Newswise — Two University of California, San Diego faculty and four artists represented in the university's Stuart Collection are featured in the Emmy Award-nominated PBS series Art: 21 - Art in the Twenty-First Century.
UCSD Emeritus Professor Eleanor Antin, as well as Stuart Collection artists Tim Hawkinson, Elizabeth Murray and Kiki Smith, are profiled in Season Two, set to begin airing in early September 2003 on PBS stations nationally. Faculty member Barbara Kruger and Stuart Collection artist William Wegman were part of the program's first season. The first broadcast series of its kind in the United States, Art: 21 focuses exclusively on contemporary visual art and artists, and highlights only 20 influential artists each year.
An internationally renowned artist and teacher, Eleanor Antin has been a professor in the UCSD Visual Arts Department since 1975. She is known as an influential filmmaker, performance and installation artist who delves into history as a way to explore the present. During her long career, she has had numerous solo exhibitions, including a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Antin has created major installations at the country's leading art museums, and as a performance artist has appeared in art venues around the world, including the Venice Biennale and the Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award in 1998, and was the recipient of the UCSD Chancellor's Associates Award for Excellence in Art in 1996.
Barbara Kruger, who joined the UCSD Visual Arts faculty in 2002, is famous for her distinctive photomontage-and-text piece pieces. She has also been active in an extraordinary range of fields, including installation, architecture, sculpture, audio and video, critical writing, curatorship, and various forms of public advocacy. Her work is presented in numerous books and exhibition catalogues, most notably Thinking of You, published by the M.I. T. Press. The last 25 years, Kruger has held a series of visiting appointments at leading institutions such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Tim Hawkinson is working with the renowned Stuart Collection at UCSD on what promises to be the collection's latest artwork. Hawkinson, known for using everyday objects to build fantastic mechanical devices, is developing a large work for the academic courtyard of four new buildings being constructed at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. The 20-foot high, 300-ton bear, Hawkinson's first public outdoor sculpture, will be comprised of eight stones (torso, head, ears, arms, and legs). Appropriately, its construction will be a significant feat of art and engineering. Begun in the spring of 2003, the project is scheduled for completion in early 2005. Elizabeth Murray's Red Shoes was commissioned in 1996 by the Stuart Collection and is her first freestanding artwork. Known as a painter, Murray infuses her work with familiar stories and shapes that recall fairy tales, cartoons and animated film. Kiki Smith's 1998 sculpture, Standing, situated between the UCSD Medical Teaching Facility and Basic Sciences Building, reflects Smith's concern with the body and skin as protective but fragile membranes. Standing is Smith's first permanent outdoor work.
William Wegman, who is known for his whimsical photographs of weimarainers, created his first major outdoor sculpture for the Stuart Collection - a scenic (or non-scenic) overlook at the southern edge of the campus. The site commands a view not of the Pacific Ocean, but of suburban sprawl. His overlook, complete with telescope, drinking fountain, and picnic table set under a palm tree, makes a simple cartoon-like connection between Southern California's still picturesque natural scenery and its booming economic growth, which places an ever-increasing strain on the region's environment. La Jolla Vista View was created in 1988.
The Stuart Collection is the result of an innovative partnership between UCSD and the Stuart Foundation. Currently comprised of 15 major works, the collection utilizes the 1,200-acre UCSD campus as the location for site-specific artworks by the leading artists of our time.
For more information on the UCSD artists featured in Art: 21 - Art of the Twenty-First Century, follow the links below:Eleanor Antin - http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/eantin.htmBarbara Kruger - http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/bkruger.htmTim Hawkins, Elizabeth Murray, Kiki Smith, and William Wegman - http://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu
For more information about the visual art program at UCSD go to http://visarts.ucsd.edu or the Stuart Collection at UCSD go to http://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu.
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