From Concrete Cowboys to Antarctic Robots: True adventures with author/explorer G. Neri
G. NERI: ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture
Sponsored by The Richard & Julia Rush Endowment
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College
Thursday, February 1st – 6:00pm (doors)/6:30-8:00pm lecture and Q. & A.
Free and Open to the Public
Florida Southwestern State College is pleased to announce renowned American author G. NERI’s ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture/presentation “From Concrete Cowboys to Antarctic Robots: True adventures with author/explorer G. Neri” at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on Thursday, February 1, 2024 at 6:30pm. Now completing his twentieth book, according to the author: “I am a storyteller, filmmaker, artist, and digital media producer. I write novels, graphic novels, free verse poetry, non-fiction picture books and comics. These books cover ages 7 – 18 and beyond. They can be about my true adventures in Antarctica, the Black urban cowboys of Philadelphia, the fragile gang life in the Southside of Chicago, the intertwined history of space and civil rights, or creative heroes like Johnny Cash, Harper Lee or Christo.”
Neri is the Michael L. Printz and Coretta Scott King award-winning author of such books as the bestselling Yummy: the Last Days of a Southside Shorty and Ghetto Cowboy, which was made into the Netflix movie, Concrete Cowboy, starring Idris Elba. His books have been translated into multiple languages in over 25 countries. They include “My Antarctica”, “Safe Passage”, The Collectors, Tru & Nelle, Grand Theft Horse, Christo and Jeanne-Claude Wrap the World, Hello, I’m Johnny Cash, and Chess Rumble. In 2017, he was awarded the first of two National Science Foundation grants that sent him to Antarctica; he is currently co-chair of the Antarctic Artists and Writers Collective. In 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from SUNY for his literary and Antarctic output.
As Neri continues: “When I was in college, I made an animated film with jazz legend Chick Corea called ‘A Picasso on the Beach’, which became a student Academy Award finalist and aired on HBO and Bravo for seven years. After that, I decided to become a filmmaker for real, and I wrote, produced, and directed my first independent feature film… In 1999, I started writing and illustrating for kids, but it wasn’t until I started writing for teens around 2004 that things started to happen… My books brought me back around to movies again with Concrete Cowboys and Dinosaurs of Antarctica.”
Sponsored by The Richard & Julia Rush Endowment in celebration of Black History Month and our on-going “Purvis YOUNG: Honey in the Sky” exhibition, this special, one-time-only ArtSPEAK@FSW event is FREE and Open to the Public. Seating is limited and first-come, so doors will open at 6pm for the 6:30pm event.
Bob LEWIS on The De-Evolution Band: ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture & Q. & A. event
Sponsored by The Richard & Julia Rush Endowment
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College
Thursday, November 9th – 6:30pm (doors)/7-8:30pm lecture/reading and Q. & A. with Bob Rauschenberg Gallery Director Jade Dellinger
Free and Open to the Public
Florida Southwestern State College is delighted to present DEVO co-founder (and original bandmember) Bob LEWIS for a Richard & Julia Rush Endowed ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture/reading and Q. & A. event in conjunction with our “DEVO 5-0: The Beginning was the End – A Fiftieth Anniversary Tribute to The De-Evolution Band” exhibition at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. Reading his latest poem, “Reflections in Mark Mothersbaugh’s EYE” (to be published in a forthcoming monograph by/about the DEVO frontman), Bob Lewis will provide context and answer questions about the seminal band he helped to conceive more than five decades ago.
Born in Akron, Ohio in 1947, Robert “Bob” Lewis is an American poet, composer and musician – best known as co-founder and early guitarist for DEVO. Having played basketball briefly for coach Bobby Knight at Cuyahoga Falls High School, Bob Lewis was a National Merit Scholar and became the first student to receive a degree in Anthropology from Kent State University. Deeply engaged in poetics as well, he was mentored at Kent State as a writer and became life-long friends with renowned Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, British poet (and Beat scholar) Eric Mottram and Robert Bertholf, an English professor (who was later named Curator of the Poetry Collection and Charles D. Abbott Scholar-in-Residence at the University at Buffalo/SUNY). His poetry was published at that time in Creedences, Shelley’s and in the Poetry Review. He released a book of poetry titled “Viscerally” in 1977, and while working as a consultant in Damascus, Syria in the 1980’s, Bob Lewis served as Middle East Correspondent for “Rolling Stock” magazine, published by Ed and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn.
Starting in 1970 in direct response to the senseless murder of four fellow students by the National Guard at an anti-war protest on the K.S.U. campus on May 4th, Bob Lewis and Gerald Casale began exploring the theme of de-evolution. They were joined by Peter Gregg the following year in recording three proto-Devo songs—”I Been Refused”, “I Need a Chick” and “Auto Modown”—on primitive equipment in an apartment located over Guido’s Pizza Shop in Kent, Ohio. In 1972, Lewis and Casale published seminal tracts on de-evolution for the now-defunct Los Angeles-based newspaper, The Staff. And, in 1973, they formed the band DEVO with Mark Mothersbaugh and made their debut performing at the K.S.U. Creative Arts Festival as the Sextet Devo.
As always, this ArtSPEAK@FSW concert-event sponsored by the Richard & Julia Rush Endowment is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Seating is limited and available on a “first come”-basis, so doors will open at 6:30pm for this 7pm special “one-night-only” public performance.
Jaap BLONK: ArtSPEAK@FSW poetry performance/event
Sponsored by The Richard & Julia Rush Endowment
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College
Friday, October 27th – 6:30pm (doors)/7-8:30pm performance
Free and Open to the Public
Florida Southwestern State College is delighted to present internationally-acclaimed sound poet, musician and improvisational performer Jaap Blonk for a Richard & Julia Rush Endowed ArtSPEAK@FSW spoken-word/concert-event in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. Often described as the Netherlands’ performance poet “par excellence” and widely-acknowledged as sound poetry’s chief representative, before the term “performance poetry” was coined or the advent and popularity of so-called poetry slams, there was Jaap Blonk. Employing every register of the human voice, Blonk succeeds in dissolving the boundaries between poetry and music, and promises an unforgettable experience for all in attendance at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW on Friday, October 27th at 7pm (doors at 6:30pm).
Born 1953 in Woerden, Netherlands, Jaap Blonk is a self-taught composer, vocalist, poet and visual artist who has toured and performed on every continent. His unfinished university studies in physics, mathematics and musicology, as well as, a series of unfulfilling and unsuccessful office jobs inspired his penchant for activities in a Dadaist vein. In the early 1980s, he discovered the power and flexibility of his own vocal range, and set out on a decades-long quest to research phonetics and the expanded possibilities of the human voice. Over time, he has developed into a specialist in the creation and performance of sound poetry and become a unique vocal improviser, supported by a powerful and uninhibited stage presence. With the use of live electronics, the scope and range of his concerts have been considerably extended. To date, Blonk’s music has appeared on 30 CDs with his own Kontrans label, as well as, many other recordings and a dozen books with his visual work published in several countries. He performs and gives workshops worldwide on a regular basis, but this performance at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery will mark his Fort Myers/Southwest Florida debut.
As always, this ArtSPEAK@FSW concert-event sponsored by the Richard & Julia Rush Endowment is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Seating is limited and available on a “first come”-basis, so doors will open at 6:30pm for this 7pm special “one-night-only” public performance.
David GIFFELS on The Beginning was the End: ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture & book launch event
Sponsored by The Richard & Julia Rush Endowment
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College
Saturday, October 14th – 6:30pm (doors)/7-8:30pm lecture/reading and Q. & A.
Moderated by FSW Humanities Professor Dr. Elijah Pritchett in dialogue with co-authors David Giffels & Bob Rauschenberg Gallery Director Jade Dellinger
Free and Open to the Public
Florida Southwestern State College is pleased to host renowned author David Giffels for a Richard & Julia Rush Endowed ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture and book launch event in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. Reading from and discussing his latest publication, “The Beginning was the End: DEVO in Ohio” (The University of Akron Press, October 2023) with co-author and Bob Rauschenberg Gallery director Jade Dellinger, this first official launch event for their new book will be moderated by FSW Humanities Professor Dr. Elijah Pritchett in the context of the “DEVO 5-0: The Beginning was the End – A Fiftieth Anniversary Tribute to The De-Evolution Band” exhibition.
