Bob Staake: 2014 National Book Festival
http://loc.gov/podcasts/bookfest14/podcast_staake.html
http://loc.gov/podcasts/bookfest14/transcripts/pod-NBF14_staake.pdf
Speaker: Bob Staake
Series: 2014 National Book Festival
Date: July 28, 2014
Running Time: 11:08 minutes
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Michael Fila (301) 581-5194 mfila@strathmore.org
Strathmore Fine Arts Presents
2013-2014 Fine Artists in Residence Exhibition
Saturday, August 2 through Sunday, August 24, 2014 Gudelsky Gallery Suite
Gallery Hours
Strathmore Fine Art Presents
2013-2014 FINE ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE EXHIBITION Featuring New Works by chukwumaa, Ali Halperin, Ariel Klein, Nguyen Nguyen with mentors John Anderson, June Linowitz, John Wang, Eileen Martin
NORTH BETHESDA, MD – Emerging visual artists chukwumaa, Ali Halperin Ariel Klein, and Nguyen Nguyen will conclude their residency experience at Strathmore by unveiling new works in the art center's Fine Artists in Residence Exhibition. Their unique voices and contemporary perspectives are expressed through oil paint, hand drawn and digital illustration, mixed media, performance art, and soft sculpture. The exhibition is on view from Saturday, August 2 through Sunday, August 24, 2014 in the Mansion at Strathmore. The multidimensional exhibition will also include work from Fine Artists in Residence (Fine AIR) mentors—multidisciplinary artist John Anderson, sculptor June Linowitz, calligrapher John Wang, and glass artist Eileen Martin. For more information, call (301) 581-5100 or visit www.strathmore.org.
The first floor of the Mansion will feature past works by the Fine AIRs, collaborative works created with their mentors, as well as original works by the mentors. The second floor will feature new works exclusively by the Fine AIRs, with each artist highlighted in their own gallery space.
Strathmore's Fine Artist in Residence program cultivates local visual arts talent in the Washington, D.C. area by pairing artists early in their careers with established professionals in related disciplines and mediums. Fine AIR residencies last eight months, during which participants expand their craft and explore new artistic possibilities in professional development workshops, attend site visits, build their audience, develop a curatorial perspective, solidify their artistic voice and, ultimately, premiere a new body of work commissioned by Strathmore.
Artists Unveiling New Projects at the Fine Artists in Residence Exhibition
chukwumaa: Mixed-media sculptor and performance artist chukwumaa's work explores the concept of "belonging" by exploring the interactions between individuals and the group. He shares these observances using surreal performances and new media soft sculpture, using impermanent material such as video,
cardboard, store bought tape, found objects and bungee cords. chukwumaa will present a new perspective, positioning, and understanding of an older work called "HURR POEM," featuring performance, video and impermanent sculpture. The new work is titled "HURR POEM (Document)."
Ali Halperin: In her exploration of consumer culture, mixed media artist Ali Halperin entombs clothing in black tar. She pairs these works with plush handcrafted knits and fur textiles to construct bodily wall sculptures. She applies a hardening formula to the fabric, that she created herself over time, to couple the soft material with a rigid surface. The tar simultaneously represents the "elite" through its slick, black sheen, while nodding to the ostracized or maligned, those "tarred and feathered." She deconstructs the relationship between the physical body and commercial objects, exploring the fetishism of commodities and concepts of luxury and leanness.
Halperin received her BA from Barnard College at Columbia University in New York City, her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate at Maryland Institute College of Art, and a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ariel Klein: For his 2014 exhibition at Strathmore, Ariel Klein painted "The President's Own" United States Marine Band from life. Klein shadowed the musicians at public concerts, ceremonies, nighttime parades and to the funeral of a three-star general at Arlington National Cemetery, using his iPad as a canvas to make digital sketches which he then translated into oil paintings. By capturing band members in a contemporary style, Klein creates a fresh visual interpretation of the patriotic spirit represented by "The President's Own" United States Marine Band.
Named a distinguished Scholar in the Arts by Governor Martin O'Malley, the Silver Spring resident studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Bellas Artes.
Nguyen Khoi Nguyen: Nguyen Khoi Nguyen is a multidisciplinary artist with expertise in drawing, painting, film-making, and music. He is currently working on a multimedia graphic novel titled The Gulf, the third chapter of which he created for his residency at Strathmore. The project is a nonlinear narrative; each story is its own vignette. The Gulf is inspired by Nguyen's experiences and family history, particularly living in Vietnam, Southwest Florida, and Washington, D.C., and includes stories, drawings, music, and animation. The title refers to the physical location of the Gulf Coast of Florida, where the artist was raised, as well as the idea of division—between adulthood and childhood, parent and child, and Vietnamese and American identity.
