Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition featuring works by JoAnne Berke. The exhibition, Significant Moments, will run from November 24 through December 31.

JoAnne Berke is a retiring professor of Art Education at Humboldt State University, a position she has held since 1994.  A life-long world traveler who continues to teach Art-Ed workshops in China, Berke is responsible for having mentored and trained many art instructors who are currently working in the K-12 school systems in California and beyond.

The exhibition, Significant Moments, has a selection of works spanning the period of 1985 through the present.  Works on paper, drawing, mixed media, paint and mosaic will be on display.

In Berke’s mixed media pieces, her penchant for incorporating the written word as a conceptual device that simultaneously provides a compositional structure for the work, is on full display.  Visitors to the gallery will also encounter mosaic and found object sculpture that range from the absurdly ironic to somber beauty in tone.  Two of these sculptures, Seed Catcher, 2009 and Ancestors, 2017 highlight Berke’s bravado mosaic technique as applied to architectural forms.

JoAnne Berke’s conceptual approach is tempered by a narrative impulse that reflects significant episodes and developments in her life.  This is especially evident in the three rebuses that document her life events spanning the years of 1985 through 2014.  A rebus is a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures and individual letters; for instance, apex might be represented by a picture of an ape followed by the letter X.

The artist states that, “At the time of this exhibition I will be completing my last semester teaching at HSU. I think of this exhibition as a significant moment and the exclamation point to the end of a successful career of 45-years teaching art, and also perhaps, a time for my own rebirth as an artist.”

Exhibition Schedule 

The exhibition will run from November 24 through December 31.  A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, December 2, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. The gallery will be open daily from noon to 5 p.m. The gallery will be closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California.  The gallery was recently relocated and renamed after 19 years in its former location on First Street in Eureka. For more information call 707-443-6363

Once you reveal to someone that you’re a visual artist, they inevitably ask, “What medium do you work in; are you a painter, a sculptor, a printmaker?” Even though most people want a simple answer, I usually give them the unsatisfactory response that I’ve worked in wide range of media through out my artistic career. For me it’s never been about the medium, it’s about the idea and how I can best convey the concept.

 In this exhibition I have chosen two and three-dimensional pieces that are mixed media and narrative in nature. They have been described as wry interpretations of our culture and society and are examples of work that has had significant meaning in my life as I’ve responded to personal transitions and global, and societal issues.

In Rebus I, II and III, I use the format of a rebus, a word puzzle that uses pictures to represent words, to tell stories about personal transitions.  The rebus became popular in the 18th century. In linguistics, the Rebus Principle means using existing symbols such as pictograms that are similar to what many ancient writing systems used. As our world becomes more and more visual I feel the rebus is having a rebirth and all of a sudden feels very 21st century.

In pieces, It’s all French to Me and  he Book of Knowledge texting acronyms and technological transitions in my lifetime are explored.

 In  Seed Catcher and  Irma I speak to ecological and climate issues.

The three-dimensional piece,  Ancestors is a meditation on mortality.

Become One With Nature refers to the struggle with the artist process.

Shiva Lingam are reflections on the unity and duality of male/female energy. 
At the time of this exhibition I will be completing my last semester teaching at HSU. I think of this exhibition as a significant moment and the exclamation point to the end of a successful career of 45-years teaching art, and also perhaps, a time for my own rebirth as an artist.

JoAnne Berke
Winter 2017

Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery presents, The Water Seekers, a solo exhibition of paintings by Teresa Stanley. The show runs October 3 through November 5. Stanley, an abstract painter based in Northern California, is a studio arts professor with a focus on painting and drawing, who has taught at Humboldt State University since 1991. This collection, painted during the winter and spring of this current year, draws inspiration from the subject of water, its symbolism, and the power it wields over our collective consciousness.   

The paintings in this exhibition were conceived during the record rainfall of the El Niño storms of last winter and spring, preceded by a long and severe drought in California. Stanley worked in her studio with the daily sound and climate of steady rainfall all around her. She began to imagine a narrative, “where the search for water was paramount. The search was not only necessary for survival, it was also important because water represented an affirmation of some sort of truth.”

Clusters of information populate her canvases, distilled and interpreted in her painted forms and abstract compositions. They reflect her imaginative narrative and her personal influences, which Stanley states include, “the national political drama, her late father’s electronic schematic designs, the music of Alice Coltrane, the photographs of Bernd and Hila Becher, the color in Matisse's paintings and most importantly, my daily walks with my dog at the marsh near my home . . . the paintings are bulwarks of a personal nature, constructed from a collection of experiences, a hedge made to contain certain privately gathered truths.”

Stanley continues, “I was highly influenced by feminist artists of the 1970s who made the return to narrative forms of artmaking as a way of documenting their largely unexamined experience.  It was through the influence of artists such as Elizabeth Murray, Philip Guston, Susan Rothenberg, among others, that I found a way to combine my interest in process and formalism informed by personal narrative.  Joseph Beuys was also a powerful influence on many artists of my generation and his famous dictum, “Art is life, life is Art.” was a message to make work about the reality of daily concerns/existence. Many artists, myself included, combine a largely abstract sensibility with the interest in making shapes/objects look like tangible “things” or environments.  Some artists that come to mind in this regard are Martin Puryear working in sculpture and Anish Kapoor also in sculpture.” 