Co-author, with Steve Love, of “Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron”, and, with Jade Dellinger, of “Are We Not Men? We Are DEVO!” (SAF Publishing Ltd./UK 2003/2008) – the first-ever book about this seminal band, David Giffels is a former Akron Beacon Journal columnist and writer for the much-beloved MTV series “Beavis and Butt-Head”. He has been published in The New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic.com, Parade, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire.com, amongst many others. He has written seven books of nonfiction, including the critically acclaimed memoirs, “All the Way Home” (William Morrow/HarperCollins 2008), winner of the Ohioana Book Award, and “Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life”, published by Scribner in 2018 – a book hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “tender, witty and … painstakingly and subtly wrought,” and by Kirkus Reviews as “a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and son.” Also, a Book of the Month pick by Amazon and Powell’s and, like his celebrated “The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches From the Rust Belt” (Scribner 2014), both were New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” selections. Additionally, David Giffels is a professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches creative nonfiction in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program.
This special ArtSPEAK@FSW event sponsored by the Richard & Julia Rush Endowment is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Robert MARGOULEFF on DEVO’s Freedom of Choice: ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture
Sponsored by The Richard & Julia Rush Endowment
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College
Friday, September 29th – 6:30pm (doors)/7-8:30pm lecture and Q. & A.
Florida Southwestern State College is delighted to present Grammy Award-winning record producer/engineer and electronic music pioneer Robert Margouleff for a Richard & Julia Rush Endowed ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture and Q. & A. in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery.
A colleague and friend of synthesizer/instrument inventor Robert Moog, Robert Margouleff was also an early creative resource for Andy Warhol’s “factory” and co-producer of “Ciao! Manhattan” (1972), the cult classic film and semi-autobiographical tale of 1960s counterculture actress, socialite and “Warhol superstar” Edie Sedgwick. Margouleff had purchased a Moog Series IIIc in 1968 and became friends with the renowned bassist Malcolm Cecil, who had approached him to learn more about this synthesizer. In exchange for Cecil teaching Margouleff how to use the recording console, Margouleff taught Cecil how to use the Moog. And, within the year, the duo set out to build the largest synthesizer in the world and jointly formed a group known as TONTO’s Expanding Head Band, through which they explored the nearly unlimited capabilities of their machine. They recorded the album Zero Time (1971), attracting attention from many other leading artists of that era to the newly emerging music technology. Robert Margouleff and Cecil then worked with Stevie Wonder on a string of award-winning albums, including Music of My Mind (1972), Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973) and Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974), all of which featured the duo as associate producers, engineers and synthesizer programmers. Culminating in a Best Engineered Album Grammy for Innervisions (shared with Malcolm Cecil,) Margouleff’s producer/ engineer other credits include work with Quincy Jones, Stephen Stills, Jeff Beck, Weather Report, the Doobie Brothers, Joan Baez, Depeche Mode, Oingo Boingo and DEVO.
In 1980, Margouleff produced DEVO’s Freedom of Choice album which included the song “Whip It’ and earned the band their RIAA platinum record award/designation. On working with Robert Margouleff, DEVO’s co-founder and principal songwriter Gerald Casale said, “He just brought the right kind of tone and energy to the fact that we [were] using mini-Moogs.” In an interview for Rhino Records, Casale described how DEVO’s demos for the album, which featured extensive usage of the Moog Bass, convinced Margouleff to work with them.
This special ArtSPEAK@FSW event sponsored by the Richard & Julia Rush Endowment is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Record producer speaks at FSW gallery – Florida Weekly (September 27, 2023)
Lonnie HOLLEY: An ArtSPEAK@FSW Conversation & Concert Event
Sponsored by The Richard & Julia Rush Endowment
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College
Wednesday, September 6th – 6:30pm (doors)/7-8:45pm performance
Free and Open to the Public
Florida Southwestern State College is honored to present internationally-acclaimed musician and renowned visual artist Lonnie Holley for a Richard & Julia Rush Endowed ArtSPEAK@FSW conversation and improvisational concert-event in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. Subject of the recent documentary film “Thumbs Up for Mother Universe: Stories from the Life of Lonnie Holley”, a feature article in “The New York Times” < https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/arts/design/lonnie-holley.html > and a major solo exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art/North Miami, Lonnie Holley is a national treasure with a deep interest in and respect for our gallery namesake. Rather profoundly inspired by his month-long residency at Bob Rauschenberg’s Captiva Island compound (at the invitation of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation) almost a decade ago, Holley will return to Southwest Florida for the first time since 2014 for this special “one-night-only” public performance.
Born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, Lonnie Holley was one of 27 children. Stolen as an infant and sold for a pint of booze, from the age of five, he worked various jobs, lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic, and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood. Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. His visual art is now in the collections of major museums throughout the country, on permanent display in the United Nations, and has been featured in the White House Rose Garden. The main subject in the new podcast “Unreformed”, which chronicles the inhuman conditions and abusive treatment suffered at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in the 1950s and ’60s, Lonnie Holley has also recently released his “Jagjauwar” album (with musical collaborators including R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe).
This special ArtSPEAK@FSW concert-event sponsored by the Richard & Julia Rush Endowment is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
ArtSPEAK@FSW Concert: TATSUYA NAKATANI & The Nakatani Gong Orchestra
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW
Friday, March 3rd, 2023– 6:30pm (doors)/7-8:45pm performance
Florida Southwestern State College is pleased to present internationally-acclaimed avant-garde percussionist, composer and sound artist, Tatsuya Nakatani & The Nakatani Gong Orchestra for a special “one-night-only” ArtSPEAK@FSW concert-event in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. Performing worldwide since the 1990s, Nakatani-san has released over 80 recordings and toured extensively, often performing 150 concerts or more per year. Celebrated for his solo work as an improvisor and experimental musician, he also has a long history of collaboration – including his large ensemble project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. Teaching master classes and giving lectures at universities and music conservatories around the world, Mr. Nakatani is originally from Japan, but now makes his home in the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Nakatani’s distinctive music is centered around his adapted bowed gong, supported by an array of drums, cymbals, and singing bowls. In consort with his personally hand-carved Kobo Bows, he has spent decades refining and developing his sound as an arrangement of formations of vibrations, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can still recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in traditional Japanese music. According to the artist-composer: “Ma is an important part of my relationship to sound. Ma is an idea – meaning space, distance, air, feelings, and things in between…” As Nakatani continues, “It is the silence between the notes which make the music.”
The NAKATANI GONG ORCHESTRA – NGO – is a nomadic, large ensemble contemporary sound art project. Local musicians are trained in Nakatani’s technique for playing his adapted bowed Gong, and he conducts them in a performance of his original compositions. In the last decade, the NGO has performed hundreds of concerts involving thousands of participants around the world in the creation of these transformative sound works. At the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, fourteen local volunteers (FSW students, faculty – as well as, community members – trained musicians and “non-musicians” alike) will perform on seventeen Chinese wind gongs of various sizes under the instruction of and following a solo set by Mr. Nakatani.
This special ArtSPEAK@FSW concert-event is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Chuck STATLER shows+tells The Truth About De-Evolution:
Premiering an “All DEVO” program of “newly restored” music videos and early pre-MTV films.
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery
Florida Southwestern State College
Thursday, February 23, 2023
6 – 8pm Screening + Q.&A. with the director
A pioneer who directed music films for upstart record labels and emerging superstars like Elvis Costello, Madness, and DEVO before MTV’s existence, Chuck Statler has earned his moniker as the godfather of music video. Minneapolis-based but Akron, Ohio-born-and-bred, Statler met fellow art students Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale—the nucleus of DEVO—at Kent State University in the early 1970s. They soon began collaborating on the music films that would become a hallmark of DEVO’s act. Not long after, Stiff, Blank, ZE Records, and other maverick New Wave labels commissioned Statler to produce films for their artists. Music videos (aka short band films), traced from the budding European “pop clip” business of the 1960s, were used by record labels in America and Europe to promote new talent. Already friendly with many New Wave artists and skilled in 16mm film production, Statler had found his niche. Career highlights and a retrospective screening at the Museum of Modern Art/NYC in 2006 featured his films with Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe, Madness, Suicide Commandos, and post-MTV clips including music by Pere Ubu, The Moldy Peaches, and The Wipeouters. The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW is delighted to host the director as he premieres an “All DEVO” program of “newly restored” music video and early pre-MTV films from 6-8pm on Thursday, February 23rd, 2023.
Following the screening, the audience will be invited to participate in a Q.&A. with Chuck Statler and Jade Dellinger, Director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery and co-author of the first ever book tracing the history of the seminal band Are We Not Men? We are DEVO! (SAF Publishing Ltd./UK 2003/2008).
