March 10–April 11, 2014
art-design.umich.edu/exhibitions
The Stamps MFA program offers its graduate students unique access to the University of Michigan’s world-renowned researchers and facilities, and is designed for artists whose studio practice actively engages fields of knowledge beyond the cultures of art and design. Students are expected to develop a robust engagement with another field of inquiry and to carry out creative work informed by and interacting with that field.
Ann Bartges: Holding Still
Drawing on her work with the School of Music Theater and Dance, Ann Bartges’ Holding Still uses video projection and live performance to explore complex relationships between living memory, photography, time, representation and the separation between self and image.
Mia Cinelli: Reconstructing Recollection
Mia Cinelli engaged with sociology and anthropology as background for Reconstructing Recollection, a series of sculptural representations of memories highlighting the discrepancies between perceived and actual recollections.
John Gutoskey: Shaman Johnny’s Pop-Up Shop & Gallery
LGBTQ studies, women’s studies and art history inform John Gutoskey’s Shaman Johnny’s Pop-Up Shop & Gallery, featuring artist and healer Shaman Johnny and his print work, queer valentines, health & beauty queer products, a photo booth and Shaman Johnny’s Sacred Backroom.
Molly Dierks: home/Body
The sculptures in Molly Dierks’ home/Body deal with the mother-daughter bond, gendered role-play, and the relationship between self and body, drawing on personal experiences, memory, and feminist theory.
Katie St. Clair: Wayside
For Katie St. Clair, “a styrofoam cup brittle with age, a cigarette filter once pressed to lips, cast proof of our existence, mingled with trees, fallen branches and leaves. These collages and temporal installations reveal the hidden nature of our closest experiences.” Katie worked with the School of Natural Resources and Creative Writing.
Parisa Ghaderi: Only an Inch Away
Drawing on research in American culture, and the schools of Social Work and Public Health, Parisa Ghaderi employs video and audio installation, prints and cinemagraphs, to speak about absence and presence, to holding onto memories of people when they leave, momentarily or forever.
Peter Leix: Muscatawingh – Plains Burnt Over
Building on work with Screen Arts and Cultures, Peter’s feature length-documentary film explores life in Flint, Michigan, through an intertwined series of portraits of people bringing brightness and structure to a collapsed environment. This is the film’s world premiere.
Juliet Hinely: Per Mr. Handy
Per Mr. Handy is a site-specific audio-walk and performance installation in the Jam Handy Building, now abandoned but once a prolific movie studio in Detroit’s heyday. A 1973 memo left behind by the building’s namesake becomes an ambiguous atlas from which to explore the space. Juliet Hinely’s research for this project included work with Dance, Urban Planning, and Museum Studies, as well as an audio documentary course at Duke Center for Documentary Studies.
Rolando Palacio: Una Vida Linda
Anthropology, American Culture, and the Stamps outreach initiative Detroit Connections informed Rolando Palacio’s photographic portraits of Southwest Detroit, aka “Mexican Town.” The images reflect “the way we speak to each other and the shared histories of our journey.”
MDesign program: In addition to its MFA program, the Stamps School begins accepting applications in fall 2014 for our new two-year professional degree program in design. Emphasizing interdisciplinary and integrative practice, the program centers on a carefully chosen cross-disciplinary cohort mixing graduate student designers and professionals to work on projects that address complex design problems related to critical social issues.
About the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan
The Stamps School offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees in art and design. The school’s unique open curriculum emphasizes interdisciplinary study, requires international educational experiences, fosters community engagement, and draws on the resources only available at a top-ten research university.