Nguyen studied visual art at the Cooper Union, music and integrated arts at Bard College, and completed a master's degree in jazz piano at the University of Maryland. Nguyen was the recipient of the DC Commission for the Arts Artist Fellowship Grant for 2012.
Strathmore Fine Artist in Residence Mentors
John James Anderson (mentor to chukwumaa): John James Anderson is an associate professor of art, and program coordinator of Visual Communication at Prince George's Community College. His work has received several grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and is represented locally by Adah Rose Gallery. He has also written art criticism for Washington City Paper, Art in America, and Sculpture. Anderson's work often defies categorization as he moves fluidly between painting, performance, sculpture, and mixed media. His work often references issues of social consciousness, such as labor issues, culturally marginalized peoples, gentrification, and urban places in transition.
However, his work at Strathmore represents a departure for Anderson as he returns to his roots in painting. Canvases cut into unconventional shapes are streaked with neon and brightly hued lines, creating linear abstractions.
For their collaborative piece, Anderson and chukwumaa are merging their performance styles by blending performance art with text.
June Linowitz (mentor to Ali Halperin): Sculptor June Linwotiz has been a working artist for nearly 30 years. Her current work is an evolving series of wall hanging, three dimensional heads that explore emotions and states of mind. The series explores several universal concepts: masks, emotions, and human facial expression. Most often, the bottom part of each head displays the facial expression associated with an emotion, while the top part interprets or comments on that emotion. Linowitz's wall hangings are primarily sculpted from polystyrene and wood, and painted with encaustic, a wax material.
For her collaborative piece, Linowitz and mentee Ali Halperin created a zombie mask, infusing Linowitz's current series with a cheeky pop culture reference. They will also display a work depicting an old and a young woman, created using digital illustration and traditional sculptural techniques.
John Wang (mentor to Ariel Klein): John Wang expanded an early interest in calligraphy and painting into the field of Chinese seal carving. He blends these related skill sets in his fine art. In 2014 he was designated a Seal Carving Master by the Maryland State Fine Arts Council. Wang currently teaches calligraphy at the George Washington University. He displays several traditional Chinese calligraphic works at Strathmore.
During weekly studio visits throughout the residency, Wang demonstrated for Klein the art of traditional Chinese calligraphy. Together they developed a calligraphic digital illustration for Strathmore.
Eileen Martin (mentor to Nguyen Nguyen): While glass artist Eileen Martin began her career in lead and copper foil stained glass fabrication and glass painting, she has expanded into fused and kiln-formed glass, lamination and sand-blasting. She incorporates a variety of other media into her sculptural works, including clay, metal, rubber, concrete, paper, stone and wood. She also does on-site restoration of stained glass in historic structures and churches. She is a member of the National Capital Art Glass Guild and the Washington Guild of Goldsmiths. At Strathmore she displays colorful layered glass sculptures that are textured, but also flat like a canvas.
Martin collaborated with pupil Nguyen Nguyen to mount panels of his graphic novel on glass, isolating the work from its larger narrative and inviting the viewer to perceive the piece in a new way.
About Strathmore
Strathmore is an arts presenter and cultural destination serving to nurture art, artists and community through creative and diverse programming of the highest quality. The Mansion at Strathmore is located at 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda, MD, one half-mile north of the Capital Beltway and immediately adjacent to the Grosvenor-Strathmore station on Metro's Red Line.
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Strathmore is supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive. An agency of the Department of Business & Economic Development, the MSAC provides financial support and technical assistance to non-profit organizations, units of government, colleges and universities for arts activities.
Strathmore is also supported in part by the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County.
Strathmore Fine Arts Presents
2013-2014 Fine Artists in Residence Exhibition
Saturday, August 2 through Sunday, August 24, 2014 Gudelsky Gallery Suite
Gallery Hours
Mansion at Strathmore
10701 Rockville Pike
North Bethesda, MD 20852
For additional information or to purchase tickets visit www.strathmore.org or call (301) 581-5100.
Thanks to recent gifts, we have far more Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese comics waiting to be cataloged than we can handle – even with the broad range of language skills among the cataloging team! 
