SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE (SFAI)
Nestled within the streets of Russian Hill, SFAI's campus overlooks the Bay area and is really quite breathtaking. I visited San Francisco this past May and had the opportunity to meet with Admissions Counselor, Jana Rumberger. SFAI encourages its students, both undergraduate and graduate, to explore many different avenues and allows individual development within an interdisciplinary context. In addition to its lovely location, SFAI boasts working one-on-one with their accomplished professors, an impressive list of visiting artists lectures at their graduate lectures symposia, and allows direct exposure with professional artists.
*This Institute was also founded by Ansel Adams in 1945, the Photography Department was the first program of its kind dedicated to exploring photography as a fine art medium.
*Also SFAI is ranked 7th for Graduate Photography Programs as stated in US News & World Report.
*Annie Leibovitz earned her BFA at SFAI in 1971.
Photographs from my trip:
PROFESSOR HENRY WESSEL
BIOGRAPHY:
Henry Wessel was born in 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey. He is an American photographer noted for his descriptive, yet poetic photographs of the human environment.
Wessel earned a B.A. degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1966 and an M.F.A. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972. Before graduating with his M.F.A., in 1971, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Wessel a fellowship and, one year later, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his photographs. In short order, Wessel's work was included in exhibits at the International Museum of Photography and collected by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Visiting California in 1970, Wessel was taken by the West Coast light and moved to San Francisco. Today, Wessel is on faculty in the photography department of San Francisco Art Institute. Much of Wessel's work is still produced in California. To date, Wessel has produced five books of photography. In 2007, Henry Wessel will be exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
QUOTES:
"Wessel's remarkable work, witty, evocative and inventive, is distinctive and at the same time a component part of the great development of photography which flourished in the 1970s. The pictures continue to grow and evolve and the work is now regarded as an individual and important contribution to twentieth-century American photography." - Sandra Phillips, Introduction at the SFMOMA, 2007
"Chances are, if you believe the light, you are going to believe that the things photographed physically existed in the world. It's this belief that gives the still photograph its power." ( from an Interview with Henry Wessel by Stephan Janáček published by Min Gallery, Tokyo, Japan 1986)
Wikipedia, Initials. (2010 , September 17). Henry wessel. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wessel,_Jr.
WORK:
Fascinated by his mother’s real-estate photos as a teenager in New Jersey, Wessel shot this series of bungalows in Southern California from the armrest of his truck more than thirty years later. Playfully candy-colored, these houses suggest a human presence only in details, such as a modest cooler left curbside or a garden hose coiled against the side of a house. Although different in color, the structural similarities of the bungalows, as well as the similar compositions of the photographs themselves, imply both the futility of originality and the manufactured quality of the American dream of home ownership.
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Initials. (Photographer). (2010). House pictures, 1990. [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/wessel_jr_henry.php
WORK:
When I visited in May I had the opportunity to visit the Diego Rivera Gallery with a collection of graduate student work. McManus constructed light boxes for each of her seven "One Minute Studies" of 8mm film cut and arranged onto plexiglass. Unfortunately, I cannot find any other information on her, but here are a few more close up images of that I took of her work as seen in the gallery:
http://www.carlingmcmanus.com/
California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
* CalArts is ranked 6th for Graduate Photography Programs as stated in US News & World Report.
I am interested in CalArts for a number of reasons. There students are called "Calartians!" How cool is that? It is located in Valencia, CA and also boasts one-on-one mentoring by its faculty and encourages interdisciplinary experimentation. As an MFA seeking student I will have my own SPACIOUS studio. CalArts has extensive Artmaking facilities for photography as well as a "Super Shop" that is used for processes such as woodworking, metalworking, machining, moldmaking, spraying and sandblasting. I also have a great interest in metals and jewelry. With their facilities and "Super Shop," it will allow me to experiment with both photography and metalworking. Oh, did I mention they have an outdoor pool??
PROFESSOR JO ANN CALLIS BIOGRAPHY:Since she emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important practitioners of the "fabricated photographs" movement, Jo Ann Callis (American, born 1940) has made adventurous contributions in the areas of color photography, sculpture, painting, and digital imagery. For her, photography is another studio tool to be used, along with the sets she creates and the models she directs, to render the sensual tones and textures of fabric and food, or to animate clay figures of her own making. The persistent inventiveness of Callis's work has made her a force in Southern California art and in recent photographic practice.
