Art+History: Three Artists at the Nightingale Brown House
In the fall of 2008 artists Kianga Ford, Carla Herrera-Prats, and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman will create work for Art+History, an exhibition influenced by the specific physical and historical parameters of the John Nicholas Brown House and its garden. Rather than present a traditional historical or art exhibition, Art+History will offer a hybrid experience. How discreet are the historic and artistic practices? How flexible are our notions about the past? In short, Art+History will explore what happens when new hands rifle through, untangle, and re-fold the contents of our home.
Student Involvement
A major motivation for Art+History is to provide experiential learning for public humanities’ students affiliated with the JNBC. The residency program will allow students to work with the artists in residence, gaining insight into the processes of art making, research, installation, and interpretation. Graduate students Rosie Branson-Gill and Meg Rotzel will curate the exhibit and other JNBC students will develop interpretative materials, public programs and publicity for the exhibition opening. In addition, each artist will need a research assistant to provide interpretative support, practical assistance, and connection to the JNBC and University historic collections. Public Humanities graduate students are encouraged to fill these positions.
How students can participate:
Contact co-curators Meg Rotzel: meg_rotzel@brown.edu and Rosie Branson Gill: Rosemary_Branson_Gill@brown.edu. There will be project updates through the summer and fall of 2008. The exhibition opens in the spring of 2009.
Art+History Projects
Kianga Ford
Following the larger interest of my work in narrative and interaction, The Story of This Place is an ongoing project of site-specific narrative audio tours. Like a portable piece of cinema (available via MP3, podcast, or CD), the audio work guides the listener through a neighborhood or site with a scored fictional narrative inspired by real stories of the place’s inhabitants.
Relying on the idea of a “micro-locale,” not a country or even a city, but usually a scripted path through a few city blocks, these site-specific narratives accumulate to build a picture of the effects of historical migrations and intercultural influence on everyday contemporary life. My small “walks” attempt to offer a comparative analysis of the present, not by broad strokes, but through an attention to the tiny detail and idiosyncrasies of contemporary experience—the relations between neighbors, the location of services, the desires and fantasies shared by people who occupy the same public space. My stories are peopled by minor characters that reflect the resonance of both the historical and the personal in contemporary experience--in Grand Cayman this is a character who is descended from Scottish missionaries and who is married to a Chinese Jamaican financial analyst; in Bergen it is a young Cuban immigrant who represents a new post-oil Scandinavian labor class; in Miami it is the young Haitian girl who struggles with her parents’ expectation of cultural isolation alongside the diversity of her own high school experience.
Kianga Ford’s Project at the JNBC
At the core, this project considers the fictionalized dimensions of place. JNBC offers the first opportunity to work with an interior space. Pursuing some of the non-linear narrative strategies introduced in the Baltimore iteration of the project, I envision the piece for John Nicholas Brown Center as a set of short stationary narratives for rooms in the house, with certainly a piece for the wallpapered hallway and with a potential moving track for the garden. I would aim for 45-60 minutes of total audio. I would ideally like to produce a physical CD and package for the project that could be enjoyed indefinitely by visitors to the house.
How You Can Participate
Kinaga’s project will use cross-departmental recourse, primarily those of the Music department and JNBC, but perhaps other as well. For example, she will work with campus musical groups on the score for the piece. In order to navigate these multiple relationships, Kianga will need her research assistant to be her principal collaborator on-site. In addition, she will need research help looking into both the histories of the furniture and decorative details of the JNBC and the families who have occupied the house. To facilitate the final project, Kianga will also need to have an interface designed and space to host the downloadable components on the JNBC website. We are looking for two assistants: one research/on-site collaborator and one tech assistant to design the interface.
Bio
Kianga Ford works primarily with sound and environment. Using design-based installation, sound, performance, and site-specific projects to create scored environments, her works explore the dynamics of contemporary social identity, proximity, intimacy, and relationship. Her immersive, often story-based, projects ask questions about the relationship between physical and cultural proximity. Since 2003, a major focus of her work has been on developing the series of narrative walking tours, The Story of This Place, that create historically-informed but fictional stories for mapped routes through cities. In the increasingly considered field of sound art, she has worked collaboratively with a range of international composers from Toronto to Bergen. Her work has been shown at venues including The Studio Museum in Harlem; USF Verftet (Bergen, Norway); Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; The Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore; and the 2006 California Biennial at The Orange County Museum of Art. She is a current Creative Capital grantee and a recipient of the California Community Foundation fellowship for emerging artists. She has recently been awarded a grant by the Asian Cultural Council to pursue a new project in Japan. Ford is an Assistant Professor in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Boston.
