- okay, i think we'll get started. i want to welcome you allhere today to our first lunch and learn of thisparticular semester. my name is linda snetselaar, and i am the associate, can't hear me? is that better? okay. and i am the associate provostof outreach and engagement. and what we do with lunchand learns is bring a variety
of faculty, staff, and often students, to present various things thatare going on, on our campus. and we do this in both desmoines and also iowa city. and if you're wonderingabout what our schedule will look like in upcoming months, we do have a website that you can go to. and so, please feel free tocome to all of our events. we're very happy today tohave with us anita jung. she is from the schoolof art and art history.
and her artwork sort of explores the bittersweet celebration of every day. and then in addition tothat, she looks at things that are very specialwithin our ordinary lives, in terms of the work that she does. she received her bachelor's degree from arizona state university,and her master's in fine arts from the university ofwisconsin, at madison. she has several yearsof experience teaching
printmaking, drawing andinstallation courses. her work is represented innumerous public art collections and has been exhibitedextensively throughout the united states and abroad, and juried, invitational, and solo exhibitions. anita has been involvedwith professional print organizations, such asmid america print council, and she has also been involved with the southern graphicscouncil international,
and was actually a former president and honorary councilmember with that group. she's participated ininternational print conferences in poland and germany,estonia and england, and currently is doingquite a lot in india, and has been since about 2006. one of her latest projectsis something that i've had the pleasure of observingin the new hancher building, and she'll be telling you more about that,
but it's a wonderful project that involved 7th grade students throughout iowa, so she'll be telling you more about that. and please make welcome, anita jung. (audience applauds) - okay, i'm on, i'm live, okay. i'm good. i want to thank linda, 'causeshe's always very gracious and generous, and invites meto do a lot, so thank you.
and i also want to thankjade, who is her wonderful assistant who hasmiraculously organized me. (audience laughs) this is all due to her. and i'm going to kind of sneak back here so i know my slides. so i'm going to start a little bit by telling you about printmaking. a lot of people don't know what it is.
and this is a wonderful video. it's on the moma, museumof modern arts website, and it's something thatwe show our students when they are incoming inthe introductory courses, and it's an interactivevideo that's really fun, because you can go through,and you can start it, and then you can kind ofplay with that. (laughing) and so it sort of tellsyou what printmaking is, the traditions and what we do.
so, let me keep going here. i'll just do one, because it's really fun. you'll like these a lot. so this is, in a nutshell, what litho is. here we go. this is what i'm teaching this semester. see how easy it is? you just do this. and we roll it up.
this is so fun, let me see, okay. it's that easy, look. voila, a print. (laughs) so, let me hit escape. this is where i might get into trouble. exit. oh, just hit the red thing? okay, alright. so that's sort of what printmakingis, and a lot of times,
what it is, is, i'm sorry, i'm going to be like messin' up here. what it is, is very, those aresort of the traditions of it, but the medium has evolved and changed. and so this too is a print,and this is terry conrad, who is our fabulous grantwood fellow last year, and i miss him terribly. that's like, the dilemma ofthese grant wood fellows, is they leave, and i'm like, stay.
anyhow, so he, what he doeswith his printmaking work is he makes presses thatmake these amazing prints. and it's almost like the prints become the residue of the press. and all of this comes with,it's really dealing with the ideas and the theory of a print, as opposed to the traditionalmethods of making a print with intaglio, woodcut,silk screen and lithography. and then, this is neal rock.
he also was a grant woodfellow from 2015, or last year, and he's actually teachingwith us again this year, so we were able to keep him an extra year. but i would also make the casethat this, too, is a print, although he self-identifies as a painter. and the reason is, he silkscreens silica onto these forms, and then casts them. so it's very much about a print. a print is really just theability to reproduce something
in a series, or multiple times, although you don't have toreproduce it multiple times, you can just do one. and so, i think neal does that. and then this is alexandria smith, and she was our virginia a. myers visiting assistant professor last year. printmaking has been havingtwo visitors every year. she also identifies as a painter,
but these labels don't reallymake a lot of sense anymore. and more and more, thediscipline is just becoming art, the disciplines are nolonger printmaking, painting, drawing, it's really muchmore of an expanded field. and so for her work, iwould make the case that it, and i did, so i couldhire her for printmaking, that her work is very invested in print, just even being a collage-like medium, collage, layers, those are all inherently,
very printmaking-like. and also she deals with print matter, so she has found prints,wallpaper, contact paper, different things that have been printed, through industrial printing methods. and this some of my earlierwork, this about 10 years old. and i became very interested,as i think so many printmakers do, in the matrix, in terms of what a print is pulled from,
the thing of a print thatmost people never see. so it was the plates. and i was working on a lot of steel, and i began to cut themwith plasma cutters, and i was very interestedin, as linda said, sort of these everyday things. and so this was a small stencil that i brought from jo-ann fabric, and really kind of examining domesticity,
but also the overwhelmingaspect of domesticity. and this series reallystarted just, you know, it's not evident in the work. but it really started once i became a mom. and part of that was because i didn't know what to do with a baby. i was like, you know,i was kind of scared, because they let me go home with her. that just seemed wrong.
