ICI Associate publishes new book

ICI Associate, Antoinette LaFarge, has written a new book on designer, Louise Brigham which will be released on December 16, 2019 (eBook release January 13, 2020). For presale orders and more information, please visit Palgrave.com.

From the Publisher:

During the Progressive Era, a time when the field of design was dominated almost entirely by men, a largely forgotten activist and teacher named Louise Brigham became a pioneer of sustainable furniture design. With her ingenious system for building inexpensive but sturdy “box furniture” out of recycled materials, she aimed to bring good design to the urban working class. As Antoinette LaFarge shows,Brigham forged a singular career for herself that embraced working in the American and European settlement movements, publishing a book of box furniture designs, running carpentry workshops in New York, and founding a company that offered some of the earliest ready-to-assemble furniture in the United States. Her work was a resounding critique of capitalism’s waste and an assertion of new values in design—values that stand at the heart of today’s open and green design movements.

ICI Associate in Exhibition

ICI Associate, Melinda Smith Altshuler, is featured in the Cityscape Show IX at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles. The exhibition is on view from June 29 – August 3, 2019. Artist reception: Saturday, June 29, 5-8 pm.

Melinda Smith Altshuler, Burnt Offering on a Placemat, Unique solar plate photo etching on placemat, framed, 20 x 25 inches.

Monkey Head participant in upcoming exhibition


Monkey Head Participant and past Visualist-in-Residence (VIR), Amy Kaczur, is featured in a new group exhibition on display July 3 – August 11, 2019. Re: Figuring the Body at Kingston Gallery, will include Stitching Julia: installation for an imagined life, a project initiated during Kaczur’s ICI research periods.

Opening reception is on Friday, July 12, 5-8, with another reception Aug 2 for SoWa first Fridays. 

ICI Associate in Exhibition

ICI Associate, Melinda Smith Altshuler, is premiering new artworks in two group exhibitions
opening this weekend.

unfrozen, a pop-up
Feb 15-20, 2019 11-6pm /Artists recep Fri Feb 15 6-9pm

Substrate Gallery
709 Ridgewood Place, Los Angeles, CA 90038

Estimated Time of Arrival,
Artists of Santa Monica Art Studios
curated by Kristin Zethren
February 13-17 / Reception Saturday Feb 16th 6-9pm

Arena 1 Gallery
3026 Airport Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90405
Across from AFLAC/Art Fair Contemporary Los Angeles

AIDS Bottle Project

The AIDS Bottle Project is an interactive artist’s action conceived as a means of focusing attention on the AIDS crisis. From 1990 – 2000, in sites all over the United States and Europe, the ICI displayed bottles on December 1st of each year in conjunction with World AIDS Day.

Each bottle represents a person who has died from complications due to AIDS or HIV. The name and year of death is etched on the glass and a short biography is printed under the lid. In public displays, the bottles were part of an interactive process. Jars were left open so that objects of personal significance could be added to them by visitors. Response books were also available to record a range of emotions. At the end of the display, the bottles were distributed to the public free of charge. The jars were offered not only to remember those who had died, but to emphasize the individual make-up of a community and the responsibility of each living member to resist complacency about the ongoing epidemic.

 

AIDS Bottle Project Exhibition History
1999 Over 1,000,000/under 24 at Sam Francis Gallery, Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, Santa Monica
1998 Displayed at Santa Monica Festival, Santa Monica
100 Unknown Women at The Institute of Cultural Inquiry
1994
Workshop and display at Johnson State College, Vermont
Lecture and display at Montgomery Museum of Art, Alabama
Displayed at Midnight Special Bookstore , Santa Monica, CA.
1993 Display and lecture at Williams College, Massachusetts
City University of New York, New York City
1992 Displayed at Los Angeles Municipal Gallery,
SITE, Los Angeles
SPACE Gallery, Los Angeles
Watts Towers, Los Angeles
Birchfield Art Center, Buffalo, NY
University of California, Santa Barbara
1991 Displayed at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA
L.A. Eyeworks, Los Angeles
Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York City
Washington D.C. Mall

Karl Bornstein Gallery, Santa Monica
Los Angeles Municipal Gallery
1990 Tactical intervention at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Also shown at Richard Bennett Gallery, Los Angeles
1989 Visual AIDS launches Day Without Art on December 1 to coincide with World AIDS Day. The day of action and commemoration rallied artists and arts communities to remember those who have died from AIDS related illnesses.

