Students have the chance to work with renowned artists and earn class credits this coming spring through the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s Artist in Residence Program.
Each month, from February through April 2009, a different artist or group of artists will visit the college, and work with students enrolled in VIZA 629, a 3-credit hour course that includes all three Artist in Residence workshops. Or, students may opt to participate in one or two of the three workshops by signing up for VIZA 485 or 685, earning 1 credit hour per workshop.
The Spring 2009 Artists in Residence are: Michele Brody, who creates site-specific, mixed media installations and works of public art; Rebar, a San Francisco-based art design collective; and Jenny Sabin, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.
The first workshop begins in February with Brody, whose work has appeared in New York City, Germany, Costa Rica, and France. In 2006, she completed two major permanent public art installations in New York. One is a series of faceted glass windscreens for an elevated Metropolitan Transit Authority train platform, and the other, a hand-painted tile mural.
The March workshop will be led by Rebar, whose work ranges broadly in scale, scope and context, and belies discrete categorization. It is, at minimum, situated in the domains of environmental installation, urbanism and absurdity.
Much like a DJ samples recorded sounds, Rebar’s work appropriates elements of the physical/cultural world and remixes them into novel contexts. By remixing the landscape in this way, Rebar exposes new meanings and alters assumptions about the shared environment.
Jenny Sabin will lead the April workshop. In addition to teaching at PennDesign, she directs CabinStudio, a research and architectural design studio in Philadelphia. She is also collaborating with the Jones Lab at the Institute for Medicine and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on investigating the intersections between architecture, textile structures, computation and biology.
The College of Architecture’s Spring 2009 Artist-in-Residence program is sponsored by the Texas A&M Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts, the College of Architecture, and the Department of Visualization. For more information, visit
http://www-viz.tamu.edu/faculty/lurleen/air/2009/air.htm or contact Carol Lafayette at 979.845.5691 or lurleen@viz.tamu.edu.