The Comic Art Collection is heavily used by MSU students and faculty working in the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies. Help us support their research by putting more Asian comics on the shelf!
by ARUN RATH,
National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (July 27, 2014 )
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=54054
COMIC-CON EISNER AWARDS: 'The Oatmeal's' Matthew Inman honored after creative shift: 'Writing these comics was risky for me'
By Michael Cavna
Washington Post Comics Riffs July 28 2014
COMIC-CON EISNER AWARDS: Israeli graphic novelist Rutu Modan draws upon war — as she hopes for peace
By Michael Cavna
Washington Post Comics Riffs July 28 2014
NEWS from the LIBRARY of CONGRESS
July 28, 2014
Public contact: Martha Kennedy (202) 707-9115, mkenn@loc.gov
Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ada@loc.gov
Swann Foundation Fellow Erin Corrales-Diaz to Discuss
Cartoonists' Artistic Responses to Disabled Civil War Veterans
Swann Foundation Fellow Erin Corrales-Diaz, in a lecture at the Library of Congress, will examine political cartoons that interpret war-induced disability during and after the American Civil War.
Corrales-Diaz will present "Empty Sleeves and Bloody Shirts: Disabled Civil War Veterans and Presidential Campaigns, 1864-1880," at noon on Thursday, Aug. 14, in the West Dining Room on the sixth floor of the James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Avenue S.E., Washington, D.C. The lecture is free and open to the public. No tickets are needed.
Corrales-Diaz will focus specifically on images by such well-known political cartoonists as Thomas Nast (1840-1901) and Joseph E. Baker (approximately 1837-1914). Artists like Nast fought a "paper war" by using political cartoons to sway public opinion in support of specific political candidates, issues, and ideologies. During battles with the brush and the pen, a new social figure emerged who embodied patriotism and heroic sacrifice—the disabled veteran.
The rise and influence of the pictorial press in political campaigns coincided with the American Civil War. As developments rapidly unfolded on the battlefield and in the news media, the disabled veteran became a figure charged with significant political power. Artists quickly drew upon his maimed body as a campaign strategy, according to Corrales-Diaz. Focusing upon political cartoons for presidential campaigns from 1864 to 1880, Corrales-Diaz will explore how the broken body of the veteran became an emblem of a charged political visual rhetoric and generated a re-evaluation of the veteran's social role in 19th century America.
Corrales-Diaz is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is focusing on the art of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. In her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Remembering the Veteran: Disability, Trauma, and the American Civil War, 1861-1915," she examines the complex ways in which American artists attempted to interpret war-induced disability after the war and argues that the veteran's injured body became a vehicle for exploring the overwhelming sense of loss and disillusionment during the war's aftermath. Corrales-Diaz completed an M.A. in art history at Williams College, and a B.A. in art history at the University of Washington, Seattle. In addition to the Swann Fellowship, she has received other awards and fellowships including the Joan and Robert Huntley Art History Scholarship at the University of North Carolina in 2012 and a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State in 2010.
This presentation, sponsored by the Swann Foundation and Prints & Photographs Division, is part of the foundation's continuing activities to support the study, interpretation, preservation and appreciation of original works of humorous and satiric art by graphic artists from around the world. The Swann Foundation's advisory board is comprised of scholars, collectors, cartoonists and Library of Congress staff members. The foundation strives to award one fellowship annually (or biennially) to assist scholarly research and writing projects in the field of caricature and cartoon. Applications for the 2016-2017 academic year will be due Monday, Feb. 15, 2016. More information about the fellowship is available through the Swann Foundation website at www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/swannhome or by e-mailing swann@loc.gov.
The Library of Congress, the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 158 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.
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PR14-120
7/28/14
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We had great
experience traveling in Japan, and we saw three things in particular that may
interest readers of this blog: The Kyoto International Manga Museum, the Studio
Ghibli Museum outside Tokyo, and the Moomin House Café in Tokyo.
Their collection entails
nearly 300,000 items related to manga, according to the museum. To Erin and me,
the more impressive part of the museum was the reading library aspect. They have about 200 meters (about 650 feet)
worth of shelving holding nearly 50,000 manga volumes. This photo of Erin
browsing the books shows how the manga is accessible and available to grab from
the shelves. [photo 2 – Erin browsing Manga
Museum shelves] I’m not sure how you get
to the higher levels in this picture – I didn’t see a ladder – but they were
not behind glass. There were manga volumes available to read on all three
floors of the museum. They had manga from around the world - also available to
pull from the shelves to read - but ComicsDC editor Mike was not impressed with their North
American selection [photo 3 – Manga from Around the World].
They have very
affordable annual passes for kids that allow unlimited visits - about US$12 for
elementary aged children and US$36 for middle and high school aged children
(US$60 for you adults). I had read online before visiting that lots of school
children go there to hang out after school and read manga. They have a
children’s reading room that is comfortable and nice. We were there at a time that was most likely
during their school day (when isn’t it during the school day for a Japanese
student, with their cram schools and such?) and there were only a few kids. There
were mostly Japanese adults there, men and women. Seniors even. Manga in Japan
is truly for everyone.