ArtSPEAK@FSW performance/event
with The Go-Go’s co-founder and Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famer Jane Wiedlin
Thursday, January 16th, 2020 – 6-8pm.
Surveying more than two decades of drawings, designs for concert flyers to comics/zines and large-scale art objects, Beatriz MONTEAVARO: VACATION at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is an immersive installation that takes its title and inspiration from the 1982 Billboard Top 10-charting single and RIAA Gold-certified studio album of the same name by seminal “all-female” Punk/New Wave group, The Go-Go’s. The heroines of several adventurous and densely-drawn narratives included in the exhibition, The Go-Go’s are recurring characters in the work of Beatriz Monteavaro and provided early inspiration for the artist and four of her teenage friends to pay tribute to the band by dressing-up as the band for a Halloween show in the 1980’s. Fulfilling a childhood dream and literally coaxing one frequent subject of Monteavaro’s art to life, the Rauschenberg Gallery is pleased to welcome The Go-Go’s co-founder and Rock n’Roll Hall of Famer Jane Wiedlin for an appearance at the opening reception for this major survey exhibition and a one-night-only ArtSPEAK@FSW performance/event.
TRANSHUMAN ART CRITICS (Featuring Emil Schult and collaborator Emma Nilsson)
Friday, July 19th,2019 at 7pm – ArtSPEAK@FSW Concert/Event with TRANSHUMAN ART CRITICS (Featuring Emil Schult and collaborator Emma Nilsson) performing a newly-commissioned work dedicated to John Cage, and the premiere of Allan McCollum’s “Symphony for John Cage (and the Hearing Impaired)” and Philip Corner’s “Out of John’s CAGE” (2019) at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW.
Fort Myers, FL: The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is delighted to announce the return of internationally-acclaimed Düsseldorf-based visual artist, musician and composer Emil Schult to present a special “one-night-only” ArtSPEAK@FSW concert event with collaborator Emma Nilsson as TRANSHUMAN ART CRITICS on Friday, July 19th at 7pm. Formed in 2017, the TRANSHUMAN ART CRITICS duo of Schult and Nilsson will premiere newly-commissioned work in honor of John Cage. Providing attendees an opportunity to celebrate our “John CAGE: STEPS & Other Works from the Mountain Lake Workshop” exhibition (before it closes on July 27th), this multi-media/electronic music program will also feature the world premiere of celebrated NYC artist Allan McCollum’s “Symphony for John Cage (and the Hearing Impaired)” and the U.S. premiere of Fluxus pioneer Philip Corner’s “Out of John’s CAGE”.
A master student of Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth at the KunstAkademie/Düsseldorf in the early 1970’s, Emil Schult is perhaps best known for his collaborations with the legendary Teutonic electronic/pop band Kraftwerk. Most conspicuously contributing artwork for the staging of tours and album covers (including Autobahn and Radioactivity), Schult also provided lyrics for numerous songs – including “The Model” (a track featured on the band’s seminal The Man-Machine record). With recent “retrospectives” at both the Museum of Modern Art/MoMA in New York City and the Tate Modern in London – plus, a 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy’s, the cultural impact, broad visual and musical influence ofKraftwerk can scarcely be overstated.
As a visual artist Emil Schult has exhibited his work in galleries and museums internationally for decades. In conjunction with the 2012 Bob Rauschenberg Gallery exhibition “Things Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage” (which then travelled in expanded form to the National Gallery of Art/Tbilisi, Georgia), Schult was commissioned to paint a portrait of the late composer John Cage and to select records for our “John Cage’s 33-1/3 – Performed by Audience” installation.
Emma Nilsson composes sound installations and has DJ’ed in numerous museums and galleries including the SMAK Ghent, Museum der Dinge Berlin, Kunsthaus Zürich und Theater Hebbel am Ufer Berlin. She has participated in performances and artist films by Ellen Cantor, Yorgos Sapountzis, Michael Riedel, Maija Timonen. A contributing writer of numerous publications (eg on Emil Schult) and artist books, Emma Nilsson co-founded TRANSHUMAN ART CRITICS and has recently performed together with Emil Schult at the Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, Italy; 1905 Art Center, Shenyang; International Art Museum, Zhang Zhou, China; Reading Fringe Festival, UK and elsewhere.
This FREE event was generously supported by Bob Rauschenberg Gallery friend and docent Darilyn Alderman and with a grant from The Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel.
CHIP LORD (of Ant Farm) & SEAN MILLER Artists Talk about Drifting Cabinets & screening of “Miami Beach Elegy”
(In conjunction with their Drifting Cabinets “pop-up” exhibition)
Thursday, February 7, 2019
Fort Myers, FL: Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to present internationally-renowned artists CHIP LORD (of Ant Farm) & SEAN MILLER (of JEMA) for a special ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture, screening of “Miami Beach Elegy,” and Drifting Cabinets “pop-up” exhibition on Thursday, February 7, 2019 with the Artists talk: 6 – 7:30 pm and Drifting Cabinets “pop-up” exhibition 10AM -8PM.
Chip Lord grew up in 1950’s America, a place that has been a sometimes source of inspiration in his work as an artist. Trained as an architect, he was a founding partner of Ant Farm, with whom he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the public sculpture, Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo Texas, and the House of the Century, outside Houston.
His work crosses documentary and experimental boundaries and moves between video, photography and installation. He often collaborates with other artists. Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule], a collaboration with Curtis Schreier and Bruce Tomb, revisits Ant Farm’s 1970 Media Van and brings it into the 21st Century. The installation posits a “post-internal combustion vehicle’ as a space for networking around a “Media Huqquh” and in the process creates a digital time capsule. An abiding interest in the complex culture of transportation systems inspired The Executive Air Traveler, 1980, a photo series; Airspaces, 2000 – 2011 and To & From LAX, a public video installation. Lord authored Automerica for E.P. Dutton (1976) and the car as subject also “drives” MOTORIST, Road Movie, and The New Cars, 2012.
Chip Lord’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the FRAC Centre, the Pompidou Centre, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film & Digital Media, U.C. Santa Cruz, and lives in San Francisco.
The founder and director of JEMA and subject of a retrospective at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in 2014, Sean Miller is a Florida-based artist/curator and an Assistant Professor at University of Florida with the School of Art and Art History and views the John Erickson Museum of Art as a generative art work.
Acording to Kerry Oliver-Smith, former Curator of Contemporary Art at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art/University of Florida, “Sean Miller’s remarkable JEMA project upends conventional ideas of the museum, artist and curator. He reinvents the museum by creating a series of miniature and mobile museums that occupy new realms of critical and literal space from site-specific sculpture and installation space to performance and web-based project. Each museum features a different artist and from there the project expands.”
Critically-acclaimed, Sean Miller’s work has received international coverage in broadcast, TV, film and print including: The New York Times, CBS News, The Nation, Baltimore Sun, LA Weekly, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami New Times, Irish Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, ArtStar (episode “Six in the City”/Reality Television), Gallery HD, Dish Network (2008), Oddities (Season 2, episode “The Horaffe”)Science Channel,and the documentary film How to Start Your Own Country, directed by Jody Shapiro.
Chip Lord had a solo exhibition in the context of “ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective” at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, and collaborates once again with Sean Miller as a contributor to Drifting Cabinets.
MARK HOSLER (of Negativland): Slow Motion Solo Tour of the U.S.A.
Saturday, January 26th at 7pm
with Opening support by Sonic Combine & a “Paper Grotto” installation by Lily Hatchett.
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that MARK HOSLER, founding member of the celebrated American audio-visual collage group Negativland, will be presenting an ArtSPEAK@FSW experimental sound concert/event on Saturday, January 26th beginning at 7pm as a part of his six-leg “Slow Motion Solo Tour of the USA.”
Since 1980 Negativland has been creating records, video, visual artworks, radio, and live performance, using appropriated sound, image, and text. The group famously flouted music-biz norms and copyright law during its early days which resulted in lawsuits for its U2 EP. “Declared heroic by their peers for refashioning culture into what the group considers to be more honest statements,” according to The New York Times, “Negativland suggests that refusing to be original, in the traditional sense, is the only way to make art that has any depth within commodity capitalism…”
Marking his triumphant return to Southwest Florida (having previously presented his keynote ‘Adventures in Illegal Art’ in conjunction with FSW’s 2016 Humanities Colloquium), Mr. Hosler takes a break from his Negativland duties to perform solo using a performance set-up built around various homemade one-of-a-kind electronic noise-making devices. Sometimes sounding like alien electronic insects fighting each other, the instruments create a non-linear dynamic “living” system of sound. According to Bob Rauschenberg Gallery Director, Jade Dellinger, “For this special one-night-only ArtSPEAK@FSW concert event, a ‘Paper Grotto’ installation and multi-media/’live art’ performance by artist Lily Hatchett and Bob Rauschenberg Gallery ‘house-band’ Sonic Combine (featuring Kat Epple, Laury Getford and Lawrence Voytek) will open the show and provide support.”