Callis began her art studies in Ohio in the 1950s. After marriage and child rearing, she returned to photography in the 1970s to finish her undergraduate degree, and continued on to a graduate degree in the arts at UCLA. Her avant-garde style of fabricating photographs was soon publicly recognized, and her work was exhibited and published internationally. At the same time, she developed her own role as teacher at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
Throughout her career, Callis has created complex sets for her photographs. She often makes her own props, hires and directs models, and designs the lighting.
"Jo Ann Callis: Woman Twirling at the Getty Center." Getty (2009): n. pag. Web. 5 Nov 2010.
WORK:
From "Early Color"
ALUMNUS JAMES CASEBERE
BIOGRAPHY:
JAMES CASEBERE was born in 1953, in Lansing, Michigan. He grew up outside Detroit, attended Michigan State University, and graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a BFA in 1976 where he studied with the sculptor Siah Armajani. In the fall of 1977, he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, and then moved to Los Angeles where he studied with John Baldessari and Doug Huebler. He was John Baldessari’s teaching assistant. Classmates included Mike Kelly, and Tony Oursler. He received an M.F.A from Cal Arts in 1979.
Casebere's pioneering work has established him at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. His first exhibitions in New York were at Artists Space, Franklin Furnace and then Sonnebend Gallery. His work was associated with the “Pictures Generation” of “post-modern” artists who emerged in the 1980’s, which included Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, Matt Mullican, James Welling, Barbara Kruger, and others. For the last thirty years Casebere has consistently devised increasingly complex models and photographed them in his studio. Based solidly on an understanding of architecture as well as art historical and cinematic sources, Casebere's abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative. His table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Starting with Sonsbeek ’86, in Arnhem, Holland and ending around 1991 Casebere also made large scale sculpture installations.
Early bodies of work focused on images of the suburban home. He followed this with both photographs and sculptural installations dealing with the myth of the American West. In the early 1990s, Casebere turned his attention to the development of different cultural institutions during the enlightenment, and their representation as architectural types. With his photographs of prisons in particular, he critically addressed contemporary attitudes and approaches to incarceration, as well as metaphorically pointing to relationships of social control, and social structure in the broader society.
Since the late 1990’s he has made images whose sources span the globe starting with the bunker under the Reichstag (Flooded Hallway), and the sewers in Berlin (Two Tunnels). He created an expansive and beautiful body of work referencing the Atlantic slave trade. This includes a slave factory in West Africa, (Four Flooded Arches), plantations in the West Indies (Nevision Underground), Thomas Jefferson’s plantation home in Virginia (Monticello), and other 18th Century American colonial architecture.
The modern architects Victor Horta (Spiral Staircase, and Turning Hallway) and Richard Neutra (Garage, and Dorm Room) inspired him to create another small, austere group of works that seem to cast a critical eye on the homogenizing effects of globalization.
After 9/11 Casebere turned his attention toward Spain and the Eastern Mediterranean. Several works examine 10th century Andalusia and the flowering of culture and co-operation between Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures before the Inquisition. (La Alberca, Abadia, Spanish Bath, Mahgreb.) Other images depict Tripoli, Lebanon, Nineveh and Samara in Iraq, and Luxor, Egypt. Several photographs of elaborate soaring models of mosques were inspired by the 16th century Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan.
Casebere was included in the 1985 Whitney Bienniel. In 2002-3 Casebere had a solo exhibition at SECCA Gallery in Winston Salem, NC which traveled to the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, OH., the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, Quebec and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis. In 2000 –2001 he was in an exhibition called The Architectural Unconscious: James Casebere and Glen Seator, initiated by the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover Mass. which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in Philadelphia, PA. In 1999 Asylum, another solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, traveled to Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, in Norwich, England. In 1996 he was in Campo, at the Venice Bienale, Italy, curated by Francesco Bonami, which travelled to the Sangretto Foundation in Torino, Italy and the Konstmuseum, in Malmö, Sweden.
Casebere is the recipient of numerous fellowships including three from the National Endowment for the Arts, three from the New York Foundation for the Arts and one from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His work has been collected by museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among many others.
Since the late 1990’s Casebere has lived in Fort Greene Brooklyn, with his wife Lorna Simpson and their daughter Zora.
James casebere biography. (2009). Retrieved from http://jamescasebere.net/bio.html
WORK:
From Landscape with Houses, (Dutchess County, NY) #2, 2009, digital chromogenic print, size variable
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