In Public: Designing Art for the Sacramento International Airport
The Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento is proud to present In Public- Designing Art for the Sacramento International Airport featuring the work of Donald Lipski, Mildred Howard, Joan Moment, Lawrence Argent, Suzanne Adan, Po Shu Wang and Louise Bertleson, Camille Utterback, Christian Moeller and Lynn Criswell.
Opening reception: March 13, 2010 / 6:00-9:00pm
Second Saturday reception: April 10, 2010 / 6:00-9:00pm
Lecture: March 16, 2010 / 6:30-8:00pm
The Panel Experience: discussion featuring panelists from the Sacramento International Airport Artist selection process.
Lecture: April 8, 2010 / 6:30-8:00pm
New Media In Public: Camille Utterback
The complexities behind the largest public art project in Sacramento’s history unfold in an illuminating exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art Sacramento. In Public - Designing Art for the Sacramento International Airport tracks the review and design process of 10 artists’ proposals commissioned for the new terminal at Sacramento International Airport. The common element that laces all the work together is that the artists have brought the outside – the Sacramento environs - into the building. Opening March 4, 2010, the exhibition examines how the artists were influenced by public process, practical and theoretical issues, building design principals and the site’s environment. The exhibition includes illustrations of the commissioned artists’ rejected and approved designs, material samples and demonstrations of video and sound that accompany the proposed projects.
“A successful public artist needs to possess the desire, interest and skill to navigate a public process, to consider the public site and the design of the building. Those considerations lead to creating great works of art,” says Shelly Willis, Art in Public Places Program Director and exhibition curator. “This exhibition illustrates a firm understanding of these tools by the exhibiting artists.”
The exhibition also shows how collaborative the public art process is, that public artists never work alone. In these commissions, more than 30 curators, art historians and critics, county and airport staff, the airport’s principal architect, Corgan and Associates, and members of the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission were engaged in the design review process, resulting in the approval of 10 artworks for the new terminal.
Included in the CCAS exhibition are a design by 2009 McArthur fellow Camille Utterback integrates LCD screens into the glass surface of an elevator shaft to create a digital window into the natural world around the airport. A low-relief wall hanging by Christian Moeller celebrates the working man. Lynn Criswell’s design for the floor and ceiling of the building’s transfer level highlights Northern California’s indigenous birds. Other artworks include major sculptures by Donald Lipski and Lawrence Argent; a 15-foot tall glass house by Mildred Howard; mosaic floors by Suzanne Adan and Joan Moment; and an interactive sound installation by Po Shu Wang and Louise Bertleson.
Funding for these artworks comes from Sacramento County legislation requiring a percentage of public construction costs be applied to art. The five million dollars marked for the art in the airport terminal is the largest total for commissions in a single project in the county’s history.
“This is such a monumental and historic public art project, and it’s vital that we show every step of this process to the public,” Willis says. “Millions of people every year will view these artworks for decades to come.”
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
SUZANNE ADAN holds both BA and MA Degrees from California State University, Sacramento, Adan has been the recipient of public art commission from the City of Sacramento, the State of California, University of California, Davis Medical Center, and the City of Folsom. Her works has been exhibited at Jay Jay Gallery, Michael Himovitz Gallery, and Sacramento Center for Contemporary Art, Crocker Art Museum, John Natsoulas Gallery, The Fairfield Center Gallery, and Solomon Dubnick Gallery. Adan has also shown her work at the Betsy Rosenfield Gallery in Chicago, Illinois; the University of Illinois, Union Gallery, Champagne-Urbana, Illinois; Susan Cummins Gallery in Mill Valley, California; Art Bridge Community Center in Kobe, Japan; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
LYNN CRISWELL: Lynn Criswell combines painting with hammered sheet lead in works focused on gender stereotyping and childhood. Lynn Criswell has lived and worked in Chico for the past 27 years. She holds an MA from California State University, Chico, where she is currently a professor of art. She has had exhibitions internationally, including; Germany, Lithuania, Turkey and Belgium. Her work has been shown at Limn Gallery, San Francisco and Seattle.
