Athenaeum members may already be familiar with the work of Jay Johnson and Adam Belt. In 2009 Jay exhibited in our Main Gallery in a show entitled “Smoking Room.” The San Diego Union-Tribune named it one of the ten best exhibitions of the year. Adam Belt presented his drawings and installations of cement sculpture and salt in our Main Gallery in 2008.

Tristan Shone fabricates “sound machines” and will incorporate a performance into the opening reception. Alongside making machines and composing sound for performance, Shone works at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research as a mechanical engineer and the University of California, San Diego as a researcher in sound interface design.

Always innovative Rubén Ortiz-Torres creates artwork in the form of paintings, photographs, objects, installations, videos, and films. He is part of the permanent faculty of the University of California in San Diego.

Opening reception on Friday, March 30 at 6:30 PM
On view March 31 – May 5, 2012

For more information about the San Diego Art Prize, please visit their website: www.sdvisualarts.net/sdvan_new/artprize.php

About the Artists

Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Rubén Ortiz-Torres was born in Mexico City in 1964. Educated within the utopian models of republican Spanish anarchism soon confronted the tragedies and cultural clashes of post colonial third world. After giving up the dream of playing baseball in the major leagues he decided to study art. He went first to the oldest and one of the most academic art schools of the Americas (the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City) and later to one of the newest and more experimental (Calarts in Valencia CA). After enduring Mexico City’s earthquake and pollution he moved to LA with a Fullbright grant to survive riots, fires, floods, more earthquakes, and proposition 187. During all this he has been able to produce artwork in the form of paintings, photographs, objects, installations, videos, and films. He is part of the permanent Faculty of the University of California in San Diego. He has participated in several international exhibitions and film festivals. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid Spain and others. RubénOrtiz-Torres received the 2011 Lincoln Innovation Artist Award.
www.rubenortiztorres.org

Tristan Shone

Tristan Shone’s layering of differently guitars, keyboard, and electronic percussion to create the sound that is the justification for the shapes of his sculptures. Just as the music has melody and discordance, the structures he forms have flow and angle. This contrast of mechanical and emotional is confident, intense, and impressive. Alongside fabricating machines and composing sound for performance, Shone works at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research as a mechanical engineer and the Center for Research and Computing in the Arts at the University of California, San Diego as a researcher in sound interface design. Tristan Shone as Author & Punisher is an industrial doom and drone metal, one man band utilizing primarily custom fabricated machines/controllers and speakers. He has performed and shown these machines in festivals and exhibitions in the United States and abroad extensively, releasing his third album, yet first sculpture/art based album entitled “Drone Machines” in 2010 on Heart & Crossbone Records out of Tel-Aviv. His new record, focused primarily on the newer Dub Machines, will be released in the Summer/Fall of 2011.
www.tristanshone.com

Jay S. Johnson

Jay S. Johnson has worked with several materials, from clay to wood and metals. He has experimented more with paint recently, and has incorporated it beautifully into his wooden sculptures. An expert craftsman, he has worked off and on in construction, refining his wood-working skills. Whether his works are figurative or symbolic, they are most often wry and thought-provoking. Johnson himself says, “Utilizing the neutral background of the wall I attempt to draw the viewer closer to my objects by employing simple yet seductive materials and forms. Familiar images applied to these interior shapes may sometimes be clues to deciphering the content of the work, which typically deals with issues concerning man’s relations to each other and to nature.” Robert L. Pincus, art critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote about Johnson’s solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Art Library, saying: “The two major qualities that make Jay Johnson’s art so persistently compelling come together gracefully in “Smoking Room,”… One of them is his genuine gift for elegance – not easy elegance, but the taut sort of understated beauty that emanates from a keen sense of how to use materials and employ symbolic images. The second quality is his fascination with the relationship between a single form and surrounding objects, which takes a new form in this show.” Johnson work has been widely exhibited, reviewed, and collected in California including the important Museum of Contemporary Art solo show in 1997.Jay Johnson has been a UCSD lecturer for sculpture since 2001.
www.quintgallery.com/341/jay-johnson.htm

Adam Belt

Adam Belt works with physical manifestations of the unseen including the inherent properties of materials such as salt, ice and concrete, our interaction with the landscape and our wonder of the cosmos. Currently he is working with and documenting a small portable phenomenological installation. “A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not” is comprised of two full-length mirrors with a lit wall in between. Experienced and documented outside at various locations during the naturally changing light of afternoon/evening the viewer observes and experiences a heightened sense of time and the presence of the self. Adam Belt received his BFA from the University of San Diego and completed his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2001 and is now working as an artist and a professor in San Diego. His work is included in many local collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the La Jolla Athenaeum Music and Arts Library. Adam has been published in Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology magazine. His work has been reviewed in The San Diego Union Tribune, Art Week, Riviera and various other publications.
www.adambelt.com

On April 28, 2007 the haudenschildGarage held a FUEL4TALK titled The Paint’s Almost Dry with Eduardo Abaroa in Los Angeles. This FUEL4TALK was meant as a more open and fluid discussion-based context to discuss the issues that emerged in the large presentation-based The Paint’s Not Dry conference of 2005. It was hoped that through a small group discussion, things might be more open and flexible then they were in the previous “glamorous” effort. Eduardo Abaroa was the focal point of a small group discussion organized and moderated by Steve Fagin and Ruben Ortiz-Torres in conjunction with Roberto Tejada and Yoshua Okon.

