CCA Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

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CCA Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

http://www.cca.edu/academics/graduate/visual-critical-studies

http://viscrit.cca.edu

Today’s intricate and immense visual arena demands new forms of analysis and understanding. It calls for cultural critics who can write eloquently for diverse audiences in a multiplicity of forms and venues. In examining the seminal role of images, artifacts, and visual experiences in contemporary society, the MA Program in Visual & Critical Studies emphasizes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural

study, historical grounding, social and political analysis, and the artistic aspects of written communication. Our program offers a rigorous but supportive environment in which to explore and develop three crucial, interrelated skills: attentive viewing, analytical perspective, and creative and critical writing. Through our various forums and lectures students encounter writers, critics, scholars, artists, curators, and designers from around the world who explore our complex visual landscape. Our distinguished faculty comes from various disciplines across the college, including fine arts, art history, architecture, architectural history, design, design history, and critical studies.

09/22/2024

Join us this Tuesday for a conversation with the new Wattis Director and Chief Curator, Daisy Nam, who will will speak on the art/artists and thinkers/theories that have shaped her body of methods, and how that relates to the work she’s engaging at CCA. She will be joined by curator Jeanne Gerrity as she gives an introduction to the themes explored in the debut exhibition at the new Wattis Institute galleries, All This SoftWild Buzzing.

Daisy Nam has been named as the new director and chief curator of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at California College of the Arts. Nam joins the Wattis from Ballroom Marfa, where she has been a curator since 2020 and the director since 2022. Nam is widely recognized for her extensive experience working with living artists curating and developing exhibitions, commissions, public and teaching programs, as well as in fundraising and donor cultivation.

5:30-7:00 pm in Timken Auditorium
More information: [email protected]

02/27/2024

VCS Forum: Hope Mohr performance lecture “On Agency” M March 4,5-7p. From Hope’s announcement: “Tactile extensions of my movement practice, my new works in felt translate sensation into image and serve as scores for performance.

Come feel these feltings at my upcoming performance lecture, “On Agency,” at California College of the Arts on Monday March 4th. “On Agency” uses Judith Butler’s “The Psychic Life of Power” to think through feminist and q***r conundrums of agency, ambivalence, complicity, and liberation.” others.

BIO: Hope Mohr (she/her) is an artist and advocate. Her cross-disciplinary, feminist performance work “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that ride just underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). She collaborates with visual artists, poets, composers, scholars, and puppeteers and has worked extensively in museum and gallery contexts, including at 18th Street Arts Center (LA), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Sonoma), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), and in the Bay Area at SFMOMA, ICA San Francisco, 836M Gallery, Mills Art Museum, Gallery Wendi Norris, and the San Jose Museum of Art . . . Hope teaches contemporary dance technique, creative movement, movement for actors, and cross-disciplinary practice. She currently teaches “Bodies in Practice & Performance” at California College of the Arts. She has taught dance and movement at PARTS (Brussels), The Place (London), Trisha Brown Dance Studio, ODC, Stanford University, Lines Ballet BFA Program, American Conservatory Theater MFA program, Peabody Conservatory, UCLA, and Shawl-Anderson, among others.

Her book, Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance, was published by the National Center for Choreography in 2020. others.

PICS: The Force that Drives the Flower (2009); new felt work at Montalvo; Hope VCS promo. Thanks Hope and

02/19/2024

We are thrilled to have artist-scholar Eshrat Erfanian join us from Toronto via zoom for her talk, “ Digital Images, Verticality, Speed and War”——

VCS Forum
Monday February 19, 5-7p | Zoom https://cca.zoom.us/j/91734808186

Eshrat Erfanian is an artist and educator. She was born in Tehran and lives and works in Toronto.
Erfanian’s practice attempts to subvert the reading of the images generated by the new digital
technology. Her work ranges from video and video installation to digital photography and site-
specific installations. Erfanian’s work has been exhibited in the Jewish Museum in New York
City, Incheon Biennial, South Korea, Prague Biennial, and numerous galleries in New York City,
Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto. Her latest work is permanently installed at the
Immigration Hallway in the Canadian Embassy in Paris. Erfanian is an alumnx of the ISP
Whitney Museum of American Art and holds a PhD from York University in Toronto. Erfanian
is a faculty Chair at Visual Art Program in Vermont College of Fine Arts, in Vermont, USA.

02/13/2024

It was a pleasure to have heard Jane Jin Kaisen after the screening of her 2019 film, “Community of Parting” yesterday at Timken Hall.

Kaisen’s film explores the possibility of embodying the myth of Princess Bari, who was abandoned by her family by being born a girl, as a tool allowing yourself/history to reshape again.

We found particularly interesting that sound in the film (mostly from shamanistic rituals) was used to blurred the lines of ritual and reality as it contrasted with non-related images that would be expected to be religious otherwise.

In this film, Kaisen saw the act of translation as an opportunity to retell a story, configure its borders and shift it.

Kaisen’s practice contributes to the discipline of Visual & Critical Studies by proposing a methodology that utilises ancient knowledge to disclose the hidden or obscured in history.

Attn. Paulina Félix Cunillé VCS ‘24 & Vanessa Pérez Winder VCS ‘25

02/07/2024

Our first VCS Forum guest for Spring 2024: Jane Jin Kaisen (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts) M 2/12, 5-7p, Timken

12/05/2023

Repost: Limited Tickets for Thursday, December 7, 6-8pm,
The last “Shifting Possessions Salon Series”moderated by Việt Lê is happening this week at 500 Capp Street.
Artists from Paris (Frédéric Dialynas Sanchez ), New Mexico (Corey Pickett ) and Hanoi (Nhung Đinh ) convene on this moderated talk about physical and socio-political landscapes, mass media and the mundane. Afro-futurism, Asian indigenous shamanism, and European avant-garde frameworks shift as these artists ask, What does possession mean? “Shifting Possessions” is an ongoing Salon Series of 500 Capp Street with artist and academic Việt Lê having dialogues and programming on q***r(y)ing object collections, geopolitical connections and remediation strategies. Supported by and . This program is part of the exhibition “transfiguration,” curated by Việt Lê which also features Corey Pickett and Nhung Đinh at

11/17/2023

We would like to thank Jeremy Dennis for the virtual talk he gave as part of the VCS Forum Talks this evening.

