Call for Entries: Parsons Festival 2016 Exhibition
The Parsons Festival Exhibition is designed to showcase talent from across Parsons. If you’re in a bachelor’s or associate’s degree program and set to graduate this spring, show us what you’ve got!

About you: You’re graduating. You’ve spent the last few years developing an expertise, a way of thinking, a way of designing and making art that builds on your studies but is unique to you. You’ve put that perspective into your work. This is a moment to have it to be seen within the broader Parsons context, in one of Parsons’ signature campus locations during graduation.

About the show: Combining works from across all of Parsons’ undergraduate and associate’s degree programs, this exhibition will take place in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, including the Kellen and Aronson galleries, hallway, and lobby. It will be on view as a highlight of this year’s Parsons Festival from May 5 through May 20, 2016. The theme of the exhibition will address the impact of design and art practice, so submissions of works that engage critical social issues or specific communities’ needs are especially encouraged.

How to apply: Read below and fill out the entry form. It asks for things like your name and program, along with images, video, or links that’ll give an idea of your work. It’s pretty straightforward and makes sure you provide all the information that’s needed to review your submission.

Important dates and information:

Eligibility — Open to select graduating students in BFA, BBA, BS, and AAS programs.

Theme/Criteria — Preference will be given to submissions that address issues related to critical social issues or specific communities’ needs, including (but not limited to) urban and global sustainability, social justice, and social and personal agency through art and design practice.

Deadline for submission — April 5, 2016, at midnight

Notification — April 22, 2016

Delivery of work — April 25–28, 2016 (You must be able to turn in your work by April 28.)

Exhibition on view — May 5–20, 2016 (opening reception TBD)

Submission form – festival.parsons.edu/festival-application-2016/

For questions about the exhibition, contact parsonsfestival@newschool.edu.

March 29, 2016  – Ted Wiggins – Optical Hopscotch: Tricks of perception in experimental animation

7-9 PM

Room M 101 (Bark room), 66 Fifth Ave., lobby level

Filmmaker and software developer Ted Wiggin will discuss tricks of perception used by 20th century experimental filmmakers, their evocative potential, and impact on contemporary independent animation. Ted Wiggins is a filmmaker and software developer who strives to bend the computer towards traditional animation and analog techniques. His films attempt to show rational systems that transcend their own logic. After graduating from RISD in 2011, he moved to New York and now works at Hornet Inc. Ted also makes software for non objective filmmaking, which is user friendly, versatile and freely available online.

March 15, 2016 – Tom Palaima – Scribes, doodles, punning and cartooning in a Bronze Age bureaucracy

7-9 PM

Room M 101 (Bark room), 66 Fifth Ave., lobby level

Tom Palaima, a MacArthur fellow (1985-90) for his work in Aegean prehistory and early Greek language and culture, is director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory and Robert M. Armstrong professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He has lectured, written and taught extensively on the subjects of ancient writing systems, the reconstruction of ancient culture, decipherment theory, Greek language, war and violence studies, ancient religion, ethnicity, feasting ritual and kingship ideology, song as an important means of communicating social criticism, and the music of Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Woody Guthrie. Tonight he will discuss the doodles and distractions of the human beings who wrote in the Linear B script on clay tablets in the late Greek Bronze Age (1400-1200 BCE) and the tradition of picture-writing out of which their writing system and their craft developed.

Thursday, March 10, 2016 SPECIAL WILL EISNER WEEK 2016 EVENT

Seven Days of Creation: Will Eisner and The Spirit Daily Newspaper Strip With AL JAFFEE, DENNIS O’NEIL, BRENDAN BURFORD & DANNY FINGEROTH

7-9 PM

University Center, Room U L105 , lower-level lobby

75 years ago, in 1941, although busy with the Sunday supplement Spirit section (launched the year before) and other work, Will Eisner was offered the holy grail for cartoonists of his generation: the opportunity to do The Spirit as a daily strip. Eisner leapt at the offer, and The Spirit syndicated comic strip launched on October 13, 1941. Syndicated cartoonists were the rock stars of that era, and Eisner was eager to become one, and not just for the financial prospects it offered. As he said that year in a famous Philadelphia Record interview about the project, “The comic strip…is no longer a comic strip but, in reality, an illustrated novel. It is new and raw in form just now, but material for limitless intelligent development.” Perhaps the only comics artist of his generation to speak in such terms, Eisner was eager to explore what could be done with the venerable comic strip medium. The Spirit daily strip lasted more than three years, and Eisner found it to be a very different type of sequential art challenge than the comic book story that, even at age 24, he was already a master of. Tonight, a panel of Eisner experts, including AL JAFFEE (Mad magazine legend and Eisner studio veteran), DENNIS O’NEIL(longtime editor and writer of Batman), BRENDAN BURFORD (Comics Editor at King Features Syndicate) and moderator DANNY FINGEROTH (author of Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero and Chair of Will Eisner Week), will show samples of—and will discuss the historic significance of—The Spirit syndicated strip, as well as its place in Eisner’s artistic development.

