Resources

Seven years ago, former UH Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture Dean Joe Mashburn introduced Joe Meppelink and Andrew Vrana, and it wasn’t long before their shared interests in civic art, product design and architecture inspired the creation of their company, Metalab.

Read about their innovative projects designed to enhance urban landscapes aesthetically and environmentally in the Houston Chronicle here.

WGSS Postdoc Heads to Wellesley

These past two years we’ve been happy to have among us the most recent in a long line of great postdoctoral fellows, Sima Shakhsari. The postdocs, supported by the University of Houston Friends of Women’s Studies and a dynamic set of individual donors dedicated to expanding the work of feminist scholars to grow new visions for a better world, bring new insight and energy to the WGSS Program and the Houston community.

Sima arrived in Fall 2010 with a new PhD in Anthropology from Stanford. Her dissertation, on gender and cybergovernmentality in the Iranian blogosphere, is the source of her recent featured article in Feminist Review and on its way to becoming a book. Her next project explores the dynamics of the policing and “rightful killing” of transgender subjects in the “war on terror.” While in Houston, Sima has taught courses on Women in the Muslim and Arab Worlds and Transgender Migration, along with two sections of our Intro to Women’s Studies course. She’s been an invited speaker at conferences around the country, in Canada and in the UK. Along with her scholarship and teaching, Sima played key roles in our 2010-2012 speakers series and in organizing our Spring 2011 Feminist Pedagogy symposium. She’s been a terrific colleague and we know she’ll do great things in her new position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s & Gender Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Daniel Bernard Roumain, a classically trained composer, performer and violinist, takes an unconventional approach to playing the violin Tuesday while playing for students at Steamboat Springs High School.

“The waterwall’s constantly running water was cut off so the dancers could gracefully position themselves against the structure in an engaging moment right before the climax of the performance, when the water came rushing back down on top of the performers as the crowd watched in amazement.”

Read full coverage here.

INSIGHT / OUT from Aurora Picture Show on Vimeo.

Classes are out but there are still opportunities to learn on campus.

NSM’s community lecture series on May 15 will address strategies for heart repair.

Workshop led by USA Projects

The Core Residency Program & Project Row Houses,
in partnership with United States Artists co-present
a workshop led by USA Projects

THURSDAY, May 17, 2012
6 p.m.
Freed Auditorium
Glassell School of Art
5101 Montrose Blvd.

In 2010, United States Artists launched a new online fundraising platform, USA Projects. This micro-philanthropy website connects award-winning artists with friends, fans, and followers. To date, USA Projects has raised more than $1.5M for artists. This session will feature the online ecosystem: how it works for artists, how supporters have become engaged, and the opportunities the platform presents for the future of funding for outstanding American artists. Building a new ecosystem that supports hundreds, even thousands of artists is a big job—bigger than any one of us can achieve by ourselves. That´s why United States Artists has built a platform for all members of the art community to use: artists, donors, fans, national organizations, regional organizations, local organizations, and informal groups. We welcome each and every one of you to join us in our very important mission: Let´s invest in America´s finest artists together!

This workshop is free and open to the public. RSVP by emailing [email protected].

Facilitator:
Kira Shewfelt
Artist Relations Specialist and Education Coordinator
United States Artists

USA Projects, an Online Ecosystem for Funding Artists

WHO: UH School of Art
WHAT: UH School of Art Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition Opening
WHEN: Saturday, April 28, 6-9PM
Exhibition runs April 28 - May 12
Gallery hours: noon - 6 p.m., Tuesday - Saturday
WHERE: DiverseWorks, 1117 E. Freeway

Each spring, the University of Houston School of Art bids a fond farewell to graduating master of fine arts (MFA) students. Before these students embark on new creative journeys, they will share their latest works at the MFA Thesis Exhibition.

Eleven UH MFA students will showcase their works at this event. Artists include Sebastian Forray (painting and drawing), Ted Closson (painting), Rosine Kouamen (photography and digital media), Natali Leduc (sculpture), M’kina Tapscott (sculpture), Lisa Garrett (graphic communications), Emily McGrew (painting), Steve Hook (painting), Danilo Bojic (graphic communications), Chuck Ivy (interdisciplinary practices and emerging forms) and Abi Semter (painting and drawing).

For more details on the exhibition click DiverseWorks, or to read the full press release here.

Join the cast and crew of Dionysia 2012, produced by the Center for Creative Work at the University of Houston Honors College, directed by Mitchell Center Artist in Residence Aaron Landsman, as they rehearse and prepare for Aristophanes’ The Frogs.

Read more about The Frogs and Mitchell Center artist in residence Aaron Landsman.

April 13, 7-9pm
Private Hard Hat Tours and Cocktails Event

Join the list of supporters who have helped pave the way to Blaffer Art Museum’s grand reopening. This is the final opportunity to purchase a paver in time for the grand re-opening gala taking place September 21, 2012.

If purchased today, receive an invitation to the exclusive sneak-preview event this Friday and enjoy hard hat tours of the space midway through completion, along with cocktails and music. Click here to purchase a paver and gain lifetime recognition as a supporter of the biggest museum makeover in Blaffer Art Museum’s history.

Lecture by Andrea Geyer
Friday, April 6, 2012
5:30 p.m.
Freed Auditorium
Glassell School of Art
5101 Montrose Blvd.

Andrea Geyer lives and works in New York. She uses both fiction and documentary strategies in her image and text based works. Her works are temporal translations of specific social and political situations that address larger concepts such as national identity, gender and class in the context of the ongoing re-adjustment of cultural meanings and social memories. Recent works include Comrades of Time a group of seven video vingettes in which young New York women speak texts from the 1920s Weimar Republic Germany. Reflecting on that historic post-revolutionary moment, the work contemplates the need of a political imaginary to instigate true social change. Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb, a six-channel video engaging the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961) and the questions it raised about the relationship of truth and justice and about the responsibility an individual carries within a nation state. AndSpiral Lands, a photographic and textual historiography of the ongoing dispossession of lands from Indigenous people by colonization, governmentality, capitalist development that constitute one of the longest struggle for social justice in North America. Her collaborative work9 Scripts from a Nation at War is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work has been exhibited most notably at Tramway, Glasgow, 29th Sao Paulo Biennale, UAG Gallery Irvine, RedCat/Los Angeles, The Whitney Museum of American Art, TATE Modern, Serpentine Gallery London, Generali Foundation, Secession Vienna, and documenta12 Kassel. This May, she will do a performance in the context of Arika´s curated A Survey as a Process of Listening at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Geyer is an Assistant Professor in the Parsons Fine Arts program at the Parsons the New School for Design.

red, black & GREEN: a blues COLLABORATION from MAPP International on Vimeo.

Being Flynn, the new movie based on the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by IART Professor Nick Flynn.

“Sometimes awkwardly and sometimes gracefully, Being Flynn charts a middle course between the rough honesty of its source and the sentimental triteness of the much worse movie it could have been,” A.O. Scott of the New York Times wrote.

Read Texas Monthly’s coverage here.

Protecting Houston’s oldest buildings is a full-time job. Preservation Houston, formerly the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, believes it’s up to the task. Read what David Bush, Director of Programs, has to say about the name change.