ICI President helps organize a New Exhibition

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) Olympia 1863 Oil on canvas H. 130; W. 190 cm Paris, Musée d’Orsay

ICI President, current Director of the Bronx Art Museum, and former Director of the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, Deborah Cullen-Morales, has helped organize an exhibition entitled Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, curated by Denise Murrell. The exhibition will be on view at the Wallach from October 24, 2018 to February 10, 2019, and will then be expanded at the Musée d’Orsay as Le Modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse from March 26 to July 14, 2019.

You can read more about the exhibition in the New York Times.

Visualist-in-Residence Project

all_good_menCD-VIR-w

PLEASE NOTE: This is an archived Call for Applicants from the 2014 VIR season. The VIR program is currently part of the With Everything but the Monkey’s Head project. We are  not taking any new applications at this time.

CALL FOR APPLICANTS

The ICI is happy to announce the launch of its Visualist-in-Residence (VIR) Project for artists, art theorists, filmmakers, writers, and other visual researchers and cultural producers who are committed to studio-based research and the production of knowledge. The VIR offers visual researchers (or research teams) an opportunity to collaborate with the ICI for 6 – 8 weeks as they develop their work within a visual research template. We encourage you to read our brochure on visual research and to explore this topic on our website. Applications are currently being accepted for visual researchers whose cultural investigations, analyses, examinations, and experimentations are sympathetic with the Institute’s formulation of Visual Research. We encourage proposals from artists, writers, scholars and serious tinkerers who work in mediums or with ideas that typically fall outside traditional visual genres. For 2014 we are especially interested in projects that address the Institute’s current research theme: PHANTOM, MIRRORED, AND DOUBLED WORLDS. We are looking for adventurous residents who are interested in bringing new energies, concepts and ideas to the organization.

THE VIR FACILITY

The ICI provides a well-equipped study and production facility in the Institute’s main building . The VIR will have a private, dedicated space that can function as an artist’s studio, a writing room, a space for gathering data or a quiet space for evaluation and contemplation. The resident will also have access to the ICI’s equipment including a wireless network, computers, scanners, printers, analog film and movie cameras and, upon request, a photographic darkroom. The resident will have unrestricted access to their work space but the ICI does not provide room and board. Residents are prohibited from living in their workspace due to strictly-enforced fire safety codes.

THE RESIDENCY

Over the course of the residency it is anticipated that the resident will engage physically or psychically with the topography of the ICI space either through an active engagement with objects from the ICI library or Repository or through manipulation of the ICI physical space which includes a large garden and patio. In addition to the research space and publicity, the Institute will provide planning assistance, manpower and limited financial assistance to help realize the VIR project. To aid you in your research, we also offer a small collection of antique devices, arcane apparatuses, old-fashion interfaces, a library filled with books and esoteric pamphlets and a repository with a host of cultural detritus from the last two centuries. The in-progress Institute residency project will be open to the public by appointment every odd Thursday and Saturday. There will be a public event towards the end of the residency so that the resident can share his or her ‘findings’ with the public. Choosing from a variety of formats (lectures, performance, film screening, symposium), the resident will be encouraged to engage ICI associates and the organization’s curious spectators in a manner that eschews traditional exhibition practices. At the conclusion of the residency, the resident will be asked to create a material trace of their project for the ICI repository where it will become a part of our visual culture laboratory and/or traveling collection. In addition, the resident will be expected to document their research on a dedicated VIR blog during the course of their residency.

 FEES

The VIR space is offered free of charge and unlike most residency programs, we do not require an application fee. There is a $75 lab fee to be paid by each resident to help defray costs for maintenance of our computers and equipment. If this fee is prohibitive and/or dissuades you from applying, please contact us. Limited assistance might be available to help defray this cost. The ICI will also work with out-of-area residents to help them secure housing for their tenure at the ICI although this responsibility ultimately rests with the resident. We encourage the use of social media and housing sites such as airbnb.com. There is no funding from the ICI for room and board.

 APPLICATION PROCEDURE

Applications for the VIR project can be found here. In addition to the completed application, please supply us with a current CV and up to 5 samples of your previous work that we can easily access through an internet interface such as dropbox. Applications for the 2015-2016 VIR session are no longer being accepted. 

For more information contact us at info@culturalinquiry.org.