so as i didn't know what to do, i was living in this little town and it had this little mall, and it's like, where toyou go, what do you do? and so we would go there, and i would go into this jo-ann fabric, and i just became, and therewas like a jo-ann fabrics, and a paint store and a j.c. penney's, and this was the mall in this town.
and so, you know, it'slike a little corridor. and so i would take herthere just so we would get out of the house, and ijust really became interested in sort of this idea, the paint store and the jo-annfabric next to each other, and what designated sortof that more, you know, kind of masculinepainting, house painting, and then the femininefabric painting or whatever. and so, i became interested in that,
and so i started to do these decals, and i really think of it sort of as sense of being somewhatoverwhelmed with my new role. and then, as a part ofthat, i became interested just through cutting thatwith a plasma cutter, with the shapes that fell out. and so to me that reallytalks about the print, sort of a positive, negative form, but i also started to usethat, too, as a floorpiece.
and then, one of thechallenges i was giving myself was what next, what can i do with this, where can i push it? so i started to build walls. these are really heavy piecesbecause they're constructed just as you would construct a wall, and then they're completely carved in to, to carve, to embed thisdecorative element into that wall. and then (laughs) icut it out of a mirror,
which i never recommend doing, because it's really hard,and it can be painful. but i did this piece, andthen there's this beading on this camouflage fabric,and it says you can't see me. and so, it's about that invisibility. and for me, that was alsosort of a biographical aspect, because, just raising adaughter, and how daughters can sort of, trying to makesure that she's going to be visible in the world,and strong and confident.
and then the mirrors, ofcourse, are reflecting, as such. my work is very approachable, i think. it's a lot of, to understand it, if you just sort of startto name what you see, you get at the content very easily. this is actually parts of an installation, this is a larger piece. you can see that thoseflowers are all cut out of paint chips, and again, thatcame from that paint store.
so, i started to takepaint chips from the store, and my daughter, shelearned at a young age, to just start grabbing paint chips. and there's kind of a funny story, but i'll get to thatlater, i'll tell you that. this is a spray paint wall piece. again, it's that sameswag kind of pattern. and this was from lookingat children's clothes. and so, they would have,this is called target girl,
and it was a skirt intarget that was camouflage, but with pink, and i justreally though about that, like how interesting thatwas, and also kind of scary. you know, this, oh, nowit's a girl target, anyway. and this is the print that came from that, and my intention wasnot to ever print these in the traditional sense, but i had this graduatestudent, lee marchalonis, who actually, eventually came here,
and got her certificate inthe center for the book. and she's a wonderful artist,she lives in detroit now. but she said she wantedto see these printed. and so she said she wasgonna help me print them, and so that i had toprint them, and so i did. now lee also was the one who accused me of stealing paint chips. and i said, i'm notstealing them, they're free. and she said, three or four are free
if you're going to paint your house. but when you start takingthem all, that's stealing. and so, as a result of that, i did a lot of research, and i found out that thepaint company, at lowe's, they have all those different brands, well, it's just one paint company, and it's in wheaton, illinois. and i called them, and ihad to call several times,
and eventually i got aperson who was very nice, and i said would you donate some paint chips for my research? i'm an artist, i work at this university. and they said fine, and theysaid how many do you want? and i said, well, youknow, what can you give me? and she said, well, whatever you want, they're like, what to you want,two, three, four, five, six? i'm like, oh, i'll take six.
and i thought she meant boxes. and then i got phone callfrom the secretary saying that there's a 13,000 pounddelivery, and what did i order. and i said, i didn't order anything, i had no idea what it was. it was six skids of paint chips. so it was a little, bewareof what you wish for. it was a little overwhelming. and so, for a while thatbecame a major art movement
at the university of tennessee. because everyone was using paint chips. this is a piece thatwas done in des moines, and again, it's a spray paint piece, and actually keeping thatstencil up as part of the piece. so the stencil would be flippedto spray paint the one side, and then flipped back and spray painted to do the other side. and i deal a lot with binaries.
i deal a lot with positives, negatives, and that's something thati'm very interested in. and then, i also started to use these because they were steel. there's a tradition in printmakingwhere you smoke a plate. that's a really wonderfulmethod of printing. and it just really fills in any pinholes that you might have inetching, so it's for intaglio. and so, i just began to smoke the paper.