“Arguably the preeminent audio collage collective of our time,” according to HI FRUCTOSE Magazine. In addition to live shows, CDs, radio shows, books, DVDs and visual art shows both solo and with Negativland, Mark Hosler has given over 100 lectures at institutions including MIT, Yale, Princeton, Duke University, New York University, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley UCLA, Seattle University School of Law, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Universities of Arizona, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina; at various venues in Washington D.C, New York City, London, Rome, Berlin, Barcelona, Lisbon, Bologna, Lausanne, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Toronto, Vancouver, Honolulu, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia; and, as a citizen lobbyist on art issues and copyright law to various Senators and Congressmen on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.
David Amram: Lecture/Performance
In conjunction with Jack KEROUAC & Ed RUSCHA: On the Road exhibition.
Friday, June 29th at 7 pm – 9 pm
Performance by legendary Kerouac collaborator David Amram (with friends Ronny Elliott and Pamela Epps).
This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Stanton Storer Embrace the Arts Foundation and The Beaches of Fort Myers and Sanibel, and with essential loans from Jim S. Irsay, Ed Ruscha and Gagosian Gallery.
Geoffrey Hendricks: Lecture/ Performance
In conjunction with FluZUsic/FLUXUS MUSIC exhibition.
Saturday, November 11th, 2017 at 1pm
Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to host Fluxus pioneer Geoffrey HENDRICKS in conversation with
Sur Rodney Sur on Saturday, November 11th at 1pm in conjunction with our FluZUsic/FLUXUS MUSeIC exhibition.
Maria Chavez with Daniel Neumann: Lecture/ Turntablism performance
In conjunction with FluZUsic/FLUXUS MUSIC exhibition.
August 28th at 2pm, 2017
Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to host a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency Program Outreach event with internationally-renowned visiting sound artist Maria Chavez at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on Monday, August 28th at 2pm – rain or shine.
Maria Chavez is primarily known as an abstract turntablist, where she improvises with a turntable and a DJ mixer to create live sound “vibration” sculpture pieces with broken records and needles. As a sound artist, she focuses on creating site-specific or site-sensitive multi-channel sound installations. Accident, coincidence, and failure are themes that unite her sound sculptures, installations, and other works with her solo turntable performance practice. Chavez is based in Brooklyn.
According to Maria Chavez: “Very excited to meet the students at Florida SouthWestern State College this afternoon at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW w/ Daniel Neumann. Daniel and I will be talking about how we use spatial sound art practices in our installations followed by a 4.1 solo turntablism performance. It’s my last week here at Bob’s estate as a Rauschenberg fellow and all I can say is: unforgettable.”
This event is free and open to the public. Our thanks to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Rauschenberg Residency for organizing and supporting this event.
The Music of ALVIN LUCIER with the String Noise Duo
In conjunction with ANN HAMILTON: PHORA exhibition.
February 2nd at 7pm, 2017
Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma. Much of his work is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media.
String Noise is an “enterprising violin duo” in NYC. Classical avant-garde violinists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim, who are married, have expanded the two violin repertoire to include over 50 works written for them since their debut at Ostrava Days in 2011.
String Noise was highlighted in Performa 2011 and was the featured ensemble for the launch of composers collective Index 1. Premieres include works by Christian Wolff, Elizabeth Hoffman, John King, Phill Niblock, Calbe Burhans, David Lang, John Zorn and Alvin Lucier. String Noise has performed at Issue Project Room, Roulette, EXAPNO, Rockwood Music Hall and the Stone and has been heard on WNYC and WKCR.
This event is open to the public, free of charge.
Dan CAMERON: ArtSPEAK@FSW Lecture on Arturo Vega & Pedro Friedeberg
In conjunction with EMPIRE: An Arturo Vega Retrospective exhibition.
Wednesday, December 7th , 2016
Fort Myers, FLORIDA: In conjunction with our EMPIRE: An Arturo Vega Retrospective exhibition, the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that the internationally-renowned New York-based curator and cultural critic Dan Cameron will be presenting a “one-off” ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture on Wednesday evening, December 7th at 6pm on Arturo Vega and noted Mexican artist/designer Pedro Friedeberg.
Dan Cameron (b. 1956, New York) most recently served as Curator and has just returned from opening the 13th International Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador. As an independent curator, he has organized international exhibitions since the 1980’s for institutions including Fundación Caixa/Barcelona, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía/Madrid and elsewhere. In 2003, he was the Artistic Director of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006, Cameron was Co-curator of the 5th Taipei Biennial and founded the Biennial Prospect New Orleans, where he worked until 2011. From 2012 to 2015, Cameron was Chief Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. From 1995 to 2005, he was Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where he developed group exhibitions and individual shows dedicated to the artists David Wojnarowicz, Xu Bing, Los Carpinteros, William Kentridge, Carolee Schneemann, Christian Marclay, Doris Salcedo, José Antonio Hernández Diez and others. Over the last four decades, Cameron has published hundreds of texts in art books, exhibition catalogues and major magazines, and has given countless lectures at museums and universities around the world.
According to Dan Cameron, “I have been thinking about Arturo Vega’s relationship to Pedro Friedeberg and the small but by all reports amazing psychedelic scene in Mexico City in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s.” As his ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture will illustrate, “Friedeberg is the closest Arturo had to an artistic master, and the dialogue between their oeuvres is pretty amazing.”
This event is open to the public, free of charge.
This presentation is sponsored in part by the Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council of Arts and Culture and the State of Florida.
THE YEAR WITHOUT SUMMER: A Panel Discussion with artist Keith Edmier,
archeologist Dr. Karen Holmberg and FSW English/Honors Professor Marty Ambrose
In conjunction with Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re: SOUND exhibition.
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Florida SouthWestern State College is delighted to announce THE YEAR WITHOUT SUMMER: A Panel Discussion with New York artist Keith Edmier, archeologist Dr. Karen Holmberg and FSW English/Honors Professor Marty Ambrose in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on Saturday, October 8, 2016 at 1pm. The first ArtSPEAK@FSW interdisciplinary forum, this panel discussion marks the bicentennial of the notable global climatic anomalies in 1816 (commonly known as “The Year Without Summer”) that followed the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. A subject of site-visits and research for Dr. Holmberg and great source of fascination for both author Marty Ambrose and celebrated visual artist Keith Edmier (who has used actual volcanic ash from the eruption in a 2010-2014 sculpture of the same name), “The Year Without Summer” was said to be Mary Shelley’s inspiration for a short story – which was expanded into the genre-defining novel, Frankenstein.
Currently, a visiting scholar at New York University in Environmental Studies/History of Science, the noted archeologist and self-proclaimed “volcano fetishist” Dr. Holmberg’s doctoral research focused on disaster, perception, and environmental change over the very long term in human history. As she notes: “As an archaeologist, I use volcanism as a proxy for dramatically mutable environments that humans have experienced over the longue duree, though contemporary climate change and nuclear power form a strong basis to my work. I find the earth sciences and social sciences indivisible.”
Professor Marty Ambrose attended the University of Missouri-Columbia (BA in English) and then graduate school at the University of York (England) and University of South Florida, specializing in British Romanticism. She has taught at Florida SouthWestern for three decades, and has published eight novels. Most recently, she was the recipient of an FSW ARC grant, which has enabled her to research and write her first women’s fiction narrative that has taken her back to her roots as a Romantics scholar. As Professor Ambrose recalls, “While working on my new novel, CLAIRE’S LAST SECRET, which is set partially during the summer of 1816, I found that Tambora became a central symbol of the interconnectedness of nature, people, and generations—it also inspired me to weave a tapestry of narratives in my own work and stretch myself as a writer.”
The subject of a major site-specific exhibition and installation titled “Keith EDMIER: Edison Impluvium” at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery last year, internationally-acclaimed sculptor Keith Edmier will be back down from New York City as well to share his interest in the “The Year Without Summer” and eruption of Mount Tambora.
