Leccion7, 2001 by Robert Buitron
Louis Carlos Bernal – 1984 Olympics, Los Angeles
Robert C. Buitron – 1984 Olympics, Los Angeles - present
Monday, February 28 – Friday,April 1, 2005
Gallery Talk with Robert Buitron 4:00pm with reception to follow
Artist Reception – Tuesday March 8 – 4:30pm – 6:00pm
Curated by Ann Simmons-Myers, this exhibit of Lou Bernal’s work is an on going effort to remind the Community of Lou Bernal’s legacy as a teacher, photographer and proud participant in the Tucson and surrounding Communities.
Louis Carlos Bernal taught photography at Pima Community College’s West Campus for 18 years, while gaining recognition internationally for his images capturing 'barrio' life throughout Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Among many honors, Bernal was selected to join 9 other photographers to cover the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Within his images of “Los Angelenos” Bernal sought to record the extravaganza, spirit and ceremony of the event as only Los Angeles could stage.
Bernal chose to photograph the vendors and the carnival that surrounded the event With the same flavorsome humanity that Bernal found in the Barrios, these never before exhibited images of the 1984 Olympics captivate Bernal’s infectious spirit, demonstrating that anyone going anywhere for fun is a one person parade.
Chicano photographer, Robert C.Buitron, was also invited to document the 1984 LA summer Olympics, in his Olympic images Buitron captures the pageantry, processions and ceremony of that event.
We will be exhibiting Buitron’s Olympic images as well as several contemporary series of works. Buitron, an art educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the College of DuPage, focuses on cultural and political issues in staged color and black and white photographs with humor. Some pieces address questions of heritage and the assimilation and displacement of his native Chicano community in the United States. Other works suggest historical contradictions and injustices that Mexicans, Chicanos and Indians experienced when the American West was being formed.
On Tuesday March 8th at 4:00 pm, Robert Buitron will be discussing his relationship with Louis Bernal and their experiences during the Los Angeles Olympics as well as the nature of his contemporary series of works.
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Louis Carlos Bernal and the 1984 Summer Olympics
Los Angeles, California hosted the 1984 Summer Olympics. The city’s Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC) fabricated a Hollywood-worthy spectacle opened by ex-silver screen star, President Ronald Reagan. Similar to Olympic Games before and since, the arts were woven into the fabric of the sporting spectacle. The 1984 official posters, as just one example, were designed by a wide range of well-known artists that included John Baldessari, Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borofsky, Raymond Saunders and Garry Winogrand. Into this milieu, Louis Carlos Bernal brought his camera and an invitation to use it.
The Olympic Arts Festival (an arm of the LAOOC) sponsored a project that selected ten photographers from across the United States to interpret the Olympics. The artists, chosen by Robert Fitzpatrick, Richard Koshalek, Nathan Lyons and Darryl Curran – an eminent and well-qualified group of experts – included Robert Buitrón, Jo Ann Callis, Jack Carnell, Robert Cumming, Donnie Donohue, Jim Dow, Peter Reiss, Frank Stewart, Charles Traub and Louis Bernal. The style and approach of each artist exemplified the breadth of American photography in 1984 and the artists represented an equally broad geographic sweep from coast to coast.
The games, boycotted by the Soviet Union and its allies, lasted a few short weeks in late July and early August of 1984. Bernal sought to take advantage of the intensity offered by this situation. His proposal to the Olympic Arts Festival reflected on the celebratory disposition of Los Angeles’ citizens and looked toward this temperament as an artistic conduit. He pointed out that the conflated weeks of the Games presented an exceptional opportunity for people in the LA area to put on a good show. Bernal noted:
Los Angelenos have a reputation for creating strong styles in their dress ad behavior. With the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, there is a natural stage for the exhibition of cultural values. I want to make images of this display and record something of the ceremony and spirit of the event. [*]
Bernal’s images serve as character triage for the Olympic theater. Like the actors he anticipated, Bernal directs his dramatic studies not toward the heroes and heroines doggedly featured by the sporting journalists but toward the unsung people, those easily overlooked but essential to the spectacle: vendors, guards, fans, and volunteers. In his classic style each of Bernal’s performances is carefully composed; he intuitively finds a point of balance that grounds and monumentalizes the willing participants. The baroque passion of his saturated colors and his keen attention to a composition of circumstance imbue his three-penny dramas with vitality and human integrity. In due course Bernal’s artistic vigilance provokes and adjustment of our notions of the meaning and content of “Olympic”.
