JAN 18–MAR 11, 2012
Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport
Sonya Rapoport
Periodic Table,
1979
The art of Sonya Rapoport has long operated as a bridge between the public sphere of intellectual curiosity and scholarship, and the domestic one of spiritual inquiry and nurturing. Spaces of Life presents a group of Rapoport’s interactive works, created between 1980-2010, that function in the intersection between questioning and inviting.
The installation will be structured so as to infuse the spaces of the museum with the energy of the artist’s Berkeley home and studio. A mixture of documentation of original interactive installations, domestic objects that provide a launching pad for interactions, and new interpretations of the works’ systems of interaction will be developed in conjunction with Mills students and departments. Visitors to the gallery will engage in ongoing, distributed performance actions that draw on imagery and ideas from a range of disciplines including biochemistry, anthropology, psychology, and feminist studies.
Central to this installation of Rapoport’s work at Mills is Objects on My Dresser (1979-1983), an 11 phase work intended as a kind of “conceptual visit” to the artist’s home and studio. The titular dresser, which has occupied Rapoport’s foyer for decades, will be installed along with the original objects that sparked her investigation of the connections between symbols, words and ideas. Documentation of “netweb plots” created by Rapoport and by visitors to installations of previous project phases will be included along with a new “netweb plot” created with Mills students. The “Mills plot” will include images, correlative images and words determined by Mills students in advance of the exhibition, and will be on display for visitors to the exhibition to manipulate and customize according to their own, personal correlations.
Curated by Terri Cohn and Anuradha Vikram.
This exhibition is supported by the Agnes Cowles Bourne Fund for Special Exhibition and the Helzel Family Foundation.
MAR 27–APR 15, 2012
Senior Thesis Exhibition: Senior Exhibition
Senior Thesis Exhibition
WHAT TO PUT HERE?
Features the final bodies of work produced by the graduating class of the Mills College Studio Arts program.
The exhibition celebrates the artistic talent at Mills College as the senior class launches their careers and lives in many different directions.
APR 29–MAY 27, 2012
MFA Thesis Exhibition: MFA Exhibition
MFA Thesis Exhibition
WHAT TO PUT HERE?
This exhibition showcases works by students created for their graduate degrees in the Mills College MFA Studio Arts program.
This thesis exhibition demonstrates not only the high quality of work produced by Mills MFA candidates, but also their dedication to continually testing their artistic ideas and capabilities.
JUN 20–SEP 2, 2012
Sarah Oppenheimer
Sarah Oppenheimer
MF-142, Cut plywood, Room-scaled environment, Annely Juda Fine Art, London
2009
The Mills College Art Museum has commissioned New York-based artist Sarah Oppenheimer to create a new site-specific installation that addresses the museum’s unique architectural space.
Oppenheimer is internationally recognized for her architectural interventions that explore how space is animated and experienced. Her installations often have the effect of bringing two distant and distinct spaces into immediate, disorienting proximity, using a strategy of framing views and heightening the viewer’s awareness of their own physical presence within a space.
The Mills College Art Museum is situated in a historic Beaux-Arts structure designed by Bay Area architect Walter Ratcliff, Jr. in 1925. A cast-concrete building, the museum’s gallery is a 6,000 square-foot, open floor plan with an extensive ceiling skylight. Oppenheimer will design and fabricate a work that utilizes the specific qualities of the museum’s scale, light, and decoration to explore the understanding of architecture as a social space and look specifically at the role of the museum as a container for both objects and viewers.
Sarah Oppenheimer is supported in part by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
