Art from Ephemera: February 2009

Saturday, February 28, 2009

royal mail

A former student sent this link to me, about Harriet Russell's 130 letters to herself. The article is accompanied by a half-dozen great images/examples.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

a fourth and final semester of AFE

I am way behind on updating this blog. A new (and final) semester of this class began about a month ago! I've concluded that my attempts to use this blog as a teaching tool in the past have been mostly unsuccessful, so I'm not at all requiring my current students to regularly update it. But I wanted to post a quick update in order to call your attention to a new batch of potential contributors who will hopefully, at a minimum, use this space to post links to their ongoing projects, which include "handmade" elements displayed or distributed via the Web.

About the course:

Art from Ephemera (Mail Art and the Internet) was a multi-media studio class where students explored the distribution of images and text through network systems, creating art from ephemera in the form of hand-made mail art, as mass-produced printed material, and in digital format as e-mail art and blogs. Students were introduced to strategies of visual communication traditionally associated with Dada, Fluxus, and Mail Art movements, initially looking at a range of artists from Marcel Duchamp to Henrik Drescher. Our investigation each semester progressed towards more recent approaches to these strategies that utilize digital technology and the Internet, both as a broadcast medium (one to many), as well as a system that enables new forms of emergent content (many to many). In this way, students considered the medium of the Internet from both aesthetic and conceptual perspectives. Students had the opportunity to develop their personal voice through several short individual assignments, paying particular attention to the interface of art and technology, as well as contemporary theory around access, public and social spaces, interaction, audience, and community during class critiques, slide lectures, readings, films, and special presentations.

Download a sample syllabus

About the Instructor:

Rebecca Bird Grigsby origtinally taught this course as a Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship in the Text & Image Arts area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. As an interdisciplinary artist, Grigsby's work encourages transparency and active engagement with the illusion of control and related notions of interiority and domesticity, employing unlikely materials while flipping on its head a child’s typical practice of incorporating the detritus of the adult world in their creations. Other than her own photography and printed imagery, she now works almost exclusively with recycled materials and fragments of her daily experiences as primary caregiver for her two children. She received a MFA degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University ('08), and a BA degree in Art Practice and French from the University of California at Berkeley ('02). Other teaching and related educational experiences have included working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Print & Paper, Painting, and Text & Image Arts areas at SMFA; in the Education Department at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA; with SMFA's pre-college summer studio program; in the Art Practice Department at U.C. Berkeley; and with the ArtsBridge Scholar program in Oakland, CA. Exhibitions include Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; SMFA galleries; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Francisco's Fort Mason Center; the Berkeley Art Center; and the Worth Ryder Gallery at U.C. Berkeley.

Art from Ephemera

Saturday, February 28, 2009

royal mail

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

a fourth and final semester of AFE

About this blog:

About the course:

About the Instructor:

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