Chicago IL, February 12, 2004 - New York artist Lesley Dill uses constructions of paper, paint, fabric, text and metaphorical imagery to create delicate yet provocative costumes that explore the relationships of body, soul and language, and the ways in which words mediate between the interior emotional world and the exterior social realm. Cris Bruch's monumental paper structures are formalist, abstract investigations of material, form and mass that address his fascination with work and the cycles of labor and rest that drive our lives. His sculptures appear to be made of cast iron, steel or wood, rather than paper.
Structure and Skin, an exhibition of work by Bruch and Dill, will open at Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book and Paper Arts on Friday, March 12 and run through April 24, with an opening reception on March 12 from 5:30 - 7:30 pm.
Lesley Dill will present a slide lecture on her work during the opening reception. Cris Bruch will present a slide lecture on his work on Friday, March 5 at 6:30 pm. All events take place at the Columbia Center for Book & Paper Arts and are free and open to the public.
The Center is located at 1104 S. Wabash, 2nd floor. Gallery hours are Monday - Friday, 10 am - 5 pm; Saturday, 10 am - 2 pm. Call 312-344-6630 for more information.
"This is the first time their work will be shown together," says curator Suzanne Cohan-Lange, a sculptural artist and chair of Columbia's interdisciplinary arts graduate program. "As an artist and educator, I was immediately struck by the way in which their work addresses very different aspects of human endeavor. I find Cris's work to be an embodiment of his concern with the social, extroverted world of labor and work, very yang. Lesley's world is all about the interior, the yin of our lives. It's interesting that while Lesley credits living and working in India as a major influence on her work, Cris's work often has the meditative quality of a Zen garden. Both these artists really push the boundaries of paper as an art form and I think this will be an extraordinary exhibition."
Cris Bruch was born in Kansas City Missouri in 1957. He earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work has been exhibited in galleries in Oregon and Washington State as well as in Dusseldorf Germany and is in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Microsoft Corporation, the Seattle Art Commission and the Stadtsparkasse in Dusseldorf.
Lesley Dill was born in Bronxville New York in 1950. She earned a BA in English from Trinity College, Hartford, an MA in art education from Smith College and an MFA from the Maryland Institute. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is in major collections at the Whitney Museum, Yale University Art Museum, High Museum of Art and the St. Louis Art Museum.
Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383; mleventhal@colum.edu
Chicago, March 2004 - Every culture has its own wedding traditions. For some Asian Americans, the western custom of exchanging vows is replaced with pouring tea or rice wine for your parents in front of family altar or by walking around the Agni, a sacred fire believed to be the sustainer of life, which acts as a witness of the marriage.
Through wedding photographs, garments and objects from the 1920s to the present, "Double Happiness: Asian/American Wedding Stories" explores the origin and transformation of Asian wedding culture in America. The exhibition, presented by the Columbia College Chicago Center for Asian Arts and Media, opens at the college's C33 Gallery, 33 East Congress, 1st floor, on Wednesday, April 7 and runs through April 30 (gallery hours are Monday - Thursday, 9 am - 7 pm; Friday 9 am - 5 pm; Saturday by appointment). An opening reception will take place on April 7 from 5-7 pm. Both the exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. For more information call 312-344-8213.
After its run at Columbia College Chicago, "Double Happiness" will travel to the Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph for a one-week stay May 3 - May 7, in the first level rotunda.
"Double Happiness gathers a diverse array of historical and contemporary photographs as well as garments and objects that reflect the changing face of Asian American identity in the context of matrimonial union," explains exhibition curator Yuchia Chang. "You'll learn what it's like to be a traditional Chinese bride, resplendent in intricately embroidered red silk qipao and adorned in bright gold jewelry, or a Korean groom dressed in his flowing, boldly colored hanbok.
"Conversely, many of the images depict Asian couples from past generations in a western white wedding dress and rigidly formal black or white suit. Moving forward, bi-cultural marriages incorporate traditional dress, while opting for unconventional ceremonies in celebration of the mixed marriage.
"We've also taken a serious look at gender and racial relations. From China to the Philippines to Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and India, the content spans and explores the pan-ethnic/multi-ethnic/multicultural identity of Asian America. Falling under categories of ethnicity, time/generation, and place, these memory forms allow us to reflect upon personal stories of love and life and the inevitable changes, cultural fusions and flipsides of tradition."
