THE 2014 BIRKE FINE ARTS FESTIVAL sponsored by the Marshall University College of Arts & Media
Trending Now:
Artists and Audiences in the Information Age
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A month-long celebration of 21st century art and expression...
January 30 through
March 6
2014
HUNTINGTON • WEST VIRGINIA
Made possible by the Birke Fine Arts Symposium Endowment
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Trending Now: Artists and Audiences in the Information Age
The 2014 Birke Fine Arts Festival Reflecting deep personal interests in cultural and educational activities in the Tri-State area and recognizing the leadership role of Marshall University, Mrs. Helen Birke and her daughter Julie established the Birke Fine Arts Symposium Endowment in the Marshall University Foundation in 1979. This spring, we proudly present Trending Now: Artists and Audiences in the Information Age, the 2014 Birke Fine Arts Festival. For one month, the Marshall University College of Arts and Media will host internationally renowned guest artists in public performances, lectures and exhibitions for the university and the community it serves. Most events are free, and all are open to the public. We are interested in a dialogue about how the arts are responding to an audience that has grown accustomed to constant pop-ups, tweets and status updates; not only how we experience the arts, but where we experience them. Does this changing environment demand adaptation or does it make the tactile nature of sculpture, the electricity of live performance and communal gathering even more necessary? We hope you’ll join us. Nicole Perrone
Nicole Perrone
Birke Fine Arts Festival Committee Chair
All events are free except where otherwise noted.
2014 Calendar of Events JANUARY THURS 30
Exhibition Opening // Collaborative Student Projects with Artist Harrell Fletcher Thursday January 30 @ 6pm // Birke Art Gallery
Harrell Fletcher // Artist Talk Thursday January 30 @ 7pm // Birke Art Gallery *Festival Opening Reception immediately to follow in the Birke Atrium
FEBRUARY TUES 04
Glynn Washington // Public Radio Storytelling with a Beat Tuesday February 4 @ 7:30pm // Memorial Student Center, Lower Level BE5
FRI 07-SAT 08
Troika Ranch // SWARM: Immersive Multimedia Performance Friday February 7 and Saturday February 8 @ 7:00pm Joan C. Edwards Performing Arts Center, Edwards Playhouse
WED 12
Eula Biss // Literary Reading Wednesday February 12 @ 8pm // Memorial Student Center, Upper Level Shawkey Room
THURS 13
John Bresland // Literary Reading Thursday February 13 @ 8pm // Memorial Student Center, Lower Level BE5
WED 19 – SAT 01
Dead Man’s Cell Phone // A Play by Sarah Ruhl Wednesday February 19 – Saturday March 1 @ 7:30pm Joan C. Edwards Performing Arts Center, Experimental Theatre Note: there is a charge for this event. Call 696-ARTS for tickets.
TUES 25 Dan Senn // Sound Installation Exhibit Tuesday February 25 @ 8pm // Gallery 842 WED 26
Marshall University Festival of New Music Concert 1 Music of Dan Senn Wednesday February 26 @ 8pm // Smith Music Recital Hall
THURS 27
Marshall University Festival of New Music Concert 2 Music of Dan Senn Thursday February 27 @ 8pm // Jomie Jazz Center Forum
FRI 28 Marshall University Festival of New Music Concert 3 Lindsey Goodman, flute // Guest Artist Recital Friday February 28 @ 12pm // First Presbyterian Church, 1015 Fifth Avenue FRI 28
Marshall University Festival of New Music // Soundwalk Alex Braidwood and Meredith Lynn Morrison Friday February 28 @ 2pm Joan C. Edwards Performing Arts Center Atrium and Jomie Jazz Center Forum
FRI 28
Marshall University Festival of New Music Concert 4 Music of Dan Senn Friday February 28 @ 8pm // Smith Music Recital Hall
MARCH
THURS 06
Vanessa German // Artist Talk Thursday March 6 @ 7pm // Joan C. Edwards Performing Arts Center, Experimental Theatre *Birke Festival Closing Reception immediately to follow in the Playhouse Lobby
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THE 2014 BIRKE FINE A
Trending Now: Artists a
John Bresland is an essayist who works in film, radio and print. He teaches creative writing at Northwestern, and he is the Film Editor of TriQuarterly. His essays can be seen at Blackbird and Ninth Letter, read in Brevity and North American Review and heard occasionally on public radio. His work has been anthologized in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time as well as The Fourth Genre, an anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction. He was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2006 he was the recipient of the Tamarack Award for fiction. Bresland holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa.
Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her second book, Notes from No Man’s Land, received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has also been recognized by a Pushcart Prize, a Jaffe Writers’ Award, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. She teaches writing at Northwestern University and is working on a new book about myth and metaphor in medicine with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and an NEA Literature Fellowship. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, the North American Review, the Bellingham Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper’s. Troika Ranch is the artistic platform for the collaborative works of its founders, choreographer Dawn Stoppiello and composer/media artist Mark Coniglio. Troika Ranch creates contemporary, hybrid artworks through an ongoing examination of the moving body and its relationship to technology. This aesthetic framework has informed Troika Ranch’s artistic output on every level since its inception in 1994 and has earned the company a critically acclaimed international reputation. Troika Ranch has been honored with a “Bessie” Award, a prize from Ars Electronica and has received major support from The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the MAP Fund, the Arts Council England and the Jerome foundation among others.
ARTS FESTIVAL
and Audiences in the Information Age Stoppiello, a 2004 recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation’s Statue Award, lives in Portland, OR where she has been presenting works through her Salon du Garage a site-specific series for experimentation in close-up, informal, improvisational, participatory performance making. Mark Coniglio, the 2012 winner of the World Technology Award lives in Berlin, Germany where he continues to pioneer in the field of interactive live performance with the development of his critically acclaimed software Isadora®. From these two bases, and many places in between, Troika Ranch builds upon a ‘body of work’ that fosters many points of contact with the public - through collaborative, multi-media performances, installations and films; annual intensive workshops on live-media collaboration; and with publications and lectures on live-media performance. Still in-progress, Troika Ranch’s SWARM will be an immersive, multimedia installation/performance in which the movements of the audience — not as individuals, but as a community — allow them to collaboratively compose the sonic score, visual materials, theatrical lighting, and the actions of the performers themselves. The crux of SWARM is that only through coordination, conversation, and collective action can the audience — the “swarm” — reveal the fullest and most complete dramatic arc of the piece. Because audience action drives the artistic expression in SWARM, they are required participants during the development of the piece. In this way every rehearsal is in fact also a performance. Glynn Washington - Host & Executive Producer, Snap Judgment. Before creating the Snap Judgment radio show, Glynn worked as an educator, diplomat, community activist, actor, political strategist, fist-shaker, mountainhollerer, and foot stomper. Glynn composed music for the Kunst Stoff dance performances in San Francisco, rocked live spoken word poetry in Detroit, joined a band in Indonesia, wrote several screenplays, painted a daring series of self portraits, released a blues album, and thinks his stories are best served with cocktails. Snap Judgment is a themed, weekly NPR storytelling
show sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and distributed through NPR and Public Radio Exchange (PRX). Glynn and the Snap Judgment team highlight “compelling personal stories - mixing real life with killer beats to produce cinematic, dramatic and kick-ass radio.” Snap Judgment’s webpage offers podcasts of the program and background on the stories participants tell at http://snapjudgment.org/ Snap Judgment can be heard locally Sundays at 9 p.m. on West Virginia Public Radio 89.9 FM in Huntington and 88.5 FM in Charleston, West Virginia. Vanessa German is a self-taught, multidisciplinary art maker. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is presently based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s historic Homewood neighborhood. Ms. German’s sculptural and performance works blur the lines between public art, performance art, activism and citizenship. Her most recent body of work opened in October of 2013 at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City. Her work has been shown at the Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museum, Miami Basel, and is presently touring the nation with the International Collage Center, and African American Art 1950 - Present with the David C. Driskell center. Her work is in public and private collections nationwide; the Progressive Collection, the Weisman collection, the ICC, The David C. Driskell Center. She’s performed at POPTech, TEDx Harvard, TEDx MIT and been a featured speaker and performer at colleges and universities nation wide. She’s the creator/performer of 4 evening length performance works and these Spoken Word Operas have been featured in theaters from Marthas Vineyard to Cape Town, South Africa. Harrell Fletcher received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from California College of the Arts. He studied organic farming at UCSC and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990’s. His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Wattis Institute, The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, Signal in Malmo, Sweden, Domain de Kerguehennec in France, The Tate Modern in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMoMA, The Hammer Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France. From 2002 to 2009 Fletcher co-produced Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July. Fletcher is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. Fletcher is an Associate Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
Dan Senn is an intermedia artist in the fluxus tradition working in music composition, kinetic sound sculpture, experimental and documentary film. In the 1980s and 90s he was a professor of music and art in the United States and Australia. Dan travels internationally as a lecturer, performer and installation artist and lives in Prague, Czech Republic, where he directs the Echofluxx festivals, and in Watertown, Wisconsin, the USA, with his partnercollaborator, Caroline Senn. His music is published by Smith Publications of Baltimore. Dan founded Newsense-Intermedium of Tacoma, Washington, and cofounded Roulette Intermedium of New York City. He is currently artistic director of Efemera of Prague. Alex Braidwood & Meredith Lynn Morrison Meredith works with paint. Alex works with sound. When they collaborate, the resulting projects explore the relationships between the visible and the heard at the intersection of nature and the built environment. Alex Braidwood is a media artist and design educator who maintains a practice centered around a process of play, experimentation and research through making. Alex’s current work explores the relationship between people and the noise in their environment. Currently, Alex is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and a faculty member of the Human Computer Interaction Graduate Program at Iowa State University. Meredith Lynn Morrison is an artist, designer and educator who earned her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Meredith’s practice is devoted to the study of how land is formed and the natural processes that shape it. Meredith also serves as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Drake University. Lindsey Goodman is known for her “generous warmth of tone and a fluid virtuosity” (Charleston Gazette), and for her “impressive artistry” (Tribune-Review), “agility, and emotion” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Renowned for her “brilliant”, “bravura performances” (Tribune-Review), Ms. Goodman is in high demand as a soloist, chamber collaborator, orchestral musician, teacher, and clinician. An avid performer of new music, “flutist Lindsey Goodman appears to know no fear in tackling the most demanding music” (Tribune-Review). A strong advocate for emerging composers and electroacoustic or multimedia works, Lindsey is an active commissioner of new pieces and has given over fifty world premieres, including seventeen solo and chamber compositions written especially for her. Goodman is principle flautist for the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra and is in her twelfth season as solo flutist of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble.
Dead Man’s Cell Phone : A Play by Sarah Ruhl An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man — with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sarah Ruhl. A work about how we memorialize the dead — and how that remembering changes us — it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world. There is a charge for this event. To purchase tickets call 304-696-ARTS.
THE 2014 BIRKE FINE ARTS FESTIVAL Trending Now: Artists and Audiences in the Information Age Committee Members Nicole Perrone, Committee Chair The School of Music & Theatre, Acting & Movement Ann Marie Bingham The School of Music & Theatre, Clarinet & Oboe Daniel Kaufmann The School of Art & Design, Photography Rachael Peckham Department of English, Creative Non-Fiction Lang Reynolds The School of Music & Theatre, Lighting & Design Jennifer Sias The School of Journalism & Mass Communications, Mass Communications
cam-events@marshall.edu