The Water Seekers: Paintings by Teresa Stanley, is produced by students enrolled in the Museum and Gallery Practices Program at Humboldt State University. These students participate in the planning and production of exhibitions at HSU Third Street Gallery.  The gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with experience that will help them to enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.

Exhibition Schedule and Location 
The exhibition will run from October 3 through November 5. The gallery is open daily from noon to 5 p.m.  A reception for the artist will be held at HSU Third Street Gallery Saturday, October 7, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka's monthly Arts Alive event. Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California.  For more information, call (707) 443-6363

The paintings in this exhibit are from a series called The Water Seekers.  I completed these paintings in a very concentrated period over the winter and spring of 2017, a period that also happened to mark the end of a severe drought in California.  The heavy rains during that winter created a steady rhythm in my studio.

As I worked, I began to imagine an environment where the search for water was paramount. The search was not only necessary for survival, it was also important because water represented an affirmation of some sort of truth.  In constructing this imagined environment, I created images that direct, contain, extract, traverse and conduct water.  Taking the form of blueprints, pipes, bridges, factories, escarpments and towers, the images that emerge in these painting seem to be constructed resourcefully, if precariously, from random scraps and remnants of instructions, blueprints, ephemera, thoughts, memories and historical evidence.  They are bulwarks of a personal nature, constructed from a collection of experiences, a hedge made to contain certain truths.

My work is abstract but I am guided by a strong narrative impulse. My process is intuitive and I prefer to puzzle out the painting through the process of making rather than starting with a concrete plan or image.  My work courts uncertainty and chaos while also desiring control, analysis and rationality. I am drawn to the natural world but feel a strong affinity for architectural spaces. My paintings are humorous but come from a sincere and heartfelt place.  I feel comfortable working within these contradictions.

The use of personal narrative in abstraction is in part a reaction to the austerity of pure abstraction (i.e. minimalism) and seeks instead to infuse the work with content. As the Guggenheim Museum stated in its notes for the exhibition titled Storylines,

During the 1990s, a generation of younger artists embraced the concept of storytelling to articulate the politics of identity and difference, investing both abstract and representational forms with narrative content.

I was highly influenced by feminist artists of the 1970s who made the return to narrative forms of art making as a way of documenting their largely unexamined experience.  It was through the influence of artists such as Elizabeth Murray, Philip Guston, Susan Rothenberg, among others, that I found a way to combine my interest in process and formalism informed by personal narrative.  Joseph Beuys was also a powerful influence on many artists of my generation and his famous dictum, “Art is life, life is Art.” was a message to make work about the reality of daily concerns/existence. Many artists, myself included, combine a largely abstract sensibility with the interest in making shapes/objects look like tangible “things” or environments.  Some artists that come to mind in this regard are Martin Puryear, working in sculpture and Anish Kapoor also in sculpture.

Although inspired by the idea of water or lack thereof, I do not view these paintings as commenting on environmental issues. Certainly, environmental issues are a pressing concern for me and that concern (and its attendant anxiety) hovers in the background. However, in this work, I use the metaphor of water as symbolic of the search for truth – perhaps the truth of one’s existence.

I have been always very interested in how differently we map and organize our truthful, authentic experience of the world.  If you were to ask different people to describe their life experience with sincerity, there were would be countless and astounding numbers of different responses. This is most elegantly and articulated in Rebecca Solnit’s book, Infinite City.

In her book, Solnit sees maps not as merely directions on paper or a screen, but also as evidence of the many different ways one could map a specific and personal experience of geography. She invites different people to create maps of San Francisco that describe spaces that contain and plot such disparate subjects as shipyards, butterflies, cinemas, Native American tribes and queer spaces, creating distinctly different and revealing ways of mapping one’s experience. This is what I hope to do with my life and work and hence, the multitude of influences that I include as inspiration for my work.

Random events, people and objects informed this series. The national political drama, my late father's electronic schematic drawings, the music of Alice Coltrane, the photographs of Bernd and Hila Becher, the color in Matisse's paintings and most importantly, my daily walks with my dog at the marsh near my home.  I take it all in and let the experience of it wash over me in all its wonderful confusion.

Teresa Stanley
Autumn, 2017

Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery presents, Transportraits, a traveling solo exhibition of photographic portraits of transgender men by Lorenzo Triburgo. The exhibition runs from January 31 through March 5. 

Lorenzo Triburgo resides in New York where he makes his art and also works as an online instructor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Art at Oregon State University. 

Having come out as transgender at age 28, Triburgo wanted to share his experiences through a project, which would address his trans genderqueer experience. His goal is to create “positive representations of trans existence in a cultural climate lacking these affirmations.”

Triburgo states that, ”I set out to allow the fabrication of the Natural to emerge for itself. I followed instructions from Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting to create my first oil paintings, each of which would serve as a backdrop for a portrait. The resulting project, Transportraits, employs these constructed representations of nature and the language of photographic portraiture (along with all its rhetorical baggage) to poke a hole in the balloon of “truth.” While the painted backdrops in each photograph serve to underscore the artifice that our culture unconsciously embraces in its understanding of the natural world, so too, do Triburgo’s sitters subvert normative constructs of masculinity, exposing them to be equally artificial fabrications.

These portraits offer a vision where the trans experience is not hyperbolized by focusing on the evolution of the body. Instead, as Eliza Steinbock, in writing about Triburgo’s work, they are, “about an artwork that brings the viewer closer in to imagine a different trans reality.” As opposed to objectification, Triburgo presents the confidence and humanity of his sitters.

