fear Kimono
is related to internment of Japanese Americans in
the US during World War II. It contains Japanese
paper dolls made of Executive Order 9066 documents,
Japanese candy wrappers, fishing line, and plastic
sushi grass. Okada also creates objects such as
flora and fauna from wrappers. Here the material
culture comes more into play because of the contrast
with the natural world we once knew. Okada received
a recent Artist of the Year award from Cupertino.
Chike Nwoffiah,
Director of Oriki
Theater in Mountain View, presents traditional
wearable art from the Igbos in southeast Nigeria.
Traditional garments are unique to each region and
reflect the status of the individual. The garments
displayed are often part of Oriki performances and
installations that relate to the music, dance, and
village life in Nigeria, where bright colors and
bold designs are ever present. Nwoffiah is partaking
in a drum/dance performance assembly at Nimitz Elementary
School, part of a Euphrat collaborative interdisciplinary
public artwork involving artists, De Anza students,
and elementary school students.
Kerry Vander
Meer takes women's contemporary clothing,
particularly the stretchy kind, and builds art installations
that overflow with creative energy of shape, lines,
and textures. And fun. For example, a portion of
her large installation Give
and Take alludes to both the restrictive/liberating
elements of pantyhose, sometimes stretched to the
limit, and also alludes to variations of give and
take in all kinds of social, economic, and political
interactions. Yet joyful whimsy encompasses all.
Vander Meer has exhibited widely and teaches at
Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland.
Hector Dio Mendoza's
artwork reflects various meanings to material culture.
Having worked with elderly women in care facilities
where he was collecting their stories, he noted
they often crocheted doilies as they talked. So
he dipped some of these in liquid concrete and created
solid sculptures, all white. A colorful version,
Atomic Landscape,
connects to contemporary issues of youth, with whom
Dio Mendoza also works. His wide-ranging community
involvement leads him to unusual content. In the
social sciences, "material culture" helps to understand
a culture. But in his mixed-media Scapegoat
(profiling), clothing, headgear, or hairstyle
can be used to distance people, stereotype, exclude,
and worse.
Nazanin Shenasa
exhibits a handmade silk costume, Layla's
Shroud, created for a performance and installation,
Permanent Madness,
2006. The work addresses the unconsummated love
between the ancient Middle Eastern lovers Layla
and Majnun. Shroud
is a response to the medieval Iranian prototype
of a noble woman suffering in silence. Here her
poetic thoughts come flowing out of the sleeves.
The concern of being separated from your dreams
is a universal one that still pertains today. Young
people often struggle with educational and life
decisions, conflicted as to whether to conform to
family or community expectations, or to follow their
heart to the true self. Shenasa is a textile artist,
art historian and curator who teaches at De Anza
College.
The exhibition was curated by Jan Rindfleisch working
with Nazanin Shenasa, with assistance from Diana
Argabrite.
Winter 2007
Changing
Still Life
January 22 - February 15, 2007
Artists shown:
DeWitt Cheng
and Susan Danis
Artist, campus and community collaborators include
Janet Leong
Malan, Connie Young Yu, Tom Izu (California History
Center), Annie Presler and Jose
Marte (De Anza Biological, Health, and Environmental
Sciences Division)
Changing
Still Life is an interactive exhibition comprised
of "still lifes" from which viewers can draw. These
still lifes encompass a variety of directions, with
objects reflecting different cultures and histories,
found/recycled objects, objects related to different
academic disciplines, and some artworks themselves.
Viewers have the opportunity to use viewfinders
and sketch on the spot.
While creating their artwork, participants will
be studying form, arrangement, and content. Objects
will be added and removed over time. Some aspects
of the arrangement can be adjusted. Movable lights
and viewfinders enable participants to change lighting
conditions and determine their compositions.
This changing still life imbues a classic art form
with contemporary and local relevance. The unusual
objects with wide-ranging content came from artists
and from sources on campus and in the community.
Artists Susan
Danis and DeWitt
Cheng display artwork and/or objects from
their studios. Danis's work, referring to consumerism
and the environment, is constructed of recycled
materials, sometimes conglomerations of synthetic
fuzzies, beads, fake hair, plastic and rubberized
parts in garish hues, pinks and greens. Cheng's
art relates to science specimens. He morphs these
into unique creatures and attaches titles that draw
one into larger contemplations.