and this was a really fun thing, my daughter used to be my spotter, because you can literallyburn your work up, or it'll blow up in your face. so yeah, i lit a lot of pieces on fire, but that was also a way, a different way of printing,and exploring the print. i've also done a lot of shadow pieces, and the shadow is somethingi'm also very interested in
as a print, as a print in everyday, as we walk, we cast a shadow. and to me, that is, that becomes, it meets the definitionof a fine art print. this is a piece that was about katrina, and so this is older work, it's 2005. i was invited to do a piece in argentina, and that was in october, andkatrina had hit in september, and i was really devastated.
i had lived in louisianaa number of years, and so it was very personal. and so i did this piecewith cut aluminum vinyl, and that's the houses. and these are very upscalehouses from atlanta, from the newspaper, itjust happened to have it. and i paired those with a timeline of everything that happened,the 10 days of katrina, from the day that katrinafirst made landfall in florida
and 11 people died. and then it went back out into the gulf, and then it came backand it hit new orleans. so this went through, until people finally wereevacuated from the superdome, or i forget what it's called. so it's very, kind of didactic language, very just, time and information,time, information each day. and they're paralleled withthe story of hansel and gretel.
and so i found this book from the '40s with all these pictures, and i had those cut outfrom a piece of plexiglas, and then cast thoseshadows onto these homes and onto this information. because the story of hansel and gretel is a story of repeated betrayal by people that should have beenhelping these children, be it the father, thestepmother, the witch.
so, it's also a story witha lot of death metaphor, when hansel takes theswan across the lake, and all these differentmetaphors within that story, and it worked out really well. it was strange doing this in argentina, but george bush was inargentina at the time. i invited him to theopening and he didn't come, so i've always held that against him. and then here's another piece,and this is really examining
what's a painting andwhat's a piece of art. and these are just paint stripshanging from the ceiling, and the thing that i really loved about it was seeing people in it, and i should have brought oneof the slides, but i didn't. but you know, sort of,what is a piece of art, and how do people enter into it. in this piece, peopleactually were in the art, and these were very long strips,
and this is one of thethings that i used to do with my daughter, and thisis sort of the how to work when you're not working strategies. and i would make theselong strips of paint chips. and with all thesedifferent systems of ways of organizing them, andthen this piece was hung, this was in a wonderful, this is actually in jackson, mississippi, in a wonderful gallery thathas this strange kind of
hook system on the ceilingthat i was able to use. and then this is beginning to be a lot of collaborative work, so whilei'm doing all this work, i also have a practice of collaboration. and this is a piece fromestonia, from tallinn, and i went there, and ihave proposed doing a piece that would be done all onsite. and that was also a strategythat i had used a lot in my work, where i wouldarrive at a gallery,
basically, go and renta truck from lowe's, bring a bunch of drywall, cuta bunch of drywall, mount it on the walls, and use thegallery almost as a studio. and so this was made in five days, and it was quite an elaborate piece, with a really wonderful group of people, students and professional artists. and so it was myself, and therewere two people from spain, a woman from china, three estonians,
a woman from germany, a woman from cuba. and so it's very, andvarying degrees of language, but, because art is a language, we were really able to communicate. and so there's, how to make apiece without a single author, and that's something i'm alsoreally interested in, is that. and so this was, and theycame up with the theme, and it was called rabbit saves the world. and so, there was this whole story,
oh, and then there was also a woman, she's a dine navajo, so thatalso, i felt, really enriched, because of the idea of storytellingin her cultural history. and so, we just sort of madethese stories, those are russian books that the studentswere sort of talking about, the estonian studentssort of talking about the russian occupation. and then we had rabbit sortof going through all these perils and adventures, and the prints,
some of the prints were quite beautiful. and then on the floor issort of this map of the city, just with tape, and itwas a great way to just, connect things, and it was really fun. the funny thing about it was,i just went in and did this, because i've been doing this with students at different schools in different places, and my students are very used to me. i just went in and startedtalking to these students,
and say, yeah, thiswhat we're going to do. and so at the opening,they were so excited, but they told me thatthey thought i was crazy. they said we thought you were insane. and i was like, no, it worked. and they're like, you know, and they said, you know, theyhad never seen this gallery, you know this was a very,i didn't know this but, you know, framed work, matted, framed,
hung on the wall kind of space. and i came without even knowing it, and it sort of broke a lot of rules, but i didn't know the rules,so, i didn't do it on purpose. and then this is a build upof, this is the second step of the rabbit saves the world series. and this is in bristol in england. and for this piece, i justput out a call for artists to send me things.
