Calendar

CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO:

El General, 2009

In 1910 a revolution erupted in Mexico, among its rallying cries "the right to vote." Nearly a century later "Sufragio Efectivo" is heard again as thousands take to the streets. Through the legacy that filmmaker Natalia Almada inherited as the great-granddaughter of Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles (1924-1928), one of Mexico's most controversial revolutionary figures accused of having been a "Dictator," "Iron Man" and "Nun-Burner," yet also acclaimed for having been the "father of modern Mexico," El General is a portrait of a family and a country under the shadow of the past.

Winner: Documentary Directing Award, Sundance Film Festival

Natalia Almada is a recipient of the of the 2011 Alpert Award in Film/Video, a $75,000 prize given annually to important, risk-taking artists. In 2009 she received the Sundance Documentary Directing Award for El General, and her most recent film El Velador premiered at New Directors/New Films and the Cannes' Directors' Fortnight. Her previous credits include All Water Has a Perfect Memory, an experimental short film that received international recognition; Al Otro Lado, her award-winning debut feature documentary about immigration, drug trafficking and corrido music. Almada’s films have screened at The Sundance Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum and The Whitney Biennial and all three feature documentaries have broadcast on the award-winning series POV. Almada is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2010 USA Artist Fellow. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and shares her time between Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York.

Visit
http://www.altamurafilms.com/
http://www.alpertawards.org/thework/index.html
for more information.

Natalia Almada will be in residence at CalArts from Monday, Jan 30-Fri, Feb 3 and is offering a workshop. Please see the School of Film/Video for more information.

Opening Reception
Saturday, February 4 | 6–9pm

Gallery Hours
Tuesdays - Sundays | noon - 6pm or intermission

REDCAT: For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong creates a series of video sculptures and scenic backdrops that center around the making of Roman Polanski’s seminal 1974 film Chinatown.  Read more

CalArts, Main Gallery, L-Shape Gallery, Roy O. Disney Music Hall Foyer, Main Reception Area

MUSIC: A complete performance of the Song Books by John Cage.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Music Technology recital featuring performances by Ashley Jacobson and friends.

CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO: Can a 61 year-old’s life be told in 90 minutes? Of course not. But NFB producer Michael Fukushima will do his best to showcase the range and style of auteur short-form filmmaking that has epitomized the NFB Animation Studio since its founding in 1941, and made it one of the pre-eminent and most successful studios around.

A 90-minute film programme followed by Q+A session.

• Neighbours (Norman McLaren, 1952, 8:06)
• Bead Game (Ishu Patel, 1977, 5:35)
• The Cat Came Back (Cordell Barker, 1988, 7:41)
• When The Day Breaks (Amanda Forbis/Wendy Tilby, 1999, 9:40)
• Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004, 13:54)
• cNote (Chris Hinton, 2004, 6:55)
• Jaime Lo, small and shy (Lillian Chan, 2006, 7:48)
• Muybridge’s Strings (Koji Yamamura, 2011, 12:39)

Plus a special treat of two bonus films!

About the NFB

The National Film Board of Canada has led the way in auteur animation since 1941, when cinema pioneer Norman McLaren founded its first animation unit. Since then, NFB animators have created groundbreaking films across a wide array of techniques and styles. Today, the NFB is developing groundbreaking interactive productions, while pioneering new directions in 3D stereoscopic film, community-based media, and more.

Since the NFB's founding in 1939, it has created over 13,000 productions and won over 5,000 awards, including 12 Oscars, and 4 Webbys. Over 2,000 NFB productions can be streamed online at NFB.ca, as well as via partnerships with the world's leading video portals, while the NFB's growing family of apps for smartphones and tablets delivers the experience of cinema virtually everywhere.

Most recently, the NFB has been honoured with its 71st and 72nd Oscar nominations, for Dimanche (Patrick Doyon) and Wild Life (Amanda Forbis/Wendy Tilby).

