HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Monday, March 22, 2010
FLASHPOINT ACADEMY WEB EVANGELIST FEATURED IN SUN-TIMES ARTICLE
BY NEIL STEINBERG Sun-Times Columnist
Brave New World Dept.
Kristin Hertko's business card is a pleasing dove gray, with one corner rounded, a quirky touch. The company she works for is prominently featured -- "Flashpoint: The Academy of Media Arts and Sciences" -- but it is her title that really stands out, "Web Evangelist."
"That's my official title," says Hertko, 25, sitting at her desk. "People ask me about it all the time."
"Evangelist" has nothing to do with faith, except I suppose faith in the bright, shiny future of the online world of digital media, where everybody carries an iPad and the ability to create the images and sounds on those devices is a ticket to a good job.
"I use Web tools to communicate with people who'd be interested in what we do here," she said. "Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, message boards, forums, etc. etc."
Think of it as the 2010 version of someone who shows up to high school Career Days with a card table and a stack of brochures, only better.
"People aren't always at career fairs," she says. "But people are always online."
Hertko spreads the word about Flashpoint, a two-year technical college -- it would have once been called a "trade school," back in the day when that meant learning how to gap spark plugs on a V8 engine, but somehow the term seems inadequate for the $20million worth of film and recording studios and high-tech computer classrooms.
Touring the place is jaw-dropping -- it makes Columbia College look like the old Pacific Garden Mission.
Still, as with so much online, there seems to be a disconnect between the big numbers and the actual making of money.
Take Twitter.
"I'm following 930 people," she said. "Not reading every tweet, though." That's a lot. But when I ask her if anybody has actually attended Flashpoint through her efforts over the last year, Hertko puts me in touch with a Colorado girl who came to Chicago and looked at the school, but isn't attending, not yet anyway.
This is not to take anything away from Flashpoint. If the future looks like this, maybe it won't be so bad. The place is well worth a visit, if only to view CEO Howard Tullman's collection of contemporary art, a mind-bending, knee-weakening array of modern gems and an unspoken reminder to Flashpoint's 450 students that if you work hard and get lucky, there are prizes at the end.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
TULLMAN COLLECTION ARTIST PHYLLIS BRAMSON IN NEW SHOW AT CARRIE SECRIST
Then is Now: Works by Phyllis Bramson & Judith Geichman
March 20 - April 24, Opening reception is March 20th from 5-8pm
The Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce our upcoming gallery show, Then is Now, a dual exhibition featuring works by Phyllis Bramson and Judith Geichman. The exhibit will open on March 20th and run through April 24th.
Both Bramson and Geichman are interested in unconventional beauty and a certain kind of visual clarity in their work. Additionally, they share several common sources including including Chinoiserie, Toile de Jou, Chinese scholar rocks, Rococo, abstraction, and elements of collage.
Yet for all their similarities these two artist have, the substance of their work differs significantly. Despite outright figuration in her paintings, Bramson claims to "plot narrative moves which involve abstraction as the backbone." Geichman's work, on the other hand, is outwardly about abstraction and modernism, though when she creates it, she is thinking of figuration.
Some of the pivotal aspects of Bramson's art include eroticism, Orientalism, and a form or random "touring". Though she asserts that modernism is very important to her, she calls herself a Surface Surrealist, noting the undeniable influence of the Chicago tradition of figure painting, particularly Darger and Seymour Rosofsky. Geichman, on the other hand, relates to Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock and the New York school of painting. She sees herself as carrying on that tradition, but adds her own twist through her engagement with figuration as one aspect towards abstraction.
Phyllis Bramson's work is in the permanent collections of The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C. as well as many other major museums throughout the world. Among other notable accomplishments, she is a three time recipient of a NEA Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Reward, and a Tiffany Award.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
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