Tuesday, September 16, 2003

By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic

The annual Jill Watson Festival Across the Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, which will be held tomorrow and Thursday, has become a significant local contemporary arts event, sponsoring edgy performance and stimulating lectures by internationally exhibited artists who work in cross-disciplinary collaboration.

	Artwork by internationally acclaimed artist Mel Chin, who is the Robert Lepper Distinguished Lecturer this year at CMU. He'll speak at 7 p.m. Thursday during the Jill Watson Festival Across the Arts.

This year's featured speaker, who is also the Robert Lepper Distinguished Lecturer, is Mel Chin, often described as an environmental artist but widely recognized as a politically engaged activist who "intersects with disciplines such as alchemy, botany, economics and ecology ... investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility."

A recipient of grants from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts and the Pollack/Krasner and Rockefeller Foundations, Chin has produced commissioned works and public art installations for venues such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; New York's Central Park; and Floriadepark in the rural Netherlands. PBS documented his "S.P.A.W.N. (Sustainable Production: Agriculture, Worms, Neighbors)" in 2001 for its "Art of the 21st Century." "KNOWMAD" is a video game Chin developed with the help of software engineers based on rug patterns of persecuted nomadic peoples. He worked with scientists to create "Revival Field," gardens of "hyperaccumulators -- plants that can draw heavy metals from contaminated areas" in globally located polluted sites.

The festival, which is free and open to the public, was created in 1997 to commemorate the life of CMU alumna, architect and adjunct faculty member of the School of Architecture Jill Watson, who died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. Watson, who was pursuing a master of fine arts degree at CMU at the time of her death, had diverse interests and was a champion of interdisciplinary investigations.

Tomorrow's events

A performance by the School of Drama Cabaret in the Helen Wayne Rauh Studio Theater begins the festival at 4:30 p.m. tomorrow, followed at 5:30 with opening remarks by College of Fine Arts Dean Martin Prekop in the Philip Chosky Theater. Both theaters are in the Purnell Center for the Arts.

Three lectures will be given tomorrow in the Chosky Theater: 5:45 p.m., John Maeda, who heads the MIT Media Lab's Physical Language Workshop; 7 p.m., performance and installation artist Liza Lou; and 8:30 p.m., mixed media artist Eleanor Antin.

Maeda is considered a leader in the development of digital design concepts and has received such prestigious awards as the National Design Award and Japan's Mainichi Design Prize. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT and a doctorate from Tsukuba University Institute of Art and Design in Japan, and was selected by Esquire magazine as one of the 21 most important people for the 21st century.

Emerging artist Lou gained instant recognition in 1995 with "Kitchen," a bead-encrusted life-sized representation of a typical American 1950s kitchen complete with cooling cherry pie and dust balls under the refrigerator. "Back Yard," of 1997, covered 528 square feet with 250,000 blades of beaded grass, continuing her commentary on popular American culture.

An emeritus professor of visual arts at University of California, San Diego, the much awarded Antin has worked in installation, photography, video, film, performance -- including at the Venice Biennale and Sydney Opera House -- drawing and writing. She's exhibited at, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is in the collections of the latter two as well as venues such as the Jewish Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Last year she received the International Association of Art Critics Best Show award for her photographic piece "The Last Days of Pompeii."

Thursday's events

At 1:30 p.m. Thursday, Theatre Cryptic founder Catherine Boyd will lecture in Chosky and give a performance at 5 p.m. in the Alumni Concert Hall, College of Fine Arts. She has a B.A. in Dramatic Studies from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, was awarded a national three-year fellowship to "develop the staging of music through new technologies," was the only woman in Scotland to be short-listed for a Prudential Creative Briton 2000 Award, and was named the European Woman of Achievement for the Arts in 1999.

Also at 5 p.m., Chris Kasabach will give a special workshop centered on a collaboration with Japanese artist Mariko Mori, who exhibited and spoke at The Andy Warhol Museum in 1998. Kasabach co-founded BodyMedia in 1999, which "develops tools for continuous body monitoring," and has appeared in international design, engineering, computer science, economic and fashion media. Mori's Wave UFO project collects visitors' brainwaves, which are projected and animated "based on their arousal levels."

After Chin's lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, the festival will close with a performance by School of Music resident artists Cuarteto Latinoamericano, beginning at 8 p.m. in the Kresge Recital Hall, College of Fine Arts building.

For information, call 412-268-5765 or visit www.cmu.edu/cfa/watson.

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