Carlo McCormick
September 17
Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art
Carlo McCormick, a cultural critic and curator living in New York City, is the author of numerous books, monographs and catalogues on contemporary art and artists. These include Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, and Dondi White: Style Master General.
McCormick lectures and teaches extensively on popular culture and art at universities and colleges around the United States. His writing has appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Art News, Artforum, Camera Austria, Spin, and other magazines. McCormick is also senior editor of Paper magazine.
Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, featuring essays by McCormick, will be published by Taschen Books this October.
Robert Adanto
October 8
Pearls on the Ocean Floor
Robert Adanto’s films document artists working in a global framework. His debut feature-length film, The Rising Tide, explores China’s meteoric march toward the future through the work of some of the country’s most talented photographers and video artists, including Wang Qingsong, Cao Fei, Xu Zhen, Yang Yong, Chen Qiulin and O Zhang.
His most recent documentary, Pearls on the Ocean Floor, focuses on the lives and work of contemporary Iranian women artists working outside of their homeland. The film includes interviews with Taravat Talepasand, who will speak as part of SFAI’s Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture series on Monday, October 11, as well as Afshan Ketabchi, Sara Rahbar, Leila Pazooki, Parastou Forouhar, Shirin Neshat, and Negar Ahkami.
Adanto’s films have been screened in major festivals and museums internationally. He earned his MFA in Acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Since 1995, he has taught an interdisciplinary humanities course focusing on China, the Middle East and India at Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica. He is the recipient of the National Association for Independent Schools’ Leading Edge Award for Global Sustainability, for the AIDS education and activism program he founded in 2006, the Crossroads Teen AIDS Ambassadors.
Miguel Calderón
October 29
Viva Acapulco!
Miguel Calderón is a Mexican artist and writer. He has worked in various media–paint, photography, video and installation–often engaged with low-brow aesthetics and concerns. He has been described by one critic as having “a knack for pushing crass stereotypes and clichés to absurd and provocative extremes.” One reviewer of the exhibition Fantastic, curated by Nato Thompson for Mass MoCA, called him “something of an international phenom,” and he was dubbed “the enfant terrible of contemporary art in Mexico” by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
An example of the artist’s sly engagement with the media are the paintings from his 1998 multimedia exhibition Aggressively Mediocre/Mentally Challenged/Fantasy Island (circle one) that appeared in Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums.
He has had solo exhibitions at the Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico City, the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City, the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City and the 2004 São Paulo Biennale, among others.
Tucker Nichols
November 12
What Happened To Work
Tucker Nichols is a master of tongue-in-cheek interventions in both public and private settings. His paintings, drawings and installations are composed of deceptively simple gestures and text-based sentiments—they are both witty and cause for reflection.
He has had recent solo shows at ZieherSmith Gallery in New York, Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions and Gallery 16 in San Francisco, and the Kunstpanorama in Luzern, Switzerland. Nichols’ work has been featured at the Drawing Center and John Connelly Presents in New York; and is currently included in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. His drawings have been published in McSweeney’s, J&L Books, The Thing, Nieves Books and the op-ed pages of The New York Times. He was recently commissioned by the de Young Museum in San Francisco to be its first roving artist-in-residence.
He holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from Yale University. He lives near San Francisco.
Nao Bustamante
November 19
A Work of Art
Nao Bustamante’s work encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation, video art, pop music and experimental rips in time. She is likely most well known for her appearance on the Bravo Network show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist (though was eliminated on episode four). This is only her most recent act of media infiltration. In 1992, Bustamante created a fictional character who appeared as a “stunt exhibitionist” on the Joan Rivers Show. This televised performance can be linked back to Kaprow’s idea of a happening, in which an event spreads awareness and wakes the public out of passivity, creating active spectators.
Bustamante has presented in galleries, museums, universities, film festivals and underground sites internationally. Venues include the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; MoMA, New York; the Sundance Film Festival; and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2000 she received the GLBT Historical Society Arts Award. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow.
Currently, Bustamante holds the position of Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.