REDCAT: in the early 1980s, many artists were excited by the possibility of showing video art on television—a promise that was broken by commercialism. By turns humorous, pensive, or even abstract, this selection of short videos highlights some of the era’s most compelling video art accompanied by music.  Read more

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CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: An evening of original scenes written and performed by Vocal Arts students and special guests.

Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presents: Cauleen Smith

At CalArts F200
6:00 PM

CalArts, Butler Building 4

CRITICAL STUDIES: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a writer whose work has appeared in Transition, The New York Times, Harper’s, Vogue, and Essence among others. She has received awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been a guest to The Tavis Smiley Show.  Originally from Houston, Texas, she graduated in 2000 from Harvard University and was a Fulbright Scholar in the United Kingdom.  Sharifa is writing a trilogy on African-Americans and utopia; her first book, Harlem is Nowhere, was published in 2011 by Little, Brown & Company and by Granta Books (UK). It was named to the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books for 2011.

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: A concert of music inspired by Cats!, for solo clarinet, 2 clarinets, clarinet and piano, 3 clarinets and soprano, and clarinet quintet, featuring faculty, alumni and students.

REDCAT: Vintage electronics share a stage with the newest sonic technology when acclaimed Dutch composer Thomas Ankersmit highlights a two-night festival. Friday’s "Noise Night" features L. Damion Romero and noise pioneers Zbigniew Karkowski and Xopher Davidson. Saturday’s “Ambient Night” features Ankersmit along with zerfall_gebiete, Thomas Köner and Ulrich Krieger.  Read more

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CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Mid-residency recital.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: A concert of North Indian classical music for sitar & tabla.

REDCAT: Two courageous authors, novelist Shahrnush Parsipur and poet Suheir Hammad, have fiercely insisted on voicing consciousness and social criticism. Joined by editor and scholar Persis Karim, who moderates, this evening is devoted to creative conviction linking nations, genres, and generations.  Read more

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Shahrnush Parsipur was born in Tehran in February 17, 1946. She started her literary career when she was sixteen, writing short stories and articles. She graduated from the University of Tehran in Sociology. When she was twenty-eight, she wrote her first novel, Sag va Zememstaneh Boland (The Dog and the Long Winter – translated into Russian). She is the author of several additional novels, including Touba and the Meaning of Night (adapted into a film by Shirin Neshat), and the first ever Iranian science fiction novel, Bar Baaleh Badd Neshestan (On the Wings of Wind), two novellas, including the acclaimed Women Without Men, and three collections of short stories.  Parsipur has been imprisoned several times for her activism and for the feminist content of her fiction, much of which is banned in Iran. Due to the problems associated with the revolution in Iran in 1979, she could not complete her education in France, and had to return to Iran.  As a result of a misunderstanding, she ended up in the Islamic Republic of Iran's political prison, for four years and seven months, and later, because she openly referred to the issue of virginity in her novella Women Without Men, she was imprisoned twice more.  She is also the author Prison Memoir, and two collections of short stories.  In 2003 she received the International Writers Fellowship from the Brown University, and is the recipient of numerous awards.  Her works have been translated into English, Swedish, Spanish, Malayalam, Italian, Dutch and French.  Ms. Parsipur currently lives in Northern California.

Suheir Hammad is the author of ‘breaking poems’, recipient of a 2009 American Book Award, as well as the best selling ‘ZaatarDiva’, ‘Born Palestinian, Born Black’ and ‘Drops of This Story’.  She has been the Artist in Residency at the NYU’s APA Institute, as well as a recipient of the Copeland Fellowship at Amherst College.  She appeared in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Official Selection, ‘Salt of This Sea’.  Her produced plays include ‘Blood Trinity’ and ‘breaking letter(s)’, and she wrote the libretto for the multimedia performance ‘Re-Orientalism’.  An original writer and performer in the TONY award winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Suheir appeared on every season of the HBO show that inspired the Broadway run and world tour.

Persis Karim is a poet, editor and professor of literature and creative writing at San Jose State University. She is the editor of two anthologies: Let Me Tell You Where i've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006) and A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian Americans (1999). She has written extensively on Iranian diaspora literature and her poetry has appeared in numerous national and local publications. She lives in Berkeley, California.

