PRINT GUMBO SPEAKERS

FEATURED SPEAKERS:

Ellis Marsalis
Ellis Marsalis is regarded by many as the premier modern jazz pianist in New Orleans and a leading Jazz educator. Many of his former students are professional musicians locally as well as internationally. Three of his six sons, Branford, Wynton and Delfeayo as well as trumpeter Terence Blanchard, saxophonist Donald Harrison and pianist Harry Connick, Jr have since attained worldwide acclaim with recording contracts on major labels. Youngest son Jason is emerging as an important drummer on the local and national music scene. In 1986 Marsalis accepted a position at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond,Va) as Coordinator of Jazz Studies. Three years later he would return to New Orleans to occupy a chair endowed by the Coca Cola company and become Director of the Jazz Studies Division at the University of New Orleans. In 1989 Marsalis was honored by Dillard University, the site of his undergraduate studies, with an honorary Doctorate of Music.

Andrei Codrescu   http://www.codrescu.com/
Andrei Codrescu has published poetry, memoirs, fiction, and essays. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio, and has written and starred in the Peabody Award-winning movie, Road Scholar. His novels, The Blood Countess(1995), and Messiah (1999) were national bestsellers. Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1997, was published by Black Sparrow Press. Among his other books are: The Hole in the Flag: An Exileís Tale of Return and Revolution, about the dramatic collapse of Romaniaís dictatorship in 1989; Ay, Cuba: a Socio-Erotic Journey, a travelogue of contemporary Cuba; and Hail, Babylon: Looking at American Cities. Mr. Codrescu is MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and edits Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Letters & Life.

OTHER DISTINGUISHED PRESENTERS:

June Wayne   http://www.junewayne.com/
By the time she acquired her Tamarind Avenue studio in Los Angeles in 1958, she was one of the most respected artists in the United States. In 1952, the Los Angeles Times had named her Woman of the Year for Meritorious Achievement in Modern Art, and her work was in most of the major collection in the United States. Worried about the moribund condition of lithography in this country, she wrote a proposal to the Ford Foundation in 1959 requesting support to restore lithography by training master-printers to work with U.S. artists. At first cautious, the Ford Foundation granted her $165,000 in 1960 to test her plan. In 1962, it awarded her $400,000 more and in 1965 another $700,000 to maintain the workshop through 1970. Under her direction, Tamarind Lithography Workshop became one of the most important focal points of a general revival of printmaking in the United States. In 1969, as she prepared for the transfer of Tamarind to the University of New Mexico, she began collaborating with French tapestry weavers. Ever since, she has continued to push the limits of almost all art media, constantly creating new techniques and forms. She was spurred on particularly by the feminist movement, which she anticipated to an extraordinary degree, and which validated her own career path. But her art was stimulated especially by discoveries in modern science, especially space exploration, the intellectual excitement of which has driven Wayne to remainone of the most innovative artists of the day. In 1992, June received the Printmaker Emeritus Award for life-time acheivement from the Southern Graphics Council.

Warrington Colescott
Warrington Colescott was born in Oakland, California of parents from New Orleans, and educated at Berkeley. His early family life involved art and culture; the cosmopolitan, outward-looking aspect of his art seems a natural result. The Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was the lure that brought him to America's Dairyland and printmaking, a very portable art, made it possible to stay. He is currently an Emeritus faculty member there. Prints have been an influence on the style in his paintings and there is a continual dialogue between the two. Narration is at the core of Colescott's art: the source of its journalistic aspect goes back to a childhood fascination with comic strips and to his college student involvement in political and sports cartoons. Humor is the lubricant that smooths the way for barbs aimed at humanity's foibles and institutions' cruelties. The pompous edifice of culture, politics, and current fashion threatens to totter and fall when Colescott renders it with his quirky and beguiling perspective.  In 1991 he received the Printmaker Emeritus Award from the Southern Graphics Council.

Bill Walmsley http://www.fsu.edu/~svad/FSUMuseum/abridgedwalmsley.htm
Professor Emeritus at Florida State University

Jules Heller
Dr. Heller has long been held in high regard in the printmaking community.  He is known as the author of Printmaking Today and Papermaking as well as being the founding dean of the colleges of fine arts at Penn State University, York University, and Arizona State University.  He is known and respected for his prints created over a 50 year period.  For the 1999 SGC conference Dr. Heller, organized the exhibit " Codex Mendez:  Prints of Leopoldo Mendez" with whom Jules lived in the 1940s when he worked at Talleur de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City. Jules Heller is the 1999 recipeient of the SGC Printmaker Emeritus Award.

Lee Chesney, Jr.
Lee Chesney received the SGC Printmaker Emeritus Award in 1992. He has taught previously at the University of Hawaii, Hilo; the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and the University of Illinois. He had had solo exhibitions at the Amon Carter Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas; University of Florida, Gainesville; Portland State University; Honolulu Academy of Fine Art; Salon de Mai, Paris, France, among many others.  His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery London, among thers.  He received his MFA degree fro the University of Iowa and his BFA degree from the University of Colorado. His son Lee is on the printmaking faculty of the University of Texas, Austin. 

