September 14–October 21, 2016
Opening: September 14, 6–8pm
Slide Space 123
Mills College Aaron Art Center
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94613
Mills College is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition space, Slide Space 123: A Space for Art and Ideas. The gallery aims to provide a space to pose new problems, working with and against the grain of the exhibition format. Slide Space 123 is a site to exchange ideas, a venue to connect the Mills community (students, faculty, and alumnae) with currents across multiple disciplines.
Opening Slide Space 123 is Intro (The Writing’s on the Wall), curated by Jackie Im, Co-founder and Director of Et al. and Et al.etc., San Francisco. The exhibition will feature artists who grapple with how they are defined, whether by religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation. Beginning with the understanding that one is not simply one demographic or another, Intro (The Writing’s on the Wall) uses as its starting point, Adrian Piper’s letter to the editor asking, “Please don’t call me a black artist. Please don’t call me a woman artist.” This is not to deny either her blackness or her authorship as an artist, rather Piper bridles against a conflation of the two terms at the expense of her being included in either. The different descriptors framing us may in part describe us, but the pictures they draw are incomplete. For some they become qualifiers making one a subset of the whole, addendums that keep one from being referred to as what we desire to be.
The artists in the exhibition address who they are, within and against the narrow confines of identity; how intersectionality can open new paths of thinking of the self, complicating and contradicting identity as something fixable into language.
The exhibition features work by Laylah Ali, Sofía Córdova, Nicki Green, Lauren Halsey, Masami Kubo, and Zanele Muholi.
About Mills College Studio Art MFA
Mills College’s MFA program in studio art provides artists with both a formal and a conceptual foundation in contemporary art. Mills’ interdisciplinary community of artists provides the perfect setting for the development of a personal practice and professional engagement in contemporary art dialogue.
In the context of a small liberal arts college, students receive individual attention from Mills’ distinguished professors and visiting artists. Recent visiting artists and scholars include Anna Betbeze, Mildred Howard, Nandipha Mntambo, Yasufumi Nakamori, Sarah Oppenheimer, Larry Rinder, Steve Roden, Robert Storr, Sarah Thornton, Christian L. Frock and Tanya Zimbardo.
Students are encouraged to work across disciplines, but select a focus among painting, sculpture, installation, photography, intermedia, sound, new genres, video, and electronic arts. Mills College houses excellent studios for all of these disciplines. Other resources include the Mills College Art Museum, sculpture labs, digital computer lab, video suites, and both dark room and state of the art digital printing labs.
Graduate students in studio art also enjoy spacious, private studios during the entire two years of their program. Students are required to work in these on-campus studios to facilitate interaction with fellow artists, faculty, and both visiting artists and scholars.
Substantial Graduate Fellowships in the first year and Teaching Assistantships in the second year are offered.
The MFA program culminates in a thesis exhibition of student work in the Mills College Art Museum, which draws substantial interest from the Bay Area arts community including local gallerists, curators and critics.
Application deadline: February 1, 2017
Contact: T +1 510 430 3309 / [email protected]
About Mills College
Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering a dynamic progressive education that fosters leadership, social responsibility, and creativity in approximately 950 undergraduate women and more than 600 graduate women and men. For more information, visit www.mills.edu.
