Our far-flung staff

Heather Sealy Lineberry, ASU Art Museum’s senior curator and associate director, spent part of last week in Washington, D.C., participating in a national museum panel at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She and the other panelists were there to give advice on the Holocaust Museum’s exhibition State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda, which is part of a 10-year initiative on the topic of propaganda.

Heather writes:

“…the powerful exhibition explores how Hitler and the Nazis utilized propaganda to seize power and implement their radical and horrifying policies in Germany and beyond. The Nazis utilized the latest technologies and techniques and permeated all levels of society with bold and positive-seeming posters, monumental and historicist paintings and sculpture, radio, film, classroom materials revising German history or, most shocking of all, children’s games. The exhibition clearly shows that their frighteningly quick rise to power — within a decade — was fueled by Hitler’s deep understanding and use of propaganda.

“The Holocaust Museum plans to travel the exhibition nationally in 2013 and called the invitational meeting to seek advice on reconfiguring the exhibition to appear in various spaces and how to stimulate broader discussion about propaganda, representation and hate speech in our communities.

“It was a truly inspiring day of sharing with other museum professionals from the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Field Museum in Chicago, The Wolfsonian and Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, among others. It’s a pretty rare occasion when we can come together across disciplines to share our experiences and thoughts on how our museums, exhibitions and programs can be powerful spaces for sharing and addressing challenging, tough topics. I have already chatted with possible venues for the exhibition in Phoenix. It would be a great opportunity for us to explore the issues raised by this history. In the words of Adolf Hitler, ‘Propaganda is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.’ “

Guyton\Walker in the house

“Guyton\Walker” might sound like a law firm or a male model, but it’s actually one of the hottest names on the international art scene right now, and it’s actually two last names sandwiched together: those of New York artists Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker. (Here’s a link to an Interview Magazine piece on them, and here’s a recent New Yorker column about a project Guyton\Walker worked on this summer.)

Normally you’d have to travel to New York or L.A. to see Guyton\Walker’s work here in the United States, but thanks to the Ovitz Family Collection in Los Angeles, we have  one of the dynamic duo’s installations here in Tempe, in the ASU Art Museum’s Turk Gallery, until January 22.

Come see what the buzz is about, before Untitled, 2009 returns to the limelight.

Haiku You

As part of our “Lasting Impressions” exhibition of Japanese prints from the ASU Art Museum collection, you’ll find a haiku station in the gallery, where visitors are invited to write their own haiku and leave them on shelves for others to enjoy.

A refresher course (in case, like us, you haven’t written one since the 4th grade): Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry with a distinctive pattern: 5 syllables in the first line, 7 syllables in the second, and 5 again in the third line.

Here’s an example, by Japanese poet Kijo Murakami:

First autumn morning
The mirror I stare into
shows my father’s face

We dropped by the haiku station yesterday to see what people have been writing. Here are three we particularly enjoyed:

A break from the sun
And perhaps discovery
Bring me here each week

Raining outside wet
The thunder shakes my heart now
Dogs at home shaking

The heat will soon break
so much depends on weather
the heat will return

And one more favorite, from someone who signed his name Linus:

Haiku is easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Refrigerator

Deborah Sussman Joins Our Team!

Deborah Sussman

Arizona State University Art Museum is pleased to announce that Deborah Sussman has joined the Museum as PR Specialist.

“Deborah is a perfect addition to the museum team; her deep involvement with the arts, honed journalistic skills, sharp critical thinking and digital fluency set her up as the perfect connect point between what is evolving in the museum and the wider community, locally, nationally and internationally,” say Gordon Knox, Director of the ASU Art Museum.

An arts writer for local and national publications, Sussman has both covered and been an integral part of the arts community in the Greater Phoenix area for many years. The breadth of her experience, combined with her knowledge of the museum and its mission, uniquely qualify her to promote the place that Raphael Rubinstein of Art in America deemed “the single most impressive venue for contemporary art in Arizona.”

In addition to writing criticism, Sussman has collaborated on a variety of projects with local artists and institutions. In May of this year, she traveled to Sydney, Australia, under the auspices of the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts School of Art, as part of a contingent from Arizona attending the Sydney Biennale, and posted dispatches from Sydney on the ASU Art Museum blog. Last year, she was invited to provide the text to accompany a series of images by Denis Gillingwater, for an exhibition of his work in Rome. In 2007, together with Phoenix artist Jon Haddock, she created My Art Detour, an original comic for Phoenix New Times.

Sussman is a founding member of Collective Gesture, an online community of artists, curators and writers. She was responsible for curating the Collective Gesture group installation and event Garage S., in 2003, as well as the 2005 show Motherload, an installation by Sue Chenoweth and Melinda Bergman at the Writer’s Bloc in Phoenix; she also co-curated Textology: The Art of Letters at the Tempe Public Library in 2004. As an artist, her work was included in Do Me, a 2007 Collective Gesture show at Trunk Space, and in the 2003 show You Still Draw Like a Girl, at Sixth Street Studios.

A graduate of Smith College, where she studied comparative literature and art, Sussman began her career assisting downtown New York gallerist Barbara Flynn, and later worked as an editor at Scholastic Magazines. She received her Masters in English/Creative Writing from Hollins University, and her MFA in Fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She has taught creative writing at UVa, Phoenix College, and Changing Hands Bookstore, among others; currently she teaches a course on writing art and design criticism for ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts School of Art, as well as co-teaching the creative writing workshop Mothers Who Write for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Sussman comes to ASU from Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, where she served as associate editor, reporter and opinion writer for more than five years. Her work there garnered numerous local and national honors, including two first-place awards for editorial writing from the Arizona Press Club. Sussman’s art criticism has been published in Art in America, ARTnews, and art ltd., as well as on artforum.com, and her literary criticism has appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times. She is also a commentator for KJZZ, the local NPR affiliate.

Little Teaser

We thought you might enjoy a little teaser for one of the performances happening at this Fridays (10/8) FREE Opening Reception from 7-9pm.

Here is a link to the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3uQhviiPRI