About the Speakers
Robin Clark (SC '87)
Dr. Robin Clark earned a Ph.D. in Art History from City University of New York Graduate Center; an M.A. in Art History from Boston University, Boston, MA; and a B.A. in Art History from Smith College. She was named Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2007. Clark had been Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Museum since 2002. Her notable curatorial achievements at St. Louis include the New Media series featuring installations by Matthew Ritchie, William Kentridge, Rivane Neuenschwander, Cathetrina van Eetvelde and Kota Ezawa and Currents, a series of exhibitions showcasing emerging and mid-career artists including Ellen Gallagher, Toba Khedoori, Julie Mehretu, and Tara Donovan. Clark was Assistant Curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1999-2002), Collections Curatorial Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC (1996-99) and Research Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1994-95).
Paula Cooper
Paula Cooper opened her own gallery in the SoHo district of NYC in 1968. The first show at the Paula Cooper Gallery was co-organized by Lucy Lippard to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The show included Sol LeWitt's first wall drawing and works by Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. For forty years, the gallery's artistic agenda remained focused on, though not limited to, conceptual and minimal art. In 1996, the gallery moved to Chelsea where Cooper opened a second exhibition space in 1999. In 2003, Cooper and her husband Jack Macrae opened 192 Books, an independent bookstore featuring key works of literature and history, art and criticism, the social and natural sciences, travel and children's books.
Wendy Cromwell (SC '86)
Wendy Cromwell is President of Cromwell Art, LLC, a private art advisory firm specializing in 20th and 21st century art. Her firm offers acquisitions and sales strategies, along with curatorial services to both individuals and corporations. Cromwell is also a fine art appraiser and a member candidate of the Appraisers Association of America. Previously, she was a Vice President of Sotheby's, New York, where she organized Contemporary Art auctions for over nine years. Prior to joining Sotheby's, Cromwell was the director of the Lehman Brothers art collection.
In addition to her advisory activities, she lectures to private groups in museums and galleries in New York and has published numerous articles on the contemporary art market. Cromwell is on the Board of the International Association of Professional Art Advisors and the American Friends of the Israel Museum. She is a member of the Visiting Committee of the Smith College Museum of Art. She is also a member of ArtTable, Inc., a professional organization for women in the arts.
Cromwell received her M.A. in Modern Art from the Institute of Fine Art, New York University and her B.A. in Art History from Smith College.
Susan Heideman
Susan Heideman has been a Professor of Studio Art at Smith College since 1976. She received her B.F.A. from the Boston University School for the Arts and her M.F.A. from Indiana University. Her drawings, watercolors and paintings have been shown extensively throughout New England most recently at Gordon College, the Clark Gallery in Lincoln, MA and the Lenore Gray Gallery in Providence, RI. In 2005, Heideman collaborated with poet Annie Boutelle to publish relic-works in which Heideman's images were linked with Boutelle's poems inspired by the exhibition, The Way to Heaven: Relic Veneration in the Middle Ages by Henk van Os. The hard-cover book was conceived by Heideman and designed by Barry Moser, an illustrator, printmaker, and Professor at Smith College.
Susan Hiller (SC '61)
After graduating from Smith College, Hiller attended Tulane University in New Orleans, with a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Anthropology. After completing fieldwork, she became critical of academic anthropology's adherence to scientific claims of objectivity, and dissatisfied with the distance she perceived it fostered between the observed and the lived in culture.
Hiller settled in London in the early 1970's where she developed an innovative art practice that drew on influences of Minimalism, Fluxus, aspects of Surrealism and her formal study of Anthropology. In Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972/6) Hiller compiled several hundred "rough sea" postcards and systematically detailed locations, captions, and the content of written messages. In Dream Mapping (1974), Hiller had participants sleep outdoors in an area with "fairy rings," (circles formed by the marasmius mushroom). The myth is that if you sleep within one of these circles, you can enter fairy-land. Each participant recorded their dreams using a system of note-taking and diagramming and superimposed them to create a group notation. In the recent J Street Project (2002-05), Hiller located and photographed every street in Germany that has "Jew" in its name e.g., Judenstrasse, Judendorf, Judenhof, and Judenweg.