Double Happiness is generously sponsored by Illinois State Treasurer Judy Barr Topinka, the Mayer & Morris Kaplan Family Foundation, Harris Bank and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. Special thanks goes to the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago and lenders of the exhibited works.
NOTE: Images are available.
Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383
Chicago, March 2004 -- The Edible Book Show & Tea is the tongue-in-cheek April Fools' Day event at Columbia College Chicago that pokes loving fun at literature, art and food in equal measure. Once again, the Columbia College Library and the college's Center for Book & Paper Arts will co-sponsor the event, welcoming the public to the third floor of the Columbia Library at 624 S. Michigan Avenue to indulge in the eccentric delight of eating books.
The delicious doings are scheduled for Thursday, April 1, 6-8 p.m. Free to Book Cooks; $10 donation for other attendees.
Artists with a culinary streak and chefs with artistic souls are invited to participate by whipping up an Edible Book to show and eat. Create an edible book to share and the event is free. To participate with an original creation, you must RSVP by 5 p.m. on Friday, March 26 with your name, "book" title and a full list of ingredients - preferably via e-mail - to Melissa Jay Craig at mcraig@colum.edu (312-344-6635).
"This event is every bit as quirky as it sounds," says Craig, Columbia faculty member, artist-cum-cook and co-hostess of Edible Books. "It's a great chance to meet other people with an offbeat sense of humor, not to mention fulfilling two of life's most basic urges -- to create and to eat."
Uninspired or shy -- but curious and hungry? You're still welcome to attend, admire and feast. RSVP to Michelle Ferguson at 312-344-7384 (mferguson@colum.edu) and bring a $10 donation to benefit the Center's bindery.
"Edible Books is one of the favorite events we do at the library," says Ferguson, library staffer and event co-hostess. "Munching amidst the stacks sets an appropriately irreverent tone and gives rise to some memorable jocularity."
Last year's event included more than two dozen creations by artist/cooks who crafted both sweet and savory volumes. Titles included such masterpieces as Codex Interruptus by Suan Hanes, "Pooh" Dora's Box by Felicia Rogers, Book Suey by Lisa Mendez and Pair-A-Dice Lost by Carol Spector. To view books visit http://www.bookandpaper.org/exhbitions2003/ediblebooks.html.
The Chicago festivities are part of an international celebration of books, food, art and fun conceived by California-based publisher, curator and art critic Judith Hoffberg. She devised the plan with friends over Thanksgiving dinner, shared the idea via the Internet -- and the offbeat event took on a life of its own.
Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383
Chicago, February 2004 - "I grew up with a longing for my Italian heritage, to know my grandparents who had come to America long before I was born....Their immigrant stories were told to me the way one receives a prayer, and part of my history was made in their repeating." So begins the artist's introductory essay by Gina J. Grillo in Between Cultures: Children of Immigrants in America (March 2004, $29.95), the second book of photography in a series, published by The Center for American Places in collaboration with Columbia College Chicago.
Grillo's personal commitment to exploring immigrant life in the United States has turned into a creative odyssey. Since 1996 the photographer has documented the faces and captured the souls of the young people whose lives straddle two cultures. In her early twenties, employed at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Grillo's personal interest in her immigrant heritage broadened to encompass larger issues of immigration and acculturation. Later returning to graduate school to pursue an MFA in photography, she was influenced by the work of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and Augustus Sherman and her course was set.
She began by haunting the lines outside Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), later negotiating entry to citizenship swearing in ceremonies, exploring immigrant neighborhoods and ultimately being invited by the INS to photograph new immigrant families arriving at O'Hare. This opportunity led Grillo to develop relationships with individuals, enriching not only her work, but also her understanding of her own heritage. The images in Between Cultures capture families' experiences arriving in Chicago as new Americans and chronicle their integration into urban life - in new neighborhoods, with family, at cultural celebrations, citizenship ceremonies and many other everyday scenes. "When I started Between Cultures, I didn't realize the gift of stepping back to look at my own life and to examine the meaning of the immigrant journey. My photographic journey seems as unquestionable to me as my grandparents coming to America."