Lorenzo Triburgo’s Transportaits is produced by Humboldt State students. Students enrolled in the Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program participate in the daily management and planning of shows at the gallery.  The gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with experience that will help them to enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.

Artist Talk and Reception

Lorenzo Triburgo will present an artist talk about his work at Humboldt State University on Thursday, February 2 starting at 5 p.m. The presentation will be held in Room 102 in the Art Department Building on the Humboldt State University campus.  This event is free to the public and the campus community.

A reception for the artist will be held at HSU Third Street Gallery on Saturday, February 4 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  The exhibition will run from January 31 through March 5. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. and is closed on Mondays. Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California. The gallery was recently relocated and renamed after 19 years in its former location on First Street in Eureka. For more information, call (707) 443-6363

I began making photographs when I was eleven. I was captivated by the idea of creating a situation that was close to the truth, and documented as truth through the camera, but that was an extension of my imagination. In my teen years, I recognized that the camera’s ability to construct alternate truths (if in the right hands) could lend itself rather nicely to cultural criticism. In fact, I realized that photography was the perfect medium for addressing the falsities I witnessed all around me. 

Playing with the language of photography in the service of gender transgression has been a rich source of inquiry and joy in my creative life. I find an interesting relationship exists between photographic truth and biological determinism and I attempt to exploit that relationship in my images.

In 2008, when I was 28, I came out as transgender. I knew I wanted to create a project that addressed my trans, genderqueer experience, and that at the forefront of the project needed to be the fallacy of a fixed gender identity, affixed to the biological. Feminists work tirelessly to reveal the misconception of the perceived connection between “the body” and the “gender.”  I am convinced that documenting my own physical changes (or any trans bodies) would serve only to solidify this imagined relationship.

I set out to allow the fabrication of the Natural to emerge for itself. I followed instructions from Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting to create my first oil paintings, each of which would serve as a backdrop for a portrait. The resulting project, Transportraits, employs these constructed representations of nature and the language of photographic portraiture (along with all its rhetorical baggage) to poke a hole in the balloon of “truth.”

My sincerest gratitude extends to all the people who graciously gave their time to sit for a portrait and courageously lend their likeness to this project.

Although trans existence is not safe and it is not easy (although, make no mistake, it is filled with its own joys and delights), the people who are presented in these portraits made a decision to be out. It is because of this willingness that Transportraits can contribute positive representations of trans existence in a cultural climate lacking these affirmations.

I have received letters and messages from trans people around the world in appreciation of these photographs and it is for these people for whom I continue my life as an artist.

Lorenzo Triburgo
February 2017

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Photographed faces of masculine stature greet the viewer, proudly standing out against the soft palette of painted natural scenes. American artist Lorenzo Triburgo’s series titled Transportraits ask for a double take, precisely the gesture of an inside joke delivered with a smile and wink.1 To experience the breadth of the series is to reach an “aha!” moment: the portraits concern representing heroism more than the individual story. The more one looks, the more contrasts emerge: the painted and the photographed, the referenced and the indexical, the silly and the serious, oscillating across the threshold of an affected landscape and a sincere posture. Who is this real person in the fake surrounding?

The title informs the viewer that these people presenting themselves proudly are trans, and from their appearance and stance they present as an array of trans masculinities. Shot from slightly below the subject, the camera leaves no choice other than to admire the sitter. Each person was instructed to imagine themselves gazing out at a sea of people: Triburgo wanted them to feel bigger and better than anyone else. The pose is recuperative, to locate the laudatory in the place of recrimination, if not criminalization. Transgender figures of all stripes and gender ambiguous forms such as androgyny typically follow one of two representational stereotypes in the visual arts: sexualized bodies such as the Sleeping Hermaphroditus (artist and year unknown, after 155 BC), or adhering to the trope of before-and-after transition imagery. Most portraits of trans* and gender variant people before the twentieth century were taken to medically classify pathology, for research on eugenics and as police mug shots. Not only are Triburgo’s subject’s fully clothed, but in gazing out beyond the frame and dominating the viewer’s position they also refuse us access to their bodies and to capitulate to our investigating gaze.

However, rather than documenting, and dignifying, exceptional trans men, the portraits are firstly titled after Robert Norman “Bob” Ross’ instructional landscape paintings, which Triburgo recreated based on Joy of Painting episodes from PBS (1983-1994). There is no aura, as Walter Benjamin would say. “Valley Waterfall (Erin)” [Plate No. 1] sits next to “Evening Seascape (Trent)” [Plate No. 17], alongside “An Arctic Winter Day (Jose)” [Plate No. 20].

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Shifting across different climates and ecosystems, the scenes lend compositional qualities of various mood, color, and tones. The scenes were matched by the artist to resonate with the sitter’s garb, eyes and hair, to amplify their attitude. They do not reveal further personal insights into the sitter, such as where they are from; instead, the lurid skies and kitsch trees evoke a humorous levity that seems to further raise the sitter above the viewer. Hovering in the background, slightly out of focus, is the question of authenticity. These are generic scenes. These are also everyday people. Created over four years, Triburgo took his time to elaborate the series into thirty total portraits (twenty are on display) because he wanted sitters to approach him who were committed to lending their face to the name of trans. Unlike Katie Herzog’s grey-scale paintings in Transtextuality (Senate Bill 48) that depicts 48 portraits of esteemed trans men and women of letters, Transportraits is full of lively colors that reject a staid or somber approach to redressing the void of positive trans (masculine) representation.2 Thus, the photograph cantilevers from the silly tilt of a Bob Ross scene to the serious lilt of the sitter’s expression. The viewer is required to be the fulcrum across which the connotations seesaw.