Neil LEONARD “live” on saxophone (with accompaniment by Kat Epple) and post-performance Q. & A.
In conjunction with Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re: SOUND exhibition.
Saturday, August 20th ,2016
Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that current Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Captiva Island Artist-in-Residence, composer and musician Neil Leonard will be at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW this Saturday, August 20th at 1pm for a “live” concert on saxophone (with accompaniment by Kat Epple) and a post-performance Q. & A. in conjunction with the on-going “Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re:SOUND” exhibition.
Neil Leonard is an interdisciplinary arts composer and saxophonist. His work includes jazz performance; composition for orchestra with computer-generated video and sound; and sound/music for dance, theater, installation, and film. Mr. Leonard’s collaborations with visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons were featured in the 49th Venice Biennale and Museum of Modern Art/NYC, purchased by the Guangzhou Contemporary Art Museum/China and the National Gallery of Canada, and presented by the U.S. State Department at the Dakar Biennial/Senegal. He composed music for the Whitney Biennial featured “Relatives” installation by Tony Oursler and Constance DeJong. His compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall/NYC, the Boston Globe Jazz Festival, Havana Jazz Festival, Panama Jazz Festival, International Computer Music Convention/Montreal, Tel Aviv Biennial for New Music, Moscow Autumn, Auditorium Parco della Music/Rome, and Museo Riena Sofia/Madrid. Mr. Leonard is professor of electronic production and design at Berklee College of Music and Artistic Director of the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute.
Accompanying Neil Leonard on flute and performing on “Bo” (the “Strategic Structure” bell-grade brass and aluminum instrument she developed and played with Bob Rauschenberg and collaborators Bob Stohl, Lawrence Voytek and Laury Getford), Kat Epple’s Emmy and Peabody Award-winning compositions encompass a great variety of musical styles – World Music, New Age, Jazz, Metal, Orchestral Film Scores, Electronic Space Music, Native and Ambient Music. She has released 30 albums internationally, composes music for film scores and television soundtracks, and performs live original music featuring synthesizers and flutes with her various ensembles, including the “Space Music” band Emerald Web and Sonic Combine. Ms. Epple has performed at the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The United Nations, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Italy, the National Gallery of Art/Washington DC, London’s Union Chapel, and for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. For two decades, legendary visual artist and Gallery namesake, Bob Rauschenberg commissioned her to perform at his openings around the world.
More about the exhibition: “Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re:SOUND” at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is an exhibition featuring the graphic/musical scores, Harmonic series drawings and artist-built instruments of Glenn Branca and Philip Corner. This immersive installation highlights two of the most influential avant-garde composer-performers alive today. Both explore the visualization of sound. The large-scale drawings of Branca (all created in 1985) investigate the geometry and mathematics of harmonics, while Corner’s site-specific work invites visitor participation and includes the world premiere of a recently re-discovered (never-before-exhibited) series of fifty-plus original hand-painted/collaged drawings that form the basis and score for the artist’s seminal “Metal Meditations” (1973-76).
Luke SCHWARTZ (BRANCA ENSEMBLE member) performance
In conjunction with Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re: SOUND exhibition.
Saturday, August 13th ,2016
Florida SouthWestern State College is delighted to welcome widely-acclaimed, New York-based composer, guitarist and current Glenn Branca Ensemble band member, Luke Schwartz. Presenting a concert of guitar-centric experimental music on Saturday, August 13th at 1pm in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW, Schwartz and collaborators (Tom Kersey, cellist, and Jose Cochez, drums) will perform Branca-inspired compositions in conjunction with the on-going “Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re:SOUND” exhibition.
Having worked with renowned musicians including Jeff Berlin, Lawrence “Butch” Morris and Glenn Branca and sharing bills with talents as diverse as Leni Stern and Ron Anderson, Schwartz has received numerous awards and recognitions from ASCAP, New Music Forum (San Francisco) and Queens Council of the Arts (New York) for his own compositions as well. As the founder of Quiet City—a NYC based composer/performer collective—his work has explored the cross genre relationship between determinate and improvised music. Presently, a Music Theory/Composition faculty member at the Kaufman Music Center and Columbia University in NYC, Schwartz received his B.A in Music Theory and a M.M. in Music Composition from the University of South Florida (with additional studies at the City University of New York/CUNY) and has performed internationally at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Bang on a Can Marathon (NYC), Musées de la Ville (Strasbourg, France), Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany), Volksbuhne (Berlin), Melkweg (Amsterdam), Le Temps Machine (Tours, France), The Kitchen (NYC), The Stone (NYC), ABC No Rio (NYC), Subterranean Art House (Berkeley), Mount Vernon Music Space (Baltimore), New College Performance Series (Sarasota), USF Contemporary Art Museum (Tampa), and the Salvador Dali Museum (St. Petersburg), among other venues.
Reflecting on his experiences with the Glenn Branca Ensemble, Luke Schwartz has stated: “I toured Germany, France and the Netherlands with Glenn Branca. Getting to play his music in various halls was a very intense sonic experience. Branca’s sense of ‘overtone interactivity’, if I may, is fully intuitive. Some of the venues allowed for multiple layers of sonic stacking. At times it sounded as though there were angels and demons singing with one another in the rafters (a direct result of compositional decisions made that would produce such overtone clashes, intentionally).”
More about the exhibition: “Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re:SOUND” at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is an exhibition featuring the graphic/musical scores, Harmonic series drawings and artist-built instruments of Glenn Branca and Philip Corner. This immersive installation highlights two of the most influential avant-garde composer-performers alive today. Both explore the visualization of sound. The large-scale drawings of Branca (all created in 1985) investigate the geometry and mathematics of harmonics, while Corner’s site-specific work invites visitor participation and includes the world premiere of a recently re-discovered (never-before-exhibited) series of fifty-plus original hand-painted/collaged drawings that form the basis and score for the artist’s seminal “Metal Meditations” (1973-76).
FSW Welcomes Experimental Musician Luke Schwartz August 13 – Lee Herald
Stephen VITIELLO – ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture
In conjunction with Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re: SOUND exhibition.
Saturday, July 23rd, 2016
Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce an ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture by internationally-renowned electronic musician and media artist, Stephen Vitiello on Saturday, July 23rd at 1pm in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW. A pilot participant in the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency Program in 2012, Mr. Vitiello (and collaborator Taylor Deupree) released the double-vinyl album “Captiva” based on field-recordings including audio-tracks “From the Main Studio” and “From The Fish House”. As Vitiello recalls, “The presence of Rauschenberg’s history and maybe his welcoming ghost were always felt… if possibly not heard [on these recordings].” Providing both an overview of his work and recounting his experiences while in residence at the Rauschenberg compound, Vitiello’s ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture is a free and open-to-the-public event.
Collaborating on music projects and performing with Pauline Oliveros, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Scanner, Machinefabriek, Yasunao Tone and visual artists including Tony Oursler, Joan Jonas and the late, great Fluxus artist and “Father of Video Art” Nam June Paik, Vitiello has composed for independent films, experimental video projects and art installations for more than two decades. With major solo exhibitions including “All Those Vanished Engines” at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2011-2016); “A Bell For Every Minute” on The High Line, NYC (2010-2011); “More Songs About Buildings and Bells” at Museum 52, New York (2011); and “Stephen Vitiello” at The Project, New York (2006), the artist has also performed nationally and internationally, at locations such as the Tate Modern, London; the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; The Kitchen, New York; and the Cartier Foundation, Paris. As a media curator, he has organized “With Hidden Noise” for Independent Curators International; the Sound Art section to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition “The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000”; a video program for the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and “New Sounds, New Spaces” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, France. A recipient of prestigious Creative Capital (2006), Alpert/Ucross and Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-2012) awards and subject of the documentary “Stephen Vitiello: Listening With Intent” (2011) produced by Australia’s ABC-TV, the artist currently lives and works in Richmond and is a professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Presented in conjunction with the on-going “Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re:SOUND” exhibition, Stephen Vitiello’s work was exhibited at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in “Things Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage” in 2012 and is currently on view in “Play What You Like: Fluxus, Music & More…” (Curated by Jade Dellinger and co-organized by the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW) at the Howl! Happening Art Space in New York City (through July 30).
Donald SAFF & Lawrence VOYTEK:
A Conversation about Collaborations with Bob Saturday, April 30th , 2016
“I did not begin with any expectations or preconceptions. I love and respect collaboration.”