and so artists would sendme, just even a small thing. on the bottom here, right here, this is a print of a deadmouse that an artist found, and she just sent me one. and then i just, i duplicated it. so a lot of this is actuallyinkjet printing on rice paper, and the theme of the conferencewas old world, new world. and they were sort oftaking that as a larger, not only england,
but also in a largercontext of printmaking. the old traditions and the new traditions, and so i took it,obviously, as an american. but people would send me verysmall things through the mail, and then i would make them large, or i'd make them very multiple. and so i also did thissort of the old world, and then the new world, sortof division between the spaces. and it was really fun, becausethen people would come,
and they would find their little elements and things like that. and the school was really nice,they liked the piece a lot, and they asked if they couldkeep it up and i said fine. and then they were concernedabout returning the work to me. but i found out that theyhad a book arts class, and so they retained all that material to be able to do and to book works, because i very seldom do things twice,
which is ironic for a printmaker. this is another, kind ofa performance-esqe piece. this piece, for two years,i maintained a virtual farm. you guys have all heardabout farmville, right? so for two years i had afarm, and the first year i turned it into avirtual artist residency. so not unlike the grant wood colony. and so i would invite artists, and i had this very elaborate,what was in these buildings,
that there was this elaborate studio, and this wonderful b and b, and of course, it'sjust facebook farmville. but i would award residencies to artists, so it was sort of the virtual residency when you have virtually no time. and so when people wouldbe very, very busy, i would award them a virtual residency, so they could make art.
and so here, then i also had rules, about i only farmed with other artists. and so, there were other artiststhat all have these farms, and we were farming together and i was running this residency. then we did a portfolio exchange, which is a wonderful tradition. it's actually becomea very large tradition within printmaking forprofessional printmakers
to do these exchanges. and so what you do is you find 20 artists, and you ask them if theywant to be in an exchange, and then you each print 20 prints, and so, you sort of do a trade. and they're usually thematic, there's usually a reason for them. and so this was, of course, farmville, and you know, a farm one.
so each artist printed a print, and then i digitally printedout a picture of their farm, which is sideways, and then their print, that they made for theportfolio is also printed out. and then i got these,these are called woodies, from ben franklin's and different places that come in all these shapes. and so people could ink those up and then add those to thefarms, as they wanted.
that's me. (laughs) but that was the entryway into the piece. and then, i'm not a performer, it's really hard, even forme to talk, like in a talk. it's not something i do a lot. i'm not a lecturer, i'm nota professor that does that. so performing is also kind of like a thing i don't like to do. but every now and then, yousort of have to do something,
and so i was invited to be ina 10-year anniversary of 9/11. and so what i did was i xeroxed all the names of all thepeople who died on 9/11. and then i put them in stacks for the two world trade buildings, each of the buildings, each of the planes. and in the drawer wasa name of a hijacker. and so i did this piece, itwas sort of an endurance piece, because i did it for 19 consecutive hours,
which is really weird,because it wasn't that hard. at a certain point youreally are in a trance. what was hard was when igot up, and had to like, go back into the world,that was really difficult. so i just folded these planes, and then every hour a bell would go off, and i'd open that drawerand i'd fold a plane. and for me, it was just,it was a symbol of everyone being victims, and it'scalled the bluest sky,
because that is probablymy greatest memory, was how blue that sky was. and then this is liz lerman, and i love hancher, very, very much. and i really feel bad thati moved here 10 years ago, so i really only experiencedtwo years of hancher, and my daughter grew up without hancher, which i think, we still did things, but you know, we had togo places to do them,
other places. she grew up with hancher, but not the same hancher thatshe would've experienced. and this is a woodcutclass, that i taught, and liz lerman came in, and she was doing a pop up museum, and she did this piece thatwas highly collaborative with the dance department. and it was about the 150thanniversary of the civil war,
and also sort of honoringthe role of nurses. and she's a reallywonderful, wonderful person, very generous. and so she came, and shetalked to the students and talked to them abouthow to look at art, and how to critique art,and how to think about, how to be an artist in the world. and those are conversationsi'm very, very interested in. and so we made these long banners,
and there's like nine of them. they hung over the southentrance of the library, which they were so nice to let me hang from these banisters and over these, kind of created tents in the other area. but then a lot of, therewere several performances, this was called a pop up museum, so there are all thesedifferent things going on in the library, which i also really love
that relationship of thelibrary and a museum. and it's something thatkathy edwards and sean o'hara speak to me a lot about. the idea of the universityof iowa museum of art, as a library, and now it'sactually going to be connected to the library, which is very exciting, because their view was, itwas here for the students and part of what you're supposed to do. so the dancers worked with these,
and as well, some theater people. so they were velcroed, so theywere very easy to pull down, and, because we knewthey were gonna do that. it wasn't like theyjust came and did that, they asked about that, and i love that other layer. and so several timesthey visited the class, and so it was verycollaborative and very fun. this is a justseeds project,
and this was for the climate march, and justseeds is a collective. a lot of printmakingoutside of the university is done with collectives. in part, because we needa lot of big machines, and it's very, very expensive. and so people come togetherand form collectives. and so, justseeds is avery famous political one, and so they were doing these posters,
and anyone could be a representative, and they would send you these posters, and then all you had todo was photograph them. and so this is actually brianne trammel who was another virginiamyers visiting professor. her silk screen class, andthen a bunch of other people, whoever wanted to wentand george has let us put a whole bunch of these up on their wall, and some of them might still be there.