Dennis shared the journey of his artistic practice, where photojournalism become more important as part of the archive for the Shinnecock people. As shown in the slide which contains a map of Paumanok (unceded land renamed as Long Island by colonizers). Dennis shared how diverse their unceded land is as now part of New York.

Dennis also talked about his House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc. on the Shinnecock Reservation. His non-profit Ma’s is relevant within the discipline of Visual and Critical Studies as it provides a space for the development of Indigenous and BIPOC artistry, which otherwise continues to be sensationalized by the Western gallery/museum perspective. Alongside this, his overall photographic practice provides a counternarrative of the violent colonial heritage of the United States.

Ma’s House is open to BIPOC identifying artists, feel free to apply at:

11/03/2023

We were glad to hear the talk by Ly Hoàng Ly with Chair Viet Lê via Zoom. Ly showed VCS students her works as the first female Vietnamese artist who started working in performance. Trained as a painter (as Vietnamese artistic education centers on modern aesthetic standards), Ly has made a career by creating public artworks and performances. She is interested in influencing people for a positive change with her performances which are thought as protests as well. Considered as a highly influential artist, Ly wishes to make her dreams as a female artist come true.

Atte. MA VCS ‘24 Evie, Katy and Paulina

10/31/2023

Repost : Ly Hoàng Ly | Sài Gòn hybrid studio visit TH 11/2/23 6p San Francisco | 11/3 8a SG. Pics: Ly’s performance and installation; Zoom 🏎️ link: https://cca.zoom.us/j/91734808186

Repost on her solo show: Trees 🌳 are poems the earth writes upon the sky, we fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.”― Kahlil Gibran
hoang.ly and Sàn Art heartily invite you to an open studio whose title draws inspiration from a poem of Gibran in “Sand and Foam” to explore the artist’s partially unfinished, partially fulfilled space of imagination. Originating from the performance “Hugging trees – Hugging your loved ones – Hugging yourself” at the Plum Village, France in 2015, Ly Hoàng Ly carries on exploring the relations among different bodies as artistic material and the dynamic between internal drives and external forces.

As an artist adept in various materials, transformations of the external world, and micro changes in the inner soul, in this open studio, Ly presents her artwork-in-progress as a lingering meditation practice since 2018. Coming here, the audience is asked to observe, and then interrogate the static and dynamic in performance art, the individuality and collectivity in public art, and the formation, participation, and contribution of factors that seem random and trivial, yet carefully calculated: time, location, body, audience – to position the artist’s presence in her work. Coming here, the audience is invited for a conceptual dialogue to explore the possibilities of different utilisations of the interior and exterior space of the artworks; the materials and their effects on our sensation. Thus, the artist and the audience together reflect and challenge, abolish and consolidate, forgetting and searching … to figure out these connections between humans with natural beings, between our inner self with the beauty, ugliness, and inbetweenness of the surrounding world.

10/26/2023

Join us for a hybrid studio visit (Sài Gòn | SF) TH 10/26 5p PST w/ Kai Nguyễn (), whose work is featured in an article on q***r photo in Việt Nam, alongside Nguyễn Quoc Thành , among others—congrats! Zoom: https://cca.zoom.us/j/91734808186

10/14/2023

We were honored that VCS alum Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa returned to campus to make us the first place where she did a book talk for her new book, Erotic Resistance: The Struggle for the Soul of San Francisco, which comes out in the Spring.

Gigi is a multi-hyphenate creative and scholar working as an educator/ artist-performer/ writer/ psychogeographer. She’s also an inspiring speaker who kept us all engaged by sharing a combination of rich local history, an introduction to the conceptual framework she used in the book, some behind-the-scenes about her research methods and more.

Her upcoming book explores the complex but often empowered history of San Francisco’s erotic performance culture as it relates to unionization, labor rights and s*x workers’ rights as well as the impact on and involvement by communities of q***r women, trans women, and women of color.

In the Q&A, Gigi addressed questions of how she approached her different roles while doing participant-observer research, what her thoughts are on the soul of the city moving forward, and how she selected the specific examples of s*x workers that she highlighted in her presentation.

Keep an eye on Gigi’s social media for future book talks / events and mark your calendar to order the book when it comes out early next year.

***rhistory

06/21/2022

Join us for a conversation with artist Sam Vernon about her current exhibition Impasse of Desires with The Q***r Limit of Black Memory author Matt Richardson, moderated by Dr. Jacqueline Francis on Wednesday 22 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM.
Sam Vernon: Impasse of Desires, a site-specific installation and solo exhibition of the artist’s work. Using Matt Richardson’s 2013 publication The Q***r Limit of Black Memory as a critical entry point, Vernon drapes the first-floor gallery and lobby of the museum with sheets of colored fabric and creates a constellation of made and found images. Though published in 2013, Vernon uses this installation to consider the questions Richardson raises in The Q***r Limit of Black Memory—most urgently, where is the space for q***rness to exist within a collective imagining of Blackness?—and underscores their critical relevance seven years later.
This program is presented in conjunction with Museums with Pride

Address

California College Of The Arts, 1111 8th Street
San Francisco, CA
94107

Website

http://www.cca.edu/academics/graduate/visual-critical-studies

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