Following the end of the Olympic sporting events in mid-August, the Temporary Contemporary of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art hosted an exhibition of Bernal’s and the other nine artists’ work from November 18, 1984 through January 6, 1985.
Peter S. Briggs
Helen DeVitt Jones Curator of Art
Museum of Texas Tech University
[*]p. 26 in Howe, Graham; Spector, Howard and Welch, Edward. 10 Photographers. Olympic Images. [Essay by Peter Schjeldahl. Acknowledgements: Howard Spector, Richard Koshalek, Edward Welch. Introduction Robert J. Fitzpatrick.] Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. Olympic Arts Festival; Los Angeles, CA., The Museum of Contemporary Art, November 18, 1984 – January 6, 1985. Los Angeles, CA. 1984. 144pp. 0-914357-06-9
 
Smoke Dreams Mutual Attraction
By Doug Shelton
INDULGENCE 17 Jan - 18 Feb 2005
Recent work by Janice Pittsley, Alan Petersen, Nila Oakes
Mitchell Durkee and Melinda Hannigan
November 22, 2004 - January 3, 2005
Artist Reception Wednesday, December 1, 2004 from 3:30 - 6:00pm
Gallery Talk with Nila Oakes and Alan Petersen following the reception
Doorway to Heaven by Nate Larson
Think Tank - Mike Keller (Una Vida Diferente - www.unavidadiferente.com), Nate Larson (www.natelarson.com), Hadiya Finley, and Randy Simmons
George's Images 20010
Bruce Clark 4
Conduit Art Faculty Exhibition
Visual Arts Programming
2003 - 2004
 Opposing Forces
Sandra Yagi
San Francisco, CA
My work uses realism and a figurative approach similar to the old masters, whose work I greatly admire. Their techniques are used to render an exploration of contemporary issues and their impact. One area that interests me is how traditionally bound religions are at odds with modern society, technology and science. Newer, sometimes more troubling symbols of the current world culture have replaced old icons. In particular, DNA manipulation holds the potential to allow humankind to become a creator/god of sorts. Despite all of the new technology and science, the age-old questions regarding the human condition and its ultimate fate still remain.
Eric Burris
Tempe, AZ
My Art is Jewelry: wearable and portable objects to adorn the body. My jewelry derives from a specific object found in nature, a stick. Not just any stick, but a stick that is different from all others. But what makes it so different? It may be because of the knowts and twists, or the water shaped texture, or because it is the right size and shape. Where it is found is also important. It is a place, usually secluded in nature, where I choose to be at that particular time. Regardless, these pieces of wood are chosen to be the focus of each piece of jewelry. It seems appropriate for an object made from a natural process of decay and destruction to be reworked, reinterpreted, and even rejuvenated.
Jessica Calderwood
Tempe, AZ
Trained in two-dimensional disciplines, I was introduced to enameling as another medium in which to create images and texture. The process of fusing ground glass to metal has a multitude of applications. When pushed beyond the conventions of ashtrays and amulets, enameling is a medium with incredible potential for innovation. While experimenting with large-scale enameling, I discovered that the processes forced my work to change and expand. Technical problem solving often led to new and exciting concepts.
Currently, my work is an exploration in integrating image with form. Drawings taken from popular culture are combined with hand-hammered forms to create a narrative addressing the intricacies of the modern human condition.
