Registration and Student Postcard Sale

Johnson Center Bistro - Ground Floor

Performance/Installation: Image and Dust

Mary Dondero

Johnson Center Dewberry Hall South - Ground Floor

Acts of Resistance: The Sonderkommando Photographs

Judith Lerner Crawley

Claire Deal

Pam Fox

Popular Photography and Conversations about "Truth" in Culture and the Classroom

Lynne M. Constantine (moderator and presenter)

Ellen Gorman (presenter)

Suzanne Scott (presenter)

Christina Nguyen Hung

Stafford Smith

11:30 AM to 12:30 PM

Karina Skvirsky

Matthew Suib

Liselot van der Heijden

Lunch and Regional Meeting

Honored Educator

Art and Democracy: Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Sandy Skoglund

Scholarship Winner Presentation and Slide Show

Graduate School Presentations

Gordon Harkins - Penn State University

Stefan Petranek-Rochester Institute of Technology

Jill Pichocki – George Mason University

Quintina Smith - The University of Maryland

Thomas Sturgill - Carnegie Mellon University

Brent Wahl - University of Pennsylvania

Gary Schneider will give the Keynote Address. Born in South Africa in 1954, has a BFA from the University of Cape Town and an MFA from Pratt Institute in New York, where he continues to live. He worked in the theatre of Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson in the 1970’s also making films through the early 1980’s. Schneider began exhibiting photographs in 1991 at PPOW Gallery in New York.

His ‘Genetic Self-Portrait’ installation, completed in 1998 was exhibited in the U.S. at Mass MoCA and The International Center of Photography. It has also been exhibited internationally and received an Eisenstadt award in 2000. In 2004 a survey, ‘Gary Schneider: Portraits’ was mounted at the Sackler Museum, Boston and received an NEA grant. The catalogue was published by Yale University Press and HUAM.

In 2005 he received the Lou Stoumen Award and his book ‘Nudes’ was published by Aperture and they will exhibit the prints in November. Some collections which include his work are: The Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim Museum and The Metropolitan Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Canada; The Musee de L’Elysee, Lausanne; The MFA, Boston and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Art and Democracy: Familiarity Breeds Contempt

In terms of reality, we are always pushing back the chaos of nature, which conspires to undo the obsessive constructions we weave around us. Our artifice becomes natural, and the boundaries between science and nature blurred beyond measure. This queasy truth is our fluctuating universe, in which teaching and making art are a serious and welcome challenge, where cynicism is the enemy and honesty is the goal.

The 2005 SPE MA Honored Educator Sandy Skoglund was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1946.  Skoglund studied studio art and art history at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts from 1964-68. She went on to graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1969 where she studied filmmaking, intaglio printmaking, and multimedia art, receiving her M.A. in 1971 and her M.F.A. in painting in 1972.  

Skoglund moved to New York in June of 1972, where she started working as a conceptual artist, dealing with repetitive, process-oriented art production through the techniques of mark-making and photocopying. In the late seventies Skoglund’s desire to document conceptual ideas led her to teach herself photography. This developing interest in photographic technique became fused with her interest in popular culture and commercial picture making strategies, resulting in the work she is known for today.

Skoglund has been teaching photography and other art forms at Rutgers University-Newark since 1976.

"Image and Dust" For this project my intention is to omit the viewer's privileged, objective point of view, the position that allows for indifference. For me, this means eliminating the separation between the observer and what is being observed. These photo-images are covered with a layer of dust. The viewer must wipe away the dust, revealing the image, leaving the hand dirty. The dirty hand becomes a metaphor implying that the viewer had involvement in the photographed event, no matter how remote or distant. My installation is meant to allow contemplation regarding tragedy
through imagery originally intended as proof.

Mary Dondero has taught for the past 24 years at various institutions including
Roger Williams University and Rhode Island School of Design.  Presently she is a faculty member at Bridgewater State College, located in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. This past spring Dondero served as a judge for the international jury at Ecole Superieure d'Arts Graphiques et d'Architecture, Paris, France. This jury reviews exiting student's portfolios, allowing them to graduate. Dondero is one of the founding members and continues to serve as part of the executive committee of Imago, a Gallery of fine craft and art. The gallery is a nonprofit,  cooperative organization in Warren, Rhode Island. Imago is dedicated to showcasing regional artists as well as offering educational and cultural programs to the community. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally including The Museum of Anthropology, California State University, Chico, The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, The Carnegie Art Center, North Tonawanda, NY and The Barrett House Galleries, Poughkeepsie, NY.

Acts of Resistance: The Sonderkommando Photographs

I first encountered one of four known photographs taken clandestinely in August, 1944 by prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau as I walked through a barrack of Auschwitz, now a museum. In a photo/lecture presentation, I will briefly position my recent work About Auschwitz, an exhibit of my photographs with text, in the context of my art work and share what I learned about a risky attempt by prisoners working in the crematoria to provide visual evidence - to attract the attention of the Allied forces and to warn others to resist getting on the trains.

Evidence of Conviction: Connecting and Empowering Inmates and Students through Photography and Service Learning

Claire Deal is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College in Farmville, VA. She holds a MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her research interests include political theatre, the rhetoric of social movements, and the social construction of difference. She is currently a doctoral student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University.