JOAN MOMENT was born in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. She received her BS from the University of Connecticut in 1960 and her MFA from the University of Colorado in 1970. Her paintings have been widely shown throughout the country and in major museums in Brazil. She has had thirty-six one-person shows including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, N.C.; California State University, Sacramento; an eleven-year survey show at the Huntington Beach Art Center, Huntington Beach, CA; most recently at JAYJAY Gallery, Sacramento, CA and Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at the Oakland Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Long Beach Art Museum, Ackland Museum of Art, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and San Francisco Art Institute among others. Joan Moment was a professor at California State University, Sacramento for more than 30 years. She has taught and lectured at numerous universities as artist- in-residence, including; Princeton University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC; Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, NC; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY; and Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA.
MILDRED HOWARD: A native San Franciscan, Howard’s work has appeared in exhibitions around the world and has garnered numerous awards, including the San Francisco Art Institute's Adaline Kent Award, and fellowships from the Flintridge and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the De Young Museum, San Francisco, California; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California; Oakland Museum, Oakland, California; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut; Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation, Napa, California; and Rena Bransten, San Francisco, California. Howard holds an MFA in Fiberworks from John F. Kennedy University in Orinda and an AA Degree and Certificate in Fashion Arts from the College of Alameda, both in California. Howard has also taught at Stanford and Brown universities and at the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts.
CAMILLE UTTERBACK is a pioneering artist and programmer in the field of interactive installation and a 2009 recipient of the McArthur Award. Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally including The New Museum of Contemporary Art and The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The NTT Intercommunications Center, Tokyo; The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art; The Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. She has received numerous awards including a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002) and a commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Utterback holds a US patent for a video tracking system she developed while working as a research fellow at New York University (2004). She was selected as a member of the 'TR100 - the top 100 innovators of the year under 35 years old, by MIT and by Res Magazine as artist pick of the year for their "Annual Res 10 - Ten people who are making a difference in their field" (2000). Her work has been featured in Art in America, Wired Magazine, The New York Times, ARTnews (2001) and many other publications. Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a MA from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She has taught in the MFA Design of Technology department at the Parsons School of Design and the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University.
LAWRENCE ARGENT was born in England and trained in sculpture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. He holds an MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and Baltimore, Maryland. Argent is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Colorado Council on the Arts, the Core Fellowship at the Fine Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, and has been an artist in residence at the John Michael Kohler Foundation. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Denver, where he was awarded the Distinguished Scholar award in 2002. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Argent's art encompasses a breadth of form, materials and site that engage the viewer in questioning the assumed. Argent’s interventions envelope a path of consciousness through which the physical promotes the non-physical in which the sublime emerges as a vehicle traversing a slippery foundation in the gap between stimulus and response. Argent has been awarded numerous public art commissions, including those at the University of Denver, the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, and in Aurora, Vail, Fort Collins, and Denver, Colorado.
DONALD LIPSKI is a sculptor who creates art from conventional materials such as fiberglass and fabric, as well as everyday objects like guitars, bicycles, flasks, chairs, and buoys. In his public and corporate works, he has worked in close collaboration with architects and designers, including Beyer, Blender & Belle; Cesar Pelli; Rob Quigley; and Parson/Brinkerhoff. Lipski’s public projects have been both overwhelmingly popular with the general public and garnered critical acclaim. Since coming to prominence with his Museum of Modern Art installation Gathering Dust in 1979 - thousands of tiny sculptures pinned to the walls - his work has been shown and collected by museums and galleries around the world, at The White House, and in State Department exhibitions abroad. He also is the winner of many awards and honors, including The Rome Prize, The Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Awards, and The Academy Award of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His public art commissions include those for the cities of Scottsdale, Arizona, Levine Children’s Hospital in Charlotte, N.C. the Minneapolis Central Library, the Fort Worth Convention Center, Miami International Airport, Grand Central Station in New York, and the Washington D.C. Convention Center.
CHRISTIAN MOELLER studied architecture at the College of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt, Germany, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He founded his studio and media laboratory in Frankfurt in 1990, and was a professor at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, until he moved to the United States in 2001. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at UCLA. Christian Moeller works with contemporary media technologies to produce innovative and intense physical events, realized from handheld objects to architectural scale installations. Over the past two decades, his body of work represented one of the original and most complex investigations of what is possible to be revealed by the intersections of cinema, computation, music and physical space. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; the Spiral Art Center, Tokyo; the Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon; the Science Museum London; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; ARS Electronica, Linz; and the Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York. Moeller has completed numerous public art installations, including those in Tokyo, Singapore, Germany and Seattle. “A Time and Place,” a monograph on Moeller’s work from 1991 to 2003, was recently published by Lars Muller Publishers, Sweden.