The series also presents generic representational conventions, and their expectations, in a game of compare and contrast. The nineteenth century representational practices of aristocratic portraiture are set in alignment to the colonial discovery of the American landscape. The American tradition of society portraiture embodied by John Singer Sargent is recalled in the thrust of sure chins, yet these sitters are not bedecked in finery. The romanticism of the Hudson River School and Northwestern painters like Alfred Jacob Miller both influenced Ross’ wet-on-wet technique that builds intricate wisps of cloud, reflecting pools, brush and fauna. When figures appear in these turn-of-the-century landscapes at the edge of a waterline or along a ridge they are anonymous settlers or native folk. The uneasy relation between the white supremacist, heteronormative settler culture of then and the twenty-first century beholder invokes what I hear as the slightly corny imperative, to hark! Listen, this is not your usual manifest destiny image, the foliage peeled back for you to take in the serenity of the seemingly untouched land. Hark is also a hunting call to attention, used in reference to ‘harkening back’ when the hounds retrace the trail to find the scent again. The Transportraits series asks, “What was that toxic masculinity, can you still smell it?” Underlying the jest is an altogether serious quest to point to the cracks in the construction of American masculinity, interrogate the damage of its caricature-like qualities. The staging intimates that just as the ‘natural world’ is a fabrication so is ‘human nature’ a rich fantasy.

So, on the one hand the sitters gaze off to a lofty place, appearing majestic, transcendent even. Despite the potentially hyper-realistic medium of photography, we are presented with idealistic versions of a self. Yet, Transportraitsrecasts the art historical foundation of how it is to appear as a man, specifically the cannon of American romanticism of the rugged, virile conqueror of Nature including the natives. The oeuvre of Kent Monkman’s large-scale paintings in pastels and zippy bright colors launches a similar campy critique of toxic settler masculinity, but from the point of view of a two-spirit Native transfemininity.3 He appears in his paintings as Miss Chief Eagle Testicle (pronounced mischief egotistical) wearing red thigh-high boots, a thong-like loincloth (or not), and headdress. Miss Chief’s character enacts homoerotic scenes with white cowboys, fur traders, military men and the like. “History is Painted by the Victors” (2013), for example, rewrites the encounters between ‘men’ in frontier country borrowing colonial aesthetics and bending them to decolonializing tasks.

The decolonizing aesthetics within Triburgo’s series pounce on the fallacy of portraiture that purports to present the essence of the subject. For trans subjects this revealing gesture means that one’s gender presentation is judged as a true or false representation of one’s “essence.” The genre of portraiture invites the viewer to attribute gender identity (along with race, class and other social categories) and thereby makes assumptions about the matching (or not) morphology of the body underneath clothes. It plays into what I have called elsewhere the trick of “visual essentialism”: banking on the essentialism of the mimetic image appears to carry over into the essentialism of the identity represented therein. The political wish to represent marginalized identities can lead to a conflation of political visibility with actual visible representation.4 It does take heroic effort to combat visual essentialism from within portrait photography, but Triburgo has the additional challenge to avoid that his sitters are not faced with the violence of gender essentialism that would foreclose trans identities. The heroic portrait therefore nods to the daily running of the gender essentialism gauntlet, while also calling attention to the prejudice that results in uneven life chances for trans people.5 As metaphorical portraits, they refuse to give it straight, or cop to the assumptions of portraiture invested in the fullness of the subject distilled and amplified by the artist.6 This is not about respectful distanciation towards brave individuals then, but about an artwork that brings the viewer closer in to imagine a different trans reality.

At the risk of recapitulating the history of gender variance being akin to the mad or the nonsensical silly, the series asks the viewer to hold in sight two visions at once: the negative and the positive. Much like the optical illusion drawing that invites perception to register a duck and then a rabbit, then the “aha!” it is a duck and a rabbit, Transportraits shows us men who are at once trans, photographic portraits that are at once earnest and flip. The recent work of Math Bass also contains these elements of queer formalism in painted pictograms that play on now you see it, now you don’t.7 Newz! (2014), for example, presents images that can be seen in multiple ways; in an interview, Bass explains that “People have anxiety about ambiguity,” which is why she displaces gender ambiguity onto form.8 From one angle, then, we are greeted with “counter-politics of the silly object,” in Lauren Berlant’s phrasing, a kind of plaything for the viewer that in this case is also prickly and protected.9 Carefully conceived and finely executed, Triburgo’s series still panders to low art, or the popularized art of paint-by-numbers and taking a selfie. Judith (Jack) Halberstam finds great potential in engaging silly objects for cultural analysis in that with the frivolous come alternative claims not possible to make with high art objects.10 Like, Danielle Hendersen’s “Feminist Ryan Gosling” meme that reads “Hey girl. Just thinking about Chandra Mohanty’s theory that Western feminism problematically constructs the Third World woman as the pejorative ‘other’ and the colonial habits that keep women oppressed,” that “yokes the serious to the silly, the obscure and the corny, the dense with the glib,” the portrait series amounts to more than just a negative plus a positive.11 Like transgender studies more broadly, according to Susan Stryker, it enables “a critique of the conditions that cause transgender phenomena to stand out in the first place, and that allow gender normativity to disappear into the unanalyzed, ambient background.”12 In other words, transgender phenomenon emerges when the foreground flips into the background, signaled in Transportraits when the painting title challenges the precedence of the named sitter—why shouldn’t we critically consider the supposed gender normativity of Ross, or of the Romantics, or colonial masculinity? Trans gives the cover to do so, to shift the analytical lens to what only appears to be the ambient drone of normativity.

