Three faculty members from the UC Santa Cruz Arts Division have been awarded Rydell Visual Arts Fellowships.
The new 2016-17 fellows include Irene Lusztig, associate professor of film and digital media, and the collaborative team of Helen and Newton Harrison, professors-in-residence in the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) graduate program.
The Rydell fellowships were established by long-time Santa Cruz cultural icons Roy and Frances Rydell and are administered by the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County.
They are awarded solely on artistic merit by a panel of arts professionals from outside the Santa Cruz area.
Four winners this year were selected from a pool of 61 artists.
Helen and Newton Harrison have spent the last four decades working with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to explore ideas that use the arts as a vehicle for environmental change
Pioneers of the environmental and ecological art movement, the Harrisons are known for their use of maps as narratives to track climate change and ecosystems.
The Harrisons have presented their work in two Venice Biennales, two Sao Paolo Biennales, the Museums of Modern Art in Chicago, San Francisco, Bonn (Germany), Ljublijana (Slovenia) and the Museum of the Revolution in Zagreb (Croatia).
Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker, media archeologist, and visual artist. Her film and video work mines old images and technologies for new meanings in order to reframe and revive forgotten and neglected histories.
Born in England to Romanian parents, Lusztig grew up in Boston and has lived in France, Italy, Romania, China, and Russia. She received her BA in filmmaking and Chinese studies from Harvard and completed her MFA in film and video at Bard College.
Her work has been screened around the world in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, IDFA Amsterdam, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan.
A current exhibition at the r. blitzer gallery in Santa Cruz is now featuring the artwork of the 2014-15 Rydell fellows. Running through January, it includes the work of UC Santa Cruz art professor Elizabeth Stephens.
Stephens’s art has explored sexuality, gender, and feminism for nearly three decades. Her recent film, Goodbye Gauley Mountain, An Ecosexual Love Story, created in collaboration with Annie Sprinkle, opened the 2013 Santa Cruz Film Festival.
