PURSUITS/Faculty news & notes School of the Arts Bill Abdale, Art+Design, was named a 2012 Summer Printshop Artist in Residence at the Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn. Abdale also curated two exhibitions at Heliopolis, a collaborative nonprofit project space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn: Steven Rose and Joanna Seitz and Eric Lee Bowman: Chemical Portraits. He played guitar on the self-titled EP by Brooklyn’s Acid Problem, now available from 16OH Records. Nancy Bowen, Art+Design, participated in a summer residency sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and was part of the Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House in France. Bowen’s work was included in the winter exhibition To Be a Lady: Forty-Five Women in the Arts at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, curated by Jason Andrew of Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts. Bradley Brookshire, Music, performed as the harpsichordist with the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and New York City Ballet principal dancer Jared Angle at the Salon/Sanctuary Concerts. The performance took place at the Players in late September, and was reviewed in the New York Times on October 1, 2012. Brookshire returns to the Metropolitan Opera as assistant conductor and harpsichordist for the 2012–13 season. He performed in a production of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito in November 2012 and Handel’s Giulio Cesare in April 2013. Lenora Champagne, Theatre and Performance, is a playwright, performance artist, and director who often collaborates with sculptors, composers, and media artists. This fall, she is teaching three classes in Japan as a core Fulbright scholar. In one graduate and two undergraduate courses at Tokyo’s Tsuda College and Shirayuri University, her students will consider identity politics as a theme in several American plays of the 20th century and analyze plays by American feminist playwrights (Naomi Iizuka, Phyllis Nagy, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Naomi Wallace) who have adapted Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter for the stage. Larry Clark, Dance, traveled in November to Hong Kong, where he adjudicated the Asian Youth Dance Festival for the second consecutive year. Clark presented the awards to the participating companies, chaired a panel of the judges discussing the choreographers, and taught a master class.
Donna Dennis
Donna Dennis, Art+Design, received the Sixth Annual Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award. The award provides an unrestricted $25,000 to one artist each year for ongoing creative pursuits. Dennis will premiere her much-anticipated Coney Night Maze at the Neuberger Museum of Art in June 2013. Among Dennis’ other achievements: the Fall/Winter 2012 issue of Woman’s Art Journal contains a retrospective view, written by Jan Riley, of more than four decades of sculptural installations by Dennis; and an early sculpture by Dennis, Subway with Lighted Interior, 1974, became part of the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.
Artist and Professor Antonio Frasconi, 1919–2013 The Purchase College community was profoundly saddened to learn of the passing of artist, mentor, friend, and professor emeritus Antonio Frasconi on January 8, 2013, at the age of 93. Frasconi began teaching printmaking at Purchase in 1973. In 1983 he earned the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and further achieved the rank of Distinguished Teaching Professor of Art+Design in 1986, an honor bestowed by SUNY that recognizes and rewards its finest and most accomplished faculty for “consistently superb teaching.” Born in 1919 in Argentina to Italian parents, Frasconi grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay. He began his career as a political cartoonist there, then moved to the United States at age 26. Much of his work maintained a social conscience and political edge as he rose to become the most prominent woodcut illustrator of his generation. His numerous honors and awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Art and Letters Award, a Library of Congress Children’s Literature Award, a Rockefeller Foundation residency, and the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. A simple Internet search reveals the depth of reverence and gratitude generations of Purchase alumni hold for Frasconi in the vast number of resumes and bios claiming proudly that he was their teacher. “Starting teaching was probably the best thing that ever happened to me in my life,” Frasconi stated in a 1994 interview.
Adams, MA; Ode to Street Hassle, a group show at the Bronx Art Space; Still Figuring It Out at Recession Art CULTUREfix in New York; and the Dieu Donné Benefit Exhibition at the Dieu Donné Exhibition Space. The musical composition Uscirmi di braccia (2010) by Suzanne Julia Elsas Farrin, Music (Conservatory director), was performed on October 22 at AlpenKlassic in Germany. Farrin also released her first solo CD, Corpo di Terra, on New Focus Recordings. The debut of this fulllength recording was celebrated with a concert at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in November, featuring live performances of works from the recording by Nuiko Wadden, Cal Wiersma, and Julia Lichten.
Subway with Lighted Interior Stella Ebner, Art+Design, was honored with a 2012 Kala Fellowship. The award is based on an international competition that annually grants each of nine artists a cash award, unlimited access to Kala Art Institute facilities for up to six months, and a culminating show in the Kala Gallery in Berkeley, CA. Julia Elsas, Art+Design, participated in several group shows over the summer of 2012: The Phylogeny Projects at the Branch Gallery in North
John Fedchock
John Fedchock, Music, wrote the feature article “The Perfect Escape” in the October issue of Down Beat magazine. As guest soloist, he recorded with the Fred Hess Big Band on Speak. Fedchock was also a producer on the South Florida Jazz Orchestra’s Trumpet Summit, and he appeared in the film documentary on Woody Herman, Blue Flame, which premiered on October 10. PURCHASE | 1