Common Threads
Artists Statements:
Lori Andersen:
 My Artwort is a continuing exploartiona of visual imagery from a spiritual perspective. The connection of all beings and the healing we all work through are represented in my work through form and material. Referencing a native aesthetic of animals as relations and teachers, becomes a metaphor of life's lessons and subsequent growth and healing in my art.
 This body of work represents life's dualities both as a mother and a woman who has undergone a hysterectomy, the wombless mother. I beacme interested in exploring ideas of the womb as a nest, vessel and passageway. The usefulness of the nest/womb once the babies are gone and its beauty as a specialized construction for the sole purpose of nurturing the embryo/infant. Our lives are so filled with amazing wonderous events, not the least which is our mother's womb where we start our journey. Ultimately it is, indeed, the journey that matters.
George Chen:
I have been using recycled materials as my artistic medium as far back as I started buiding childhood craft projects. Most of my childhood creativity was involved with collecting found fabrics around my mother's sewing machine to construct some eclectic costumes for my hand puppets. Using these materials is so innate to me that maybe this preference is embedded in my genes.
By putting separate pieces of found objects together, it gave me an early training that would lead to my desire to do large-scale wall pieces constructing from various smaller units. Most of the found objects that I collected are sparate small individual pieces, and the first challenge is to put these small individuals together into many units. The final step is to place each of these units into a large-scale piece. Before I place all these units together, I don't have any idea how would the entire composition turn out to be, and this is the most exciting step of my artistic process. This step abstracts my composition, and the sense of unwantedness in the recycled materials. These materials resurface with a new sense of being. They are transformed.
My background is in printmaking, and I love to work with pattern, texture, and repetition of organic, biomorphic forms. My inspiration comes from my daily interaction with the world I am dealing with, and the audience could discern that from the titles of my work. I am a keen observer of the environment and the discarded materials surrounding me. The feeling aroused from being at certain places inspired me to do work associated with that enviroment with found materials within that. That environment could be the dumpster in alleyways, beautiful parks, shopping malls, or just any kind of streets. I translate the feeling of being in these places into my compositions.
The Buddhist belief of reincarnation permeates in many aspects of my childhood memory. Growing up believing in reincarnation, I believe there is no end to our lives. It is a circular, continual process. I tend to associate the recycle of unwanted materials with the Buddhist sense of reincarnation. Both cycles are continual process of rebirth. Every rebirth refreshes the unwantedness of its old life, and given another opportunity to start over again. A human life is similar to a life of an object, going from useful to useless, beautiful to worn-out. In the process of using recycled materials, I could contemplate the possibilities that our lives are also in a regenerative cycles, and we are given opportunities to make up our faults and mistakes to start over again.
I love to work with bright colors on large scales. The bright colors are associated with vitality, motion, energy and brilliance. The bright colors revived the discarded materials with energy, bursting with vitality and motion. Placed on a large scale, compositions are magnified, and these materials are dignified and redeemed with value. They become the center of attention, instead of the pile in a corner, I hope this exhibition inspires the audiences with the power of transformation, andto re-examine the cultural stereotype of the discarded.
Diana Jacobs:
My Interest in describing the surface has become more abstract. I read about topology, more like absorbing information that was esoteric and mystical for me. I love the formulas and then transformations, the grids and graphs, all of the visual stimulation they afforded. The woof and warp of fabric became an axis upon which I chose to imagine a lifeline. A display of incidents of perhaps a path, these pieces are small internal events and a cosmic realm existing together. They are an exploration of change and the desire for stasis.
Organic Abstractions
Dates: November 11 - December 20, 2003
Artist Reception: Thursday, November 13 - 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Edwin Hill, Mel Hombre, James Schaub
Artist Statements:
James Schaub
My work investigates the emotional strength of color and form. The pieces combine naturalistic shapes, textures and colors with the ever present abstract properties: undulation, rhythm, variation and sequence. Controlled space, harmonious and discordant color schemes and intensely intricate patterns chart a remembered landscape. These places evoke a sense of loss and renewal that eulogizes familial and personal histories.