and then a few other places around town. but we got permission, but wedo talk about some of that, like, art is intervention, which some people might call vandalism, but we don't call it that. and so then india isa big part of my life. and i never really thought to go there, i just had a student from india, who decided i needed to go there.
for some reason, my life seemsto be a series of accidents. or, students decidingthings that i needed to do. so i organized a studenttrip, and then i moved here, that was in tennessee,and then i moved here, and i found out aboutthe winterim program, and so i've been organizingtrips ever since. and the thing that i loveabout taking students to india, there's so many things i love about taking students to india,
but i really love themto be a visual minority, and that's a big thing, to really talk aboutthe problems in the art, and how embedded the artand the traditions are. this is a group that went two years ago, and we painted this muralat the barefoot college, which some of you mayhave heard of solar mamas, it's a film, it's a reallygreat film, it's on netflix, and bunker roy, who has ated talk, is the founder.
and he was a follower ofgandhi, and so, what he does is he empowers basically middle aged women that they refer to as grandmothers. i'm went, really, but, okay. and they actually train and teach them, and it's all about tryingto keep the villages intact, because one of the thingsthat you quickly figure out about india is the importance of family. and when somebody is separate from that,
they really do not have a support system. and so keeping the villagesintact is really important, because people go to the cities, and the slums just keep growing,and growing, and growing. and if they're in the village, they can have a better quality of life. and so they train these women, and they train women because men leave, men will leave the village.
they will take their new found skills and go try to make money for their family, but a lot of times then, they just stop sendingmoney to the families, so it's a problem. so the students designedand did this mural, and it's right across from where the women who are learning aboutmaking solar cookers, will walk out of,
and so it's sort of an homage to them. and they collaborated, and they had like a week to talk aboutthis and figure it out, so they did a great job. this is work that i did a lotof this work during the flood, and i wanted to show thisbecause it relates to hancher. and i better hurry up. it relates to the hancher piece, and what i was doing was i waslooking at floodplain maps,
and then i was printing over them. and you can kinda seeit's sort of this eclectic kind of india coming in, and the flood. so i was sort of tryingto process the flood, because i was in one ofthe displaced buildings, and so we were at menards, threeand a half miles off campus which was an amazinghardship for students, more so than anyone, tohave to do the can bus as an art student.
you schlep enough, but havingto add that was a lot more. this was a large series ofwork that i did about floods and floodplains, and also inindia, rivers are very sacred. this is a later body ofwork that i started doing, and i'm still involved in this, but it's gonna changebecause i changed buildings. and this work is about makingand being in a building with makers, and a lotof times all you'll see is the residue, or you don't really know
what was made with something. i'm very involved with the laser cutters and the computerizedrouters and different tools, and so i would take thedetritus, like the garbage that was meant to be thrownout, and make prints from that. and i was also recycling, iwould have students sort of save their ink after theyhad finished printing, and they'd have leftover ink. and so i was using that, andit was really just sort of
about trying to think about being a maker, and lessening the footprint. but also, being in abuilding with other makers, which is really interestingbecause just so much is always going on in an art building,that's it's really exciting, but half the time you see nothing. you see such a small part of it. this was really funbecause a lot of people when they would seethe work would be like,
hey, that's my students,or oh, that's mine. and i be like, what'd ya make? and so, that was really fun. but you can also see therelationship with some of this work to the jali, which are the windows, the stone-carved windowsthat they have in india. then, this takes us to hancher,and so, about two years ago sean o'hara came up to me in the hall. we were like walking inthe hall and he said,
"hey, can i ask you a question?" and i said, "sure." and he said, "would you beinsulted if we asked you "to work with kids?" and i was like, no? like would somebody be insulted for that? and he's like, yeah, sometimes people are. i was like, oh, okay. so, i was happy to do it andit was really interesting
because i've never commissioned work. it's more like i make somethingand people choose to buy it or they don't, or i propose an exhibition and it's a temporary thing. i had to make sort of likea maquette and a proposal, which i was just like, ugh,and it was really scary, but i did it. and i came up with an ideaof, i was really trying to come up with a question,something to make the students
that i would be working with, think. and i met with chuck swanson and just immediately fell in love. he's the director ofhancher and he's just one of the kindest, nicestpeople you'll ever meet. he just so cares about peopleand he really wanted to do something about the state ofiowa, and about the audiences. and so he wanted to workwith younger children, and he wanted to go to fivecities, and so, we collaborated
and i kind of talked himinto going to junior high. and junior high, i reallyappreciate junior high because a, it's when mostpeople stop making art. they self-select and theydecide that they're good at something or they'renot good at something. and so, a lot of people decide that they can't make art in junior high. so i wanted an opportunityto interact with that. also, a lot of people dothings in grade schools
and high schools, andso i think junior high gets a little bit forgotten. and i really like junior high students 'cause they're still sweet,but they're kind of edgy. we came up with the word, just a question, and that was performance. and so, what does that mean? what does it mean to perform? what does that mean whenyou talk about a place
like hancher, but what doesthat mean in your everyday life? i am performing right now. you perform in a class,you perform constantly. we're constantly performing. we're performing our lives,and so we did what i call mind maps, but they corrected me. these are constellation maps. and so we started withthe word performance and just gravitated out of there.