In a conversation with Rogert Malbert at the Fourth International Symposium on Surrealism in 2005 Hiller noted,
Everything I do is about a ghost or ghosts, but you see, my idea of a ghost is that a ghost is something that some people see and other people don't see. Our lives are haunted by ghosts, I mean our own personal ghosts and collective social ghosts and those are the kinds of cultural materials that interest me to start with, those are my starting points, and then I try to make a work that in some way is true in this old-fashioned kind of way that I was taught - truth to materials. I try to make something that is materially true to its starting point and that's the only kind of guideline I have formally for the works. I used to try to describe my starting points in different ways by saying they were materials that were denigrated or relegated, or embarrassing, or whatever and then I realized there is just a very simple way to explain, I'll just think of them all as ghosts. (1)
Susan Hiller's installations are in numerous public collections around the world, including four major works in the Tate collection. Hiller is represented by Volker Diehl, Berlin and by Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.
(1) Susan Hiller in conversation with Roger Malbert, Symposium on Surrealism, West Dean College, Chichester, May 13,2005, <Full text>
Jina Kim
Jina E. Kim is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Korean Studies at Smith College. Her research focuses on the cultural history of early 20th century Korea with primary concentrations in Korean and global modernisms, urban culture and history, comparative colonialism and post-colonialism (especially between Korea and Taiwan and between East Asia and Latin America) and the study of women and gender. Her other research interests include material and popular culture from the late Choson dynasty to the present, film and media studies, emotion and diaspora. She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Urban Modernity in Colonial Korea and Taiwan, which interrogates the complex web of intra-regional interactions between Korea and Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period through the flourishing urban culture of the 1930s.
Lucy Lippard (SC '58)
In 1971, Lucy Lippard organized the exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists. In the introduction of the catalogue she wrote,
I took on this show because I knew there were many women artists whose work was as good, or better than that currently being shown, but who, because of prevailingly discriminatory policies of most galleries and museums, can rarely get anyone to visit their studios or take them as seriously as their male counterparts.
...Very few artists of any sex in America do not work at something other than their art to earn a living, though it's true that women often have three jobs instead of two: their art, work for pay, and the traditional unpaid "work that's never done." The infamous Queens housewife who tries to crack the gallery circuit is working against odds no Queens housepainter (Frank Stella was one) has had to contend with. I admire tremendously the courage of those who stick to it. Women's art often has an obsessive element to it; it has to, given the obstacles laid in its path. It is far easier to be successful as a woman critic, curator, or historian than as a woman artist, since these are secondary, or housekeeping activities, considered more natural for women than the primary activity of making art. (1)
In addition to being an early champion of women artists, she was one of the first writers to document the evolution of conceptual art in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972...(1973) Her other books include From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (1976), Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (1984), Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (1990, 2000), The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997), and On the Beaten Track, Tourism, Art, and Place (1999).
Lippard was also a founding member of The Heresies Collective, a group of feminist artists and writers committed to social change, and Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), a collective to "provide artists with an organized relationship to society, to demonstrate the political effectiveness of image making, and to provide a framework within which progressive artists can discuss and develop alternatives to the mainstream art system."
Lippard earned a B.A. from Smith College in 1958 and received an M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1962. She received a Smith College Medal in 1992 as a notable alumna. Lippard currently lives in Galisteo, New Mexico and is working on a book of archaeological history.
(1) Lucy R. Lippard, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists (Ridgefield Connecticut: The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 1971).
Andrea Miller-Keller
Andrea Miller-Keller joined the curatorial staff at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT in 1969 and was the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art until 1998. Miller-Keller has organized over 185 exhibitions of Contemporary Art, including the first one-person museum shows for artists including Janine Antoni, Daniel Buren, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Richard Tuttle and Carrie Mae Weems. In 1996, Miller-Keller was United States Commissioner to the 23rd International Bienal, Sao Paulo, Brazil, presenting "Of Sun and Stars: Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings." She was a co-curator of the Whitney Biennial 2000 and a co-author of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art publication, "Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective" (2000).