Mel Hombre
My paintings encourage close inspection. Affecting a loyalty to meddlesome marks, distinct systems and cryptic surfaces, my smallish paintings or drawings seek to concentrate experience into intimate and sensual, hard and soft spaces. In recent work, a dialogue between organization or structure and randomness or arbitrary form suggests a path that seeks to effectively reach beyond the artificiality and embarrassment of self-consciousness. My agenda is modest: to foreground a world in which all stories that we tell are about the words we use. As speculation in the visual art tends toward political, ethnic, ideological, religious, humanistic and other contrived daydreams, I simply hope to engender some unassuming enthusiasm for naive and sincere recreation.
Edwin K.Hill
Natures' design and architecture, as found in Arizona flora, has been merged witht the free flowing, natural art shapes of these vessels. I am constantly surprised and appreciative of the results of this of this collaborative effort between artist and nature as the work takes shape and natures' beauty is exposed.
My goal for this work is that through the observation of these pieces the viewer will become more aware of this natural beauty that surrounds us in numerous types of plants, plants, trees and bushes found growing in the Southwest.
Thomas A. Philabaum
My involvement as an artist began in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the Toledo Museum of Art School. Coincidentally, around the same time, Harvey Littleton, the acknowledged Father of the Studio Glass Movement, began his first experiments in glass working using a small furnace built in the parking lot of the Toledo Museum School. My interest then was Winslow Homer paintings, drawing from life, and playing my cornet.
During my college years, I immersed myself in drawing and painting until I discovered clay. Working in ceramics was like coming home. It fed my need for physical and spiritual involvement in the aesthetic process.
Following graduation, I took a job teaching near St. Louis, and began graduate ceramics studies at night. The hand-built slab forms I made then really called for "something else" to complete them. My instructor suggested blown glass forms as a possible solution. Furthermore, it was his idea that I move to Madison, Wisconsin, to study glass working with Harvey Littleton, and continue clay with Don Reitz. Taking heed, I began the quest to synthesize and marry clay and glass. While at Wisconsin I worked equally hard in both materials, but had less than successful results in combining the two.
 By that time, 1971, Harvey was in the process of removing himself from day-to-day studio teaching and concentrating more on our philosophical and aesthetical growth through group seminars. The person who took over hot glass operations was Eriks Rudans. Eriks was a tremendous influence on my approach to studio work.
After receiving a Master of Arts degree, I moved to Chicago to teach again and pay down my college loans. As much as I loved teaching and the rapport I had with kids, I knew something was missing. I didn't belong there.
A trip to the southwest in 1974 convinced me of my life's next direction. Shortly after arriving in Tucson, I took over the lease on a pottery school and started a clay and glass cooperative with six other people. We all struggled at juggling day jobs with studio work at night and on weekends, for years.
 By 1977, my glass started to be exhibited in some galleries around the country. However, most of my glass finances were covered by selling wine goblets, tumblers and paperweights at art fairs, and working as a photographer. Continuing to be involved in clay, I returned to school and received an MFA in ceramics from the University of Arizona (1983).
Around that time, I had perfected a technique of design and form in glass that came to be called the "Reptilian" series. These pieces really got things happening. I was invited to Iceland to show and give lectures and workshops and later with my new partner, Bob Carlson, to Germany to produce work for a solo exhibition (1985) and for some Museum collections. Shortly thereafter, we dissolved our partnership and since that time I have operated Philabaum Contemporary Art Glass in a remodeled and expanded, former Tastee-Freeze restaurant in Downtown Tucson.
Simultaneous to the "Reptilian Series", I developed a body of blown glass monolithic forms called Histoliths, merging ideas derived from my impressions of micro-scanning images of plant and animal tissues with obelisk-like forms. This work led to a commission for the Arizona Governor's Arts Awards.
