Active Space: The Student Gallery
The return of students back to campus has sparked new activity in the Student Gallery of the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center. This fall two exhibitions have been installed showcasing the works from classes – ARTS 3891: Artist’s Books and Ephemeral Production and ARTS 1102: Introduction to Studio Arts.
bilder & bulletin
September 30 – October 14, 2021
bilder & bulletin features the work of Josanda Addo, Margot Bell, Olivia Forrester, Jana Harper, Mikayla Hernandez-Guevara, Jerry Phillips, Chloe Nixon, Navya Thakkar, William Tippins, and Lena Wu. ARTS 3891: Artist’s Books and Ephemeral Production is taught by Jana Harper, Associate Professor of the Practice of Art.
Professor Harper and her students worked quickly to put their conceptual ideas into ephermal production using photo copier technology and hand collage to create the works exhibited in the gallery.
Inspired by Hans Peter Feldman’s Bilder project (works hanging on short strings in the exhibition photo), participants were assigned a size of folded paper to created their work. Each edition work would compiled into collected portfolios.
Hans Peter Feldman is a German (born 1941 in Düsseldorf, Germany) visual artist known for a collecting, ordering, and representing approach to art-making. According to his wikipedia article, “In the 1960s, Feldmann studied painting at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz in Austria. He began working in 1968, producing the first of the small handmade books that would become a signature part of his work. These modest books, simply entitled Bilde (Picture) or Bilder (Pictures), would include one or more reproductions from a certain type—knees of women, shoes, chairs, film stars, etc.–their subjects isolated in their ubiquity and presented without captions.” – wiki article; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Peter_Feldmann
The ARTS 3891 students also studied the Art & Project Bulletin publication from the 1970’s. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) describes the publication with “The Art & Project Bulletin enabled the gallery to further develop artistic networks at home and abroad by allowing artists to create “exhibitions by mail” in a format not fixed to a place or time.” – https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/980
As an extension of this exhibition, the participants sent their editions works through the postal service to each other allowing the class to have documentation of the the works travels and the opportunity to have a copy of each other’s pieces. This exhibition was on view from September 30 to October 14, 2021 and was listed as a Nashville exhibition with Locate Arts, the Tennessee exhibition registry.
Repeated Patterns
November 9 – November 19, 2021
Following the bilder & bulletin exhibition, the students in the Arts 1101: Introduction to Studio Arts class, taught by Patrick DeGuia, Lecturer in Art, installed Repeated Patterns. This exhibition presents their experimentation with the cyanotype and repeated patterns of their own design.
The exhibiting artists are Gaby Acevedo, Max Guillet, Philip Gubbins, Tinah Le, Levi Makwei, Brooke Schnitzlein, Leila LeBlanc, Margot Holley, Sophia Wang, Catherine LeMaster, Frances Laven, Alex Katz.
Professor DeGuira teaches the ARTS 1101 course as part of the foundations curriculum in the Department of Art and has his students designed their patterns with paper cut by hand. The class exposed their stencils outdoors using the sunlight as their light source.
“Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotype
This exhibition was also included in the Locate Arts, Nashville registry of exhibitions.
In conjunction with their exhibition, the student will also meet with artist Caroline Allison at Zeitgiest Gallery to see and talk about her current exhibition, Behind the Moon, currently on view. Her exhibitions features some of her cyanotype works.
About the Student Gallery:
The Student Gallery is located on the first floor of the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center, home to the Vanderbilt University Department of Art. The Studio Arts Center is located in the hear of the Vanderbilt campus at 1204 25th Avenue South and nestled between the Innovation Center and the Student Life Center.
The Student Gallery offers the opportunity for hands on gallery curation and install experience for ARTS students in solo and group exhibitions. The gallery is equipped for wall mounted, floor based, video and audio works.