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December Issue 2003
Tri State Sculptors Group Plans 2004 Annual Conference for Oct., 2004, in Winston-Salem, NC
Sculptors and the public are invited to attend and participate in the Tri State Sculptors 2004 Annual Conference, Oct. 7-10, 2004, in Winston-Salem, NC, hosted by the North Carolina School of the Arts. Tri State's annual meeting, including sculptors from NC, SC, and VA, will offer an exciting mix of traditional sessions and panels as well as "hands-on" demonstrations and workshops. Of course, there will also be the Annual Member's Exhibitions of sculpture and drawings. This year's show will be held at a variety of Winston-Salem's cultural landmarks, among them Artworks Gallery, The North Carolina School of the Arts, the Arts Council Sawtooth Center for the Visual Arts (tentative).
Our two Keynote Speakers are scholar-writer-speaker, Ellen Dissanayake, and Suzanne Lacy, Chair of the Fine Arts School at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Ellen Dissanayake is known nationally and internationally for her provocative claim that humans, both as individuals and societies, actually need - biologically require - the arts. Using insights drawn from fifteen years of living and working in non-Western countries (Sri Lanka, India, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, where she taught at the National Arts School), she has developed a unique perspective that considers artmaking to be a normal, natural, and necessary component of our evolved nature as humans. Her books, What Is Art For? (1988), Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992), and Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000) -provide firm cross-cultural, historical, prehistorical, and developmental evidence that humans are biologically prepared to make and respond to the arts.
In a time when the arts are increasingly viewed as irrelevant and when hands, bodies, and imaginations are ignored in favor of mouse-manipulation and accessing information and precooked imagery, Ellen Dissanayake's findings make clear that whatever else we may do, humans also have a need to be hands-on creatures-literally in touch with the natural world-making things for their lives and making things that they care about "special."
Suzanne Lacy, an internationally known artist whose work includes large-scale performances on social themes and urban issues, is the Chair of the Fine Arts School at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Her recent work includes The Skin of Memory, with Pilar Riano, an installation in Medellin, Colombia; Code 33, a performance involving 150 youth and 100 police officers in dialogue in Oakland California; and she is currently at work on Beneath Land and Water, a project for Elkhorn City, KY, and The Borough Project, in Charleston, SC's Spoleto USA Fesitval.
Other highly visible projects over the past two decades include The Crystal Quilt (Minneapolis, 1987) a performance with 430 older women, broadcast live on Public Television; Circle (Chicago, 1993), for Culture in Action, a sculpture exhibition curated by Mary Jane Jacob; Auto: On the Edge of Time (New York, 1993-95) an installation on domestic violence for Art Park and the Public Art Fund; and Under Construction: The Turning Point (Vancouver, 1997), a social art/community development project and performance involving hundreds of teenage girls.
Lacy is a proponent through art and writing for activism, audience engagement, and artists' roles in shaping the public agenda, publishing over 50 articles on public theory in magazines such as the Performing Art Journal, Ms. Magazine, Art Journal, High Performance, and the Public Art Review, among others. She has exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art in London, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the New Museum in New York, and her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The Drama Review, Art in America, High Performance, the L.A. Times, Village Voice, and numerous books. Lacy has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Arts International, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, the Surdna Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her book on new genre public art, Mapping the Terrain (1995), was published by Bay Press.
From 1987-97 Lacy was founding Dean of the School of Fine Art at the California College of Arts and Crafts: a founding faculty at the California State University at Monterey Bay, designing an innovative arts curriculum; and the Founding Director of the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of Arts and Crafts. She was a member of Mayor Jerry Brown's education cabinet and an Arts Commissioner for the City of Oakland.
For air travel, we're just 20 minutes from the Piedmont Triad International Airport, served by seven major carriers and more than 80 flights per day. And, we're less than 90 minutes from Charlotte/Douglas International and Raleigh-Durham International airports. For the road warrior, the highways of North Carolina lead to Winston-Salem. I-40 and Business 40 pass right through town running east/west, with easy access to I-70 and I-85. US 52 (part of the future I-74 corridor) runs through town north/south, with easy access to US 158, 311, and 421.
The conference hotel, the Best Western Salem Inn & Suites, 336/725-8561, 127 S Cherry Street, Winston-Salem, NC, 27101. For toll free reservations, dial, 1-800/533-8760; fax: 336/725-2318; and e-mail at (reservations@saleminn.com). A limited number of rooms are available at the conference rate of only $ 58 + tax for 1-2 people per room. Amenities include: a complementary hot or continental breakfast, outdoor pool, cable tv, air conditioning, in-room coffee maker, exercise room, bar & restaurant. We have also reserved a select number of rooms at the historic Brookstown Inn at the special NCSA rate of $ 89 + tax for a standard room (1 person, $ 99.00, two people) and bi-level suites at $109 ($ 119 for two people). The Brookstown Inn was built in 1837 as a textile mill and is on the National Register of Historic Places. 200 Brookstown Ave., Winston-Salem, NC 27101, 336-725-1120, or 1-800-845-4262. Amenities include: complimentary morning coffee, juice, and pastries, complimentary evening wine and cheese, complimentary cookies and milk at bedtime, evening turn-down with yummy handmade fudge, individual climate control, cable television with free HBO, data ports/Voice mail, state-of-the-art exercise facility, and garden tubs and fireplaces in select rooms (www.brookstowninn.com).
Registration fees for the conference will be $80 in advance and $95 after September 5. Student registration will be $25 in advance and $40 after September 5.
For more information on the Tri State Sculptors
Educational Association, go to: (www.tristatesculptors.org).
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