Stanford University Department of Art & Art History

Congratulations to our first-year MFA students in the documentary film program: Drew de Pinto, Connor Lee O'Keefe, Maxwell Mueller, Kyle Myers-Haugh, Azza Cohen, and Alexandra Stergiou. Here they are seen, along with Professor Jamie Meltzer, during the Q&A of tonight’s online screening of their films produced during a remote fall quarter. Thank you to all, including Film & Media Studies Technical Manager Mark Urbanek, and Film & Media Studies Technologist Paul Meyers, for a ...flawless program. Visit art.stanford.edu to learn more about these films. #stanfordaah #stanfordaahdocfilm

A collection of portraits by undergraduate students of Drawing I, taught by Lauren A. Toomer. These drawing are part of this year’s online Open Studios, a showcase of the creative practice of our students during a remote fall quarter. Explore paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and much more at https://artexhibitions.stanford.edu/open-studios. Drawings by Clarice Hu; Carolyn Asante-Dartey; James Schull; Angelo Marquez-Nieto; Gabe Perez; Cristina Gonzalez Torres; Tierra Baird; Caroline Wang.

Stuart Robertson’s collage works force the viewer to reimagine views of Black people that are fed to us through popular media. These collages challenge us to either make sense of what are actually familiar faces or to make do with one’s inability to make perfect sense of them. The ideas of reclamation and recreation are heavy in his work, as they create new landscapes out of ideas and objects we once thought we knew well. Stuart, a recent graduate of our MFA program in art pr...actice, is one of four artists featured in our online fall exhibition Freeform, along with Richard Jonathan Nelson, Sam Vernon, and Laneya Billingsley, curated by Dionne Lee and Rawley Clark. Explore the show at artexhibitions.stanford.edu, link in bio! Images: Untitled, 2019. Cut paper on paper. 9" x 12". #stanfordaah #stanfordaahexhibitions

Congratulations to Zulfiya Hamzaki (MFA Doc Film ’18), whose film Doori will be screened online tonight at 7 via BAY MADE, followed by a live Q&A. Zulfiya made the film while a student in our Documentary Film Program! Learn more about her work at zulfiyahamzaki.com.

The Stanford Daily speaks to art practice lecturers Lauren Toomer and Dana Hemenway regarding the challengesand unexpected benefitsof moving their courses, drawing and sculpture, respectively, online. Hemenway notes, "What went better than expected is everyone’s willingness to continue to learn . . . The caliber of the projects that students have been able to dive into while they’re working on their own has been really inspiring."

Catastrophe in a Bottle: Ellie Ga’s Medial Detritus of Drift, an essay by PhD candidate Christian Whitworth, has been published in the second issue of MAST: TheJournal ofMedia Art Study and Theory. This essay was originally written for Professor Emanuele Lugli’s graduate seminar,Art and Invisibility: The Dissemblance of Labor, in spring 2019. Contemporary media artist Ellie Ga’s video-essayistic practice documents her maritime travels, interviews, and encounters with ant...iquated and, at times, lost artifacts of cultural production. But at certain dramatic turns within her narratives, she is forced to confront the dire realities of the humanitarian crisis emerging just off-screen. This paper considers these shifts in perspectivesfrom material studies of messages in bottles and the ruins of the Pharos Lighthouse to the bodies of asylum seekersin order to propose a vein of media studies that superimposes populations under duress with the matter of their transnational, oceanic environments. While this study, following Ga’s, partakes in a media archaeological approach by delving into the operations of seemingly obsolescent processes of writing and recording, it draws upon theories of new materialism, namely Karen Barad’s writings on intra-action and diffraction, in order to reformulate difference within the assemblage of incommensurate ideas, bodies, theories, and matters. Ultimately, Ga’s videos and performances serve to inscribe within media studies and practice an ethics of exclusion which prioritizes uncertainty and intuition. See the link in our bio to access the full article! MAST: TheJournal ofMedia Art Study and Theory is a new interdisciplinary journal on media studiessponsored by NeMLA (the Northeast Modern Language Association) at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. The special issue, Media, Materiality, and Emergency, was edited by Timothy Barker (University of Glasgow). Images: From Ellie Ga, The Fortunetellers, 2011. Performance, running time: 1 hour. Live narration, video, slide and overhead projections, recorded sound. Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York. #stanfordaahphd