– Bob Rauschenberg, 1992 [interview with Jade Dellinger]
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is honored to announce that Donald Saff and Lawrence Voytek will be returning to campus for a special ArtSPEAK@FSW presentation on Saturday, April 30th at 1pm. In conjunction with our current RAUSCHENBERG & ALBERS: Box Vs. Square exhibition and while both are on site to record conversations for the official Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Columbia University – Rauschenberg Oral History Project, we are delighted to host a public exchange about their extensive work and decades-long relationships with Bob.
Donald Saff is an artist, art historian and educator who founded the celebrated editions atelier Graphicstudio/Institute for Research in Art at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 1968, and collaborated with many of the most significant artists of the twentieth century – including numerous experimental print and sculptural multiple projects with Bob Rauschenberg. He served as artistic director for Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI, 1984–91), a worldwide initiative for positive social change with art exchanges and resulting exhibitions as the catalyst. In 1991, Saff established Saff Tech Arts (later Saff and Company) in Oxford, Maryland, where he continued to work with Rauschenberg to create series including Eco-Echo (1992–93), Shales (1994–95), and Arcadian Retreat (1996). Their Made in Tampa (1972–73) works on view currently in RAUSCHENBERG & ALBERS: Box Vs. Square were the first editions Saff and Rauschenberg produced in collaboration. Emeritus Dean and a Distinguished Professor at U.S.F., Saff was also formerly the Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Saff’s prolific career has been documented in Marilyn Kushner’s book, Donald Saff: Art In Collaboration (2010).
Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lawrence Voytek studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and received his degree in sculpture from RISD in 1982. After meeting Robert Petersen at Edison College (now FSW), Voytek was introduced to and immediately hired by Bob Rauschenberg that same year to serve as sculpture fabricator and later director of production. Voytek was tasked with welding and casting, but he was also in charge of research and development at the Captiva studio until the artist’s death in 2008. Since Bob’s passing, Voytek completed approved works and has regularly consulted on the subjects of art installation, fabrication and restoration with renowned international museums and galleries while pursuing his own art career and exhibiting his work widely.
This presentation is sponsored in part by the Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council of Arts and Culture and the State of Florida.
Additional support provided by Chico’s International
“Artist’s Talk On Rauschenberg Collaboration” in The River Weekly News (April 29, 2016)
Mark HOSLER: Adventures in Illegal Art- Creative Media Resistance, Negativland, and the Fight Not to Be Absorbed
ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture in conjunction with 2016 Humanities Colloquium: Education for a New Humanity
Thursday, February 18, 2016
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that Mark Hosler, a founding member of the celebrated experimental band Negativland, will be presenting an ArtSPEAK@FSW event on Thursday, February 18th beginning at 7pm in the Rush Library Auditorium as a part of Florida SouthWestern State College’s 2016 colloquium, Education for a New Humanity: Evolution, Devolution and Revolution. Professor of Humanities and Program Coordinator of the Honors Scholar Program, Wendy Chase, describes the Colloquium as “a response to the political rhetoric and policies that sought to minimize the value of the Humanities and their contribution to education and public life,” and a means through which to spark dialogue across disciplines about the key issues facing humankind in the 21st century. Committed to “the pursuit of truth regardless of where it might lead,” the Colloquium will bring together scholars, artists, and performers in a variety of settings to discuss and debate the purpose, function, and content of education for the new generation.
Often thought more of as a conceptual art project than a musical group, Negativland is a sound art collaborative originating in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. It became renowned for its transgressive, anarchic post-punk incursions into the sanctity of intellectual property, eulogized as “folk hero culture jammers.” In the words of Mark Hosler, “We never had a hit record– Negativland had a hit lawsuit.” Creating music out of re-appropriated material years before electronic and rap producers, Negativland has released thirteen albums since 1980, ranging from pure sound collage to more musical expositions that were primarily released on their own label, Seeland Records. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the group produced several recordings for SST Records, most notably Escape from Noise (1987), Helter Stupid (1989), and U2 (1991). Negativland was subsequently sued by SST Records and U2’s record label, Island Records, bringing the band widespread publicity and notoriety. In September 2005, Negativland curated an exhibition in Manhattan’s Gigantic Artspace/GAS gallery to celebrate its 25th anniversary, displaying art from and inspired by Negativland recordings, video projection of music videos created by the band and others, and artwork created specifically for the show.
According to Bob Rauschenberg Gallery Director Jade Dellinger: “Serving as the principal spokesperson for the group, Mark Hosler has for decades been outspoken about expanding fair use to give sampling and remix artists the right to sell their art as original work through legitimate channels, working on alternative copyright practices with Creative Commons and lobbying the United States Congress for Digital Freedom.” In addition to his work as a musician, artist, and activist, Mr. Hosler has lectured across the country at such academic institutions as Rice University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/MIT and Yale University.
Please visit https://www.fsw.edu/newhumanity for a detailed schedule of additional Colloquium events.
Jerry CASALE: We Must Repeat
ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture and 2016 Humanities Colloquium: Education for a New Humanity Keynote address
Thursday, February 11, 2016
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is honored to announce that Gerald “Jerry” Casale, founder, vocalist, bass guitar/synthesizer player, and film/video director of the seminal punk/new wave band DEVO, will be delivering the keynote address for the School of Humanities and Fine Arts third biennial Humanities Colloquium: Education for a New Humanity as an ArtSPEAK@FSW presentation. To be held as a free and open-to-the-public event on the evening of Thursday, February 11th at 7pm in the Rush Library Auditorium (Building J – Room 103), Mr. Casale’s lecture will extend the 2016 Colloquium theme of Evolution, Devolution and Revolution by exploring the position in which artists (otherwise currently known as “content providers”) find themselves in the midst of a 21st century digital ‘revolution’. According to Mr. Casale: “I will connect the dots to expose the never-ending, ‘past is prologue’ struggle against entropy that artists must endure. Drawing on the intersection of culture, politics, and the artist’s personal journey I will posit that a creative response to life’s apparent absurdity is the artist’s attempt to restore order and spirituality in the face of the endless cycle of the simultaneous forces of evolution and devolution, a subject on which I am quite familiar.”
An eyewitness to the tragic May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University, Jerry Casale (along with fellow students Bob Lewis and Mark Mothersbaugh), developed the concept of Devolution, “the idea that instead of continuing to evolve, mankind has actually begun to regress,” and formed DEVO in 1973. As Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW Director and co-author of the definitive book on the band “We Are DEVO!” (SAF Publishing Ltd./UK, 2003/2004/2008) Jade Dellinger contends, “Mingling kitsch and deadpan Dada-inspired humor with a mordantly satirical social commentary, Jerry Casale and DEVO were widely recognized at the time for their 1980 hit ‘Whip It’, but are now (at long-last) acknowledged for their enduring musical legacy, broad cultural impact and pioneering development of the music video format.”
Co-principle songwriter of DEVO’s radio hits, “Whip It”, “Beautiful World”, “Freedom of Choice” and “Gates of Steel”, Casale was also largely responsible for designing DEVO’s acclaimed stage shows and costumes, including the infamous red “Energy Dome”. An award-winning music-video and commercial director, he began directing the band’s groundbreaking videos in the 70’s and 80’s, but has since directed nearly 100 music-videos for groups as varied as The Foo Fighters, Silverchair, Soundgarden and Mint Condition before moving on to TV spot directing on the cusp of the new millennium. Currently, Casale remains active in both music and video, collaborating with Italy’s Phunk Investigation on a vinyl EP to be released Record Store Day 2016 and developing a DEVO musical, “The Beginning Was The End”, a satirical, futuristic narrative set in DEVO’s alternate world, Spudland, and propelled by DEVO’s well-known song catalogue.
FSW Professor of Humanities and Program Coordinator of the Honors Scholar Program, Dr. Wendy Chase, describes the Colloquium as “a response to the political rhetoric and policies that sought to minimize the value of the Humanities and their contribution to education and public life,” and a means through which to spark dialogue across disciplines about the key issues facing humankind in the 21st century. Committed to “the pursuit of truth regardless of where it might lead,” the 2016 Colloquium (Education for a New Humanity: Evolution, Devolution and Revolution) will bring together scholars, artists, and performers in a variety of settings to discuss and debate the purpose, function, and content of education for the new generation.
Please visit https://www.fsw.edu/newhumanity for a detailed schedule of additional Colloquium events.
