Miniatures/Models/Massives: Making and Unmaking Monumental Sculpture
Eliza Myrie
2 week course || SCULPT 664 001 || 3 credit hours || Lab Fee: $150
Monuments are vessels for collective remembrance. They define the ways in which society is expected and directed to behave in the face of the events and/ or persons represented. Monuments offer an opportunity to express, reflect upon, and externalize emotions through a form. They are often at a scale that demands our attention. This course will collectively examine what defines a monument. Students will look at events and people who society has deemed worth memorializing, and the impact these memorial forms have on ourselves and our culture. Studying monuments made or erected post-1950, the class will engage a long view of historical events and artists working contemporarily at a monumental scale. Works and attendant texts include The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, The AIDS Memorial Quilt, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Bear’s Ears, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, Maren Hassinger’s Monuments, Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980/1981, Lauren Halsey’s The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project, Claes Oldenburg’s proposed monuments, Michael Rakowitz’s A Color Removed, and Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Students will complete quick in-class exercises designed to jumpstart sculpting and will be expected to complete three finished works, two individually and one as a group. Students will be expected to participate in class discussions and critiques, as well as complete written responses to texts. The final group project will be presented to the larger Ox-Bow community in a celebration, ceremony or memorial parade designed by the class.
FACULTY
Eliza Myrie
Building a Wall Through My Father (dress rehearsal)
concrete, wood, plastic film, pine, MDF
each element approximately 6 x 8 x 10 inches
table, 192 x 22 x 50 inches
2016
Eliza Myrie, b. 1981, New York. Myrie received her MFA from Northwestern University and was a participant at the Skowhegan School. Myrie has been an artist-in-residence at Bemis Center, Yaddo, SFAI, MacDowell Colony, and University of Chicago and received grants from Propellor Fund and 3Arts Projects. She is a lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and co-founder of The Black Artists Retreat [B.A.R.]. Exhibitions include Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2018); Gallery 400, Chicago (2017); Vox Populi, Philadelphia (2016); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2016); Roots & Culture, Chicago (2014); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2012); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2011). Myrie’s work considers labor and laboring as a physical and conceptual endeavor that intersects and complicates assignations/delineations of value across gender, socioeconomic, racial, etc. categories.