and it was really anopportunity for them to interact and to engage, and to have fun. and then, this will bekind of a blurry slide. we did selfies. some of the kids, theyjust preferred to have somebody else take the photograph. but they really caredabout it and sometimes they'd come back and say i redid my selfie because it just wasn't good enough.
and that was the other thingwas, i felt like junior high students would really getthe idea of the selfie. and i used to be an artist in the schools in calcasieu parish, louisiana. one of the things that i wascharged with when i was doing that work, was to intermixthe curriculum with art, so writing, reading,history, all these things. so all the projects that iwould plan for the classes were in some way supporting other courses.
and that was a really greatexperience because i would always have teachers come upto me and say, that student, i've never seen them sit this long, ever. and then the good studentswould be so frustrated and upset because there were no answers,it was very ambiguous. the selfies i thought that they would, i wasn't sure if that wasstill cool in high school, but i figured it was in junior high. and then i became reallyconcerned because i knew i was not
gonna be able to use everypiece by every child, because hancher wasn't gonnalet me do the whole building. i don't know why, they could have. but they weren't doing that,and so i came up with measuring each of the students, theywould do their picture, their selfie or whatever,and then i would measure their height on a piece of rice paper. and they would choose thecolor, and then they would write their names, and then i wouldthank them for participating,
and i would thank them by their name. which really, to me, becamereally an important thing when you're asking peopleto trust you with their art. that was really great. this is rachel arnone, who is married to oneof our cellists here, and she's one of the mostamazing art teachers. and she really helped, i cameup with the idea of the selfie and the micrographic writingabout the word performance,
and that's how they do the drawings is they write these words. but she really helped sortof that implementation. we use south east here in iowacity as our pilot program, and so she really helpedsort of solidify the program and help us to reallyreach our target audience. she was doing these lighttables, these old light tables so that they could lightlytrace their images. so what we would do isthey take the selfie,
we'd print out a xerox, theywould lightly trace that xerox, and then they would write their words. i was fairly amazed athow well this worked. which i probably shouldn'tconfess, but i was sort of like, i was kind of prepared foranything and everything. but the students reallygot involved in it. they really enjoyed it. and the schools varied tremendously. so with some schools like storm lake
had us just work with asmall group of students. and then spencer had seventhand eighth grade do it, although i only did itwith the seventh graders, but they did it withtheir whole school then. the students really had fun, and they really engaged with one another. it did everything that i wanted it to do. and then, i'm gonna show you this video, if i can figure it out.
this was made by zoewoodworth, and so after we went to south east, we wereable to make this video. - [zoe voiceover] theuniversity of iowa is a place where great artists share theirwork with great audiences. we want you to be our next great artist. we're inviting seventh gradersfrom seven iowa communities to help anita jung, an artist who teaches at the university of iowa,create a new work that will be permanently displayed atthe new hancher auditorium.
the auditorium is currentlyunder construction on the university of iowacampus, in iowa city. the seven communities arealgona, council bluffs, iowa city, maquoketa, muscatine,spencer, and storm lake. we'll tell you more aboutthe project in just a minute, but first, let me tell you alittle bit more about hancher. hancher has been connecting artists and audiences since 1972. many wonderful performances have happened
on the hancher stage over the years. ♫ at the barricades offreedom, shall i join (upbeat instrumental music) (percussion music) in 2008, the original hancher auditorium was destroyed by flooding. but that didn't slow us down. we continued to presentartists in iowa city, and all across the stateof iowa, in your community,
and many, many others. (upbeat jazz music) in 2016, a brand new hancherauditorium will open. that's where your art will be on display. here's how the project works. first, you'll take a selfie. that's right, it won't just be your art. you will actually be part of the project. once you have your selfie,
you'll trace it onto a sheet of paper. then, you'll write a short description of what performance means to you. once you've written it,you'll write those words on the lines of your outlined selfie. don't worry, your artteacher will help you if you have any questions. once your artwork is done, your art teacher willsend it to anita jung.
