Marina Abramovic. An artist’s life Manifesto
http://thestimuleye.com/2012/02/05/an-artist-should-not-make-himself-into-an-idol/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmSgui8LmcQ
Monday, April 30, 2012
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Making history by living history: Chief research archivist Judy Schiff celebrates 50 years at Yale | Working@Yale
Making history by living history: Chief research archivist Judy Schiff celebrates 50 years at Yale | Working@Yale
Schiff will be honored for her half-century of service to Yale at the Long-Service Recognition Dinner on March 31.
"Schiff soon became skilled in the cataloguing and maintenance of historic archives, including manuscripts, photographs, scrap books, daguerreotypes, paintings, movies, recordings and all manner of memorabilia."
A mutually beneficial town-gown relationship, the diplomatic mission of Yale University and its host city New Haven, has the perfect ambassador in Judy Schiff, who has strong ties and even stronger loyalties to both worlds.
Schiff, who grew up in the Westville section of New Haven and attended Sheridan Middle School and Hillhouse High School, is marking her 50th year of employment at Yale. She, along with more than 200 other long-service honorees, will be feted at the Long-Service Recognition Dinner this spring. But, as the sole 50-year honoree and someone whose contribution to Yale is unique, Schiff is in a class by herself.
For the last 40 of her 50 years at Yale, Schiff has held a single title – chief research archivist. In that capacity, she has worked on such significant Yale projects as the Tercentennial celebration, the World Special Olympics in New Haven and the archives of Charles Lindbergh and his family, one of the largest and most valuable in the Sterling Library archives. Read Full Article Here | Making history by living history:
Yale archivist to serve as city historian | Yale Daily News
Yale archivist to serve as city historian | Yale Daily News
Yale archivist to serve as city historian
Yale archivist to serve as city historian
Judith Schiff, Yale’s chief research archivist, will serve as city historian. Photo by Sharon Yin.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Mayor John DeStefano Jr. appointed Yale’s Judith Schiff as the Elm City’s official historian on Monday.
Schiff, who is currently the chief research archivist at the Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Department, will serve in the position until Dec. 31, 2013, according to a City Hall press release. At the Library, where she has worked for 52 years, Schiff specializes in Yale, New Haven and American history. Since the role of city historian is an unpaid post and has no “officially assigned” duties, according to City Hall spokeswoman Elizabeth Benton, Schiff will continue to work at Yale while serving the city.
“Judith Schiff is knowledgeable in all matters regarding New Haven history, and has consistently demonstrated a passion for New Haven’s past as well as a commitment to the betterment of its future,” DeStefano said in the press release. Read More Here | Yale Daily News
YaleNews | Archivist Judith Schiff named city historian
YaleNews | Archivist Judith Schiff named city historian
Judith Schiff
Judith Schiff, chief research archivist at Yale, has been appointed as city historian by New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr.
Schiff, who is both a lifelong New Haven resident and a longtime Yale employee, succeeds the late Richard Hegel, who served as the first city historian until his death in February.
The city historian serves as the “go to” person for questions regarding local history. The position is unpaid.
Schiff’s research focuses on Yale, New Haven, and American history. She is a founder and past president of the New England Archivists and of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven. She is widely published on matters regarding Yale and New Haven history, including the Michelin Travel Publications’ “Green Guide to Yale and New Haven,” and the chapter on the “Social History of New Haven” in “New Haven: An Illustrated History,” edited by Richard Hegel.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Petty Cash / Holiday Board Game
Materials: 11x17" standard paper stock, kroy type setting, photocopy
This work was designed for use (by the staff) at the Arts Council Staff and Board 198? Holiday Party . The party took place in the original Arts Council offices in the basement of the Foundry Building on Whitney Avenue, New Haven, Connecticut.
This was by far one of favorite pieces as it satisfied many issues for me. It was playful and sharp in its willingness to address real issues. It was personal and played on many issues that existed in the Arts Council Organization at the time. I am typing this many years after the fact but I can still read each of the coupons and remember what I was thinking at the time.
The fact that I refer to this piece as a "board" game is the first and obvious pun. Each of the items on the board were coordinated with a coupon. The "boards" (posters) were printed in a heavier stock and taped up on the walls of the office as party decorations. When the board members arrived at the party, they each received a plastic packet which contained the board cut up into coupons. On the back of the coupon there was a hand (photocopied) printed explanation of the specifics related to each of the coupons. Each coupon represented some type of issue that existed between the staff and the board members.
