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  • NJ MoCA Art Conversations: Secrets of the Contemporary Art World

    The world of contemporary visual art is often intimidating, challenging, and seemingly unapproachable. To help break those perceptions and barriers, New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art will present “Art Conversations,” a series of three scholar-led panel talks that will provide context and insight into what defines contemporary art, its transformational trends, and its relevance and impact on society. The highly credentialed and charismatic United Nations journalist Alexandra King will moderate conversations with art critics, collectors, curators, technology producers, and artists. The program will target new audiences comprised of the public, students, and informed art lovers wanting a richer understanding of these topics. The series will encourage public thought and discussion with an open Q&A at the end of each panel.

     Secrets of the Contemporary Art World will focus on the insights into the nuances and impact of contemporary visual art on society and will feature the following panelists:

    Stephen Westfall (b. 1953, Schenectady) is an artist and art critic who describes himself as a “Poppish, post-minimalist geometric painter.” He is a contributing editor to Art in America, and his writing has also appeared in Bomb Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. Westfall is the recipient of the 2009 Rome Prize Fellowship and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2007. He has received awards and grants from the National Academy of Arts & Letters, from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the New York State Council on the Arts, and from the Nancy Graves Foundation. He holds an MFA from the University of California Santa Barbara. He has held teaching positions at Bard College and at the School of Visual Arts, New York City. Westfall recently served as the Jules Guerin/John Armstrong Chaloner Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy. He has had shows at Lennon Weinberg Gallery, Galerie Zürcher, and at Galerie Paal. Westfall’s work is found in the collections of The Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bon Marche, and the Library of Congress.

    Isaac Lyles (b. 1982, Gadsden, AL) is the owner of Lyles & King located in New York’s Lower East Side. He has a B.A. in Art History from the University of Texas, Austin and a M.A. in Art History from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Prior of opening Lyles & King in May 2015, he was a gallery director at Derek Eller Gallery, Tilton Gallery, and Elizabeth Dee. Exhibitions Lyles curated have been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Modern Painters, The Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice among others.

    Art collector Steve Shane (New Jersey) visits thirty galleries in New York City, where he has an apartment, every Saturday. Sundays he goes to museums, or galleries outside of Manhattan. All of his vacations are scheduled around art events. He has barely missed a major international art fair in twenty years. He regularly sends out his art e-mails of his picks to over five hundred fellow enthusiasts. Shane prefers to term himself an “art lover” rather than as a collector, stating that his “collection is only a little side effect of my passion,” although he has amassed a collection of over five hundred works of contemporary art to date. Shane has never sold any of his collection, which will one day be bequeathed to different museums.

    SERIES MODERATOR | ALEXANDRA KING
    Alexandra King is a multimedia journalist living in New York City. Currently, Alex works as a Producer/Reporter at United Nations Television in New York. Alex began her career in journalism in her local BBC newsroom in her native England, aged 16. She studied English Literature at University College London, becoming News Editor of London Student (Europe’s largest student newspaper) where she was twice shortlisted for the prestigious Guardian student media awards. She also began interning and freelancing for local newspapers, as well as working for BBC London, Sky News and Five News. A Masters degree in Journalism at Columbia University in New York City followed.  She has reported from four UN General Assembly Debates, interviewed numerous celebrities like Stevie Wonder, Pharrell Williams and Steve McQueen, and produced and reported from the field in Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. Her work has been featured on networks such as CNN International, MTV, NHK and Agence France Presse.

  • NJ MoCA Art Conversations: The Intersection of Technology and Contemporary Art

    The world of contemporary visual art is often intimidating, challenging, and seemingly unapproachable. To help break those perceptions and barriers, New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art will present “Art Conversations,” a series of three scholar-led panel talks that will provide context and insight into what defines contemporary art, its transformational trends, and its relevance and impact on society. The highly credentialed and charismatic United Nations journalist Alexandra King will moderate conversations with art critics, collectors, curators, technology producers, and artists. The program will target new audiences comprised of the public, students, and informed art lovers wanting a richer understanding of these topics. The series will encourage public thought and discussion with an open Q&A at the end of each panel.

    This panel will focus on

    the influence and
    incorporation of breaking technologies on contemporary art.

    Panelists:

    Zachary Kaplan is Executive Director of Rhizome, the leading born-digital art institution, an affiliate of the New Museum in NYC. Rhizome commissions, presents, and preserves art engaged with digital culture. This year, the organization was awarded a historic grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build Webrecorder, a new tool to create interactive archives of the dynamic web. Kaplan has been at Rhizome since 2013, and before that at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, and MOCA, Los Angeles.