She has served on numerous advisory boards, search committees, and selection panels, including those of the former Bunting Fellowship Program at Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, M.I.T., the National Endowment for the Arts, Independent Curators International, New York State Council on the Arts, Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, and currently, among others, the Harvard University Office of the Arts, and the List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T.
Miller-Keller grew up in Southern California, received a B.A. from Harvard University in International Relations in 1963 and did graduate work in Art History at Columbia University from 1965-67.
Miwa Hanako
Miwa Hanako is descended from a traditional porcelain-making family in Japan. For over twelve generations, the Miwa family has protected, nurtured and renewed the ceramic traditions of "Hagi ware," a style typically associated with teawares and known for its rich white glazing. The tenth generation Miwa Kyusetsu, Miwa's great-uncle, was Hagi's first Living National Treasure; her grandfather, Miwa Kyusetsu XI, is the current Living National Treasure for Hagi. In recent years, Miwa's father, the influential twelfth Kyusetsu has challenged the conservative conventions of Hagi's ceramic traditions with his abstract, sexually-charged ceramics.
Miwa's work embodies the idea that Hagi is not defined by its materials or techniques. As she eloquently declares, "Hagi is a spiritual state of mind." (1) The artist's beginnings were in sculpture and she did not begin working in clay until after receiving a degree in Interactive Arts at the University of Wales in 1998. Miwa's signature source of inspiration is a blooming lotus flower. In her work, Love Lotus, an installation of ceramic lotus flowers reflected and multiplied in a folding screen mirror of stainless steel, the artist creates an allegorical world in which the purity of love, symbolized by the lotus, blooms in perpetuity. The lotus may also represent the natural beauty of the artist's ancestral home of Hagi, where the flower is found growing in many of the region's marshes.
(1) Miwa Hanako, in conversation with Wahei Aoyama at Yufuku Gallery, Tokyo, August 21, 2008.
Jiha Moon
Jiha Moon was born in Taegu, Korea and currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA. Moon received her B.F.A. from Korea University in 1996; her M.F.A. from EWHA Women's University, Seoul, Korea in 1999; her M.A. from the University of Iowa's School of Art and Art History in 2001 and a second M.F.A. from Iowa in 2002. Moon currently holds an artist-in-residency position at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, PA.
Self-described as a "cartographer of cultures,"(1) painter Jiha Moon has said of her painting,
In my recent work I try to visually express the complex relationships between the east and west, between nature and technology, and between the mental and physical worlds. The narrative motifs of these mindscapes come from my background as a Korean and through my cultural experience in the United States. Borrowed images from the histories of art, nature, and culture are important elements in my work. I often use the shapes or icons that are symbolic and intersect in different cultures. I find these archetypes in sources ranging from 14-Century European master paintings, to Asian watercolor drawings, and even cartoon shows on TV. I deconstruct and replace these in new environments to create my own fiction...
...I often use bright plastic and candy colors that have been influenced by products found in shopping malls, sensuous colors in TV commercials, and animation. Contrasting western, pop cultural colors against a traditional, Asian, monochromatic watercolor style is intended to bring pictorial drama to my work. (2)
(1) Artist's statement, 2008, website for the exhibition Jiha Moon: Turbulent Utopia, The Mint Museum Charlotte, North Carolina, February 2 &emdash; July 6, 2008.
(2) Artist's statement, 2004, <Full text>
Rebecca Morris (SC '91)
Rebecca Morris was born in Honolulu and lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1994. Morris received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2008) and awards from Art Matters (1996), the Tiffany Foundation (1999), the Illinois Arts Council (1996) and The Durfee Foundation (2005). A solo survey exhibition and catalogue of her paintings was presented by The Renaissance Society in 2005. She has had solo exhibitions at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles; Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles; The Santa Monica Museum of Art; and Shane Campbell Gallery, Oak Park, IL. Morris is represented by Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Germany.