“Devo dude headlines FSW Humanities Colloquium” from Florida Weekly (February 3, 2016)
Crispin Hellion GLOVER: ArtSPEAK@FSW Event
Friday, July 10, 2015
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that Crispin Hellion Glover, the internationally-acclaimed screen actor and movie director, will be presenting an ArtSPEAK@FSW event on Friday night, July 10th beginning at 7pm in the Rush Library Auditorium. Offering the second part of his “IT?” trilogy for the first time in Southwest Florida, Mr. Glover will perform a one-hour narrative reading of his illustrated books as “Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slide Show, Part 2” before screening his most recent feature It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. Following the film, he will open the floor to discussion with a Q. & A., and will end the evening with a book-signing/meet n’ greet.
Described as part horror film, part exploitation picture and part documentary, It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. tells the story of a man who is unable to express his sexuality in the way he desires. Communicated from the actual point of view of lead actor and screenwriter Steven C. Stewart, who, while suffering from severe cerebral palsy and confined to a nursing home for a decade, lived for years watching people do things he was never able to do – this semi-autobiographical, psycho-sexual tale was revered as, “Wildly impassioned and macabrely fascinating” by The New York Times.
Crispin Hellion Glover began his prolific acting career at the age of thirteen. He landed his first film role in My Tutor in 1983, and was cast opposite Sean Penn that year in Racing with the Moon. Perhaps best known for portraying riotously eccentric characters on screen, Glover starred as George McFly in Robert Zemeckis’ box office smash Back to the Future (1985), Layne in River’s Edge, Groovin’ Gary in The Orkly Kid installment of The Beaver Trilogy, the Christmas-obsessed Dell in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), Andy Warhol in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), Howard Barth in Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), Train Fireman in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), the Knave of Hearts in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), as well as oddball title roles in Bartleby (2000) and Willard (2002).
Not scheduled to be screened again (after this Ft. Myers presentation) until late August at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, PAPER magazine declared, “What Diane Arbus was to photography, Crispin Hellion Glover is swiftly achieving as a filmmaker… Training his sardonic eyes on the strange and afflicted, he achieves a mad dark poetry on celluloid.” This is a special “one-night-only” ArtSPEAK@FSW Event with Mr. Glover in attendance at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery/Rush Library Auditorium.
This event is open to the public, free of charge. The first-come, first-served seating is limited. However, please note that NO ONE UNDER 18-YEARS OF AGE WILL BE ADMITTED due to the graphic/adult nature of the material to be presented.
ArtSPEAK@FSW Lecture/Performance by Bernard BRUNON – That’s Painting
Productions, Inc.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that Los Angeles-based visual artist, art critic and curator Bernard Brunon will be presenting an ArtSPEAK@FSW performance/lecture on Wednesday, May 13th at 6pm. Originally aiming to make paintings that would stand outside the established art historical codes of representation, and sharing an affinity with the work of the internationally-renowned BMPT and Supports/Surfaces art groups in France in the 1960’s and early ‘70’s, Bernard Brunon eventually found himself painting houses. Adopting as his motto “With less to look at, there’s more to think about,” the artist has run a house-painting company (THAT’S PAINTING Productions) as a conceptual art project for almost three decades.
According to Bernard Brunon, “Painting a room does not create an image of the room; it inscribes it in its real space.” By managing a house-painting company, the artist sets painting, and art-making, within social and economic reality of the everyday. With a respectful nod to Rauschenberg for his groundbreaking work in the gap between the two, Brunon’s practice truly merges art and life – turning monumental monochrome abstraction into house-painting (and vice-versa).
For his ArtSPEAK@FSW presentation at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, Bernard Brunon will discuss his current work-in-progress – “Erased Dave Muller” (2015) – within the historical context of Bob Rauschenberg’s seminal “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953). Previously “painting out” or “painting over” site-specific installations by other prominent fellow artists, Brunon’s newly commissioned work for the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW, is the latest in a series including his “Erased (Daniel) Walravens” in Galerie le Sous-sol in Paris in 1996, “Erased (Hamish) Fulton” at Texas Gallery in 1997 and “Erased (Katharina) Grosse” at the Contemporary Art Museum (CAMH) in Houston in 2004.
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, FSW and Los Angeles artist Dave Muller have commissioned THAT’S PAINTING Productions to paint over the 250+ ft. mural painted for “Dave Muller: Everything Sounds Good Right Now” in wall-colors that were developed by our Gallery namesake Bob Rauschenberg as the backdrop for numerous exhibitions of his own work.
This event is open to the public, free of charge. The first-come, first-served seating is limited.
Emil SCHULT: ArtSPEAK@FSW
Lecture and multi-media performance (in collaboration with YuXuan Kong and Sonic Combine)
Saturday, May 2, 2015
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that internationally-acclaimed Düsseldorf-based visual artist, musician and composer Emil Schult will be presenting an ArtSPEAK@FSW performance/lecture on Saturday, May 2nd at 1pm. Accompanied by special guest YuXuan Kong on the Guzheng (Chinese zither) and including a set from Bob Rauschenberg’s former collaborators and renowned experimental music collective Sonic Combine, this multimedia concert event will also provide visitors a final opportunity to experience the site-specific and immersive exhibition “Dave Muller: Everything Sounds Good Right Now.”
A master student of Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth at the KunstAkademie/Düsseldorf in the early 1970’s, Emil Schult is perhaps best known for his collaborations with the legendary Teutonic electronic/pop band Kraftwerk. Most conspicuously contributing artwork for the staging of tours and album covers (including Autobahn and Radioactivity), Schult also provided lyrics for numerous songs – including “The Model” (a track featured on the band’s seminal The Man-Machine record). With recent “retrospectives” at both the Museum of Modern Art/MoMA in New York City and the Tate Modern in London – plus, a 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy’s, the cultural impact, broad visual and musical influence of Kraftwerk can scarcely be overstated.
As a visual artist Emil Schult has exhibited his work in galleries and museums internationally for decades. In conjunction with the 2012 Bob Rauschenberg Gallery exhibition “Things Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage” (which then travelled in expanded form to the National Gallery of Art/Tbilisi, Georgia – former Soviet Union), Schult was commissioned to paint a portrait of the late composer John Cage and to select records for our “John Cage’s 33-1/3 – Performed by Audience” installation.
This event is open to the public, free of charge. The first-come, first-served seating is limited.
Ted RIEDERER: ArtSPEAK@FSW
Lecture/performance and special “one-night-only” screening of his documentary film NEVER RECORDS: YOU ARE NOT LISTENING
Thursday, April 9, 2015
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that New York-based visual artist and musician Ted Riederer will be presenting an ArtSPEAK@FSW performance/lecture in conjunction with a special “one-night-only” screening of his much-celebrated, feature-length documentary NEVER RECORDS: YOU ARE NOT LISTENING (Directed by Jason Wyche) next Thursday evening, April 9 from 6-8pm.
Shot on location in Northern Ireland and in London, England, the film NEVER RECORDS: YOU ARE NOT LISTENING explores the power of art and music to unite, educate, and uplift a community. A self-proclaimed “one-time refugee from punk rock and sometime band member (as frontman for Thumper),” Ted Riederer has ambled artistically from the Americas to the Antipodes while creating a catalyst for social interaction and the artistic expression of others through his Never Records projects. Travelling his record lathe and not-for-profit recording studio/“mock record shop” (Never Records) from New York to Liverpool, Lisbon and New Orleans, Stephen McCauley of BBC Radio/UK proclaimed that Riederer’s efforts had “taken the city by storm… a cultural phenomenon. (Never Records) plugged people back into why music was important in the first place.” Receiving the Best of Fest award at the Victoria Texas Independent Film Festival in 2013 and garnering critical-acclaim in both the 2013 RxSM Underground Film Expo and CBGB Film Festival, Wyche’s documentary NEVER RECORDS: YOU ARE NOT LISTENING closely follows Riederer, features performances by some of the UK’s most talented musicians and deftly illustrates just what is possible when the all-mighty dollar (or British Pound) is taken out of the art and music equation.
The official trailer for NEVER RECORDS: YOU ARE NOT LISTENING can be viewed at: <https://vimeo.com/46362406>
The work of Ted Riederer has been presented internationally in exhibitions at PS1, Prospect 1.5, Goff and Rosenthal/Berlin, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco), Marianne Boesky Gallery, Context Gallery (Derry, Ireland), David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University), The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum/Tampa, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Dhaka Arts Center, Bangladesh. Following the film screening of NEVER RECORDS: YOU ARE NOT LISTENING, the artist will present a new performance of his solo “Drums & Roses” (this time inspired by the floral elements prominently featured in the DAVE MULLER: EVERYTHING SOUNDS GOOD RIGHT NOW mural/installation currently on-view in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery).
