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Conference 2008: Speakers, Panelists, and Exhibits

Honored Educator

Martin Prekop, Carnegie Mellon University

Former Dean of College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, Martin Prekop is photographer, painter and sculptor whose work has been shown worldwide. His most recent exhibitions have included shows in Santiago, Chile; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Chicago, Illinois. His work appears in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; University of Illinois, Evanston; the City of Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, along with the corporate collections of Mellon Bank and The Gap Corporation.

As an arts administrator, Mr. Prekop has served as a consultant to the Fulbright Commission; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Interior Design Institute, Denver; and the US-China Arts Commission, Columbia University. Additionally, he has served Professor and Dean of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Visiting Artist at Carlisle University, England; and the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland; and President of the Board of Directors of the OxBow Summer School of Painting. He collaborates in exhibition with the Ghandi Group.

Pre-Conference Lecture

Rosamond Purcell

Pre-Conference Lecture Sponsored by Silver Eye and Carnegie Mellon
Knowing the World Through Pictures: The Photographs of Rosamond Purcell

Rosamond Purcell is an internationally recognized artist who has photographed for many years in natural history and anatomical collections. Her published works include three books with the late paleontologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould, and one with sleight-of-hand artist, Ricky Jay. Her book Owls Head (2003), a meditation on the nature of dissolution of objects, is also a biography of William Buckminster, owner of a scrap-metal and antiques yard in Maine. Bookworm (2006), a retrospective of her photography, includes collages based on writing and books in derelict condition.

Purcell’s installation called “Two Rooms” included displays of her collected ruined objects and constructions from her studio as well as a reconstruction of the Seventeenth-century museum of the Danish collector, Ole Worm, as based on a well-known engraving of that room. “Two Rooms” appeared at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, at Mount Holyoke College, Tufts University and Harvard University. Worm’s room, as re-constructed by Purcell, will now be permanently installed at the Geological Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Currently Purcell has been commissioned by Harvard University to document the world-renowned collections at the Western Foundation for Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, California. A comprehensive book from this project, tentatively titled Egg and Nest, is scheduled for publication by Harvard University Press in Fall 2008. Silver Eye plans to present an exhibition of these incredibly detailed and fascinating studies in the winter of 2008. Our show, titled “Taking Chances” will reveal Purcell’s unparalleled attention to the patterns of eggshells, the strategy of weaving and nest building, and the texture of plumage. It will include approximately sixty exhibition quality, archival Iris inkjet prints.

A presentation called Knowing the World Through Pictures: The Photographs of Rosamond Purcell will be at Carnegie Mellon University on Friday, November 7th at 4:30 p.m. This is being sponsored by the Pittsburgh Medieval Consortium and is scheduled to coincide with the Society for Photographic Education Regional Conference hosted by Carnegie Mellon University that weekend.

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Panel

Chris Borkowski: Inside/Outside the White Walls: Curating New/Digital Media

Chris Borkowski is a media maker from Buffalo, NY that is now living and working in New York City. He has worked professionally as video editor, network administrator, media arts center Technical Director, and University instructor in digital arts. He is a co-founder of the video art portal Perpetual Art Machine [PAM]. He has shown work internationally at various galleries and media festivals and has also performed a number of real-time audio and video pieces.

He like sunsets and long walks in the park, the shape of pixels, social climbers, hackers, misfits and charlatans. His favorite colors are RGB and finds name dropping and writing his own bio the biggest turn off.

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Panel Discussion

Amanda McDonald Crowley, Executive Director eyebeam

Amanda McDonald Crowley brings to Eyebeam a substantial and international background in media arts. She moved to New York in October 2005, relocating from her native Australia where she had been based while working nationally and throughout Europe and Asia as an arts producer, facilitator, researcher and curator. She served as the Executive Producer of the 2004 International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA2004), developing the event from concept to major conferences, exhibitions, performances, concerts and site specific installations on a ferry in the Baltic Sea and locations in Estonia and Finland.

In 2002–03 she was an arts worker in residency at Sarai: the New Media Initiative in Delhi, India and was Associate Director for Adelaide Festival 2002. From 1995 to 2000 McDonald Crowley was Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), an organization with a national brief to foster links between the arts, sciences and new technology.

Thomas Sokolowski

Thomas Sokolowski assumed his position as Director for The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, on May 1, 1996. Mr. Sokolowski previously served as Director for New York University’s Grey Art Gallery & Study Center since 1984.

Under Mr. Sokolowski’s direction, Grey Art Gallery mounted 15 exhibitions and site-specific installations annually, including the nationally and internationally acclaimed touring exhibitions Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties and Success is a Job in New York...: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol, which was shown in Paris, London, Turin, Philadelphia, Newport Beach and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. That exhibition marked the first time Warhol had a one-person show in Pittsburgh, and the Carnegie Museum of Art showed its early support by co-sponsoring publication of the catalogue.

Mr. Sokolowski served as chief curator for the Chrysler Art Museum (1982–1984), and as curator of European Painting and Sculpture (1981–1982). He has taught for New York University (1989–1992); Old Dominion University (1982–1984); the University of British Columbia (1980–1981); the University of Minnesota (1979); and Kent State University (1979).

Mr. Sokolowski earned his master’s degree and did doctoral work in art history with an emphasis on late 17th- and early 18th-century Italian art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. A native of Chicago, Illinois, Mr. Sokolowski received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago.

He currently has been Vice President of the board of the Penny McCall Foundation and Board member for Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force. He has served on the Boards of the MacDowell Colony, Visual AIDS, Artist & Homeless Collaborative and Dance Alloy. Mr. Sokolowski has also served on the editorial board of the publication Art + Text, and F/X Television’s arts correspondent.

Mark Cooley

Mark Cooley is an interdisciplinary artist interested in exploring the intersections of art, activism, popular culture and institutional critique in a variety of contexts. Subjects of particular interest are U.S. foreign policy, the fine art culture industry and the political economy of new technologies. Mark’s work has been featured internationally in online and offline venues such as Exit Art, NY, Rhizome.org, Furtherield.org, the World Social Forum, MediaLabMadrid, and many other international venues.

Mark is currently a professor in the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University in the suburbs of Washington D.C.