Sarah Norell (SC '06)
Sarah Norell is a visual artist currently living in Chicago. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Norell is a queer woman invested in making politically relevant art that examines the power structures in the social, artistic and political worlds. Drawing on her background in sociology, her practice includes a systematic exploration of a topic through academic research and hands-on resources available in her community such as dance or trapeze lessons, leather working and fiber technique classes. She primarily works in, and explores intersections between, text, performance, fiber and video. Her work examines the demands of social norms, the erotic and grotesque, memory and the nature of the ephemeral, war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the role of language in relation to these topics.
Esther Pullman (SC '64)
Esther Pullman received her M.F.A. from Yale in Graphic Design in 1966. She worked as a graphic designer until the early 1980s when she transitioned back to the fine arts with her study of photography. As both a photographer and gardener, Pullman has studied greenhouses as a subject almost exclusively since 1999, engaging with the themes of light and dark, decay and renewal and the changing of seasons. Pullman has written, "And what more compelling or life-affirming symbol could there be than the greenhouse: a temple of light, modulating the energy of the sun; a stage for life, death and rebirth; a self-contained environment mirroring our own condition of life on the planet?" (1)
Her most recent exhibitions include "Environment for Growth" at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA and "Greenhouses" at the Victoria Munroe Fine Art Gallery in Boston. The artist is represented by Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA and Jane Deering Gallery, Gloucester, MA.
(1) Artist Statement, "Green/house/Divided"
Nora Rachel Rabins (SC '04)
Nora Rachel Rabins majored in Studio Art and minored in Logic while at Smith College. In 2009, she received her M.F.A. in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she was honored with a Graduate Award of Excellence. Rabins also received a Collegiate Teaching Certificate from Brown University and an award of Excellence in Teaching from RISD's Furniture department. Her work has been exhibited in Milan, London and the United States. She teaches at the Steel Yard, a community art center in Providence, RI and continues her practice at Smokestack Studios in Fall River, MA.
Casey Ruble (SC '95)
Casey Ruble lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Ruble received her M.F.A. from Hunter College in 2002. She teaches at Fordham University as an artist-in-residence, works as a freelance critic for Art in America, and has been curator and assistant curator of several exhibitions in New York. Her work has been shown at Nicole Klagsbrun and Black & White Gallery in New York, the Hunterdon Museum of Art in Clinton, NJ and Galleria San Salvatore in Modena, Italy. Her work and curatorial projects have been reviewed in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail and Sculpture Magazine. She is represented by the Foley Gallery in New York.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" in which she declared:
I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife.
I am a mother. (Random order).
I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking,
renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also,
up to now separately I "do" Art.
Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things,
and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.
One of Ukeles' earliest and best known performance pieces was Washing, Tracks, Maintenance, Outside, July 22, 1973 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. The artist's official and unpaid position as "artist-in-residence" of the NYC Dept of Sanitation began in 1977. In her performance work TOUCH SANITATION, Ukeles spent eleven months shaking hands with each one of NYC's 8,500 sanitation workers, to say, "Thank you for keeping New York City alive." In an interview, Ukeles explained, "People have misunderstood. They thought that maintenance art is about cleaning. But it was never just about that, it was about the personal, the social, and taking care of all the planet." (1) The process of sustaining life systems has informed Ukeles' environmental installations, performance and mixed media work.
Ukeles received her B.A. in History and International Relations in 1961 from Barnard College and an M.A. in Inter-Related Arts from New York University in 1974. She is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC.
(1) Speech Interviews, Mierle Laderman Ukeles with Benedicte Ramade, Dept. of Sanitation, New York, March 2007, <Full text>
Lynne Yamamoto
Lynne Yamamoto teaches 3-D Design and Installation Art at Smith College. The artist was born in Honolulu in 1961. She holds a B.A. from Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA (1983), and a M.A. from New York University (1991). She has had solo exhibitions at Drury Gallery, Marlboro College, VT (2006); P.P.O.W., NYC (2000, 2001, 2004); The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2003); Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2000); Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris, NYC (1999); and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, NYC (1997). Her work has also been in exhibitions at Exit Art, NYC (2005, 2006); The Artists' Museum, Lodz, Poland (2000); Paco das Artes, São Paolo, Brazil (1997); Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery, Leeds, United Kingdom (1996); and Luisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlabaek, Denmark (1996). She is represented by P.P.O.W.