This event is open to the public, free of charge. The first-come, first-served seating is limited.
Laurie ANDERSON: ArtSPEAK@FSW Lecture
Saturday, January 24, 2015
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is honored to announce that Laurie Anderson, one of America’s most celebrated, innovative and influential artists, will be presenting an ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture on Saturday afternoon, January 24th at 1pm in Rush Library Auditorium. On the final day of the RAUSCHENBERG: China/America Mix exhibition (now “remixed” – with works repositioned using chance operations and reinstalled for the New Year), the highly-revered Ms. Anderson will present a one-off artist’s talk on her current projects and recent work.
A seminal figure in Contemporary Art and music, Ms. Anderson has produced pioneering works that defy categorization and have blurred the boundaries of performance, theater, visual art and experimental music/sound. Since the 1970’s, Ms. Anderson has published numerous books (and been the subject of several), produced videos (for PBS and MTV), films (including her feature-length Home of the Brave), radio pieces (for National Public Radio and BBC) and original scores for dance – including her groundbreaking collaboration in the 1980’s (on Set and Reset) with choreographer Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg.
With the unanticipated popular appeal and U.K. radio chart success of her One Ten Records (and later Warner Brothers) single “O Superman,” Ms. Anderson’s recording career was launched in 1981 and unintended celebrity-status secured. Her live shows range from simple spoken word to elaborate multi-media stage performances such as Songs and Stories for Moby Dick (1999). In 2002, Ms. Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance The End of the Moon. In 2007 she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. In 2008 she completed a two-year worldwide tour of her performance piece, Homeland, which was released as an album on Nonesuch Records in June 2010.
The subject of a 2003 retrospective entitled The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson that was organized by The Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon which travelled from France to Milan, Düsseldorf, Dublin and Tokyo through 2005, and a more recent survey of visual and installation art presented at CCBB in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 2010, Ms. Anderson has had work acquired for the permanent collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art/New York and has recently announced a partnership and extended loan that will provide a long-term home for exhibiting and presenting various “works-in-progress” at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.
This event is open to the public, free of charge. The first-come, first-served seating is limited.
Dave HICKEY: The Rauschenberg Legacy (sans Bob)
an ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture
& Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste Book-Signing to Follow
Saturday, October 4, 2014
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College is honored to announce that Dave Hickey, perhaps the most highly-revered, widely-read and provocative writers addressing cultural issues today, will be presenting a “one-off” ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture on Saturday afternoon, October 4th at 1pm in Rush Library Auditorium. In celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the Gallery’s renaming in Mr. Rauschenberg’s honor and in advance of our “RAUSCHENBERG: China/America Mix” exhibition opening on the artist’s October 22nd birthday, Dave Hickey will speak publicly for the first time on “The Rauschenberg Legacy (sans Bob).”
Author of popular books such as Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy and The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, Hickey’s latest endeavor – the much-celebrated Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste is a collection of enlightening writings on cultural phenomena in a time when the commoditization and oversimplification of art seems most prevalent. Having served as Executive Editor for Art in America magazine and as a contributing editor to The Village Voice, Dave Hickey has written for publications as wide-ranging as Rolling Stone, Art News, Artforum, Harper’s Magazine, Andy Warhol’s Interview, Vanity Fair and Playboy, and been the subject of lengthy profiles in Texas Monthly, U.S. News and World Report, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Once described by Newsweek as “exhilarating, deeply engaging… and a provocation to reignite the conversation about the purpose of art,” Hickey’s books – much like his lectures – both stimulate and provoke thought and debate. The College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award winner in 1994 (the “Oscar” for art criticism) and a 2001 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation (so-called) “Genius Award” (a $625,000, no-strings-attached grant for those deemed “exceptionally creative”), this is an extraordinary/one-time-only opportunity to hear Dave speak about Bob.
More about us: The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery was founded as The Gallery of Fine Art in 1979 on the Lee County campus of Florida SouthWestern State College/FSW (then Edison Community College). On June 4th 2004 the Gallery of Fine Art was renamed the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, to honor and commemorate our long time association and friendship with the artist. Over more than three decades until his death, the Gallery worked closely with Rauschenberg to present world premiere exhibitions including multiple installations of the ¼ Mile or Two Furlong Piece. The artist insisted on naming the space the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (versus the “Robert Rauschenberg Gallery”) as it was consistent with the intimate, informal relationship he maintained with both our local Southwest Florida community and FSW.
“DAVE HICKEY ArtSPEAK@FSW Lecture on Rauschenberg” from TimeOut.com (October 2014)
Keith EDMIER: Artist’s Talk
Saturday, August 23, 2014
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is pleased to announce an artist’s talk by the celebrated New York sculptor Keith Edmier on Saturday afternoon (1pm) in the Rush Auditorium at Florida SouthWestern State College. Speaking candidly for the first-time on his fascination with Pop culture and much reported art collaborations and exhibitions with 1970’s icon Farrah Fawcett (who he exhibited with in two-person shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh) and the late, great motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel (who he worked closely with on their “EK:KE” project at the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa in 1997).
Keith Edmier was born in 1967 on Chicago’s South Side. He grew up in the suburb of Tinley Park, Illinois. In 1985 at age 17, Edmier moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry creating special make-up effects. His first job was working for Rick Baker on Michael Jackson’s “Caption EO” (which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola). He then worked for Chris Walas on David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly”, which won an Academy Award for best make-up in 1986. Edmier briefly attended The California Institute of the Arts/CalArts (studying under the influential artist Mike Kelley), then continued to work in the film business throughout the rest of the 1980’s, supervising effects for films including “Bride of Re-Animator”, “Barton Fink” for Joel and Ethan Coen, and the television series “Freddy’s Nightmares”.
In the beginning of 1991, Edmier moved to New York City to work as a fine artist. He had his first solo show in 1993 at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery. He has exhibited extensively since – including shows at the Tate Modern in London; the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Edmier has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum/Tampa (curated by Bob Rauschenberg Gallery Director Jade Dellinger), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, and a mid-career survey at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, New York. He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2001 Biennial Award, and his work is in numerous private and public collections including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hessel Museum of Art/CCS-Bard College, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Denver Art Museum; The Israel Museum, Tele Viv and The Tate Gallery in London.
Benjamin PATTERSON: Born in the State of FLUXus – A Performance/Lecture
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
In conjunction with our on-going exhibition
ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective
May 9 – July 25, 2014
at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery
Presented in conjunction with ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective (May 9th – July 25th, 2014) and represented in the exhibition at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison State College (soon to be Florida SouthWestern State College) by his two solo projects [Paper Piece (1960/2014) and Bollywood Love: Object of Desire (2010)], the influential and affable artist Ben Patterson will discuss the origin and history of the Fluxus movement, his current work and his ongoing involvement with Sean Miller and the John Erickson Museum of Art.
A founding member of Fluxus, the international collective of artists known for infusing avant-garde practices with anarchic spirit and humor, Ben Patterson helped revolutionize the artistic landscape at the advent of the 1960s and was on the forefront of ushering in a new – often controversial – era of experimental music and visual art. Now in his eighties and residing in Germany, Mr. Patterson has been the recent subject of a major traveling retrospective (organized by the Contemporary Art Museum/Houston) and has had the distinction of having his work acquired by numerous institutions – including the Permanent Collections of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A classically trained musician and composer whose most significant contribution to Fluxus was exploring the connection between action and music, Ben Patterson has spent more than five decades creating compositions for both the body in action (“action as composition”) and the unconventional playing of his instrument, the contra bass, through ordinary gestures. Later recognized as the first official Fluxus event, after a brief encounter with John Cage in 1960, Mr. Patterson became a fixture in the experimental music scene in Germany and co-organized and performed at the first International Festival of New Music with George Maciunas at the Staatsmuseum in Wiesbaden in 1961.
In the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Bob Rauschenberg, with tongue-in-cheek – often provocative – humor, Ben Patterson’s work is a celebration of “ordinary life”. Employed for some years as a reference librarian, an arts administrator and as an entrepreneur with his own music management company, Patterson took a hiatus and withdrew from his career as an artist for nearly two decades. Reemerging in the 1980’s and returning to Europe to live, Ben Patterson has spent the last twenty-five years prolifically creating visual art, scores and performing his work.
Remembering Performance Artist Ben Patterson (07-02-16) – SWFL Art & Theater News (July, 2016)