Though created in the first years of openly transitioning, Triburgo’s first major trans themed series resists the public declarations that mark many trans visual artist’s repertoire. The work is attentive to the political ramifications of taking a confessional tone or working within diaristic or narrative representational forms, to the extent that he comes to refuse ultimately to represent trans and queer subjects in his latest project. This results in a decisive break in the correlation of the morphological body with gender identity. The following project Policing Gender (2014-ongoing) turns away from the outside world to capture an interior space filled with folds of rich fabric gently hanging from an invisible source. The series titles each piece like Policing Gender (for May) to name an incarcerated trans and/or queer person, visually presented in their absence. Though clearly related to the art historical tradition of depicting femininity through sensuous folds (from Caravaggio to Catherine Opie), the emphasis on a unique textile for each portrayal also references Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-1979) place settings. Along with the thirty-nine women represented in Chicago’s famous installation with a special one-off plate, a personalized fabric runner reminds us to question who is missing from our visual and social histories. If we were able to speak with them here, communing at the table, what would they have to tell us?13  

I have resisted speaking directly about individual portraits because the coming together of the series around people willing to give face and give the lie to stereotypes about trans men confounds the desire to individualize and exceptionalize each person. The medium format film Triburgo uses renders each bust in sparkling detail, yet the final prints in smaller than life-size result in a grand but not grandiose presence. These men are not visualized to be towering figures. Hark! Listen, because you cannot see, see, see everything.

Eliza Steinbock is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society, The Netherlands and writes on contemporary philosophies of the body, visual culture and transfeminist issues.

1 I wish to thank Lorenzo Triburgo for the honor of engaging with this work, and for our delightful and productive discussions in Amsterdam during the Pride Photo Award public conversations (“Winner of Gender Category Lorenzo Triburgo in conversation with Eliza Steinbock” in September 2012 in the Old Church of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and more recently in preparation for this essay. I have borrowed some of his phrasing, such as the term sincere, the line about no aura, the metaphorical portrait, and the poetic closing words.  
2 http://www.katieherzog.net/2015/08/03/transtextuality-senate-bill-48/
3 http://www.kentmonkman.com/
4 Eliza Steinbock, “‘Look!’ but also, ‘Touch!’: Theorizing Images of Trans-Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism” Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics: Desire, Affect and Representation in Pornography eds. E. Avramopoulou and I. Peano (Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books, 2016), pp. 59-75.
5 Rebecca Kling writes that calling trans people “courageous” and “brave” is easier than speaking the truth that living as a trans person is dangerous and difficult, and it distances the cisgender person from having to imagine a trans reality, or help trans people combat discrimination. “Don’t Call Trans People ‘Brave’ – We’re Just Trying to Live in a Prejudiced Society” The Guardian October 9 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/09/dont-call-trans-peo....
6 Ernst van Alphen, “Chapter 2: The Portrait’s Dispersal,” Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21-47.
7  David Getsy and Jennifer Doyle “Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Doyal and David Getsy in Conversation,” Art Journal Open [online] (March 31, 2014) http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=4468. 
8 Bill Powers, “’People have anxiety about ambiguity: A Talk with Math Bass” ArtNews.com, posted on March 17, 2015, accessed on February 20, 2016, http://www.artnews.com/2015/03/17/bill-powers-talks-with-math-bass/
9 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 12.
10 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 20. 
11 Jordan Alexander Stein, “Silly Theory” Avidly post on LAReviewofbooks.com November 20 2012, http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2012/11/20/silly-theory/.
12 Susan Stryker, “Introduction: (De)Subjugated Knowledges,” The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1-18, 3. 
13 This analysis appears in Eliza Steinbock “Collecting Creative Transcestors: Trans* Portraiture from Snapshots to Sculpture” Companion to Feminist Art Practice and Theory eds. M. Buszek and H. Robinson (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming 2017).

Gio King Galadron
Charlie's Cornflake Series:
Genesis, 2018
stop motion animation
4 minute 34 second duration

Jesse Nelson
Your Are What You Eat, 2018
stop motion animation
hand-drawn animation
35 second duration

Taylor Macias
Art School, 2018
clay-mation
1 minute 13 second duration 

Ann Valdés
Fascination, 2018
stop motion animation
2 minute 35 second duration
Art Center Award

Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery presents Cultivated Ecologies, an interdisciplinary video and essay project by Cynthia Hooper. The exhibition runs from January 29 through March 4, 2018. Cultivated Ecologies examines the extensively reconfigured network of wetland refuges scattered across California’s Great Central Valley. Though now disconnected and drastically diminished, these wetlands remain ecologically significant, and have been designed to more-or-less successfully coexist amid one of our planet’s most intensively cultivated and astonishingly productive agricultural regions.