FUEL: Barbacoa

About the Participants

Eduardo Abaroa

Mexican artist working in the fields of sculpture, installation and live action since 1991. He has shown his work in many major Museums in Mexico, LA MoCA, PS1 and ICA Boston in the United States, Reina Sofía Museum in Spain, and Kunstwerke, Germany as well as in important venues in the UK, Canada, France, Korea and other countries. As a writer, he was an art reviewer for the art section of Reforma newspaper, and has written for other important Mexican publications like Curare, Casper, Moho, D.F. and Codigo 06140. He has contributed texts for exhibition catalogues of artists like Francis Alÿs, Melanie Smith, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Tercerunquinto and Dr. Lakra, among others. He is currently course director at Soma, and was a co-founder of the influential Temistocles 44 artist run space in Mexico City(1993-1995).

Ruben Ortiz-Torres

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is an artist who is joining the Visual Arts Department effective Fall 2001. He began his career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in the early 1980s, well before he received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 1992. Ortiz-Torres is a Mexican-born artist who has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990. Ortiz-Torres is widely regarded as one of today’s leading Mexican artists and as an innovator in the 1980s of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism. Over the past ten years, he has produced a body of work in a wide range of media — extended series of photographs, series of altered readymades, a feature film, several videos (including three in 3D), large scale video installations, major painting series, sculptures, customized cars and machines, photocollages, performances and curated exhibitions. Since 1982, Ortiz-Torres’s work has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions, over 100 group shows in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and more than 50 screenings of his films and video works. Over 150 written pieces cover his work in mainstream media such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Reforma (Mexico), La Jornada (Mexico), and El Pais (Spain); in significant art world publications with international circulation such as ArtForum, Art Images, Frieze, New Art Examiner, Poliester, Bomb, Flash Art, and Art in America; and in numerous exhibition catalogues and books. Ortiz-Torres has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from, to name a few, the Andrea Frank Foundation, the Foundations for Contemporary Performance Art, the U.S. Mexico Fund for Culture, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, and the Fullbright Foundation.

Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

The organizers were Steve Fagin, Yoshua Okon, Roberto Tejada and Rubén Ortiz-Torres.  Participants included Gerardo Estrada (UNAM & former Minister of Fine Arts, Mexico), Cuauhtémoc Medina (Art Critic & Curator, Tate London), Rubén Ortiz-Torres (Artist), Yoshua Okon (Artist), Monica Manzutto (Co-Director, Kurimanzutto Gallery), and Carmen Cuenca (Co-Director, inSite).

“The 1990s in Mexico City were a period of tremendous political upheaval and incredible cultural energy. The art that grew out of that was socially interactive. Today, that art is internationally recognized. But does that mean it might lose its living spirit? The goal of this conference is to take a breath before the art has become ‘official, important art.’ We want to recapture its undergroundedness, its funkiness – and its politics.

Is the image of Mexico City circa 1995 no longer one of experimentation and anarchy-or of putting whatever together? Without us noticing, has it now been refigured as a minor capital of arriviste entitlement? To what degree are “we” willing to settle for only this Mexico City, a dot on the map of the moveable feast that is the art world’s list of usual suspects: “If it’s Tuesday, it must be____________. (Fill in the blank with GATT member wannabe of your choice.)” With “Before the Paint’s Dry,” we wish to revisit 1990s Mexico City: bars, cantinas, the pre-”Fondesa” cafes, alternate spaces, “bad music,” and strong opinions. What stories and histories and political interventions were being imagined-and are still to be written now? We wish to convene a día de los muertos to see if this corpse called Distrito Federal can still sing a calavera to us from the mid-1990s in a charmed and off-tune timbre: tuba as melody; tambor militar as rhythm.  Mexico City, circa 1990s: The art scene was blooming and bleeding-edge – and as complex and messy as those adjectives imply. Before the story is sanitized and boiled down to a simple chapter in an art-history tome, the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego is convening some of the scene’s leading participants to argue alternative accounts.” – Steve Fagin

About the Participants

Carmen Cuenca

A native of Mexico City, Cuenca graduated in 1980 from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in Art History. Prior to moving to Tijuana in 1989, she served as Associate Curator at the San Carlos Museum in Mexico City. For the past 20 years, Cuenca has been actively promoting contemporary artists and artistic practices in the binational region. She recently resigned as subdirector of visual arts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, where for five years she directed the curatorial and programmatic development of El Cubo, the first international-scale museum in Baja California. From 1994 through 2005, Cuenca played a central role in the inSite project, a binational venture focused on commissioning new public projects by artists in the San Diego/Tijuana region. She served as coordinator of Mexican projects for inSite94 and as Executive Director, Mexico, for both inSite2000 and inSite05. During her work with inSite, Carmen Cuenca was responsible for completing over 200 commissioned projects, from site-specific installations to performances to the production of film and video works. Prior to joining inSite full time in 1997, Cuenca served as cultural attaché for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, and before that as chief curator at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Cuenca has served as a board member of various non-profit arts organizations in San Diego, including the Children’s Museum of San Diego and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Cuenca is currently working on the development of several exhibitions of Tijuana artists that will be presented in Mexico City and elsewhere, as well as the planning for the next version of inSite that is scheduled to begin in 2010.