she'll select many of thestudents works to be part of the piece of art that will hang in the new hancher auditorium. pretty cool, huh? before we go, here are a fewamazing facts about hancher and the new auditorium. the new hancher auditoriumwill have about 1,800 seats. (bells chiming) that's a lot, but hancher'scommitted to connecting
with many, many more people,all across the state of iowa. the new building includes 10million pounds of structural steel to form the skeleton ofthe building and hold it up. the new building also includes 80 million pounds of concrete. that's enough to fillan entire football field of a depth of 10 feet. you might be wondering whywe think the arts are so important that we're buildinga huge new building for them.
well, we believe thearts make life better. they help us explore our owncreativity, solve problems, and come together as community. and, of course, the arts arefun, just like this project. everyone at hancher's excitedto see what performance means to you, and we can'twait to share your art with everyone who comes tothe new hancher auditorium. we hope you and yourfamily will come to hancher to see your art and a showwhen the new auditorium opens.
and who knows, maybe in a few years, you'll be a student atthe university of iowa. when you come to hancherauditorium with your friends, you'll be able to show themyour art and remember how you contributed to an amazing new place for artists and audiences. we look forward to seeing your art, and seeing you at hancher auditorium. - so i think zoe just did anamazing job with that piece.
and so we would be able to show that to the students at the other schools. and these are the teachers,and they were just so welcoming and sosupportive of the project. one of the other things thati really love about hancher is that it doesn't just go to places once. one of the things that chuckis passionate about is building relationships, and so he saysyou have to go multiple times, relationships are formed.
he really does go out of hisway if you know it or not, to go and bring a lot ofthings across this state. these teachers wereall very well wonderful and very welcoming. and then, he went with, i can'tremember kevin's last name, he went with a performer torevisit all of the cities that we had gone to. they had a contest to name the piece. they named it we all perform,
or that was eventually thename that was selected. which was great, i think. and sometimes you don't knowif you're on the right track or not, and then somethingserendipity happens. what was so amazing wasthis woman, her father died building the first hancher,and we met her at south east. this picture's after many tears. everyone was just like oh. but she was a teacher'saide and we're just doing
this project, and all of asudden she's just sort of sitting there talking to me and she divulges that, and just like wow, how did that happen? so, that's here. this is just sort ofthe making of the piece. it's on panels, it's on wood. and i started with maps,silk screening maps, and slowly buildingthem and kind of working them all at the same time, more or less.
on top of the maps, once igot done painting the maps, i made some stencils ofthe hancher building, because again, i wantedhancher, this idea of inside, outside, of bringing people to hancher, of hancher going to people. so that's actually theblueprints of hancher cut out and stenciled on there. and then the faces ofthe children are added. and it's pretty colorful.
everyone's like it'sreally colorful. (laughs) this is the finished piece, so it reads from councilbluff to muscatine. oops, wait, where did we go? you warned me about that. anyhow, so that is the end, and this is some of my more recent work. so if anyone has anyquestions, we have time, i'll make up answers.
i'll try to find them out,i can google really quick. any questions? covered it all? well sometimes i'm asked a lotabout, a lot of times using these commercial things and if the work, sometimes people will be like,how do you feel about cliche and things like that, 'cause that's alsosomething i really enjoy. i really think that whenyou're dealing with that,
you're kind of enteringinto a understood truth, and so that's a reallygreat way to interrupt it. so flowers and all thesesort of tropes that sometimes artists kind of frownupon, i kind of embrace. i do all that. uh huh? - [woman] i do have one question for you. you create these originalimages, but you work a lot with (mumbles) images, stencils.
what is the significanceof that for you in a way, i guess it could be called (mumbles), maybe a little bit to some extent? and also, (mumbles) images, what is the importance of that process? - a lot of that it's kindof an involved answer, but some of it has to do withego and wanting to sort of work with the world around you, rather than just always being the maker.
and so, that idea of eclecticism and sort of interactingin the world around you. and also, just not reallyhaving to reinvent. there's so much out therethat the remix is something that i think that's reallyan important art form. - [woman] some of the onesyou were showing early from the grant wood scholars,were three dimensional? - yes. - [woman] the one was kind of round,
and the one was a whole big structure. so printmaking, is that sort of new? i mean, you think aboutprint as just a flat print, but you can go into three dimension? - definitely, and claesoldenburg who's a sculptor, he's really known forhis soft sculpture work, and he also does a lot of public art. there's a baseball bat infront of the post office in chicago, and different,
a very large sculptureof a spoon with a cherry. i think that's in st. louis, i'm not sure. - [audience] minneapolis. - minneapolis. oh, yeah, well. he actually made a lot ofprints that then could be constructed, cut out and constructed, which was an amazing strategy because a lot of collectorsbought two prints.
one to cut out and structure,and then one to keep flat. it's a good idea. so, i think artists have beenworking with that forever, and of course fred groomsis a wonderful example, too. and even robert rauschenberg, too. and so, what i think now is happening, and i think it's just such agreat time to be in the arts is that it's sort of a post-structuralist and pluralism is totally invited.
we're kind of divided intoareas only because of academia, and then also the commercial aspect. but artists are definitelycrossing all those boundaries, because it's not like lithographyis a discipline any more. it's a tool, it's a series of techniques, and if that is the voice youwant and you need for a piece, that's the tool you should use. i think that's wherepeople are at, artists. - [man] do you keep arelationship with lasansky?