Boyd Saunders
Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He is a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and printmaker and came to the University of South Carolina in 1965 with a mandate to establish and develop the printmaking program. In 1972 he played a central role in the founding of the Southern Graphics Council. He received the B.S. degree from Memphis State University, the M.F.A. from the University of Mississippi and has done additional study at the University of Alabama and the Bottega d' Arte Grafica in Florence, Italy. His original prints and paintings have been exhibited and collected throughout the U.S. and in many foreign countries.  He is the 2002 recipient of the SGC Printmaker Emeritus Award.

Phyllis McGibbon
Phyllis McGibbon is an Associate Professor of Art at Wellesley College. Raised in the Midwest by transplanted Canadians, she received her BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Phyllis has worked in open access print studios in Scotland, England, Canada and Belgium, and has been awarded residencies at the Kala Institute (CA), the Bemis (NE), the Millay Colony (NY) and the VCCA (VA). She travels frequently as a
guest artist and has served on the visiting faculty for  RISD as well as the University of Georgia Study Abroad program in Cortona Italy. Described by the Los Angeles Times as "a tinderbox of ideas and allusions", Phyllis' art incorporates drawing, lithography, reprographic constructions and large temporary site works. She has produced installations on site at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, (WI), the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, (MA); Sushi Inc, (CA); OCCCA, (CA); Clarke College, (IA); and the Davison Art Center (CT). Her prints and artist books are included in over 30 public collections. Awards for her work include grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the NEA, the WESTAF Regional NEA, Art Matters, Inc, and most recently, the Howard Foundation.

Ruth Weisberg
Dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. MA University of Michigan; Laurea in Painting and Printmaking, Academia di Belle Arti, Perugia, Italy 
Exhibitions: Huntington Library and Art Collection (San Marino), Jack Rutberg Fine Arts (Los
Angeles), Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), Bradley University (Peoria, IL), the Alice Simsar Gallery (Ann Arbor, MI), Fresno Art Museum (Fresno), Temple University (Rome). Recent shows in New York, Albuquerque, San Francisco, Oslo, Sao Paulo, Frankfurt, Berlin and Nairobi. Her work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jewish Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Detroit Institute of Arts, Harvard University, Biblioteca Nationale d'Italia (Rome), Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, Norwegian National Museum. Awards: USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award for Creative Work, College Art Association Distinguished Teaching of Art Award, Senior Research Fulbright combined with a visiting artist residency at the American Academy in Rome; National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar. 

Robert Lieber
Professor of Economics, Georgetown University. Areas of Specialization: International Relations, Foreign Policy. B.A., Wisconsin; Ph.D., Harvard; and postdoctoral study at St. Antony's College, Oxford. Professor Lieber's research and teaching interests include international relations theory and American foreign policy, with emphasis on Europe and the Middle East. He is the author of six books, including No Common Power: Understanding International Relations; The Oil Decade; Oil and the Middle East War; Contemporary Politics: Europe (co-author); Theory and World Politics; and British Politics and European Unity. With Kenneth Oye and Donald Rothchild, he is co-editor and contributing author of four books on American Foreign Policy: Eagle in a New World: American Grand Strategy in Post-Cold War Era; Eagle Resurgent: The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy; Eagle Defiant: U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1980s; and Eagle Entangled: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Complex World. Professor Lieber has held fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In addition he has been Research Associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, as well as Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution and Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, and a member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Presidential Study Group on U.S. Middle East Policy. His most recent book, of which he is editor and a contributing author, is Eagle Adrift: American Foreign Policy at the End of the Century, (Longman, 1997). He was Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars during the 1999-2000 academic year. 

Jonathan Fineberg
Jonathan Fineberg is Professor of Art History and University Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and trained as a research candidate in psychoanalysis at the Boston and Western New England institutes for psychoanalysis. He has
also taught at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities. He has won numerous awards including the 1969 Pulitzer Fellowship in Critical Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts Art Critic's Fellowship, curated major exhibitions in the United States and abroad and published more than a dozen books and catalogs as well as over 40 articles on modern art in journals ranging from Art in America to The New York Times. His most recent books are The Innocent Eye: Children's Art and the Modern Artist and Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being.

Beth Grabowski
Beth Grabowski has taught printmaking, book arts and contemporary theory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1985. There, she teaches as part of a "non compartmentalized" curriculum, encouraging an investigation of print media as a dimension of a broader art-making process. Her current work investigates issues of identity and relationship.  Several recent projects involve collaborations with her children as a means to involve the relationship of mother and child as a determining factor of the work. Beth Grabowski has shown her work across the United States and abroad.  She has received several North Carolina Arts Council awards, including an Artists' Project grant in 1987 and Artist's Fellowships in 1989-90 and1999-2000.  Beth has twice been a fellow at the Institute for the Arts and
Humanities at UNC-CH.  Her work has been exhibited widely, both in the US and abroad, most recently at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC.   She has served the SGC as Vice President (94-97) and as the representative to the American Print Alliance from 98-2000. On the technical side, Beth is the author of A Printshop Handbook, a
technical manual, published by Times-Mirror.  She has a continuing interest in bridging low tech and high tech as well as aiding the demystification of process whenever possible!