"[In] Gina J. Grillo's telling photographs, one discovers faces filled with joy and radiant expectation, others show stoic calmness, still others reveal questioning wariness and, it seems at times, sadness," writes historian Leo Schelbert in the book's conclusion. "Great longing for what they had to leave behind coupled with unease about their new surroundings, with their different tongue, lifestyle, and occasional disdain and hostility, seem to fill their souls. Grillo's masterful look at children of immigrants in contemporary America provides a unique perspective on the newcomers' enduring challenges."
A major traveling exhibition of Between Cultures: Children of Immigrants in America opens on February 14 at The Ellis Island Immigration History Museum in New York City. Between Cultures: Children of Immigrants in America will be in bookstores in March and is distributed by University of Chicago Press ($29.95 hardcover).
Gina Grillo has taught photography at Columbia College Chicago since 1997. Her work documenting children of immigrants to America has been on exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Field Museum, The Children's Immigration Museum, the Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and was recently selected for "The Spirit of Family," a book and exhibition project produced by Al and Tipper Gore. Her photographs have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Exito, Interiors, New World Publications, Migration World and Family Support Magazine. She has done documentary projects for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the Family Resource Coalition and the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights.
Future editions in the photography series co-published by The Center for American Places and Columbia College Chicago include You're Not From Around Here by Michael Smith (April 2004); Place, Art, and Self by Yi-F Tuan (April 2004) and The Dan Ryan Expressway by Jay Wolke (October 2004), among many others.
NOTE: Gina J. Grillo is available for interviews. Review copies of "Between Cultures" available.
Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383
Chicago, March 2004 - Elliot Earls, Head of the Department of 2-D Design and Designer-in-Residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art will discuss his graphic design and typography projects and perform for the public as part of Columbia College Chicago's ART TALKS series. Earls often features himself as the central protagonist in his own work, which is known for its integration of grotesque and cartoonish typefaces, disturbing drawings, digital tricks and pyrotechnics.
The lecture and performance will begin at 6:30 p.m. on April 21 at Columbia's 623 S. Wabash building, Room 203. ART TALKS is free and open to the public. For more information call (312) 344-7887.
As a performance artist, Earls has performed in New York City at the Wooster Group's Performing Garage, Columbia College Chicago, and the 2000 Culture Mart Festivals. He has also been a featured performer worldwide at such venues and events as the Cretiel Theatre Festival in France, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Oak Street Theatre in Portland, Maine, Experimenta 99 in Lisbon, Opera Totale in Venice, Typo 2000 in Berlin, and Living Surface in Park City, Utah.
Earls' first release, Throwing Apples at the Sun, won numerous awards and was included in ID Magazine's 1996 Annual Design Review, the 1996 American Center for Design 100 Show, and the 1996 New York Art Directors' Club Show. As a typographer, his original type design is distributed worldwide by Emigre Inc. and his posters are part of the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. In 2001, Earls was named a finalist for the Chrysler National Design Award in New Media.
In May 2002, in association with Emigre Inc., Earls released Catfish, a film on DVD that traces his work from lab to stage. The highly manipulated digital film incorporates animation, stop motion photography, drawing, typography, and live action into a seamless performance documentary. In addition, all of the music on Catfish is written, sung and played by Earls, whose influences range from hip-hop to country and from contemporary to classic musicians.
Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383
Chicago, March, 2004--Can machines be more intelligent than people? If so, how are human beings different from machines? Professor Terence Brunk thinks that cinematic images of intelligent machines, like Hal in the film 2001 and the android David in Artificial Intelligence AI, may reveal as much about our ideas of ourselves as they do about technology. We create artificially intelligent beings in our own image. The motto of Tyrell, the android creator in Blade Runner, is "More human than human." Brunk will examine such representations in relation to cultural assumptions about gender, emotion and relationships.
His presentation, HAL Grows Up: Thinking Machines and the Popular Imagination, will engage his audience in an imaginative encounter with intelligent machines in film, music and literature. With luck, they will have the honor of interacting with an intelligent machine "in person." The program will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 1 in the Fifth Floor East Meeting Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. Admission is free. Call 312-744-6630 or visit www.intersections.colum.edu.