Pam Fox lives in Richmond, VA and teaches photography at Hampden-Sydney College and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She holds a BFA and a MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Communication Arts and Photography respectively. She is a recipient of a Fellowship Grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and a Fellowship from Virginia Museum in Photography.

Popular Photography and Conversations about "Truth" in Culture and the Classroom

This panel explores the ways in which popular photography can be a route into sophisticated questions about "truth," "reality," "self," and "proof" in the classroom and in pop culture. The three presenters will address this topic through brief, image-driven talks on contemporary "spirit photography," on classroom use of gender representation in pop photography and on the photos used for album covers by the 1980s British band The Smiths. A Q&A and discussion among the panelists and session attendees will follow the papers.

Lynne M. Constantine (moderator and presenter) is Associate Chair and Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University, where she teaches courses in art theory, visual perception, and art as social action. She holds graduate degrees from Yale University and is completing a PhD in Cultural Studies at Mason with an emphasis in visual culture, pop photographic movements and art as a social action. Her artistic practice includes performance/installation and photography.

Ellen Gorman (presenter) is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University, with emphasis in aesthetics, visual culture, critical theory, art criticism and twentieth-century movements in art. With Lynne Constantine, she co-founded the annual interdisciplinary Visual Culture Symposium at George Mason University. She teaches composition, literature and cultural studies at Mason and George Washington University.

Suzanne Scott (presenter) is Assistant Professor in New Century College, George Mason University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, gender representations in popular culture, aesthetics, and women's studies. She holds an MA in English from James Madison University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College. Her artistic practice includes performance/installation and mixed media works in 2D and 2D.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a photographer and video artist; she lives and works in New York City. Her work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows at Jessica Murray Projects, NY, Smack Mellon, NY, Art in General, NY, StudioSoto, MA, Kunstahalle Exnergasse, Austria, Impakt 2004, The Netherlands, Le Centre pour L’image Contemporaine, Switzerland and others. She has participated in numerous residencies including: Smack Mellon, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell, Institute of Electronic Arts, Woodstock Center for Photography and others.

Matthew Suib, a Philadelphia-based media artist, has exhibited installations, video and audio works and photographs internationally at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Kunstwerke (Berlin), Images Festival (’02, ’05, Toronto), and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre (NYC). Most recently, his work Cosmic Microwave Background with New Humans was exhibited in collaboration with Brooklyn-based collective New Humans at Apex Art (NYC). He is also a member of the Philadelphia artist-cooperative Vox Populi.

Liselot van der Heijden is an emerging artist from the Netherlands who lives and works in New York City. She has shown art projects and videos throughout the US, Europe and South America. International venues include: Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Videochroniques in Nice, ZKM Zentrum fur Medien Technologie in Karlsruhe and Videonale 8 in Bonn, Germany. In New York City she has shown video works at the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, the Queens Museum, Artist Space, Art in General, Schroeder Romero, White Box, and Momenta Art among other venues. She received numerous residencies from the Experimental Television Center and a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She has a BFA from the Cooper Union and a MFA from Hunter College. Currently she is teaching at Cooper Union and Pratt Institute. She is one of the organizers of Nomads and Residents.

Christina Nguyen Hung, an interdisciplinary artist, has been investigating the zones between different systems of knowledge, and different cultures since she was born in Washington D.C. during the height of the Vietnam war as the child of a Vietnamese father and an American mother. Christina maintains her bifurcated existence by living between Baltimore, MD and Pensacola, Florida, where she teaches new media as an Assistant Professor of Art at University of West Florida. As a former member of subRosa, a cyberfeminist art and research collective, Hung created participatory information theater" performances and installations, which were designed to instigate an informed, critical dialogue about the effects of technology, and especially biotechnology, on the lives of women. In her most recent work, she explores issues surrounding  "free" trade, national security, and freedom of speech, by creating iconic images and texts (such as the First Amendment) with the cultured bacterium Serratia marcescens. Hung’s work has been widely exhibited at numerous venues such as the exhibition “A Knock at the Door” at the Cooper Union for Advancement in Science and Art; the Maryland Art Place ; Festival Intermediale in Mainz, Germany; St Mary's College of Maryland; and the Digital Secrets conference at Arizona State University's Institute for Studies in the Arts. Her writing and images may be found in the anthologies Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing, and Domain Errors!: Cyberfeminist Practices. Her work as both an individual artist and as a member of subRosa has received support from The University of Virginia, UMBC, the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts.

Stafford Smith’s approach to photography is influenced by his multi-faceted background in broadcast television, painting, and his interests in pop-culture. His work ranges from large loud colorful tableaux to somber expressions in black and white. There is often an element of subversive sarcasm in the background. His most recent work involves a redefinition of the family portrait and an attempt to breathe new life into this moribund genre. By combing the latest digital technology with old-fashion cut-and-paste techniques Stafford hopes to come to terms with what a portrait really is and how the American family has evolved from its traditional image. Stafford received his MFA from Cornell University. He lives in Williamsport, PA with his very talented wife and 2 daughters where he teaches at Lycoming College. His work is exhibited nationally.