The game was a playful but honest confrontation of the tensions between the board and staff members. One example would be the "misspelled" coupon. One of the things the Arts Council did at that time was publish the monthly Arts Calendar. It seemed that someone's name was mispelled each month. This was a constant source of annoyance to the board and there would be constant complaints from the board to the executive director and then to the staff. As a way to create a playful acknowlegement that this was a problem. this coupon gave the board members the choice of which month they wanted their name misspelled.
Only the board members got the coupon packets and so it was a gift to them from the staff.
Cultural Translation was a special offer for a language lesson from Bob Aiudi, who was a polyglott. There was some twist to, but I will have to look at the offer to refresh my memory.
Win was a raffle. In this case I purchased a cake at my favorite grocery store Walbaums. It was of particularly low quality but most likely overly decorated for the holiday season.
Staff Chance | this coupon was a particularly meaningful one, as it gave the board member the opportunity to complain directly to one staff member. Unfortunately the coupon's expiration date was the day before the party.
Current Comment: I always loved this piece and even now as I describe it, I can re-appreciate how much I was putting together and putting things out. I was learning about non profits and in particular policy and operations. This was a very exciting time for me and I was eager to learn as much as I could. It is worth noting that I was a board member in this organization before I became a staff member. I actually liked many of the board members and was poking fun at both the system and our own shortcomings as both board members and staff members. To this purpose each of the coupons created for the board game and given to the board members were directed at issues that we as staff members were dealing with in some way. In the end it was a lot of fun for all of us staff members to work on it and it was cutting edge enough to make it both meaningful and fun. To this day.. I become animated when I have a chance to discuss and handle this work.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Misc. Flatwork
This is a group is flatworks. The front piece is one of my earlier photo-montages. It is Clare's birth and homecoming. The painting behind it is a painting from a class taken in Madison as an effort to bring myself back to the work after and extended disconnect related to my mother's illness and all my domestic responsibilities. The tall piece just behind it is one of my first and only poster layouts done for EAGLE SCHOOL. I was quite excited about being able to design that piece on photoshop and have it professionally printed. A number of them sold to the parents and a large poster was printed by Cory Muir for the school. As far as I know it is still hangs there. The poster itself was of paintings of volcanoes done by the kindegarten, known at the school as the nest. The poster was created by taken digital photographs of each child's painting. This project brought me back to my democratic values of the importance of all creative efforts. I may have been inspired to take this on after engaging in the repeated selection process for the auction posters. The auction posters were one of the ways that I offered my skills to the school as a volunteer.
"Waste 'M Brace" boxed items
The box pictured here contains artifacts from the exhibition. What you see on the top is the invitation to the show. There is a wonderful story about this exhibtion. There are some pieces written about the show in this box along with multiple reviews of it and maybe I will try to recall and type it and assorted artifacts from the exhibition. I hesitate to take this too much further right now.. but maybe I will indulge myself. I would like to start scanning these documents and commenting on the various individual pieces.
This process of photographing the current studio space and its contents is making it possible for me to begin to find my way into the work. It is giving me a chance to see the space and its contents as a whole and some practice thinking about the work.
Milwaukee House Studio/Storage Contents
This photograph documents a variety of artifacts. It includes the time based digital projections done for several years around 2005. These digital works were projected in in NYC at the Jonathan Shorr Gallery as part of a number of events that I participated in there. It was an exciting time and I truly enjoyed learning how to create these digital works and making them. The very first one was accepted at a show in New Haven, Ct and then became part of an online exhibition. If I find that link.. I will add it to this post. Link to Digital Decorating on Popping Pixels site
In the far corner of this space is a stack of assorted containers. these boxes and containers hold VHS video documents as well as slides from a number of shows. The Red plastic covered box next to the digital works is the actual box used at the "Bureacratic Birthday Cake". The red plastic that surrounds the box was the plastic used to create the maze. The box now holds many of the forms.. which I have packaged to preserve them.
The white bookcase behind the boxes is a space that I use to both store things and to sort. Right now there appear to be some binders and a printing materials on the shelves.
In a effort to preserve the many documents that I collected over the years I recently took them out of plastic tubs and cardboard boxes and placed them in heavy vinyl plastic bags. These bags were left over from the family business and I was fortunate to have so many of them to use. It reminds me to the early bags which I was given by my mother which became a staple of my studio work. The first formal piece in which I used small plastic bags was "Collect All Six". Now that I think about it.. the "FOURPACK" created for the First Show of 1984 was packaged in a small plastic bag. There is a strong theme of the use of plastic bags in my work since the middle of the 1980's.