These wetland refuges were constructed to remedy the near total destruction of Central Valley wetlands during the region’s historical reclamation for agriculture, and now depend on agricultural infrastructure to survive. The sites are critical stops for millions of migratory birds along the Pacific Flyway, as well as year-round havens for countless local species. Though carefully tended and protected by decades of legislative efforts, these habitats nevertheless face significant challenges—including ongoing competition with agriculture and cities for water, loss of habitat from crop conversion and urban encroachment, persistent regulatory uncertainties, and an increasingly unstable climate.

Cynthia Hooper’s four non-narrative experimental documentary videos patiently depict the graceful and seasonally shifting characteristics of these austere and dramatically mediated habitats. The videos stealthily observe the interactions between refuge wildlife, the infrastructure that supports it, and the human populations that make forays into these novel ecosystems. Accompanying essays in the exhibition describe the historical, hydrological, ecological, and political complexities of these carefully engineered places. The project encompasses state and federal refuges found throughout the Central Valley, including those within the verdant rice-growing regions of the Sacramento Valley, along the extensively re-engineered San Joaquin River basin, and amid the endless industrial-agricultural vistas of the Tulare basin.

In describing her project, Hooper states that these refuges “inhabit a politically and hydrologically shared space, but nevertheless hum with ecological resilience. They are designed for the seemingly paradoxical objectives of both wildlife enjoyment and wildlife hunting, and spatially conflate these sometimes class-divided activities. The sociological complexities built into these refuges mimic our cultural frictions at large,” asserts Hooper, “yet these sites also foster interactions between diverse human communities in addition to those between humans and nature.”

Some of the regions she has explored and filmed include the artificial wetlands of Mexico's Colorado River Delta, the Klamath River dams in California and Oregon, and the built environment of California's Humboldt Bay.  Hooper has exhibited her work nationally and internationally  including exhibitions at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, El Centro Cultural Tijuana, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and at Mass MoCA in Massachusetts. She has also been the recipient of grants and residencies, including the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Gunk Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

Cynthia Hooper resides in Eureka, California where she teaches at College of the Redwoods.  Her videos, essays, and research-based projects examine and interpret infrastructural landscapes. Her detailed investigations patiently capture the incidental, effectual, and emblematic activities that define these complicated places.

HSU Third Street Gallery will host a Gallery Talk by the Artist  on Saturday, February 24 at 3 p.m.  Come meet the artist as she guides you through her exhibition.

Exhibition Schedule and Location
The exhibition, Cultivated Ecologies, will run from January 29 through March 4. The gallery is open Tuesday–Sunday, noon – 5 p.m.  The gallery will hosta public reception for the artists on Saturday, February 3, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., during Eureka Main Street’s Arts Alive Program.   HSU Third Street Gallery will host a Gallery Talk by the Artist  on Saturday, February 24 at 3 p.m.  Come meet the artist as she guides you through her exhibition.  Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street in Eureka, California.  Admission is free for all. Groups are encouraged to call ahead to arrange tours. For more information call (707) 443-6363

Humboldt State University (HSU) Third Street Gallery presents, Dog Summer: Young Alumni -2018, on exhibit from July 1 through September 2. The exhibition features works by the 2018 graduates from Humboldt State’s Art Department.

Annually, HSU Third Street Gallery exhibits the creative work of these ambitious artists as they transition from their art studies into their professional careers. The Dog Summer: Young Alumni-2018 exhibition presents the work of 33 graduates whose art includes a wide variety of media and talent. This exhibition reflects the breadth of courses offered at the university including media areas such as motion graphics, sculpture, jewelry, painting, photography, graphic design, printmaking, and ceramics.

“The new alumni participating in this show have all developed to a point where their craft has approached a professional level,” states Third Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley.  “These participants demonstrate tangible evidence of artistic accomplishment. Crucial to their success, however, is an intangible quality they share—a dedication and commitment to making art as a way of life informed by aesthetic and intellectual engagement with their work.”

Upon entering the gallery, visitors will encounter a number of pieces of art by these graduates that have garnered awards and prizes.  These annual prizes, awards and scholarships are either underwritten or endowed by generous community members who support the educational mission of the Art Department at Humboldt State.

After over 20 years of exhibitions, this will be the last scheduled show to be presented by HSU Third Street Gallery.  In April of this year Humboldt State University announced that it will close the gallery in September.

HSU First Street Gallery opened in Eureka, California in 1998 to provide hands-on experiences for students and as a public service, bringing free exhibitions to California’s North Coast community.  In 2016, the gallery was relocated to Third Street in Eureka and renamed HSU Third Street Gallery. During its 20-year history the gallery’s exhibitions have focused on contemporary arts, and featured artists from the local area as well as national and international artists.

Annually, the gallery would also present ongoing exhibition series that were interdisciplinary in nature, which variously addressed the subjects of social justice, diversity, the Earth's environment, its natural resources, environmental responsibility and action.  The exhibitions were able to attract many visitors each year, and they were especially popular during monthly “Arts Alive!” events. After the gallery closes, the space may be used to serve students in other ways for the duration of the lease. 

 
Exhibition Schedule and Location 

A reception for the artists will be held at HSU Third Street Gallery on Saturday, July 7 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.   The exhibition will run from July 1 through September 2. During the exhibition the gallery will be open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. and closed on Mondays. The gallery will be closed on July Fourth in observance of the holiday. Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California. For more information, please call (707) 443-6363

Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery presents, HOT, on exhibition in the gallery’s South Room from January 29, 2018 to March 4, 2018. This exhibition features seventeen student and alumni artists from Humboldt State University.

