RUTGERS MFA BLERG

PRESS

2012-01-24T16:14:00.001-05:00

Visiting Artists it's back...

2012-01-24T16:12:00.004-05:00

Thanks Michael Shoudt for this weeks poster!
Spring 2012 Visiting Artist roster coming soon.

2012-01-21T00:55:00.004-05:00

Get ready, get busy...

Visiting Artists

2011-12-12T14:45:00.002-05:00

Postponed: Lecture will be on Wed. Dec. 14th at 6:30pm

2011-12-02T19:08:00.003-05:00

Pics

2011-12-02T18:07:00.001-05:00

Check out photos from last night's 1st year exhibition reception!

Click the "event photos" page to the right!

Visiting Artist: Leigh Ledare 11/30 6:30

2011-11-28T17:29:00.002-05:00

Thomas Nozkowski Lecture 11/29 5pm

2011-11-28T17:24:00.002-05:00

OPENING RECEPTION THIS THURSDAY, 5-8

2011-11-28T15:43:00.005-05:00

Mason Gross Galleries

33 Livingston Ave

New Brunswick, NJ 08901

at/ around/ beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers @ the Zimmerli

2011-11-26T15:46:00.002-05:00

http://www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu//exhibitions/?id=101

Turkey Dance

2011-11-22T16:13:00.001-05:00

Let's all just learn this quick.

First Year Review Show Reception Dec, 1st 5-8pm

2011-11-19T21:44:00.004-05:00

Mason Gross School of the Visual Arts is pleased to present their annual exhibition featuring first year graduate students.

Students present their research and work, that has been developed over their first three months in the program. Students work in a range of various practices, spanning video, painting, installation, performance, photography, printmaking, and drawing.

The exhibition is comprised of,Tomer Aluf, Ulrika Anerson, Milcah Bassel, Jesus Benavente, Rebekah Callaghan, Caitlin Cocco, Hannah Craft, Zachary Cummings, Raque Ford, Caecilia Gray, Vanessa Gully Santiago, Aubrey J. Kauffman, Isreal Lund, Rachel Malin, Sophy Naess, Grant Newman, Nicholas Pilato, Bethany Robertson, Kevin Travers, and Elizabeth Wells.

The reception for the first year review students will take place Thursday, December 1st, 2011 at the Mason Gross Galleries, located at 33 Livingston Ave, New Brunswick NJ, 08901

Assorted in Philadelphia

2011-11-07T12:11:00.000-05:00

Patricia and I are in this show.

~Av

Hanneline Rogeburg

2011-11-06T21:23:00.002-05:00

Visiting Lecture David Joselit

2011-11-02T12:34:00.001-04:00

Mason Gross Presents LaToya Ruby Frazier

2011-11-01T00:55:00.001-04:00

Visiting Artist, Dona Nelson

2011-10-23T16:37:00.002-04:00

We are very excited to welcome Dona Nelson this week.

Lecture will be on Tuesday, October 25th at 6:30 in room 110/117

Welcoming Students from the Academy of Fine Art in Munich to Rutgers

2011-10-21T13:54:00.002-04:00

Students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich are visiting Rutgers MFA program. This visit is to further develop a relationship between our two schools in hopes of creating a future exchange program. The students from both Rutgers and the Academy will present a pair of shows that present their respective bodies of work. The shows will be in the Livingston Arts Building (LAB) Thursday October 20th and Friday October 21st, with opening receptions each evening.

Studenten der Akademie der Bildenden Künste in München besuchen Rutgers MFA-Programm. Dieser Besuch ist die weitere Entwicklung einer Beziehung zwischen unseren beiden Schulen in der Hoffnung, die Schaffung eines zukünftigen Austausch-Programm. Die Schülerinnen und Schüler aus beiden Rutgers und der Akademie präsentiert ein Paar zeigt, dass ihre jeweiligen Gremien der Arbeiten zu präsentieren. Die Shows werden in den Livingston Arts Building (LAB) Donnerstag 20. Oktober und Freitag, 21. Oktober, mit Öffnung Empfänge jeden Abend.

Finally!!!! The Visiting Artist Poster!!!!

2011-10-17T17:01:00.002-04:00

Thanks James Brittingham for making this awesome poster!

Visiting Artist, Blake Rayne 10/19

2011-10-17T12:20:00.004-04:00

*poster courtesy of Grant Newman

Visiting Artist Clifford Owens 10/12

2011-10-12T15:33:00.004-04:00

*Thanks Patricia Brace for creating this weeks poster.

The 2000 Mason Gross School of Art Alum's work is currently on view at the Mason Gross Galleries' Project Space

Owens work will soon be on display at the MoMA PS1 Nov 13th 2011-March 2012. info here

Clifford Owens is best known for his provocative performances, in which the audience is frequently required to engage with Owens, and shifts of power and perspective are at play. The body is often employed as a conduit for conversations, exposing the underlying dynamics between individuals, the artist and viewer, and/or the photographer and the subject of an image. Owens also uses performance as a means to create formal photographic installations that question the intersection of performance, documentation and photography.

