News and Notes from MCC Artist Fellows
We compile a monthly list of presentations, honors, publications, and events featuring past and present MCC Artist Fellows & Finalists. As you’ll see, the news is good – not just about these award-winning artists, but also about the breadth and vitality of contemporary arts throughout the Commonwealth and beyond.
Compositions by Richard Cornell (Music Composition Fellow ’07) and Michael Gandolfi (Music Composition Fellow ’03) were among those performed by Boston Musica Viva in its recent All-American Grooves concert. Read an admiring review of the event in the Boston Globe.
Vico Fabbris (Painting Fellow ’06) and Nathalie Miebach (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’09) both have work in Second Nature at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Their pieces, along with work by Susan Lyman and Michael Mazur, explore contemporary responses to nature, bringing the natural world into works of art in surprising ways. Vico contributes lushly detailed botanical drawings (of completely invented plants and flowers). Nathalie has constructed reed sculptures derived from scientific data gathered at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown. The show has an opening reception Friday, October 16, 2009, and runs through November 29. There will be a free gallery talk with the artists and curator Christopher Busa on Saturday, October 17, 2009 at 12:20 PM in PAAM’s galleries.
Janet Rickus (Painting Fellow ’06) and Ellen Wineberg (Painting Finalist ’04) are both included in Still Lifes at Gallery Henoch in New York City. The show runs October 3-31, with an opening reception Saturday, October 3, 4-7 PM.
Sandra Allen (Drawing Fellow ’08) has a solo exhibition of drawings at Caroll and Sons Gallery in Boston, through October 17.
Alicia Casilio, Sara Casilio, Kelly Casilio, and Cary Wolinsky (Sculpture/Installation Fellows ’09), aka TRIIIBE, have the film Bailouts in a group show called America for Sale at Exit Art in NYC running from October 2-November 21, with an opening reception Friday, October 2, 7-10 PM.
Laura Chasman (Drawing Finalist ’04) is one of only 49 artists (from 3,300 entries) to be selected for the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Competition 2009 exhibition, in Washington DC. The competition is a triennial event that invites figurative artists in all media to apply. Laura’s portrait Nicholas will appear in the resulting exhibition, on view October 23, 2009-August 22, 2010.
Sculptures by Alan Colby (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’07) will be on display at the Saint Gaudens Museum in Cornish, NH. The museum, a national historic site, is the home, studios and gardens of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of America’s greatest sculptors. Alan’s show, Stone Age to the Digital Age, is on display through October 31.
Karen Dolmanisth (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ’03) has an installation at the Taber Gallery at Holyoke Community College: First Language, Immanence and Interpretation, a temporal, evolving installation. There’s a reception/performance project on Thursday, October 8, 5:30 PM.
Patrick Donnelly (Poetry Fellow ’08) joins Jason Roush for a poetry reading at the Honan-Allston Library in Allston, Ma, Monday, October 26, 6:30 PM. The reading is coordinated with a 3-week poetry reading and writing residency with 5th graders at Gardner Pilot Academy, in November ’09. The residency is organized by the Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project and funded by the Harvard-Allston Partnership Fund and the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Firefly Press (a local letterpress studio) will also participate. In other news, Patrick’s second book of poems, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, is forthcoming from Four Way Books, and he has recently joined Poetry International as an Associate Editor. From the Fishouse, an audio archive of emerging poets, has recently posted a 2007 reading he gave at UMaine Farmington.
Michael Downing (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Finalist ’08) has a new memoir, Life with Sudden Death, new from Counterpoint Press. Michael will read and discuss the book at Porter Square Books on Thursday, October 29, 7 PM. An essay adapted from the book recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine.
Ralf Yusuf Gawlick (Music Composition Fellow ’09) was commissioned by Boston College in collaboration with the German Embassy (Washington D.C.) to write the music for the documentary Writing on the Wall: Remembering the Berlin Wall. The film will premiere on Sunday, October 11, 4:30 PM at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Michal Goldman’s (Film & Video Fellow ’07) documentary At Home in Utopia, about a Jewish labor housing cooperative in 1920’s Bronx, screens at the Brookline Library on Tuesday, October 20th at 6 PM. A discussion with Yok and Bebe Ziebel, former Coops Residents featured in the film, and filmmakers Michal Goldman & Ellen Brodsky, will follow the free screening.
