3/4/18: Class 50: Full-Time Art Faculty: Leslie Hewitt, Lucy Raven, and Will Villalongo

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3/4/18: Class 50: Full-Time Art Faculty: Leslie Hewitt, Lucy Raven, and Will Villalongo

Hi Projects class 🌬,

This week we’ll be joined in our discussion by Leslie Hewitt, Lucy Raven, and Will Villalongo, the three of whom were appointed as the newest Full-Time Faculty of the School of Art in Fall 2016. Here’s the announcement of their hiring, from the May 9, 2016 SoA newsletter:

THE SCHOOL OF ART ANNOUNCES THE APPOINTMENT OF THREE NEW FULL-TIME FACULTY

After an extensive search, the School of Art welcomes three additions to the full-time faculty. All will begin teaching in Fall of 2016: Leslie Hewitt will teach a studio class and Contemporary Art Issues; Lucy Raven, Advanced Film/Video and Sculpture; and William Villalongo, Painting and Basic Drawing.

Leslie Hewitt graduated from The Cooper Union, earned an MFA from Yale University, and has studied Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University.  She has exhibited in a number of national and international galleries and has been included in public collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Represented in MoMA's New Photography 2009, a thematic presentation of significant recent work in photography, Hewitt was also the spring 2012 Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the visual arts at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. Hewitt currently teaches Professional Practice in the Art History department at Barnard College and is a Visiting Critic at the Yale School of Art.

Lucy Raven graduated with a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history from the University of Arizona, and earned her MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She works with animation, installation, sound, and the live format of the illustrated lecture. Raven's films and installations have been exhibited internationally, including at MoMA, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; mumok, Vienna; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Portikus, Frankfurt; the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Raven was recently an artist in residence at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, where she created a new site-specific cinema built for a single (3D) image. Raven also teaches in the MFA program at Bard.

William Villalongo received his BFA from The Cooper Union and his MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. His work resides in several notable public collections including The Studio Museum In Harlem, Princeton University Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is currently a Lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.

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Class 49: Jalal Toufic

We were visited by thinker, writer, and artist Jalal Toufic.

We began class by reading the Projects Class course description, and then turned to mission statements. Faye passed around her prints of Cooper’s previous and recently revised mission statements, and we read the two versions aloud. “I would fail to write Cooper’s statement,” said Jalal. We then read through Jalal's Director’s Statement for the School of Visual Arts line-by-line, discussing at length the many concepts packed into the statement: failing better; building universes that don't fall apart two days later; the relation between jouissance and art; schools as temporary autonomous zones; the practice of subtle and progressive incomprehension; critique and learning not to correct artworks; failings of an "artistic research" methodology; intuition and communications being sent and received between artworks in the past, present, and future; and how to produce artists and artworks that are not merely "reducible to culture".

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Weekly Bulletin: 2/26/18

  • Dan: Working on building things and could use help, asked if anyone wants to trade physical labor, an hour for an hour. Studio is on the 9th floor.
  • Mauricio: On two committees, Diversity Taskforce and Community Planning Collaborative. Feeling under and over qualified to think about the pedagogy of Cooper. Asking for help accessing the conversation. Walid suggested asking Judith Bernstein about the minutes of the curriculum committee.
  • Dempzil: Preoccupied with show, coming up May 1 together w Yonaton. Has been looking into Aby Warburg.
  • Yonaton: Working on show. Made posters for Daniel Arsham lecture.
  • Harry: Organized and drove for the bus trip around the city last Monday, visiting: TKTKTK Read printed out articles while we toured around, a kind of moving lecture. Vic and Harry made a Google map of the itinerary, and are open to doing it again and changing it up.
  • Eva: Related a little bit to the idea of the Design Club she has been workshopping, Kelsey, Alex, and Richard invited freshman and sophomores interested in design to gather in the type shop on Tuesday 2/27 from 1-2pm.
  • Claire: Spent time in the archive this week with Archive Club. Found really bad typography in one of the yearbooks.
  • Faye: Archive Club met at the archives. Next fundraiser ideas are making a mug and an ashtray, if people have ideas. An ashtray for “What are you smoking?” or “blowing smoke up your ass”? Suggested to talk with Claire’s friend with the ceramics factory.
  • Liv: Shared that Ariella Azoulay was lecturing in IDS on Plunder: The Origins of Modern Art.
  • Vinny: Still working with the artist who's looking for assistants, if people are interested.
  • Taesha: Architecture Lab CNC routers will be up and running in a week. Architecture Party is March 21. Credit hour switch is now affecting Architecture School. Current discussion in curriculum committee about collating freehand drawing and digital drawing into one representational drawing studio.
  • Amelia: Read a really good article on New Inquiry: “Privacy for Whom?” by Sam Adler-Bell on the white middle-class imaginary of privacy violations versus the compulsory visibility of the welfare poor. The article covers two recently released books: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks and The Poverty of Privacy Rights by Khiara M. Bridges.
  • Casey: Went to MoMA this week, and a saw Tania Bruguera's Untitled (Havana, 2000), open through March 11. Reading a few books maybe of interest to the class: _Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities_by Martha C. Nussbaum (for the Tampio class), Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University by Howard Singerman (who is visiting Projects Class on April 9), and Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives beyond Markets and States by Derek Wall.
  • Kiersten: Ad Chairs met with the Board, last meeting of the semester. An intense meeting. Invited everyone to the CUAA/community potluck FEC event she is co-organizing with Rachel Appel, and Vic for students and alumni to have a conversation and help answer each other's questions. Not guaranteed to work or be more comfortable than admin sessions but hasn't been tried.
  • Ariana: Swamped with work. ESC meeting from 9-10 in 506. Finals week is coming back to Eng school after being gone for one semester, which was a mess. Working on coming up with a plan on how to make that better. Not enough space or time, maybe proposing to add a day to the academic calendar? Heard that credit hours and set and not gonna change, there's a petition going around. No planned replacement of the time they're cutting.
  • Owen: Knee deep in show, a lot formed out of Projects and path through cooper. Happy to go through with anyone from Tues - Sat. Asked for help on Monday, tig welding, holding plywood together.
  • Kunning: Saw Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away at Guggenheim. Communist party of China announced a plan to eliminate presidential terms.
  • Anton: Visited archive with Claire, Faye, Ariana, looking for things to make merch out of. Arch archive is still in the process of calling students for rights waivers for online database and it's taking a long time.
  • (Taesha: Students now have to sign a waiver about reproduction rights, but you have to purchase images of your own projects, photos are $20.)
  • Jake: Heated debate about communication issues between Ad Chairs and Board/Admin with Kiersten and others. Trying to communicate condition and position of current students at Cooper. Feels like they don't understand what students are going through, with pushes for fundraising, publicity, and advertising feeling backwards...cart before the horse. Board doesn't register the toll tuition payments take on students. Feels like students are being leached for resources: as achieving scholars and monetary units. There is an admissions crisis that's being patched over by the common app, only 250 home tests in Architecture with a 30% acceptance rate.
  • Vic: Went on bus trip, co-planning CUAA event with Kiersten and they're enthusiastic about connecting with students.