A presentation by Lowry Burgess and Frank Pietronigro about artists whose medium is outer space.
Thursday, March 23, 2006, 7 pm H&SS Auditorium, Room A53 Baker Hall (lower level)
Presented by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
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Distinguished fellow in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and professor in the School of Art, Lowry Burgess, and collaborator Frank Pietronigro, an associate fellow in the STUDIO, will present their work in the field of space art.
Lowry Burgess will discuss his efforts to gain support and acknowledgement for this pioneering work, and present an overview of his poetic work. In his view, "In a time of extraordinary global cultural tensions, the global community needs to reach toward and express shared human feelings--in particular, those feelings associated with the universal surrounding sky with its starry cosmos from which we derive our very being. Recently, in the middle of the last century, it became possible to displace the whole of humanity, mind, heart and body from the surface of the earth to venture into cosmic space and time. From that moment, a limited number of artists have been engaged with this new context in the service of unfolding its broader meanings."
Frank Pietronigro will describe his experience and present video of the "drift paintings" he created in microgravity during a parabolic flight aboard NASA's KC135 turbojet. He will also discuss his role as project director and co-founder of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium (ZGAC), an international organization dedicated to fostering greater access for artists to space flight technology and zero gravity space through the creation of international partnerships with space agencies, arts organizations and universities.
The artists will also present an overview of their current project, the "Space Art Track" of the 25th International Space Development Conference, co-sponsored by the National Space Society and Planetary Society. They will help facilitate a series of inspirational presentations and panels complimented by an exhibition, film screenings, and Zero Gravity Arts Consortium parabolic flight for artists and webcast direct from Zero Gravity Corporation's Boeing 727 jet.
For more information, please call x83454.
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About the artists
Lowry Burgess is an internationally renowned environmental artist/poet and educator. He created the first official non-scientific payload, the "Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture," taken into outer space by NASA in 1989. His major 35-year opus, the "Quiet Axis," contains 8 major aspects, all containing celestial and cosmic elements. His artworks and documents are in museums, archives and collections in the US, Europe and Japan.
He is professor of art and former dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a distinguished fellow in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. He is also a member of Carnegie Mellon's Center for the Arts in Society. He has held other distinguished chairs in Hartford and Montreal. He has been a fellow and senior consultant at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 25 years where he created and directed large collaborative projects in the US and Europe.
He is the originator of the international New Year's arts festival called "First Night." He originated the arts in the subways programs for the Department of Transportation. He has developed and advised in more than a dozen major city scale and national projects. He has been featured in television and radio broadcasts in the US, Europe and Japan, including NOVA, Smithsonian World and NPR.
His book, "Burgess, the Quiet Axis" received the prestigious Imperishable Gold Award from Le Devoir in Montreal. He has been honored with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Institute of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Artist Foundation and Kellogg Foundation.
Frank Pietronigro is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and author residing in San Francisco, California. Pietronigro has achieved international recognition for projects he creates that build bridges between artists and space flight technology. As a result of "Research Project Number 33: Investigating the Creative Process in a Microgravity Environment", Frank became the first American painter to create three-dimensional "drift paintings" while floating in zero gravity aboard NASA's KC135 turbojet.
In 2004, Frank Pietronigro was appointed associate fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and currently serves as co-founder and project director of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium. Pietronigro also serves as co-chair for the Space Art Track of the 25th International Space Development Conference.
He was invited to participate in Paris' historic International Art Outsiders Festival: Space Arts Festival and was included in a symposium and presentation titled Visibility - Legibility of Space Art: Zero Gravity Art: The Experience of Parabolic Flight, that was held at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in 2003. Pietronigro's work has also been presented with museums and institutions, including the virtual Tate In Space, Tate Museum, London; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; Museum Fur Gestaltung, Zurich; Galeria Ze Dos Bois, Lisbon; Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, NY; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco; Blohard Gallery at Vox Populi, Philadelphia; the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. He was appointed by the San Francisco Art Commission to direct the 39th Annual San Francisco Arts Festival, a month long celebration of the visual and performing arts of the Bay Area.
Pietronigro received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in Interdisciplinary Arts and also studied fine art at the Philadelphia College of Art.
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The STUDIO for Creative Inquiry is an interdisciplinary research facility within Carnegie Mellon's College of Fine Arts. The College of Fine Arts is a community of nationally and internationally recognized artists and professionals organized into five schools: Architecture, Art, Design, Drama and Music, and their associated centers and programs.
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