In 1988 I was appointed to two local Arts Advisory Boards, and began to take an interest in the disbursement of art money, and influence. As a result of this involvement I learned to write grants, one of which allowed me to visit Guadalajara, Mexico (1989) to develop contacts for an exchange program with Tucson (Guadalajara & Tucson are "Sister Cities"). This culminated in another grant in 1990 to visit Mexico City to research a similar project, then on to Guadalajara. For two weeks I produced work at the Camarasa Glass factory in Tlaquepaque. The work was exhibited at the Galeria Palacio Nacional in Guadalajara, and the proceeds went to benefit the Institute for the Blind and a local orphanage.
In the late eighties I began to miss my roots in clay and started using glass as a material for "hand-building", i.e. making slabs and coils from molten glass and putting them together hot. Many sculptural forms emerged from this process, but the "Canastas" (large baskets and bowls of woven, colorful coils) became the best known pieces from this endeavor.
In the early nineties, I was able to renew my passion for drawing by painting with enamels on blown glass forms. Multiple layers are achieved by "casing" hot glass over each successive painted layer before the final expansion. The themes behind these pieces range from "The Blind Leading the Blind" to "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil".
In the late nineties, I began research into "Scavo" surfaces applied to the glass. This work is now the "Venerable Vessel" series, a collection of large vases and bowls with bright contrasting interiors to offset the ancient look of the surface.
Since 1981, I have continuously sold a line of production work through wholesale accounts and galleries who participate in the ACC Craft Fairs, and the Rosen Buyers Market of American Crafts. The stability behind this business has made it possible for me to pursue other projects and my personal artwork.
Philabaum Glass Gallery began by showing the works of artists I most admired. Photography, ceramics, paintings, sculpture, monoprints, drawings and glass have been represented, but since 1991 we have exclusively shown glass. Over 400 glass artists have participated in our exhibitions, the highlight of which is our annual Southwest Invitational-now in its 14th year.
From 1993-96 I served on the Board of Directors of the Glass Art Society. During that tenure, I was able to assist in the running of conferences in Toledo, Oakland, Asheville, and Boston. All good training, because in 1997 I was the co-chair for the largest conference ever; in Tucson. During the conference I had the good fortune to co-curate a major glass exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art with Joanne Stuhr (Curator of Exhibitions at the Museum).
Also, in 1997, I was elected to the Board of Trustees of the American Crafts Council, of which I was Chair of the Nominating Committee. In April 1998, I was invited to perform a demonstration of my Handbuilts at the Glass Art Society's 28th Annual Conference held in Seto, Japan at the Yumito Studios in Toyota City. I also taught a week long workshop in Shizuoka, Japan at Sunpu Studios.
In March of '98 Governor Jane Hull presented me with the Arizona Governor's Art Award for Artist of the Year.
In May 2000, the Community Foundation For Southern Arizona awarded me the prestigious $25,000 Arizona Arts Award in recognition of significant contribution to the growth and development of the arts in Arizona.
I've had an interesting and varied career, and I thank all those people who have had a hand in helping me.
Faculty ExhibitsDates Displayed: Feb 24 (M) – March 27 (Th), 2003
Bruce Clark
 Professor of Fine Jewelry at PCC West Campus-Bruce Clark is known for his meticulously designed inlay jewelry utilizing platinum, fine silver and gold. Clark's recent work, Wound Bound and Wrapped Around, breaks with tradition, the humble materials of rubber and thorns with gold and silver leafing create the foundation of this more playful body of work.  The nature of this work touches upon the notion of a light and dark side of Good and Evil: Thebracelet Cuernos (horns, Devil) is madeup of woundsections of soft rubber tubing disrupted by threatening silver coatedmesquite thorns; in juxta position with Cuernosis the bracelet Alas (wings, Angel) created in gilded rubber tubing with "wings" made of flexible cut rubber. This body of work is what Clark considers "art play" as opposed to "art work."
