Conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winner Raven Chacon

Artist and composer Raven Chacon is the first Native American awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music for his composition Voiceless Mass. He has exhibited widely and to great
acclaim as a solo artist and member of the art collective Postcommodity
(2009–2018). Chacon’s lithograph Horse Notations—produced at the Crow’s
Shadow Institute of the Arts, located on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation—was on display in the exhibition “In Translation: Prints Across Media” at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Chacon joined for a conversation about art, music, and Indigeneity, followed by a performance of the experimental composition Horse Notations.


WVU Lunchtime Looks: Marie Watt

Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt is currently on view at the Art Museum of WVU. “Lunchtime Looks” hosted on Zoom by WVU offers an overview of the exhibitions main themes and ideas. 


Charles White’s Global Perspective

“Charles White’s Global Perspective” is now published in the most recent issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary Art, edited by Eddie Chambers (UT Austin), dedicated to theme of African American art in an international context. The article tracks White’s artistic response to various cultural and political forces, including Mexican modernism, anti-fascism, the Cold War, and the Pan-African movement. It is available here.


HereIn Journal: On J Noland

John P. Murphy on J Noland:

Noland’s work is playful and provocative, cerebral and scatological, and
generally licenses intoxication in one form or another. We are roughly
the same age and both hail from the Midwest, so I recognize the raw
material of his work: the bowling alleys, beer cans, bb guns, and
tailgates that comprised the requisite rites-of-passage for a white
midwestern male born in the 1980s. Noland does not mock these objects
and rituals so much as discover in them forms of misplaced yearning and
sublimated spirituality: Elmer Gantry on peyote hunting for sin and
salvation in the post-industrial Rust Belt. The folksy fun and games are
also totems of addiction, insecurity, toxicity, and despair. It is a
sort of via negativa—accessing the sacred through the crass
castoffs of middle Americana: a trash-littered path walked side-by-side
with intoxicated friends.

The rest of the essay here.


Prints and Protest: Bridges Academy Lecture

Throughout history, artists have protested war and injustice, struggled for peace and progress, and imagined Utopian futures. Spanning the 18th century to the present, this talk by John Murphy, PhD, the Hoehn Curatorial Fellow for Prints, will offer a brief overview of art and activism, drawing on examples from the University of San Diego’s growing collection of fine art prints. We will consider how artists such as William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles White have used printmaking as a medium to critique society, to encourage empathy and action, and to promote positive social change. Bridges Academy is a continuing education program hosted by the University of San Diego Office of Planned Giving. 



Blake, Morris, and the British New Left

The Journal of William Morris Studies has published “William Blake, William Morris and the British New Left” in its most recent issue (vol. 23, no. 4). In the annals of English art and literature, William Blake and William Morris stand in sharp relief as figures of promethean energy: poets, artists, engravers, and utopian visionaries. In the 1950s they became vital resources for the British New Left as it confronted the twin specters of western capitalism and eastern communism. New Leftists, having broken ranks with Stalinist orthodoxy, turned to Blake and Morris for fresh models of cultural and political engagement. They served as standard bearers for the concept of ‘socialist humanism,’ put by forward by activist historian E.P. Thompson in the pages of the New Reasoner  as a post-1956 vision of Marxism that drew on Marx’s early philosophical writings on alienationa nd estrangement. For Thompson – whose long career was bookended by studies of Morris and Blake, respectively – both figures proved a necessary complement to Marx by expressing what he called “the great aspirations at the source of the Romantic Revolt.” Their work provided a brief, tantalizing glimpse of what a romantic poetic married to radical politics might conjure – not just a culture of critique, but a visionary “city of art” (Blake’s Jerusalem and Morris’s Nowhere) to which all citizens would contribute as co-creators and collaborators. 


“Pear-Shaped Kings and Orange Presidents: Recognizing Protest Art”

May 20, 2020 | “Pear-Shaped Kings and Orange Presidents: Recognizing Protest Art” 

Artists’ engagement with political and social protest movements is a diverse, vibrant and historically significant topic. This session will reflect specifically on how modern artists – mostly in Europe and the United States – have produced memorable works, in a wide variety of media, to draw attention to injustices and press for change. By initiating the discussion with important examples from the history of art, Derrick Cartwright, PhD, associate professor and director of University Galleries and John Murphy, PhD, Hoehn Curatorial Fellow for Prints and art history lecturer, hope to inspire critical thinking and further conversation about the continued role of artists in protests today.



Charles White: Conference Papers

Presented two conference papers on Charles White in February: 

“‘Meet Mr. and Mrs. Charles White: An Interesting and Talented Combination’”. Paper for panel Rise Up: Power, Protest and Representation in Black Visual and Material Culture, 1835 to Present, College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL (Feb. 12). 

“Charles White: Art and Reality in the USSR”. Paper for panel African-Americans and
Stalinism: The Visual Culture of Soviet 
Anti-Racism, American Association of Teachers
of Slavic and East European Languages (ATSEEL), San Diego, CA (Feb. 7)

© John P. Murphy
Using Format