One neat thing you
can do at the museum is get a manga portrait of yourself done. Erin and I sat
down together for a portrait and I’m so glad we did. It’s one of my favorite
souvenirs from the whole trip. [photo 4 – Anime Karla and Anime Erin] The
artist was Nakahara Kasumi. The lettering at the top in purple and blue is our
names spelled out in Japanese phonetically. It’s funny to me that she drew Erin
flashing the peace sign. Erin did not pose that way. Instead it was a flourish
Kasumi added -- and I know exactly why. It’s because whenever you see Japanese
school children – and we saw this all over in Japan – taking a photo of each
other at a shrine, a temple, in the city, anywhere, they always, and I mean
ALWAYS, pose flashing a peace sign. Boys, girls, teens, kindergartners. Every kid,
every time in photos. It was cute that she drew Erin that way too.
Unfortunately there
were no photos allowed inside the museum, so these photos are all outside.
There were so many details to discover, like the soot sprite window in the
Totoro ticket booth that greets you at the entrance [photo 5 – Karla at Totoro
ticket booth], all the beautiful stained glass windows with Ghibli characters
and scenes, the Jiji-shaped (the cat from Kiki’s
Delivery Service) faucet handle on a sink outside, the art
nouveau/steampunk water fountain and bench. Mayazaki’s movies so effectively
use scene to create a mood, and so does the Ghibli Museum. The style of the
museum is an odd-sounding English country/steampunk/art nouveau mix that
somehow melds together in an evocative and beautiful way. 
The Ghibli Museum
restaurant is a real treat in and of itself [photo 6 – Totoro at The Straw Hat
Café]. We waited for about 45 minutes to get in, but once we did it was all
worth it. The style inside the restaurant, called The Straw Hat Café, is
particularly English country. The food was served on adorable dishware with
Ghibli characters and embellished with Ghibli flags [photo 7 and photo 8 – The
Straw Hat Café food]. If you go and want to take home the cute flags, save them
from your food because they sell them at the restaurant for $6 for a set of
four! On the patio outside the restaurant, they sell beer that is only
available at the Ghibli Museum [photo 9- Ghibli beer] – which, unfortunately
for my husband, I couldn’t take home unopened.
One Studio Ghibli
footnote from our trip that shows what Ghibli films can mean for the Japanese:
we had a wonderful visit to a hot springs bath village called Shibu Onsen in
the “Japanese Alps” in Nagano. The village was very old with all wooden
buildings. It had nine different hot springs baths that you could visit for free
if you were staying in one of the inns in the village. Picture traditional
wooden Japanese architecture, narrow cobblestone streets, and being able to
walk from one end of the village to the other in about ten minutes. Our
innkeeper was a lovely woman named Keiko, and when we checked out of the inn she
noticed the Totoro paper fan I was holding that I had gotten at the Studio
Ghibli gift shop. With delight, she asked if Erin and I knew the film
The food is prepared
in the most kawaii way! [photo 12 – Moomin House Café
menu] All the food, both sweet and
savory, is prepared including shapes from the Moomin universe. We ordered
dessert there: Hattifattener madeleine and pudding in a souvenir mug for Erin
[photo 13 – Hattifattener madeleine and pudding in a souvenir mug] and a
whopper of an assembled dessert for me that including Hattifattener and
Moomin-shaped cookies and a Moominhouse cake [photo 14 – Crazy Moomin
dessert]. It was almost too kawaii to
eat. Almost. J At one point when I had gotten up to go look around at the
gift shop, the waitress came and set the Snork Maiden down next to Erin. You
can see Little My in the background, sitting at the neighboring table. Like
everywhere else in Japan, service was excellent, and the servers at the Moomin
House Café made sure that all the customers had a guest Moomin family member at
their table at one point or another during their meal.
Karla Hagan teaches physics by day and
only occasionally has a comics blogger alter ego (ok, never before). She is
totally qualified to write this blog post by virtue of living three doors down
from Mike. The comics are strong with
that one.
The new store is a nice well-lighted place on P St, NW, at 21st St, next to Second Story Books and above Subway. They may be a BIT overstocked on Saga and The Walking Dead this week. Cartoonists Carolyn Belefski, Joe Carabeo, Matt Dembicki, Shannon Gallant and TR Logan attended the opening, signing copies of the new Magic Bullet #9 free anthology from the DC Conspiracy. More pictures are here.