The binders seen in the bottom half of this photo were an extension of earlier versions of document books which were solely my art work. these binders contained plastic sleeves and were used to organize assorted fragments of the work. I built these books at the time to use as documentation for the various projects I was working on and so at the end of a period of time... I had a volume which documented things in a fairly detailed way.
The binders shown here are photos albums. I found myself exploring the commercially available photo albums as a way to explore personal time and photos. the sticky nature of these volumes allowed me to begin to explore cutting and rearranging photographs. In the early 1990's after the birth of my third child... I began a body of work which I referred to then and continue to refer to now as "Dismembered Family".
Although I have not looked at these exact albums... I am going to guess they are part of that work. I found it necessary to photograph my reality extensively and to review the photos and then to begin to cut them apart. The ability to stop and examine time was a critically important practice for me as I became more and more deliberate in developing myself as a caretaker, provider and lover of my children. I found that I needed to think about them and to spend time with them and this endless time left me in a state of sensory overwhelm. the photographs helped me to slow things down and gave me time to visually examine reality.
This project started while still living in New Haven Ct. It developed fully during teh first year living at the farmhouse in Highland, Wis. My memories are of the walls of my bedroom being covered with photos of the children, Mike and the new and exotic farm landscapes. I used artists tape to adhere these photos to the walls and a simple sissors to start cutting them up.
The cutting was a random process. It was hard to cut the photos, especially the ones I really liked. I started to cut the ones that I considered to be weak in some way. I would turn them over and sometimes fold them in half and then in quarters and cut them not looking at the front of the image. Then I would turn them over and start to rearrange them until something new happened. I liked that I was only using a siszors and tape and or a glue stick. I needed to keep it very simple and very tactile.
This was still the time of film for me and I would take the rolls of film to the grocery store and order doubles and the larger of the prints... the 5x7 inche prints. I think I experimented with the glossy and the matt finishes.
Before this work there are a number of photomontages of the family. these were very different in that they were large sheets of paper.. I am going to say 11 x 17 with many uncut photos all arranged and then photocopied. I would use these to send to people but still mostly they were my own way of marking time. they were my own way of understanding what was happening.
The mothering work was an enormous task for me. I had a hard time processing everything. I had a hard time putting it all together. this got worse with my marriage to Mike and our two children. the bar was set high and I was confused and struggling to make sense of my domestic life.
The challenge was so enormous that I just keep it going. I held on with a thread and keep fighting to recover some sense of my self. that is what ultimately led to the move to Wisconsin but I know that the seeds of this move were planted long before and it was in its own way a critically deep dream. I wanted to leave the east coast. I wanted to leave the elitistally saturated community. I need to leave and my personal situation was making it more and more necessary.
I am jumping ahead a bit.. but that is fine and even wonderful. the bottomline is that these books in their cheap commodity culture patterns hold for me the moments that when added up create visual information about how I worked to understand who i was and what was happening to me.
Moving UP&OUT
I have been thinking about this project for a long time. The time has come to dig out of this basement space and to bring the work out into the light. When I come down here... I become overwhelmed with all the documents and the lack of natural light and space. I know that the first step is the hardest. There will be on final resting space for understanding how this became my life... but that is not the goal of this project. It is time to collect myself. It is time to put things together and to take things apart at the same time.
It is time to create digital files and ways to organize myself on line as well as in physical space. I hesitate to type too much right now.. but if the verbal spewing helps to open me up to the the chaos I am embarking upon... then let that be the medium and the process of... SPEW begin.
I will use this space to explore the physical reality along with the psychological and emotional reality. I am going to give myself full freedom to be messy and irregular. There is no schedule and for the most part no artificial goals or desired outcomes right now. I am not opposed to results... but results are not my goal. the work is the goal. In that way I would like the work/process to be an organically connected and disconnected experience. I want to be open to the flow and to the frustration. I want to witness the resistance and the flow of the EFFORT.
The overall purpose and goal of this project is to help create and sustain personal and creative momentum. Change and movement are necessary to me and I want to strengthen my "CHANGING" habit.
I want to stress that I am creating this blog space for me. It is a tool and a media that I plan to use as a place to express myself as a means to support my own EFFORTS to rekindle my studio practice. My instincts are strong to do this and I feel that my personal liberation depends on me doing this work. If I find that idea changes... I will alter the course of the project.
I plan to start this blog in a very simple and provisional way. I will post images and add my experiences of the photos that will allow me to awaken my memories which will should ultimately lead to new connections.
The simple explanation for this work is the desire as an artist and now student of art history I appreciate the importance of my own voice being clearly inserted into the this body of work.
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