Dan Piersol
Doris Zemurray Stone Curator of Prints and Drawings, New Orleans Museum of Art.  He has MFA, MA, and BA degrees from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and has additional studies at the Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies and the Smithsonian Institution. Recently  he has served as juror for the 2001 Delta national Print and Drawings Exhibition, the 2001 Springfield Museum of Arts National Printmaking Exhibition, and the 1999 American Print Alliance internet exoibition "Scrolling the Page: Artist's Books from Around the World." He has recently lectured at Arkansas State University, the Huntsville Museum of Art and the University of Southern Mississippi, among others. He has regularly published articles in Arts Quarterly.  Some of his exhibition projects include "A Passsion for Paper: rints and Drawings from the John and Joel Weinstock Collection", "The Expressionis Spirit", "Under s Spell: Whistler and His Influence", and "Trasparent Motives: Prints from Glass Plates", among many others. 

Leslie Koptcho
Leslie Koptcho is an Associate Professor of Art at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.  Her prints and bookworks, are included in prominent collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Fogg Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Marion Koogler McNay Museum and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Koptcho was a Yaddo fellowship recipient
in 1990 and in 1991 traveled to India sponsored by the US Information Agency to conduct intaglio workshops and to exhibit her work.  Numerous international and national exhibitions are to her credit. Her prints have been selected for "Ecce Homo" the Clemson National Print
Exhibition, "Colorprint USA" and "Between Nature and Culture" which was exhibited in Finland, the Czech Republic and the United States. Most recently she was included in the 73rd International at the Print Center, "Personal Mysteries: Ten Women Artists" at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and "Visual Poetry" at the Alexandria Museum of Art.  She has published several articles in Contemporary Impressions and has been very active in the printmaking community.  She has served on the Board of Directors for both the Southern Graphics Council and American Print Alliance.

John Scott
John T. Scott is a sculptor/printmaker who has taught at Xavier University in New Orleans for the past 36 years. Many of his former students are now working as professional artist throughout the country. He has created a number of major public sculptures in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Houston and Atlanta to name a few. He has lectured and been a visiting artist at major universities throughout the United States and has taught in France. He has been awarded a number of honorary degrees and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. 

Clarke Bedford
When he is not documeting the life and art collection of Frederick Draper Kalley, Clarke is a Conservator at the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, DC. 
 

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS:

John L. Risseeuw
John received BS, MA, and MFA degrees in printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He came to Arizona State University in 1980 to establish book arts classes within the printmaking area and to direct a book arts press for publication and creative research purposes. The Pyracantha Press was founded in 1982.  His own private press, the
Cabbagehead Press, was founded in 1972.  He currently teaches courses in Fine Printing & Bookmaking, Papermaking, Artists' Books, and Photo Processes for Printmaking. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in over 310 competitive and invitational exhibitions throughout the world.  His prints, books, and collaborative works have traveled in recent years in Africa, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and South America as well as being exhibited in many locations in the United States. His work has been shown and referenced in The Complete Printmaker, revised edition by Ross and Romano, A Century of American Printmaking by James Watrous, and Thelma Newman's Innovative Printmaking, as well as professional journals like Fine Print and Hand Papermaking. Collections holding his work include the Library of Congress, American Medical Association, IBM, American Museum of Papermaking, American Craft Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, New York Public Library, Newberry Library in Chicago, the Getty Center, Folger Shakespeare Library, Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, British Library, Royal Library in the Hague, Netherlands, Artpool, Budapest, Hungary, Fudan University in Shanghai, the
Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami Beach, numerous university libraries, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He organized the 1999 SGC conference in Tempe, Arizona.

Beauvais Lyons  http://web.utk.edu/~blyons/default.html
Beauvais Lyons is Director of the Hokes Archives and a Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where he has taught printmaking since 1985. His one-person exhibitions presenting imaginary cultures have been presented at over 35 galleries and museums across the United States.  His current traveling exhibition, The George and Helen Spelvin Folk Art Collection" presents the work of eleven imaginary "outsider" artists. He has published articles on his work in Archaeology, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Contemporary Impressions, The New Art Examiner, and Leonardo.  His work is cited in Linda Hutcheon's 1994 book Irony's Edge: A Theory and Politics of Irony and Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilsonís Cabinet of Wonder published in 1995.  His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum. He was awarded the Southeastern College Art Conference Award for Creative Achievement in 1994 and a Southern Art Federation/ National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988.  From 1994-96 Beauvais was the President of the Southern Graphics Council, and is currently the editor of the SGC newsletter Graphic Impressions.  He received his MFA degree from Arizona State University in 1983 and his BFA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980.  He organized the 1992 and 1995 SGC conferences in Knoxville, Tennessee.