    Atif Akin (1979, Turkey) is an artist, curator, lecturer and designer. As an artist his work aims at contemplating politics through artistic practice. His work in digital media is informed by his interest in the mutational and transformational implications of the digital world. Recent projects tackle topics such as natural disasters and energy politics; radioactivity and nuclear mobility; multi-culturism within the context of war; and how society’s catastrophes turn into spectacle. Although his work can take many forms, moving fluidly between various media, he frequently employs information architecture and data visualization in his presentations, which can be site-specific or public installations as well as in screen-based formats including online works.  He has curated projects including PixelIST: Festival for Electronic Arts and Its Subcultures as well as the exhibition Uncharted: User Frames in Media Arts at Santralistanbul Museum, a show of artworks employing the use of large-scale digital and interactive media. He has written numerous articles including: Creativity and Connectivity; Alice in Wonderland; Art and Politics; and Data Driven Boredom, among others. He has taught at Bilgi University and Kadir Has University both in Istanbul and is currently Assistant Professor in Design at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He runs his own design studio, PaganStudio in NYC.

    Andrew Demirjian is an interdisciplinary artist who creates alternative relationships between image, sound and text that challenge contemporary media conventions. He uses computer programming, surveillance, data gathering and motion tracking to twist perceptual relationships between the senses. The pieces take the form of interactive installations, generative poems, audiovisual performance and single channel videos. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of the Moving Image, Eyebeam, Rush Arts, the White Box gallery, The Newark Museum and many institutions internationally. The MacDowell Colony, Puffin Foundation, Artslink, Harvestworks and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts are among some of the organizations that have supported his work. Andrew teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Film and Media Department at Hunter College.

    SERIES MODERATOR | ALEXANDRA KING
    Alexandra King is a multimedia journalist living in New York City. Currently, Alex works as a Producer/Reporter at United Nations Television in New York. Alex began her career in journalism in her local BBC newsroom in her native England, aged 16. She studied English Literature at University College London, becoming News Editor of London Student (Europe’s largest student newspaper) where she was twice shortlisted for the prestigious Guardian student media awards. She also began interning and freelancing for local newspapers, as well as working for BBC London, Sky News and Five News. A Masters degree in Journalism at Columbia University in New York City followed. In 2008, Alex won a Columbia fellowship for young broadcast journalists at United Nations Television, a broadcasting operation set up to provide people around the world who may not have access to objective factual news coverage with unbiased and accurate reporting. UN stories and raw footage from the front lines of global conflict and crisis are distributed rights-free to global broadcasters, as well as broadcast on the UN’s own TVchannel, Channel 150. In her first year, Alex helped cover the crisis in Libya, the conflict in Darfur and the humanitarian response to the tsunami in Japan. Since then, she has covered human rights abuses, conflict, women’s issues, international justice, climate change, and humanitarian crises. She has reported from four UN General Assembly Debates, interviewed numerous celebrities like Stevie Wonder, Pharrell Williams and Steve McQueen, and produced and reported from the field in Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. In addition, Alex has produced and co-produced a number of PSA’s, promos and official Secretary- General messages, designed to highlight pressing UN issues or events, everything from World Autism Awareness Day to Holocaust Remembrance Day. She also assists and advises other UN departments and offices on digital strategy and production, has conducted trainings in editing and shooting, and is frequently called on to help coach top UN officials and celebrities in on-camera delivery and voice overs. Her work has been featured on networks such as CNN International, MTV, NHK and Agence France Presse.

  • NJ MoCA Art Conversations: Sculpture Tour and Michael Malpass Film Screening

    The world of contemporary visual art is often intimidating, challenging, and seemingly unapproachable. To help break those perceptions and barriers, New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art will present “Art Conversations,” a series of three scholar-led panel talks that will provide context and insight into what defines contemporary art, its transformational trends, and its relevance and impact on society.

    This event will include a tour of the sculpture on campus including the new J. Seward Johnson pieces and the Michael Malpass Retrospective in Pollak Gallery. There will also be a screening of the new documentary about Michael Malpass titled “Michael Malpass – A Great Circle” created by Monmouth University Communication Students under the direction of Erin Fleming, Director of Production Services.

    We will meet at 7 p.m. in front of Wilson Hall to begin the tour. The documentary will be screened in Pollak Theatre at the conclusion of the tour.

  • Intro to Celtic Music Workshop with Switchback

    Attendees are presented with traditional pieces of Irish music, folklore and dance. Following the historic time-line of Irish emigration to the United States, participants are made aware of the evolution of Irish music, once immigrants reached America. They will  listen to the transformation of Irish music into today’s western, jazz and bluegrass. The resurgence of Irish music, dance and culture are also examined.

    Brian FitzGerald and Martin McCormack of Switchback have been playing their brand of eclectic Celtic and Americana music at sold-out concert halls, performing arts centers and festivals for over 20 years. Featuring a mix of Irish music and original songs, their concerts have been described as “breathtaking scenery for your ears.” With a mix of mandolin, guitar, and bass their harmonies have won comparisons to the Louvin Brothers, the Everly Brothers and Simon and Garfunkel.

