Where I'll Be All Day Today

My thesis cohort has been working toward this event for a whole year, and it's going to be great. It's a public event, and all are welcome.



The 2009 MA Symposium provides an occasion for graduate students working within SFAI’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies -- Exhibition and Museum Studies (EMS), History and Theory of Contemporary Art (HTCA), Urban Studies (US), and SFAI’s Dual Degree MA/MFA program -- to make presentations based on the findings that inform their theses.

The program schedule for the symposium is as follows:

10:00am

Welcome and Introduction
Renée Green, Dean of Graduate Studies

—Session Introductions: Jeannene Przyblyski, Program Moderator and Chair, History and Theory of Contemporary Art

Session 1

—Nancy de Y. Elkus (Dual MA/MFA – HTCA):
“Interventions into the Optical Economy: Producing Contemporary (Feminist) Embodiment through Hapticity, Fancy, and Fracture”

—Gwen Kuanying Kuo (MA – HTCA):
“Decoding China: A Case Study of Ai Weiwei”

—Laura L. Poppiti (MA – EMS):
“Becoming Undone: Nao Bustamante and Given Over to Want”

—Kara Q. Smith (MA – US):
“From Punk to Peer: Trajectory of an Ethos”

—Respondent: Julian Myers

—Discussion

12:00noon

—Lunch

1:00pm

Session 2

—Introduction

—Devon R. Bella (MA – EMS):
“The Appearance of Knowledge: Museum Libraries and Institutions of
Art Research”

—Brooke Kellaway (MA – EMS):
“Archiv ist Überflüssig: Documenta 5’s Contemporaneousness Reanimated”

—Laura Cassidy Rogers (MA – EMS):
“Rendering Life, Refiguring Diversity from the Highlands of New Guinea”

—Respondent: Trevor Paglen

—Discussion

2:50pm

—Break

3:15pm

Session 3

—Introduction

—Camille Washington (MA – EMS):
“Situating Blackness in African American Museums—An Investigation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture”

—Dori Latman (MA – US):
“Alternatives, Entrepreneurship, and Collaboration: Art in Urban Contexts”

—Anna Fenia Schneider (MA – EMS):
“Superfluous Bodies: Observations on the Politics of the Oceans and Their Reverberations in Contemporary Art”

—Respondent: Betti-Sue Hertz

—Discussion

4:50pm

—Conclusions and invitation to reconvene in SFAI Café for reception

Respondent Bios

Director of Visual Arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) since December 2008, Betti-Sue Hertz was curator of contemporary art at the San Diego Museum of Art from 2000 to 2008, where she produced several major exhibitions and catalogues, including Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes (2008); Animated Painting (2007); Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark (2006); Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia (2004); and Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions (2002).

An art historian whose writings have appeared in such publications as Documents, October, Afterall, and Frieze, Julian Myers is an assistant professor in Visual Studies and Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts.

An artist, writer, and experimental geographer, Trevor Paglen has published three books, including Blank Spots on a Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009). Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley.


SFAI’s Graduate Division would like to thank the following for their generous support in making the 2009 MA Symposium possible: Chris Bratton (SFAI President), Okwui Enwezor (SFAI Dean of Academic Affairs), and faculty members Robin Balliger (Chair, Urban Studies), Dale Carrico, Claire Daigle, Hou Hanru (Chair, Exhibition and Museum Studies), Krista Lynes, and Jeannene Przyblyski (Chair, History and Theory of Contemporary Art).