The exhibition, HOT, will address climate change and global warming. With temperatures rising around the world, artists are exploring ideas about climate change — its causes and effects. With the general consensus from the scientific community about the threat of climate change and the recent regulation roll- backs from the current administration, artists are ever more inspired to create conversation around these topics with their work.

Participating artists are showing work in sculpture, ceramics, photography, painting, prints, jewelry and mixed media.  For example, alumna Elisa Griego-Martinez uses gouache and ink suspended in acrylic over maps and hydrographs to illustrate her thoughts about the recent wildfires. She states that, “Amplified by climate change, the recent dry spell has lingered on despite record rainfall, causing low agricultural yields, wildfires, and stress on available resources. It has not only changed the landscape but the political and social climate of the region.” Artists participating are utilizing their materials and subject matter to address the issues of rising temperatures, pollution, natural disasters, rising sea levels and diminishing resources.

This exhibition will run in the gallery’s South Room along side local artist Cynthia Hooper’s solo exhibition, Cultivated Ecologies, an interdisciplinary video and essay project that examines California wildlife refuges. Hooper’s exhibition will be held in the Project Room at the gallery. Artists participating in HOT will be Regina Case, Julie Clark, Tim Clewell, Gio King, Haley Davis, Lizzy Dostal, Claire Esselstrom, Lisa Griego-Martinez, Chelsee Harris, Harley Hinkle, David Jordan, Anna Kowalczyk, Anna Ladd, Malia Matsumoto, Bethany Matthis-Montgomery, Terry Torgerson, and David White.

Exhibition Schedule and Location
The exhibition, HOT, will run from January 29 through March 4. The gallery is open Tuesday–Sunday, noon – 5 p.m.  The gallery will hosta public reception for the artists on Saturday, February 3, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., during Eureka Main Street’s Arts Alive Program. Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street in Eureka, California.  Admission is free for all. Groups are encouraged to call ahead to arrange tours. For more information call (707) 443-6363

Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition featuring a survey of works by Keith Schneider. Ranging over the years of 1996-2017, the exhibition, Selected Works: Drawing, Mixed Media, and Ceramics, will feature many works by the artist that have never been exhibited on California’s North Coast.  The exhibition will run through May 13.

Schneider’s œuvre is an amalgamation of his life’s passions and pursuits.  Animated by a love of play and experimentation, Schneider allows his work to speak for itself, in order to evoke personal emotions and interpretations from his audience members. 

Aesthetically, Keith Schneider is interested in objects that “wear” their history or appear to do so. Since his graduate school days Schneider has been developing a community of unique characters, populated by animals, human-like figures and totems.  Themes and symbols of shelter, labor, transportation, journeys, music, song and companionship further inform this artist’s world. In the artist’s words, “The life story that each object could tell remains a mystery; but the hint of its past adds a layer of richness, even when drawn over or partially obscured by paint.”
 
When working in collage and mixed-media sculpture, Schneider engages in free-form improvisation as he uses everything from household items to sidewalk debris to inform his art.  His drawings, however, evince a careful, focused eye and a disciplined hand, yielding rich pieces that simultaneously portray his quirky characters while serving as a meditation on drawing itself.  In his ceramic work he creates thrown ceramic vessels (vase and urn forms) as the underlying foundation of his characters’ physical shape; and in turn, he often gives some of his characters a vessel of their own, such as a boat or wagon.

To impart such richness to his ceramics, Schneider utilizes trompe l’oeil (a trick of the eye), manipulating the clay to appear as if it were another material such as fabric, leather or wood.  Schneider effectively uses the language of fabric to create characters with individual personalities and expressive facial features.  A master of ceramic glazing technique, he easily conveys the delicate nostalgia of a vintage toy, a bit worn out, but nevertheless cherished. The use of buttons for eyes, wheels and wooden limbs evoke a mélange of pathos and humor.  These objects emanate a bittersweet energy, each character bringing a unique backstory to the mix.

“Often, as I am working, these pieces take on a life of their own and it is interesting to me that some of my characters seem worried and perplexed, some quizzical and amused, some mischievous and playful. As I live with these characters, I believe that they speak to me about myself.”

Schneider knew early in his life that art was the path he wanted follow. He left Southern California to move to California’s North Coast in the 1980s where he completed a Masters of Art at Humboldt State University.  He then wanted to take his art to the next level and completed a Masters in Fine Arts from University of California, Santa Barbara.  Having been familiar with the area, Schneider moved back to Humboldt where he has established himself as an art professor, teaching ceramics and drawing at Humboldt State University.

His work has been exhibited in galleries nationwide and he has been the recipient of numerous awards for his art. Schneider has been featured in Ceramics Now magazine and at the SOFA (Sculpture Objects and Functional Art and Design Fair) in Chicago.

Selected Works; Drawing, Mixed-Media, and Ceramics, by Keith Schneider, is produced by Humboldt State students enrolled in the Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program.  These students participate in the daily management and planning of exhibitions at the gallery.  The gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with experience that will help them to enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.

Gallery Talk by the Artist

Keith Schneider will give a talk about his work on Saturday April 21 at 3 p.m.  Come meet the artist as he guides you through the exhibition.

Exhibition Schedule

This exhibition will run from April 3 through May 13. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, April 7, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.  Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California.  In 2016 the gallery was relocated and renamed after 19 years in its former location on First Street in Eureka. For more information call 707-443-6363.