March 8, 2016 – Frederick (“Rick”) Schneider – Polish Posters: Reflecting the Soul of a Nation

7-9 PM

Room M 101 (Bark room), 66 Fifth Ave., lobby level

The poster art of Poland has made a significant contribution to international visual culture. In particular, works created after World War 2 through the 1980s, in a genre known as the “Polish school,” are revered by museums of modern art, collectors, and design educators around the world for their illustrative power, daring, and innovation. Yet, these works and the artists who produced them are not well known to the general public. In the aftermath of two world wars, occupation and international economic depression, with shifting borders and the slow reconstruction of bombed cities and under repressive Communist rule, the Polish people struggled to reinstitute cultural events and recreate venues for plays, films, opera, concerts and the circus. To promote these performances, Polish artists painted, collaged and handlettered poster art, devising imaginative, personal interpretations of content and narrative—all while their country experienced deprivation, social upheaval, demonstrations and workers’ strikes. In spite of hostile conditions, Polish posters found their way onto city walls and construction sites that became impromptu galleries of art for ordinary citizens. Using playful, surreal or thought provoking images and a language of visual metaphor, analogy, and culturally recognizable associations, Polish poster artists defied governmental restrictions and censorship to produce work which has come to be recognized as part of a unified and ultimately, national form of expression. The artistic lineage of Polish posters can be traced to early 20th century influences, but most especially to the innovative and courageous poster artists of the pre- and post World War 2 era who took teaching positions in the newly reopened art schools of Poland. Passing down their theories and practice to succeeding generations, they taught painting, composition and conceptual thinking through the lens of poster design. This was a time of extraordinary works being created under extraordinary circumstances, and Polish posters remain an inspiration to visual communicators everywhere.

Frederick (“Rick”) Schneider has taught the history of illustration at the Art Institute of Boston (now Lesley University College of Art and Design) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and at Parsons/The New School in New York City. He is an award-winning graphic designer, art director and freelance illustrator, whose appreciation for and knowledge of the history of illustration has influenced and inspired students for more than 30 years. In 2015, with the patronage and collaboration of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rick has initiated and directed the design of an important new global resource for the study and enjoyment of illustration history – www.illustrationhistory.org. The site is home to essays, video presentations, timelines, book and exhibition catalogue excerpts, and biographies of historically important masters and contemporary practitioners. It is designed to encourage research and provide resources to all those interested in illustration’s vital place in art history. Image: Wiktor Sadowski. A theatrical poster for musical My Fair Lady done in 1986.

March 1, 2016 – Theodore Barrow – “From the Easter Wedding to the Frantick Lover”

7-9 PM

Room M 101 (Bark room), 66 Fifth Ave., lobby level

Theodore Barrow will present and discuss his paper, “From the Easter Wedding to the Frantick Lover” — an exploration of the relationship between text and image in the long eighteenth century. Theodore Barrow is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His area of focus is intertextuality in the art of John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer.

February 24 (Special Weds. date) – Sara Lipton on Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography

7-9 PM

Orozoco Room, A-712, 66 W. 12th Street

Sara Lipton is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Stony Brook and the author of Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée, which won the Medieval Academy of America’s John Nicholas Brown prize. The recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post.

The 142nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at 7pm at The New School, 66 West 12th Street,  Room A 712 (Orozco Room). Free and open to the public.

This is a speed tour through a wide variety of images, mostly works on paper: children’s drawings fromn a Japanese interment camp in China, examples of Kitaj’s “autobiography” drawn from screened book covers,  commissioned portraits of US soldiers in Iraq found in Baghdad’s Green Zone, works of obscure artists who need reputational upgrading  (large apocalyptic woodcuts.  WWII ink drawings., 1920s cross country travelogue Works illustrate transformations in Russian propaganda policies, the output of a famous Mexican print workshop and transformations in Hungarian  communist aesthetic practice)

Professor Price is on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and at Cardozo Law School in New York. The work has been assembled over 50 years of marriage to the art historian Aimée Brown Price (who has admitted to being not so adventurous as her husband nor so aesthetically evolved)..

“Laughter is a Devastating Weapon (Tate Publishing, October 2015) is an exciting new publication devoted to the work of German artist John Heartfield (1891-1968), known for his incomparably dark, mocking, politically pointed photocollages. The title aptly refers to the satirical power of Heartfield’s artistic efforts, which earned him one of the top positions on the Nazis’ “the most wanted list” when they came to power in 1933 and nearly cost him his life.”