What is now called the Turing Test was proposed by A.M. Turing in 1950 as a measure of whether a machine could be as intelligent as a person. In the test, a guesser tries to determine from a lying man (or computer) and a truthful woman which of the two is actually the woman. Turing thought a computer capable of such deception would be developed before the year 2000.
Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the AI Lab at MIT, defined artificial intelligence as "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men." Today Deep Blue can play masterly chess. And according to Ray Kurzweil, "Levels of intelligence far greater than our own are going to evolve within this century." Yet the Loebner Prize of $100,000 for a computer capable of passing the Turing Test remains unclaimed. Human beings still lie better than machines do.
Brunk is Professor of English at Columbia College Chicago, where he directs the Literature program. He earned his PhD from Rutgers University, specializing in Gothic Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies and Composition Studies. He is co-author of a widely used composition textbook, Literacies: Reading, Writing and Interpretation (Norton, 2000) and numerous essays on feminist literary theory, 18th century British literature and culture, and pedagogical applications of technology. His current projects include an article on constructions of masculinity in Matthew Lewis's classic Gothic novel, The Monk. With his students he produces a multimedia hypertext version of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.
HAL Grows Up: Thinking Machines and the Popular Imagination is part of the adult education series, Intersections: A Meeting Place for Diverse Ideas on Contemporary Culture and the Arts. Intersections, a collaboration between the Cultural Studies Program of Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, presents monthly lectures and discussions that investigate and celebrate the complexity of contemporary culture and the arts in which scholars and educators from Columbia College Chicago explore a broad range of compelling topics in a format designed to be informative, invigorating and accessible. For a complete schedule visit www.intersections.colum.edu. Intersections lectures offer Continuing Education Credit for Illinois Public School Teachers. For information on CE credit, contact Paul Camic, Ph.D. at pcamic@colum.edu.
Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383, mleventhal@.colum.edu
Chicago, March 2004--Denise Duhamel's Barbie doll cavorts through her 1997 volume, Kinky, revealing entirely new possibilities for her plastic body. When Nick Carbó's version of Barbie meets his Secret Asian Man (inspired by the Johnny Rivers song), she says, "Hi there, big guy. I was made in the Philippines. You look like you were made there too." Both playful personae live out fantasies based logically on everyday absurdities. Duhamel and Carbó will read from these and other work at Columbia College Chicago on Monday, April 19, in the Concert Hall, 1014 S. Michigan Avenue. The program begins at 5:30 pm, and is free and open to the public. Please call 312-344-8138 for information.
Duhamel's recent collection is Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. Critics have called it "knee-slapping, quasi-existential poetry," "as hard to abandon as a taut thriller," and "somewhere between Sex and the City, Sharon Olds and Spalding Gray." Besides Kinky, her other titles include The Star-Spangled Banner, Girl Soldier, and two volumes co-authored with Maureen Seaton: Oyl, and Exquisite Politics. Widely published and anthologized in more than 50 volumes, her work has won awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets and Writers' Writers Exchange, and the NEA.
According to Alex Maskara, Carbo "says things that drive nails into the bones." Thomas Fink says Secret Asian Man "marvelously juxtaposes fragments of prurient, poignant erotic dialogue with solemn epistemological discourse." Carbó's El Grupo McDonald's won the Fourth Annual Asian American Literary Award. He has edited three anthologies of Philippine literature: Pinoy Poetics, Babaylan, and Returning a Borrowed Tongue. He has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Carbó and Duhamel co-edited Sweet Jesus: Poems About the Ultimate Icon. Carbó is Visiting Poet-in-Residence during Spring 2004 at Columbia College Chicago. Duhamel and Carbó are married and live together in Hollywood, Florida.
The Poetry Series, which is sponsored by the English Department of Columbia College Chicago, will culminate with Pulitzer Prize winner Maxine Kumin on Thursday, May 27, Ferguson Theater, 600 S. Michigan Avenue. Contributors to this year's issue of Columbia Poetry Review will read from their work on Thursday, May 20, Ferguson Theater, 600 S. Michigan Avenue. All programs take place at 5:30 p.m. and are free and open to the public.
Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383