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and historian who lives and works in Mexico City. PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, UK. Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National University of Mexico and Associate Curator of Latin American Art Collections at Tate Gallery in London. He is also a member of Teratoma, a group of curators, critics and anthropologists based in Mexico City. He has just curated the Francis Alÿs exhibition Walking Distance from The Studio at the Colegio de San Ildefonso Museum in Mexico City and is currently preparing an exhibition of British-Mexican artist Melanie Smith titled Ciudad Espiral/Spiral City. Among his recent publications is When Faith Moves Mountains, coauthored with artist Francis Alÿs, documenting the action produced in Lima in 2002, released by Turner in Madrid.

Gerardo Estrada

Dr. Estrada is Coordinator of Cultural Diffusion at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is also a full-time Professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM and President of its Association of Graduate Students since 1991. His career has provided him with a vast experience in the cultural sector. Since the beginning, he has occupied important positions such as Director of the House of Mexico in Paris, Director General of the Mexican Radio Institute, Cultural Attaché of the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. From 1992 to 2000 he was Director General of the National Institute of Fine Arts, a position which he held for 8 years, and before assuming his current position at the UNAM, he was Director General of Cultural Affairs of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003. Estrada received his BA degree in Sociology from the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM in Mexico City. From the École d’Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales of the University of Paris he later received his MA and PhD degrees in Sociology.

Monica Manzutto

Manzutto is the co-director and co-owner of the internationally influential Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico City.

Roberto Tejada

Roberto Tejada is the author of many books that include, most recently, “National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment” (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and “Celia Alvarez Muñoz” (UCLA/CSRC; University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He has served also as co-curator on the exhibitions “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2001), and “Luis Gispert: Loud Image,” at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College (2004). His research has earned awards from the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation (2009) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (2007). His writings appear frequently in exhibition catalogs, among them “Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide” (New York: Aperture, 1996); and “Mexico/New York, Photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans” (New York: DAP, 2003). Tejada has published critical writings on contemporary U.S., Latino, and Latin American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. He lived in Mexico City (1987 – 1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; and as executive editor of Artes de México. Tejada is, as well, the author of several poetry collections, including “Mirrors for Gold” (Krupskaya, 2006) and “Exposition Park” (Wesleyan University Press, 2010); he founded and continues to co-edit the journal “Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas”. Tejada’s research and teaching methods interrogate modern and contemporary image environments from an interdisciplinary viewpoint: a critical art history whose visual knowledge can locate objects and actors in the global-culture context. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and has taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); at Dartmouth College, where he was the César E. Chávez Fellow (2002 – 2003); and at the University of California, San Diego (2003 – 2008). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is an artist who is joining the Visual Arts Department effective Fall 2001. He began his career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in the early 1980s, well before he received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 1992. Ortiz-Torres is a Mexican-born artist who has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990. Ortiz-Torres is widely regarded as one of today’s leading Mexican artists and as an innovator in the 1980s of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism. Over the past ten years, he has produced a body of work in a wide range of media — extended series of photographs, series of altered readymades, a feature film, several videos (including three in 3D), large scale video installations, major painting series, sculptures, customized cars and machines, photocollages, performances and curated exhibitions. Since 1982, Ortiz-Torres’s work has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions, over 100 group shows in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and more than 50 screenings of his films and video works. Over 150 written pieces cover his work in mainstream media such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Reforma (Mexico), La Jornada (Mexico), and El Pais (Spain); in significant art world publications with international circulation such as ArtForum, Art Images, Frieze, New Art Examiner, Poliester, Bomb, Flash Art, and Art in America; and in numerous exhibition catalogues and books. Ortiz-Torres has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from, to name a few, the Andrea Frank Foundation, the Foundations for Contemporary Performance Art, the U.S. Mexico Fund for Culture, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, and the Fullbright Foundation.

Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

Yoshua Okon

Yoshua Okon, artist and founding co-director of La Panaderia which was a key arts crossroads space in Mexico City. Since the late 1990s Mexican artist Yoshua Okon has been developing his own variation on these themes. Okon considers himself a performance artist, even though most of his work takes the form of videos that document invented scenarios set up in collaboration with invited participants. Among his best-known projects is Orillese a la Orilla (1999–2000 – the title, a command meaning ‘move to the curb’, is a grammatically incorrect phrase that, to the local ear, suggests both poor education and low social status), in which Okon asked Mexico City policemen to act out the threatening techniques they employ in everyday life.