Mark Newport
 Assistant Professor of Fiber Arts at ASU-Tempe- Mark Newport's, recent work is based on contrasting ideologies as well. Newport questions the status of some of America's most noted male role models, sports figures, politicians, service men and super heroes and their obvious sense of responsibility to "teach" boys what masculine identity is, or should be. Newport combines what is considered "feminine art" beading, embroidery and quilting with images of "strong" men,. Imagery of Spiderman, Batman and other super heroes are superimposed onto quilts and are then carefully enhanced with embroidery and beads, clearly contradicting the strength and masculinity associated with being a superhero.
Clare Verstegen
 Professor of Fiber Arts, ASU School of Art - Tempe- Clare Verstegen's highly textured, geometrically balanced works, reference opposing forces. Verstegen creates silk-screened canvases combining hard-edged flat geometric shapes with photographic images ranging from Cheerios to lobster claws. Verstegen's surfaces are built, each element is added separately , providing the illusion of texture and dimension yet the canvas surface remains smooth. Each image is always geometrically divided, Verstegen often uses the element of symmetry which references differing conditions, touching upon the notion of death and renewal.
Barrios
Dates: Oct. 28 (M) - Dec 20 (F), 2002 & Jan. 2 (F) - Jan. 10 (F), 2003
  On November 2, 2002 Pima Community College dedicated its West Campus Art Gallery to the late photographer, Louis Carlos Bernal. The dedication included a retrospective exhibiton of Bernal's work, a catalog of the exhibiton and a panel discusion with catalog essayists James Enyeart, Luis Jimenez, Patricia Preciado Martin and Leslie Marmon Silko. The event also featured the premiere of a documentary of Bernal's life and work.
  Bernal taught photography at Pima's West Campus for 18 years, while gaining recognition internationally for his images capturing the essence of Mexican American life throughout Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Among many honors, Bernal was selected to join 9 other photographers to cover the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
![Untitled [Lisa Bernal], 1971. Louis Carlos Bernal.](http://wc.pima.edu/art_gallery/images/bandera.jpg)
Pima College West Campus Visual Arts Division Faculty initiated the dedication of the gallery after Bernal was struck by a car in 1989. In an unprecedented move, the Pima Community College Board of Governors unanimously voted to name the gallery for Bernal.
Beneath the Surface
Dates Displayed: September 3 (Tu) - Oct 18 (F), 2002
 Photographer, Karen Hymer-Thompson, received her BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and her Masters degrees in Photography form the University of New Mexico, she currently teaches Photography at Pima Community College. Her current work is made up of images recording "fragments and glimpses" of her travels in Cuba. The photographs are composed of the textures and shapes of worn streets and buildings in rural areas of the island and Havana. Through her images of street scenes and family life she reveals a place of visual intensity where time is seemingly suspended. Although the images are not overtly political, she views any American presence in Cuba as a political act.
 Sculptor, Bryon Draper , received hi BFA and Masters degree in Sculpture from Brig ham Young University, where he currently teaches. Draper's interest in ruins of antiquity collides with a modern sensibility in his sculptures of fragmented figures. Draper constructs forms interchanging cast bronze or steel fragments of figurative elements with texture blocks of cut stone using spatial alignment to tie the fragments together. The viewer visually completes the figure as a whole, making his or her own connections and conclusions.
 Printmaker, Monirul Islam, a graduate of the Institute of Fine Arts-Dhaka University in Bangladesh and New York University Department of Art, offers a rich vision of texture, rhythm and abundance through his large viscosity etchings. The surfaces are highly engaged, crowded with lines and forms emblematic of villages in Bangladesh or the city streets of New York, where movement is both suggested and actual, Islam's work demonstrates his mastery of printmaking as well as a unique language of form and color to spin his "Stories of Past Memories". In conjunction with this exhibit, Monirul gave a lecture.
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