April 30, 2007 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact:
Lara Hoyt, Coordinator for Public Relations and Alumni Affairs
Forty years of Che Guevara at Mason Gross Galleries New Brunswick, NJ – Marking the year of the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, Mason Gross Galleries at Civic Square presents a show inspired by an extensive private collection of posters, dating from the 1960s to the present, that depict the iconic Marxist revolutionary. Opening May 9, “Beauty Is in the Street: The Iconography of Idealism” brings part of that collection together with specially commissioned contemporary artworks made in response to the posters as printed artifacts and as ideas.
“The exhibition looks at the continued power of Che as a symbol of hope and of opposition across cultures,” said curator Gerry Beegan, a professor of visual arts at Mason Gross School of the Arts. “Whatever one might think of his beliefs, his use of violence, and his political failures, Che retains a remarkable cultural resonance 40 years after his death.”
Although the poster collection shows many images of Guevara, the commissioned works are not limited to his image or his person. Using animation, photography and posters, artists and designers from several different countries explore themes of iconography, reproduction and representation through various media. The contributors are Experimental Jet Set, a Dutch design group; Stefan Saffer, a Berlin-based German artist; Henry VIII’s Wives, an artists’ collaborative based in Scotland and Scandinavia; David Jourdan, a French artist who lives and works in Vienna, Austria; Aleksandra Mir, originally from Poland and based in New York City; Liselot Van Der Heijden, a Dutch artist living in New York City; Pedro Lasch, a Mexico City native and assistant professor of visual arts at Duke University; Josh MacPhee, an artist, curator and activist in Troy, New York; and New York City artists Cristóbal Leyht, Carrie Moyer and Karlos Carcamo.
As part of a community outreach effort, “Beauty Is in the Street” will also include works by a group of New Brunswick High School Students. Through collaborations with Rutgers’ Center for Latino Arts and Culture, the New Brunswick-based Puerto Rican Action Board, and the New Brunswick School-Based Youth Services Program, Mason Gross design students provided mentoring and instruction to the local high school students during the spring semester. The local high school students learned basic design concepts and skills and applied them to their own icons, using the classic Guevara posters as models.
Running simultaneously in Mason Gross Galleries will be “Interdisciplinary Lab 1: Repetition,” an exhibition created through a new collaboration between the dance and visual arts departments at Mason Gross School of the Arts. Over the course of a semester, the students worked in small cross-departmental groups, each of which consisted of one visual artist and two or more dancers. Together, they investigated the themes of repetition, replication, and translation, then produced works that combine dance, digital video, sculpture, sound, physical computing, motion detection, web-based work, performance art, photography and painting.
Capturing dance in a gallery setting was no small challenge, said Beegan. Examples of the resulting works include a performance piece cued by the movement of audience members, a flip book that physically captures a dance and allows it to be replayed, and a feminist reinterpretation of Yves Klein’s famous use of the human body as paintbrush, in which the “paintbrush” choreographs the artwork. In another piece, a solo dance is recorded by one group member and sent to the next via the online video sharing Web site You Tube. Each member of the group—whether a dancer or visual artist—attempts to repeat the dance and send it on in an exchange not unlike the classic childhood game of telephone. Beegan said that with the visual artist in the middle of the process, the work raises the question, “How do you translate something if you don’t know the language?”
The visual artists in “Interdisciplinary Lab” are Reid Bingham, Jamie Bruno, Evan Damerow, Philippe Garcesto and Jen Park. The dancers are Jen Andrews, Ella Crowe, Kim DeBenedictis, Mandy Dorio, Heather Favretto, Claire Kim, Jenna Marchitello, Melinda Mendez, Melissa Mendez, Jessica Smith, Pam Sommer and Shonel Symister. Beegan and Patricia Mayer, dance department chair, are the faculty mentors.
Both exhibitions run May 9 through June 8, with a public reception on May 9 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The reception will include a dance performance and a guided tour given in Spanish by contributing artist Pedro Lasch.
Admission to the gallery and reception is free. Gallery hours for this exhibit will be Tuesday through Saturday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. The Mason Gross Galleries are at 33 Livingston Avenue in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. For more information, visit www.masongross.rutgers.edu or call 732-932-2222. “Beauty Is in the Street” is co-sponsored by the Center for Latino Arts and Culture, the Rutgers Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes, and the Office of the Associate Vice President for Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts and Humanities, with additional funding provided by Merck & Co., Inc. About Mason Gross School of the Arts Founded in 1976, Mason Gross School of the Arts is the arts conservatory of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and is home to the departments of dance, music, theater arts, and visual arts. Its faculty and alumni rosters include arts professionals recognized nationally and internationally. The school's enrollment of 625 undergraduates across four departments and 250 graduate students across three departments, combined with a faculty of 140, assures students the opportunity to work closely with accomplished artists within their fields.
About Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey A comprehensive research institution with more than 50,000 students on three main campuses in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden, Rutgers comprises one of the major state university systems in the nation. Chartered in 1766 in New Brunswick as Queen's College, Rutgers is the eighth oldest institution of higher learning in the nation and now comprises 29 degree- granting divisions, including 16 offering graduate programs of study.
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