Short Talks
Short Talks presents dialogues with six contemporary artists: Stephen Vitiello, Barbara DeGenevieve, Gary Schneider, Michelle Citron, Patrick Nagatani and William Pope.L.
six artists in their own words
Patrick Nagatani has been a pioneering practitioner of the Contemporary Constructive Movement since the late 1970s. A project spanning nearly three decades, Chromatherapy began in 1978 while photographer Patrick Nagatani was working in Hollywood as a set designer on films such as Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "A lot of this work is influenced by the cinema," Nagatani says, citing directors David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino.
Nagatani's work is in over fifty public collections nationally and internationally. He has received numerous awards and grants, including two major National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Grants.
He has been highly influential in developing a vocabulary of ideas and presentations based on constructing large-scale sculptures, small models, and paintings in front of the camera.
Patrick Nagatani is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico.
Stephen Vitiello is a sound and media artist. In his work, he is particularly interested in the physical aspect of sound and its potential to define the form and atmosphere of a spatial environment.
Stephen Vitiello has made numerous sound and media works, with recent CD releases including Scratchy Monsters, Laughing Ghosts (New Albion Records), Buffalo Bass Delay (Hallwalls), Scanner/Vitiello (Audiosphere/Sub Rosa), Bright and Dusty Things (New Albion Records), Scratchy Marimba (Sulphur UK/Sulfur USA), Light of Falling Cars (JDK Productions), and Uitti/Vitiello (JDK Productions).
His recent solo exhibitions have included The Project, NY; Galerie Almine Rech, Paris; and The Project, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include the 2002 Whitney Biennial, New York; Ce qui arrive at the Cartier Foundation, Paris; and Yanomami: Spirit of the Forest, also at The Cartier Foundation.
Stephen Vitiello is currently an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and an Archivist for The Kitchen, NYC.
Barbara DeGenevieve Barbara DeGenevieve has made numerous video, performance and photographic works including Steven X and Barbara C and The PanHandler Project.
Her work has been shown at museums and institutes around the world including the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Frankfurt Kunstverein. Her photographic works are included in the collections of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Seattle Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; Seattle Museum of Art and Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque.
In 1988 she received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship for her photographic work, and in 1994 was awarded another NEA Fellowship which was revoked by the National Council on the Arts due to the work's sexual content.
She is currently the Chair of the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Gary Schneider has been shown internationally in many solo and group shows, including exhibitions at the Musee de l'Elysee Lausanne in Switzerland, Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago, PPOW Gallery in New York City, Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, and the International Center of Photography in New York City.
His work has been reviewed or featured in publications such as Art Forum, Art on Paper, The New York Times, Le Temps, and Art in America.
His work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and the International Center of Photography.
He is currently an adjunct professor at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. He is also currently the Artist in Residence at Stony Brook University.
Michelle Citron Michelle Citron has made numerous media pieces including the CD- ROMs As American As Apple Pie and Cocktails and Appetizers, and the films What You Take for Granted and Daughter Rite, a ground-breaking experimental narrative about mothers and daughters, which Vincent Canby in the New York Times hailed as a "stunning achievement."
Her work has been shown at museums and film festivals around the work including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, The Kennedy Center, the American Film Institute and the New Directors, Berlin, London, and Edinburgh film festivals. Her films are distributed worldwide and are in over 200 permanent collections.
She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Filmmaking Grants, a National Endowment for the Humanities Media Grant, and Illinois Arts Council Fellowships for both Filmmaking and Screenwriting.
Her book, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (Univ of Minn Press, 1999) won three awards, including a special commendation from the Krasza-Krausz Book Award, which cited the book for being "an extraordinary blend of autobiographical and film writing which offers a radical new way of thinking and writing about film." She was named the Van Zelst Research Professor in Communications for 1991-92 at Northwestern University, where she is a Professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film. She is Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Associate Dean of The Graduate School at Northwestern. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin/Madison.
A former Professor in the Department of RTF at Northwestern and former Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Arts, she is currently the Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College, Chicago.
William Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries. He attended Mason Gross School at Rutgers University for graduate work and studied with Ruth Maleczech and Lee Breuer of Mabou Mines at Re-Cher-Chez Studio in New York City. He has received many important awards, residencies and grants including three National Endowment Fellowships, a Creative Capital Project Grant in 2001 for his large scale performance-installation The Black Factory, a Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Purpose Arts Grant in 2003, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.
Pope.L's exhibition and performance work has been reviewed in NKA, Summer, 1999 and his Boston Commons Group Crawl in February 2000 received extensive coverage by both the Associated Press and the Boston Globe. His inclusion in The 2002 Whitney Biennial was highlighted in the Sunday New York Times and his street performances featured in Art in America May 2003.
In 1999, Pope.L was included in Out of Action at the Los Angeles Contemporary, had a one-person exhibition of objects and a twenty-year photographic survey of his performance work at The Project Gallery in Harlem, New York City, and toured Europe with his crawl piece, Black Bodies and Sport.
In 2000, Pope.L was invited to Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, where he exhibited, lectured, and performed The Hole Inside the Space Inside Yves Klein's Asshole. In February and June, he performed two versions of Eating The Wall Street Journal; the first version at Mobius, Boston, MA, and the second version at the Sculpture Center in New York City as a part of the exhibition Söma, Söma, Söma, which he also curated. In addition, Pope.L was commissioned by the Yaddo Artists Colony to produce and perform a new version of his solo performance Eracism at Thread Waxing Space, New York City. In May – June of 2001 Pope.L exhibited Hole Theory at The Project in New York City.
In March 2002, Pope.L had a one-person exhibition at The Project in Los Angeles and in 2001 – 02, he began The Great White Way, 22 miles, 7 years, 1 street, a crawl journey up the spine of Manhattan to be completed over a period of seven years.
In 2003, Pope.L had solo exhibitions at Drew University in Madison, NJ, and Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, TX. He was also included in The White Show at Bill Maynes Gallery, NYC, In Motion at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Body-Con, which toured Japan from November 2003 to May 2004.
A traveling retrospective exhibition on Pope.L's work of the last 25 years, entitled eRacism, began at the ICA in Portland, Maine, in 2002, and traveled to DiverseWorks in Houston, Texas, PICA in Portland, Oregon, ArtistsSpace in New York City, and Mason Gross School at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 2004, an all media version of the survey show, eRacism: electronica was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
In Spring 2004, Pope.L’s The Black Factory toured and was exhibited as part of The Interventionists: Art in the Social Space at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2005, Pope.L had a one person show, Some Things You Can do with Blackness, at Kenny Shachter Rove in London, designed a major magazine project for the College Art Association’s Art Journal, and organized Bringing Decarie to the Mountain, a group crawl in collaboration with the city of Montreal. The Black Factory has just returned from its 2005 national tour and preparations for a 2006 tour are now being made.