Owens studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mason Gross School of Visual Art Rutgers University, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2005 -2006 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004. Grants and fellowships include Art Matters, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Lambent Foundation, and the Rutgers University Ralph Bunche Graduate Fellowship.

The Mason Gross Galleries at Civic Square, 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Hours: 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, until 6 p.m. Wednesdays, and noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays

Admission is free. More information is available by calling 732-932-2222, ext. 798

Hannah Craft

2011-10-12T14:15:00.006-04:00

The Child Looks Up and...
at the Solo(s) Project House

Opening in Newark next friday, Oct 21st, 7-11 pm.

The show is in conjunction with "newark open doors," a weekend full of gallery tours, parties, parades, etc to promote the arts in newark. here's a link with a bit of info: http://www.newarkarts.org/opendoors/aboutod.html

Israel Lund

2011-10-08T15:06:00.003-04:00

Click here

Annual Fall Exhibition, MASS DISTRACTIONS & CULTURAL DECAY

2011-10-04T20:26:00.004-04:00

*Opening reception images posted on events page!

Mason Gross Galleries

2011 ANNUAL FALL EXHIBITON

MASS DISTRACTIONS & CULTURAL DECAY

September 30th - October 22nd

Reception, Wednesday, October 5TH 5pm - 7pm

Artist Talk with Jon Kessler Wednesday, October 26th 6:30 pm CSB room 117

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists. - Cornel West

Between the 1940’s and 1990’s, during the Cold War period, the United States competed against communist-bloc nations in a race to be the dominant superpower, economically, scientifically, and technologically. This period saw the development of advanced satellite technologies, television, and the Internet. The Internet was developed in the 1970’s as part of the structures of defense against or in case of nuclear war. Prior to its development, computers were primarily seen as a way to store and protect government and proprietary information.

In the United States, the passage by the US Congress of the Cable Act of 1984 helped promote computer and Internet access for the population at large. The rapid expansion of cable services and satellite networks led to the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. These acts have personalized uses by ordinary individuals who rely heavily on these technologies for information, communication, entertainment and shopping.

The “culture industry” is a term applied in the 1940s by Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to the fusion of television, radio, film, and advertising. Their essays “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” and “The Culture Industry Reconsidered” emphasize consumers’ inability to distinguish advertisement and entertainment from reality. Consumers, in their account, tend to seek pleasure as a means to escape reality instead of developing ways of thinking that resist manipulation by the culture industry. Adorno and Horkheimer observe:

The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalistic production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered

them... the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. - Dialectic of Enlightenment (1969)

Through the filter of the culture industry, art has been reduced to crafty techniques that are easily consumed by the mass public. The culture industry’s ability to strip meaning from traditional art forms stems from processes of mechanical (re)production. In “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” Adorno borrows from Frankfurt School colleague Walter Benjamin, adopting his term “aura” — the sacred and authentic distance that characterizes traditional art before mass reproduction— to point out that in the decay of the “aura” is where culture industry steals its style and conceals its deceptive ideologies as a form of social control.

Consider The Pictures Generation (1974-1984), a generation of artists that witnessed and experienced after-affects of post-World War II America, Vietnam War and The Watergate Scandal when the media culture of movies, televisions, popular music and magazines was creating a sea of pictures that seduce us into consumerism and shape our ideas about gender, race, sexuality and citizenship. This generation expressed a resistance against mass media imagery by investigating how pictures achieve power over masses. -The Pictures Generation, Douglas Eklund, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009)

Twenty-five years from now another generation of artists that have experienced The War on Terrorism, The USA PATRIOT Act and the Global Debt Crisis, will find themselves in a similar conflict as The Pictures Generation. How will newly developed social network technologies such as youtube, vimeo, myspace, facebook and twitter play a role in the fabric of our social conscience? How will these events be programmed in our cultural-memory? How will information be disseminated through future artistic practices?

In his seminal essay, “The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Benjamin argues that with the destruction of “aura” art is no longer based on ritual but on politics. Frankfurt School theorists believed that artists should not play a subordinate role to the culture industry; rather, as cultural agents, artists should function within and transform representations in the culture industry for purposes of positive social change.

In the exhibition Mass Distractions and Cultural Decay, more than 150 artists deploy strategies and techniques that counter and subvert culture industry ideologies that promote racism, classism, nationalism, militarism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism, and consumerism.

Some of the artists featured in Mass Distractions and Cultural Decay will include:
Michael Paul Britto, Brian Bulfer, Heather Bursch, Damian Catera, Crystal Z. Campbell, Taeyoon Choi, Raphaël Dallaporta, Emory Douglas, Sam Durant, Sarah Eliassen,
Hasan Elahi, Andrea Fraser, Harun Farocki, Nate Harrison, Marc Handelman, Akintola Hanif, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, Sean Hovendick, Jon Kessler, Ardele Lister, Amanda Matles, Laura Mulvey, Remembering Olive Collective, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Martha Rosler, Ivor Shearer, Scott Thode, Shane Whilden, Hank Willis Thomas and Jasiri X.

Mass Distractions and Cultural Decay was curated by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Associate Curator.

The Mason Gross Galleries at Civic Square, 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 are open from
10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays and noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays. More information is available by calling 732-932-2222, ext. 798. Admission is free.