Museum of the Revolution, a film by Srdan Keca, assistant professor in our documentary film program, has received the prestigious Sundance Institute Documentary Fund Grant. Museum of the Revolution centers around a community living inside the remnants of one of the most ambitious, and never completed, architectural projects of socialist Yugoslavia. Inside the dark corridors of this unfinished structure, a little girl and an old lady evolve an unlikely and enchanting friendshi...p. When a new urban development is announced on the site of the Museum of the Revolution, the community is forced to find a new home, and soon the little girl takes on the burdens of a hard adult life in the streets of Belgrade. As the city around her is being transformed, so looms an end to childhood dreams. Work on this project started in 2014, when Keca made a multi-channel video installation about the unfinished building, that was exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Production of the feature-length documentary started in early 2017, and it is expected to premiere in 2021. Learn more: https://www.sundance.org//2020-documentary-film-program-fa #stanfordaah #stanfordaahdocfilm @sundanceorg Images: Stills from Museum of the Revolution, dir. by Srdan Keca

Congratulations to Brett Amory (MFA Art Practice '20) whose work "Self in Place" is included in the Open Exhibition at de Young Museum. The de Young Open is a juried community art exhibition of submissions by artists who live in the Bay Area. All 877 works of art are hung salon-style in the the 12,000-square-foot Herbst Exhibition Galleries. Learn more and see all of the works: https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions/de-young-open... Image: Brett Amory, Self in Place, 2020. 52.375 x 49.75 x 3 inches.

Dexter Sterling Simpson, a senior majoring in film and media studies, discusses his new documentary, Brain Bridges," which is available to view online: https://youtu.be/OzHcV6wPFso The film investigates global talent flows, brain hubs and socioeconomic development, all as part of a long-term project by Stanford sociologist and Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) Director Gi-Wook Shin.

Yechen Zhao is a PhD candidate in art history who studies the history and theory of photography. Here, he shares details of the first chapter of his dissertation, which explores E.J. Bellocq, Lee Friedlander, and the negative's forgotten shadow. From 1967 to 1970, the American photographer Lee Friedlander printed photographs from a set of 89 glass negatives formerly belonging to the New Orleans photographer Ernest John Bellocq, which had been discovered in a wooden chest afte...r Bellocq's death in 1949. Friedlander used these negatives, which depict women from New Orleans' red-light district circa 1912, to reconstruct what he and the Museum of Modern Art saw as a heretofore unrecognized artistic oeuvre, culminating in a 1970 exhibition of 34 Friedlander-made prints at the museum. Despite claiming to be reproductions of pictures printed by Bellocq, no such photographs have ever been found. This chapter investigates the material and theoretical gymnastics required to reproduce non-existent photographs, and in so doing provides a model for thinking about the processual unfolding of photography across time. Following the historical and material transformations of these negatives as they traveled from 1912 to 1970, I demonstrate how the stubborn indeterminacy of their origins and purpose can be reconsidered as a form of productive potentiality inherent not only to the historical contexts of their survival, but also to the photographic negative in general. Image: E.J Bellocq, (untitled), c. 1912. Printed later by Lee Friedlander. #stanfordaah #stanfordaahphd