Jill Slosberg-Ackerman
Jill Slosberg-Ackerman’s sculptures develop from familiar forms of furniture. She subtly bends and transforms known objects causing a reconsideration of use, class and period of stuff as familiar as tables and shelves. Ackerman riffs on vernacular and derivative design itself; her work is far from sly, but full of quiet humor, respect and wonder. An end table is given a few extra planes, a discarded bedside table grows layer upon layer of veneer over a banal motif, objects float, others glow. Encountered in a gallery, these works hold down an exhibition space, self possessed and offering up the secret lives of the furniture residing in your own home. Within her studio, the sculptures bump up against Jill’s own work tables, tools and works in progress; they uncannily emerge from everyday use, quietly asserting the intellect and imagination required to transform and throw into relief the objects that hold our bodies, things, history and ideas.
Jill Slosburg-Ackerman’s Project at the JNBC
Jill is interested in aspects of context—how the combination of places and things extend or alter meaning. Beginning with overlays of time, structure, decoration, and style that co-exist within the John Nightingale-Brown House, Jill will develop a couple of sculptures that ruminate on, or reveal material transitions within the house.
How You Can Participate
Jill will be making a number of visits to the JNBC throughout the fall semester. She will ask individual students and staff to spend some time with her and talk about specific places within the house that disclose the complexities of the historic house. Jill may also need one research assistant to look into the history of these places within the JNBC. Hoping to gain from other perspectives and disciplines, she will be working on one large sculpture and a series of smaller ones.
Bio
Jill Slosburg-Ackerman was born in Omaha, Nebraska. She is inspired by the pragmatism of the Pioneers who settled the Great Plains and by its landscape. Her mother founded the Omaha’s first art gallery in the 1950’s, which influenced her decision to become an artist. Ms. Slosburg-Ackerman’s work includes drawing, jewelry, and sculpture. She is a Professor of Art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work is in numerous collections including The Boston Public Library, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. She is the recipient of many grants most recently from Anonymous Was a Woman, The Berkshire Taconic Trust, Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Carla Herrera-Prats
Through archival research Carla Herrera-Prats’ work comments on the cultural and economic transactions that flow, often invisibly, in the context of a transnational world. Her projects juxtapose photography and material from different sources questioning the documentary value of both images and text.
Carla Herrera-Prats’ Project at the JNBC
Using the photos from the archives of John Nicholas Brown House Carla will try to understand how the Brown family has been “historicized” through photography. Also looking at the parallel history of the technology of photography, she will research the photo studios that took formal family portraits throughout the 19th and 20th century.
How You can Participate
Carla has chosen a set of Brown family portraits that bear the imprint of portraiture photographers and studios in Providence, New York and Massachusetts. She would like to work with some students to research the studios and photographers. A video or a set of prints may be produced based on discoveries during the research process, on which she will need help. Carla has already chosen a number of photos and made a list of studio photographers that are ready to be tracked down.
Bio
Carla Herrera-Prats was co-director of the gallery Acceso A in Mexico City and currently is part of the collaborative CAMEL. Herrera-Prats has shown her individual work in Canada, Colombia, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the United States, in venues such as Centro de la Imagen, Museo Dolores Olmedo, Centre Vu, Artists Space, and The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, among others. From the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes she received the “Jóvenes Creadores” scholarship and support for studies abroad. She has also been recipient of the Interdisciplinary Grant from CalArts, the Van Lier Foundation Fellowship, the Jumex Collection Support, and the LEF Foundation pre-production grant. Herrera-Prats was recently a Visiting Lecturer at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and taught the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is currently teaching at CalArts, Valencia, California. Carla Herrera-Prats received her BFA at “La Esmeralda,” in Mexico City, and her MFA in Photography at CalArts, Los Angeles. She has been a participant at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.