For many years, I have been attracted to objects that “wear” their history, and have collected these things, such as old toys, maps, pencils, and sheet music as inspiration for my ceramic pieces, and to use in my assemblages and collages. I like the quality of these things, and how time has given them a story that can be read into them.

The assemblage materials that I use come from many different sources, but whether culled from thrift store bins, beach debris or sidewalk trash, the unifying factor in most of my pieces is that they are made with the quality of assemblage in mind. Over the years, I’ve attempted to use this idea of collage and assemblage as a thematic starting point, and I hope that this sensibility is present to the viewer in most, if not all of the work that I make.

In my ceramic work, inspired by things I have scavenged, I often invent my own “found” objects and materials.  In my more recent work, I have used clay “fabric” to dress up my characters and clay tape ands stitching to hold them together.   Since facial expression is so important in defining the personality of each of my figures, using wrinkles, tears and holes in the clay fabric has opened up new and exciting options for achieving this.

My pieces are constructed from earthenware clay and fired to cone 03.  Surface color is developed with underglazes, glazes, stains and sometimes lusters.  I often begin my pieces with a wide variety of wheel thrown forms and put them together in combination with other elements; sometimes extruded pieces, sometimes press-molded or handbuilt.  During this process, I try not to be too cerebral, but instead, attempt to react directly to what is visually in front of me and trust my instincts.

Often, as I am working, these pieces take on a life of their own and it is interesting to me that some of my characters seem anxious and overwhelmed, some worried and perplexed, some quizzical and amused.  As I live with these characters, I believe that they speak to me about myself.

Keith Schneider
Spring, 2018

Cal Poly Humboldt’s Goudi’ni Native American Arts Gallery presents Tintah: Amongst The Trails, works in wood and works on paper by Robert Benson. Exhibition runs October 5th through December 2nd, 2023.

Focusing on a new body of work, Tintah, Hupa language for amongst the trails, features newly carved salvaged old growth redwood sculptures, and watercolor studies. Robert Benson, Tsnungwe, is a leading figure among artists in the northwestern California art world. He worked as a well-respected teacher for more than 30 years at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California, as well as a curator of Native art. 

His current paintings and sculptures are filled with trails, literal and suggested. “There is the trail into our family hunting camp that I traveled for more than fifty years, there are trails handed down through stories and mythologies, and there are the trails of imagination. When we consider that at the most basic level a trail is just something connecting two points, even the ladder and stairway forms that populate my work can be viewed as kinds of trails. To be amongst the trails is to find your rhythm, your place, and to discover the interplay between that rhythm and the melody of the universe.” Benson states.

Tintah:  Amongst the Trails

A trail is quite simply a rough path across open country formed by repeated travel. Trails are everywhere. Universal. But the physical act of walking a trail is personal. Some of the experience is dictated by what you bring, some by what you find: Walk the same trail at a different time of day, in a different season, at a different age, with a different load (be it physical or emotional) and even the most familiar trail becomes new, offering experiences beyond simply the convenient passage from point A to B. Much like the creative process, walking a trail is an act of will but also an act of discovery. There is the trail head, the point of origin, and there is a desired destination. However, despite our intentions, the reality and experience of a trail is often non-linear. In between origin and destination, a world of possibility exists filled with spurs, obstacles, confrontations, and resolutions. This trail is as much a place as origin or destination.

Tintah is a Hupa word that literally translated means, Amongst the trails. The word is used figuratively to mean, In the forest. I chose Tintah as the title for this exhibition for several reasons. First, my paintings and sculptures are filled with trails, literal and suggested. There is the trail into our family hunting camp that I traveled for more than fifty years, there are trails handed down through stories and mythologies, and there are the trails of imagination. When we consider that at the most basic level a trail is just something connecting two points, even the ladder and stairway forms that populate my work can be viewed as kinds of trails.

 There is also the notion that being "amongst the trails" is to be in the natural world and to recognize the ubiquity of the trail. When we start to look, we see literal and metaphorical trails all around us. Trails connect us. They act as touchstones to who or what came this way before. From antiquity to today, from dinosaur trackways to New York City subway lines, from a wildfire's trail of destruction to hidden ant trails and glacial moraines, the list of trail makers and phenomena is expansive.

Lastly, there is the trail's metaphorical sense regarding exploration of our world and ourselves. The path of life, path of least resistance, the road less traveled, stairway to heaven, the ladder of success: Our language is filled with phrases that speak to this connection between the trail and the pursuit of personal growth or enlightenment. In my Native culture, just to be on the trail to the high country is itself a spiritual journey. The trail is perceived as having its own life and is treated with appropriate regard.

Walking a trail, your mind gets clean. There is an auditory component to the work of it. Almost like music, your stride, each footfall and breath, creates a kind of rhythm. The mind becomes clear. In that state, you become open to what in you resonates with the natural world, the sounds and sensations outside of yourself layered atop that internal rhythm of breath and stride. To be amongst the trails is to find your rhythm, your place, and to discover the interplay between that rhythm and the melody of the universe.

—Robert Benson, 2023 

The HSU Art Department and Reese Bullen Gallery is pleased to announce Twenty | Twenty: BFA Exhibition. This exhibit showcases work by our inaugural BFA cohort and celebrates their achievements. Featured work includes painting, photography, sculpture and jewelry.