What:
MFA Wang Dang Doodle
Featuring student work from the 2011-12 academic year

When:
Monday, May 7th, 2012
Reception and Gallery Viewing: 6.30pm
Outdoor Screenings: 8.30pm

Where:
Duke School at Hull Street
1517 Hull Street
Parking available on-site
http://maps.duke.edu/map/?id=21&mrkId=4736

Refreshments will be served – blankets recommended for the outdoor screening!

For more information, please contact Teka Selman (teka.selman@duke.edu) or Emily Wallace (emily.wallace@duke.edu).

Come out to Carrack Modern Art gallery on Saturday, April 28th at 8:00 for an evening of short films by renowned filmmaker and all-around good guy, Bill Brown.  Brown is a recent addition to the Arts of the Moving Image faculty at Duke University and has screened his films all over the world, including Sundance, MoMA, Ann Arbor and many others. He will screen a variety of short works sure to be concerned with history, place and perhaps even flying saucers.

The Short Films of Bill Brown
Carrack Modern Art Gallery
111 West Parrish St. (2nd floor)
Durham, NC 27701

Reception with artist at 8pm, films begin at 8:30pm

Oscar-nominated filmmaker John Sayles, a pioneer of the independent film movement of the 1970s, will receive the 2012 Duke LEAF Award for Lifetime Environmental Achievement in the Fine Arts.

An original “do-it-yourselfer,” Sayles wrote and directed the critically acclaimed “Return of the Secaucus Seven” (1979) on a shoestring budget of $40,000. He followed with 16 other films he wrote and mostly edited, including “Matewan” (1987), and the Oscar-nominated films “Passion Fish” (1992) and “Lone Star” (1996). His latest work is “Amigo” (2010).

“John Sayles’ work subtly, but compellingly — and at times with humor — interweaves environmental themes and conflicts with themes of human conflict and struggle,” said Nicholas School Dean William L. Chameides. “Ultimately, Sayles makes us aware on a visceral as well as intellectual level of our strong material and spiritual connection to the natural world and, in the process inspires people to value and steward our environment.”

Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment will present the award to Sayles during a 2 p.m. ceremony on Saturday, April 21, in Reynolds Theater, located in the Bryan Center on West Campus. Sayles will meet with MFAEDA’s for an informal lunch/discussion before the awards ceremony on Saturday.

The awards ceremony is free and open to the public, but tickets are required and will be distributed through the Duke Box Office. There are charges associated with online ticket reservations and will call. More information is available at www.nicholas.duke.edu/leaf.

The Duke LEAF award has been given annually since 2009 to an artist whose work has lifted the human spirit and inspired others to help forge a more sustainable future. Previous recipients are Robert Redford, Jackson Browne and Barbara Kingsolver.

On April 19 Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian will sign copies of their new book, In This Timeless Time: Living & Dying on Death Row in America, published by the University of North Carolina Press and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies. The book includes a DVD of their film Death Row and “is about life on Death Row in Texas, the special prison within a prison the state maintains for men it plans to put to death,” as Jackson and Christian write in their preface. The event will be held in conjunction with a reception for the CDS exhibit Full Color Depression: First Kodachromes from America’s Heartland, curated by Bruce Jackson.

Thursday, April 19, 6–9 p.m., talk at 7 p.m.
Talk by Bruce Jackson, followed by a book signing with Jackson and Diane Christian
In conjunction with a reception for Full Color Depression: First Kodachromes from America’s Heartland,curated by Bruce Jackson
Center for Documentary Studies
1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, North Carolina

For more information on In This Timeless Time, click here.

To watch a trailer from Jackson and Christian’s film Death Row, produced by CDS publishing intern Joel Mora, click here.

To read an interview with Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, click here.

To read a recent review of Full Color Depression, click here.

Full Color Depression is in the Kreps Gallery at CDS through July 23, 2012. A public auction of prints from the exhibit will be held at the Center for Documentary Studies on June 21.

Bruce Jackson is James Agee Professor of American Culture and SUNY Distinguished Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is author of numerous books and films. Diane Christian, a poet, scholar of religious literature, and documentarian, is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Courtesy Wolfgang Hastert

Preoccupations, a public exhibition of works by members of the inaugural class of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFAEDA) will be on view starting Thursday, April 19th,  in the Corridor Gallery of the East Duke building on Duke’s East Campus.

Preoccupations

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 19th, 5-7pm

East Duke building, Duke East Campus, 1304 Campus Drive

For a searchable map, click on http://www.maps.duke.edu

A preoccupation; an absorption, engrossment, something that holds the attention.

Seven of the first MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts students examine their preoccupations and the preoccupations of those around them. 

Eric Barstow exhibits two video works which deal with the preoccupation of self-image.  Living within a society so driven by the images in films, television, the web, etc., has made many feel the need to ensure their own image is at its best. But what does this entail?

Marika Borgeson exhibits an exploration of paper and light.

Wolfgang Hastert exhibits selections from JUXTAPOSSE, a series of juxtaposed portraits of Duke University faculty and the MFA EDA student cohort.

Annabel Manning exhibits a video work exploring train as eye as surveillance between Durham and Charlotte.

Lisa McCarty exhibits photographs taken at Lacock Abbey, the home of William Henry Fox Talbot. Both site and subject of the first photographic negative, the Abbey is hallowed ground in the history of photography and became a point of pilgrimage for McCarty.

Laurenn McCubbin exhibits a series of portraits in watercolors and in video titled Intimate, part of her larger work The Intimacy Project, a series of interviews with sex workers exploring the idea of “performative emotionality”. In the video, the object of the gaze looks back – the odalisque observes the viewer. Is the emotion being performed? Reflected? In this long portrait, the sex worker invokes a moment that might either be genuine or contrived.

Talena Sanders exhibits a video portrait of a man with a singular message for the Las Vegas art world.

Preoccupations is made possible in part with generous support from the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies.

MFAEDA Carpentry Shop | April 2012

Impossible Instant Film

Originally from Chicago, Webon received a B.A. in history from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Thereafter, she spent six years in Taipei, Taiwan, where she taught English, learned Mandarin Chinese, and at the age of 23, founded and published a premiere arts magazine with $300 dollars. She ran the magazine for five years.

Welbon returned to the United States and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and obtained a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in film and video in 1994 and Ph. D. in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 2001. She is also a graduate of the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women.

Welbon had successfully produced and distributed over 20 films. Her films have screened on PBS, Starz/Encore, TV-ONE, IFC, Bravo, the Sundance Channel, BET, HBO and in over one hundred film festivals around the world including Toronto, Berlin, and Sundance.

As a business consultant for independent filmmakers, she focuses on distribution and niche marketing, employing new media and social networking techniques. She has presented nationally on numerous topics including producing, the state of black independent cinema, and self-distribution.

Welbon is also Chair of the Journalism and Media Studies Department and Assistant Professor of Africana Woman Studies at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, NC.