Community participation yielded historical objects
from Connie
Young Yu and Janet
Leong Malan. Historian Young Yu offers a
trunk and artifacts related to early Chinese-American
history in the area, items from her family's collection,
including a pair of slippers for bound feet belonging
to her grandmother. Some items go back to the 1880s.
For example, from the Route 87 upgrade, she recovered
a liquor jug that was from the Woolen Mills Chinatown
(1887-1902). Artist Leong Malan's objects reflect
family history in Cupertino: a drilling tool, heart-shaped
hoe, abacus used until the '70s, her grandfather's
incense burner, business ledgers, and immigration
papers. Her family was the first Chinese family
to settle in Cupertino (1952), developing a successful
flower-growing business.
Campus input included architectural elements salvaged
by the California
History Center (CHC) as time and new construction
are changing the historic face of De Anza. French-style
doors were salvaged from the West Cottage, recently
demolished in an expansion project. Designed by
architect Willis Polk for the Baldwin estate circa
1895, it served as guest and servant quarters for
the main house currently housing the CHC. Director
Tom Izu:
"De Anza College owes its 'Spanish California' architectural
theme and archway logo to elements in the two original
Mission Revival style cottages." Restoration plans
for the remaining cottage are under development.
A sheep's horn, a whale vertebra, and turtle shell
from the De
Anza Biological, Health, and Environmental Sciences
Division, courtesy of Laboratory Technician
Jose Marte,
are incorporated. Microscopic specimens, animal
bones, insect collections, and anatomical models
enable concentration on the natural world, in its
own struggle with urban development. Faculty member
Annie Presler
has provided native plants for display. These relate
to De Anza's Environmental
Studies Center (next to the Kirsch Center),
a 1.5-acre arboretum showcasing California's native
plant communities and promoting native plant usage
in landscaping.
As new items are added, e.g. plants, or books or
text-based materials, participants will have added
opportunities to consider individual objects, partial
views, and juxtapositions to develop their content
and individual statements - whether by drawing,
photography, or poetry.
The Euphrat Museum is in an interim space in the
A quad while the design of the new Euphrat building
is being finalized and construction proceeds. For
this exhibition, some basic sketch materials will
be provided. Other individual projects, class assignments
or visits need to be coordinated with the Museum.
Fall 2006
DeAnza
and Foothill Art Faculty/Staff Exhibition
Exhibition opened November 14th, and ran
through December 7th.
Reception with artists' presentations November 28th,
6-8PM.
Fall 2004
Edges
highlighted formal solutions and also explored edges
with respect to timely content, whether on a personal,
regional, or global level. In his Visual
Quotations series, Titus
Kaphar worked from selected 19th century
paintings but only painted the African Americans.
He worked in oils on dry-erase whiteboards with
all the surrounding area left white. A hard edge
separated the two. Diana Pumpelly Bates' bronze
sculptures focused on the edge between physical
and spiritual worlds. Photographer Julian
Cardona's works documented the violent entry
of Mexico to globalization and probed inside the
maquiladora world alongside the border. His series,
Dying Slowly
showed difficult edges: the border between life
and death, death in life. In another series, THE
TRUTH, Evidence of a Failure, he documented
family members searching for the bodies of their
daughters in the desert. Lucy
Arai created soft and hard edges by applying
sumi ink in washes on handmade paper and then employing
sashiko,
traditional Japanese running-stitch embroidery,
in concentric circles and fluid patterns. Consuelo
Underwood drew directly on the wall, included
wrapped shaman sticks, and created an unusual red
leather grid that looked like barbed wire. It referred
to the ten sites where the U.S. government has constructed
a 14' steel wall to secure the Mexico/U.S. border.
Spring 2004
City
Life presented art related to the urban experience.
It highlighted urban transportation, work, architecture
(buildings, landscape, and interiors), public art,
neighborhoods, and life styles. Lewis
Watts showed photographs of urban life in
Oakland, selections from his series Evidence:
The Oakland Cultural Landscape Project. Jessica
Dunne created paintings of urban night scenes,
including parking lots and freeways. Seyed
Alavi photographed numerous people on Market
Street in San Francisco and layered their facial
images, six at a time, to create composite images
displayed as large kiosk posters. Harriete
Estel Berman's nine-foot-square sculpture
of "grass" constructed from recycled tin consumer
products called attention to the rampant consumerism
in our city malls. Large photographs of Tokyo subway
scenes by Kim
Yasuda explored ideas of personal and public
space in Japanese cities. Katherine
Aoki created something new, an active urban
world populated with women who provoke us to challenge
gender-related expectations.
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