Words, Music, Action!
with Richard Hull, John Yao, & Ken Vandermark
PAINTING 668 001 | 3 credits | $100 Lab Fee
July 15 - 27, 2024
In this interdisciplinary course, participants will invite music and poetry to inform their efforts in painting, drawing, and performance. The group will explore painterly strategies that foreground intuition within a structure and embrace poetic rhythm and syntax. In service of this creative integration, esteemed guests including poet and critic John Yao and musician and composer Ken Vandermark will lead students through demonstrations related to their fields. Pulling from the rich history of painters, writers, and musicians in concert, the class will look at the work of Joe Brainard and John Ashbury, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauchenberg, Joan Mitchell and John Schuyler, Katharina Grosse and Barry Schwabsky, and Alain Kirilli. Assignments will ask participants to practice the interpretation of words and sounds through painting and drawing techniques. The class will culminate in a symphonic performance of spoken and written word, music, and visuals designed by the students, faculty, and class guests.
Richard Hull’s paintings, drawings and prints can be found in the collections of many museums, including, the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Smart Museum, Chicago. Hull has presented more than forty solo exhibitions dating from 1979 to 2023, along with countless group exhibitions. He has exhibited his work at the, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nelson- Atkins Museum, Kansas City; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. He lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.
John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950 to Chinese emigrants, Yau attended Bard College and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978. Yau’s many collections of poetry include Corpse and Mirror (1983), Edificio Sayonara (1992), Forbidden Entries (1996), Borrowed Love Poems (2002), Ing Grish (2005), Paradiso Diaspora (2006), Exhibits (2010), and Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012). His collections of stories and prose poetry include Hawaiian Cowboys (1994), My Symptoms (1998), and Forbidden Entries (1996). Yau has written on artists such as Andy Warhol, Joe Coleman, James Castle, and Kay Walkingstick. He has also collaborated with artists Archie Rand, Thomas Nozkowski, and Leiko Ikemura in poetry and art books like Hundred More Jokes from the Book of the Dead (2001), Ing Grish (2005), and Andalusia (2006). Yau has received many honors and awards for his work including a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley. Since 2004 he has been the Arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail. He teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.
by Jim Newberry
Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) is an improviser, composer, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, and writer. In 1989 he moved to Chicago from Boston and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America and Europe, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians. In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in Music.