    Held in conjunction with the concert featuring Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill with Switchback on April 22 at 8 PM in Pollak Theatre

  • Resonance Collective Dance Performance

    Erlanger Gardens will come to life with a site-specific performance event invoking the wonder and desire of nature through a visceral landscape of moving bodies and sound. Monmouth University has united visual artist Lucy Kalian, whose work is being shown this semester in the Pollak Gallery and The Resonance Collective; a collaborative interdisciplinary dance and vocal ensemble, bringing our environment to life through stunning imagery and virtuosic physicality. The Erlanger Garden performance will begin at 12:00PM and will feature an original dance and electronic/live vocal piece. This is the beginning of a day-long event culminating in the Pollak Gallery opening of Lucy’s Swells and Soundings exhibit at 6:30PM. Within her exhibit, Lucy explores the tidal forces at work where land and water meet. This exhibit is cosponsored by the Urban Coast Institute. 

    Erlanger Gardens are located
    right outside Wilson Hall. Pollak Theatre will serve as the location for the dance
    performance in the event of rain. 

  • Gallery Talk: Bruce Dorfman & Ira Goldberg

    Please join us for an informal gallery talk with exhibiting artist Bruce Dorfman and Ira Goldberg, Executive Director of the Art Students League of New York.  The discussion will offer visitors the opportunity to ask questions, and hear stories about the artists life, work, and experiences working as a professional artist in NYC.  In addition, Mr. Goldberg’s long association with Mr. Dorfman will add addition insight into the artists work and history.

  • Laughing With Me! – Improv workshops with Michael O’Keefe (Ages 8-12)

    Laughing With Me! is the ASD program that is filled with fast-paced, interactive fun!! Students think of communication issues like a game!! They will become flexible within these experiences. The outcome being that now they won’t break, but simply bend. They also learn that it’s OK to fail. It’s simply a part of life that’s ultimately not a big deal. Also, a common occurrence of the program is an understanding of a special kind of laughter that gives a boost to self-confidence and creates a feeling of camaraderie. This is called “earned laughter”, because the students realize that they have done something funny on purpose, in a setting that promotes and encourages that behavior. Delve into the ASD workshop where we look at how we handle what comes our way – expected or not! Add in the great fun and team spirit built into our games. We’ll be playing with both our strengths and our quirks. Your child is set for laughter and learning!

    Mike O’Keeffe is a teaching artist with The Count Basie Theatre, and has been performing and teaching improv comedy professionally for over 25 years. He received his MA in Education from Monmouth University in 1996, and has been a public school teacher for 20 years. He has done regional improv touring shows with former troupe-mate Wayne Brady, and has traveled across the country performing corporate comedy and team-building. Recently, he presented a TED Talk on the concept of “Play” called “Using Improv to Become a Better Human”. He is an Adjunct Professor at Monmouth University, where he teaches Critical Discourse. This spring, he was a keynote speaker at the National Youth Leadership Council’s, “More Powerful Together” conference in Washington DC, which brought together educational leaders and future educators. He was a speaker at Princeton University this summer, where he demonstrated how to integrate performing arts into their Common Core Curricula.

    FREE but registration is required.

  • Laughing With Me! – Improv workshops with Michael O’Keeffe (Ages 13-17)

    Laughing With Me! is the ASD program that is filled with fast-paced, interactive fun!! Students think of communication issues like a game!! They will become flexible within these experiences. The outcome being that now they won’t break, but simply bend. They also learn that it’s OK to fail. It’s simply a part of life that’s ultimately not a big deal. Also, a common occurrence of the program is an understanding of a special kind of laughter that gives a boost to self-confidence and creates a feeling of camaraderie. This is called “earned laughter”, because the students realize that they have done something funny on purpose, in a setting that promotes and encourages that behavior. Delve into the ASD workshop where we look at how we handle what comes our way – expected or not! Add in the great fun and team spirit built into our games. We’ll be playing with both our strengths and our quirks. Your child is set for laughter and learning!

    Mike O’Keeffe is a teaching artist with The Count Basie Theatre, and has been performing and teaching improv comedy professionally for over 25 years. He received his MA in Education from Monmouth University in 1996, and has been a public school teacher for 20 years. He has done regional improv touring shows with former troupe-mate Wayne Brady, and has traveled across the country performing corporate comedy and team-building. Recently, he presented a TED Talk on the concept of “Play” called “Using Improv to Become a Better Human”. He is an Adjunct Professor at Monmouth University, where he teaches Critical Discourse. This spring, he was a keynote speaker at the National Youth Leadership Council’s, “More Powerful Together” conference in Washington DC, which brought together educational leaders and future educators. He was a speaker at Princeton University this summer, where he demonstrated how to integrate performing arts into their Common Core Curricula.

    Free but registration is required.