- mauricio died a couple years ago, but i really like the family a lot. - [man] but i mean, sincethey're teachers, too. - with, you mean, like tomas? - [man] right. - oh, well, i have takenstudents to visit tomas' studio, which is quite impressive,it's like the dream studio when i grow up, someday,maybe, i don't think so. - [man] you work with allthese different mediums
and everything else, and i'mjust being a little facetious, does anybody still use pencil and paper? - everybody uses pencil and paper. it is a technologicaltool, just like a computer, and almost every student istaught to draw, basic drawing. it's actually been found really important. and i'm really sad that they'reno longer teaching cursive in the schools, because i think that is a really important drawing.
and that's what i usedto always say to people. for some reason peoplewill take a drawing class and then tell you theydon't know how to draw. and then i always say well,do you know how to print? yes. do you know how to write cursive? those are two verysophisticated forms of drawing. everyone draws. - [man] thank you.
uh huh. anyone else? yes? - [man] talk about sort ofthe upside of the flexibility of disciplines, or techniques,but i wanna get to (mumbles). i know there's a lot ofnostalgia for the disciplines, especially (mumbles) directlyand the other prints, and some ceramics and things. and also, there's a lot ofpressure to cut departments,
they're start looking at cuts and i wonder you start seeing everything sort of merged into design and more and moretowards commercial design. i wonder in some ways, by identifying, and sort of anythinggoes, or whatever works. does it also play intosome sense in which, do we need a separate facultyfor each of these disciplines? - well, there's a coupledifferent questions there. and one question aboutsort of the disciplines.
people need to know the disciplines. they need to be fluid. you have to learn the toolbefore you can cross it over. and so, we do still teachthe technical based courses. but then when we get into advanced, we start to encourage themand we start to discuss would that be better as a silk screen? is that better as an etching, would that be better as asilk screen with etching?
so posing those questionsi think are important rather than being a purist. if a purer medium iswhat will best support the artist's idea and intention, then certainly that's what they should do. so we would never deterthem from doing that. it used to be when i was beingtrained and i was sort of an anomaly, people were like you chose, you were either alithographer or an etcher.
and i just was like both. actually i was a paintingmajor in my undergrad, so i didn't have to followthe rules, because it was like oh yeah, she's a painting major,let her do what she wants. i kind of got away with that, and then when i went to graduate school, i had already been doingthat, so i just continued. so that's one question, andthen your second question, was, can you?
- [man] i just know there'sa lot of pressure especially on the arts in terms ofstaffing and faculty, a little bit as we kindof merge everything into some quasi design kind of major, that institutionally that's tough, how many faculty arewe gonna have in that? - well, i think it's superimportant to have multiple faculty because they willteach you differently, and everyone has differentways of doing things.
one of the things that really benefited me and really help me break down boundaries, was that i had the opportunityto study with amazing people in my field, multiple people. i actually have studied witha lot of different people, and every single one has taught me so much that i can utilize, and thatin turn has helped me so much as an instructor because ifa student is blocked by how i'm giving them information,i can try a different tact.
i would love to have colleaguesthat also could navigate and have differentexperiences than i have. i think that's super important to create a really holistic and large dialogue. but i also think it's reallyimportant for students to be able to take a lot ofclasses across the curriculum and to learn a lot of tools. and i don't thinkdigital's all bad, at all. - [man] how do you feel ifyou're working with older
students, i'm talking 50,60, 70-year-old students? i took a drawing class wheni was probably like 50, and really enjoyed it, butmy instructor seemed like she was a little appalled becausei did a drawing of a gun, a thompson submachine gun, and i just wondered ifyou had a comment on it? - i like working witholder students a lot. i actually would encouragethe university if there's empty seats in a class to allowpeople to take those classes
for non-degree seeking and a nominal fee. you think? because they might as well,because one of the things that my last institution, wehad a lot of older students, it was a more urban campus. i loved those intergenerationalrelationships, and i actually teach acourse now that looks at that intergenerationalrelationships that form, and there's something reallywonderful about seeing
a 19 year old become verygood friends with somebody in their 70s, and thatisn't their grandparent, they are peers in a class. i think that that can bereally exciting and really fun. i think subject matteris always a discussion, conceptually why is somebody interested in drawing something, what is their goals, what is their intent, andthose are really important conversations that we have,so that people can express
themselves in a way in whichthey can be understood, and also aren't puttingsomething into the world without intending that. so we have a lot of those and help people developconcepts and ideas. - mm hmm. - [linda] anita, thank you so very much. - [anita] thanks.