Michael Hoerman (Poetry Fellow ’04) is coordinating the launch of a Gulf Coast Poetry Tour on Tuesday, October 6 at Rudyard’s British Pub in Houston. The tour, held for the first time this year, will include more than a hundred emerging poets from the Gulf region featured together in marathon readings in Houston, Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Mobile, Oct. 6-9.
Brian Knep (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ’07) has a solo exhibition at the Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford. The show, entitled Exempla, features six interactive pieces in which hundreds of creatures playful, child-like drawings work together to achieve sometimes complicated, often futile tasks. The projected works, which are based in the scientific concept of emergent behavior, will be on display through November 15, 2009. Also, look for Brian’s solo show at Judi Rotenberg Gallery in November ’09.
Andrew Mowbray (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ’05) has a solo exhibition, Tempest Prognosticator, at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. The show is the inaugural exhibition in the PLATFORM series, featuring early- and mid-career artists from both the New England and national arts communities. Andrew’s art explores contemporary responses to weather, literally injecting himself into the process, wearing a human-scaled anemometer or over-sized umbrella. The show, which includes sculpture, performance video, and drawing, will be on display through January 3, 2010. There will be a gallery talk featuring the artist on Saturday, October 10, 3 PM.
Scenes from Monica Raymond’s (Playwriting Finalist ’07, Poetry Finalist ’08) The Owl Girl (read an excerpt) will be read at the Inkubator Festival in Washington, DC on Saturday, October 3rd; details at inkwelltheater.org.
Transition, a comedy about race and identity, by Peter Snoad (Playwriting Fellow ’09), runs October 9 through November 1 at the Attic Studio and Film Theatre in Los Angeles by Towne Street Theatre as part of its 10-minute play festival. The same play will also receive a staged reading by Mixed Phoenix Theatre at the Jerome Robbins Studio in New York City on October 23. Another of Peter’s shorts, The Life of Trees, is the winner of the 10-minute play category in the New Play Competition of Brevard Little Theatre, in Brevard, NC. It will receive a staged reading in May.
THINK AGAIN (Photograph Fellows ’99), the artist/activist collaborative of S.A. Bachman and David John Attyah, let us know that the exhibition ACTIONS SPEAK, a multi-media project commissioned by the Worcester Art Museum, has been extended through the summer of 2010. According to the artists, the piece “focuses on the connections between political brutality and public policy, and reconsiders ongoing social problems like HIV/AIDS and violence against women.” The project is a hybrid of text, photography, drawing, etching and digital design.
Jeff Warmouth (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ’05) is among the artists in EAT the Art at the Bunker Hill Community College Art Gallery. The group exhibition, centered around the concept of food as art, runs through October 31, 2009.
Joan Wickersham (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’08) reads from her memoir The Suicide Index at Harvard Coop in Cambridge on Thursday, October 15, 2009, 7 PM. She recently did a Q&A on Newtonville Book’s Community Blog.
Tracy Winn (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’08) will read from and discuss her short story collection Mrs. Somebody Somebody on Friday, October 23 at 7:00pm, at Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell. The event is part of the 2009 Concord Festival of Authors.
Past Fellows Notes
Sep. 2009
Aug. 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
Apr. 2009
Mar. 2009
Feb. 2009
Jan. 2009
Dec. 2008
Nov. 2008
Oct. 2008
Are you a past fellow or finalist with an event, honor, or other bit of news you’d like to share? Tell us about it.
Images: Nathalie Miebach, SOLAR BEGINNINGS (2008), Reed, wood, weather data collected on Cape Cod, 56x66x27 in; Laura Chasman, TIF (2002), gouache on illustration board 12×11 in; Brian Knep, EXPAND (2008), interactive video installation, computer, video projector, custom software, light switch, 5×7 ft.