Oleg Savunov is a first-year MFA candidate in art practice. As a photographer and lens-based artist, his field of interests ranges from photographic documentary projects to conceptual lens-based works that explore philosophical and existential questions. Landscape has been his perpetual object of research and investigation, which has made him expand his practice towards installation. By creating and mounting installation pieces into a landscape, and using photography as a too...l for documentation, he hopes to construct a metaphor or a certain effect by framing the reality and space. His most recent documentary project features the town of Ozersk, a closed city where a state company called Mayak produces nuclear weapons components and isotopes, stores and regenerates spent nuclear fuel, and arranges its disposal. A plutonium charge for the first Soviet atomic bomb was created here. Access is possible only by obtaining a pass for a certain period of stay, which makes it impossible to find here any "random" people who do not have family or professional ties with it. Due to its secret, sensitive status, it was created as an absolutely enclosed, self-sufficient entity with all the structures and goods necessary for residents. One gets the impression of a place with a utopian history, which is felt even now: a clean city without graffiti, with fragrant apple trees, and Stalinist buildings in the "old city. This atmosphere contrasts with the fact that there is a plant nearby that produces components for nuclear weapons and belies the picture of serene, everyday life. In 1957, Mayak was the site of the Kyshtym disaster, one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. During this catastrophe, a poorly maintained storage tank exploded, releasing 50-100 tons of radioactive waste to the atmosphere. The resulting radioactive cloud spread to the northeast direction from Ozersk, covering a huge territory which is still a restricted area. Explore more of Oleg’s works at olegsavunov.com. Thank you to @somthing_happened for sharing this project, and welcome to the Department of Art and Art History! #stanfordaah @stanfordartpractice

First-year documentary film studies students Kyle Myers-Haugh, Connor Lee O'Keefe, and Azza Cohen sit safely distanced in Oshman Hall as they learn how to thread 16mm film in a Bolex wind-up camera. They are led by Film & Media Studies Technologist Paul Meyers, who makes use of a document camera to project the fine process onto the big screen. We are grateful for the faculty, students, and staff who have embraced this new kind of beginning for our documentary film program. We... are impressed by your efforts, and especially thrilled that our first-year students have joined us for this memorable year. Stay tuned as we continue to chronicle the activities of our documentary film students. Thank you to Film & Media Studies Technical Manager Mark Urbanek for capturing this moment! #stanfordaah #stanfordaahdocfilm

Sondra Perry delivers an online artist’s talk as part of the fall installment of the Department of Art & Art History’s annual Studio Lecture Series. #stanfordaah #sondraperry

Artist Sondra Perry joins us today at 5:30 pm to deliver a talk as part of the Department of Art and Art History's Studio Lecture Series. Learn more and register: https://events.stanford.edu/events/887/88724/

Miguel Novelo, MFA candidate in art practice, has released La Marea: La Corriente, an interactive essay documentary that depicts the life of Jorge, a teenager in the tropical landscape of Seybaplaya in Campeche, Mexico. Jorge represents the contemporary Mexican youth, whose hometowns are undergoing rapid changes by profit-driven industries. But rather than drive economic development, these changes force migration and displacement. Jorge’s dream of staying at home is the Mex...ican dream. The free digital experience, presented by @cineolafilms, can be viewed at cineo.la/la-marea. Congratulations to @miguelnovelocrz! Images: Stills from "La Marea: La Corriente. #stanfordaah @stanfordartpractice

Congratulations to Miguel Novelo, MFA candidate in art practice, who has released La Marea: La Corriente, an interactive documentary about life in the tropical landscape of Seybaplaya in Campeche, Mexico, seen through the eyes of a teenager named Jorge. The free digital experience, presented by CiNEOLA, can be viewed at https://www.cineo.la/la-marea.

The fall quarter has begun! There is still an opportunity to enroll in our wide-range of art practice courses, including the following in photography: Composite and Time; Home as Studio Space; Performance; and an intermediate-level seminar taught by Professor Jonathan Calm. See our flyers and visit art.stanford.edu/courses to learn more.

An orange-red sky greeted many of us this morning, including Sommer Wood, the Department of Art and Art History’s photography lab manager. Here she captures the McMurtry Building, and views from its top floor. We wish everyone the very best during this unpredictable time, stay well and safe! Thank you to @sommerwoodphoto for sharing these photos!... #stanfordaah #mcmurtrybuilding