CalArts, B324

MUSIC: The Sound Art program presents visiting artist Thomas Ankersmit, as part of the Survey of Sound Art class re: Serge Synthesizer.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: An evening with the CalArts big band and others, featuring works by Bartok, Satie, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolpy, Matt Otto and Lauren Baba.

REDCAT: Celebrating the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, REDCAT hosts two nights of rarely played music by the American visionary. The New Century Players, CalArts’ professional new music ensemble, joins forces with the CalArts Orchestra to perform such works as 103, Fifty-Eight and Cage’s seminal graphic score Fontana Mix.  Read more

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CalArts, Butler Building 4

CRITICAL STUDIES: Melissa Buzzeo has worked as a counselor, curator, professor and palm reader.  She has taught at Naropa University, Iowa Writers Workshop, Pratt and Brown University, and has been a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts.  Her first full-length work, What Began Us, was published by Leon Works in 2007. A second, Face, was published by BookThug in 2009.  Translated into both French and Catalan, she is the author of three chapbooks:  In the Garden of The Book, City M. and Near: a luminescence.  Her work has appeared online in Tarpulin Sky and Trickhouse. A new book, For Want and Sound, is forthcoming this year from Les Figues Press.  Her current work, The Devastation, is based on the fallibility of a single image: a sea-wreck in language. If water is desire, connectivity, the possibility of current, language itself, what happens when that water is emptied out, when nothing is left but the basin of retrieval, the properties of the body and the memory of matter, addressed.   Ms. Buzzeo currently lives in Brooklyn.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: An evening of original and originally inspired music with the Zirque Michael Bonner Trio.

President’s Day

Institute closed; offices closed.

Studio Visits Only

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: A night of original compositions and songs by Alex Wand.

REDCAT: A large-scale revolving set magically transforms into dozens of different locales in this internationally acclaimed work from Argentine writer-director Mariano Pensotti. The Past follows the evolution of a quartet of characters as Argentina’s economy collapses and their lives take unexpected twists and turns in a fast-paced, multilayered “mega-fiction.”  Read more

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February 24, 2012
7-9pm
ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives
909 West Adams Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90007

In conjunction with the College Art Association 2012 Annual Conference, the Queer Caucus for Art will host a reception at ONE Archives for QCA members and the public. ONE Archives is currently presenting Cruising the Archive, a three-part exhibition as a part of Pacific Standard Time, and To Whom It May Concern, a site-specific installation by artist Catherine Lord.

On view at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives:

Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 is a three-part exhibition that explores the relationship between artistic practices and LGBTQ histories through artworks, objects, and documents culled from the collections at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. The most comprehensive exhibition of materials from ONE Archives, Cruising the Archive is presented as a part of Pacific Standard Time.

In conjunction with Cruising the Archive, Catherine Lord has produced a site-specific installation, To Whom It May Concern. Borrowing its title from the dedication of John Cage’s book Silence, To Whom It May Concern explores a network of generosity. Photographs of several hundred book dedications, considerably enlarged, are presented along the mezzanine space above the closed stacks of ONE’s library.

For more information on Cruising the Archive and To Whom It May Concern, please visit
http://cruisingthearchive.org/

Co-sponsored by Queer Caucus for Art subcommittee of the College Art Association and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.

It is the purpose of the Queer Caucus for Art: the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Caucus for Art, Artists & Historians to nurture and encourage the study of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history, theory, criticism, and studio practice in the arts; and to provide, through its various events, better communication among its members, the academic and the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, and the public at large.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives is the oldest active LGBTQ organization in the United States and the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world. Founded in 1952, ONE Archives became a part of USC Libraries in 2010.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Solo graduation piano recital, celebrating the 200th birthday of Franz Liszt, and featuring works by Liszt, Mozart, Chopin and Ligeti.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: The third concert, in a series of four, featuring the work of undergraduate composition majors at CalArts.

Final concert of the series:

• April 30, 2012