During the 2019 College Art Association Annual (CAA) Conference in New York City, the Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to host an Alumni Reception at the Massey Klein Gallery. The reception also celebrates the work of Dodd Alumna, Sarah Irvin who will be showing at the gallery at that time. The Reception will be held on Friday, February 15, 2019, from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm.

The College Art Association, as the preeminent international leadership organization in the visual arts, promotes these arts and their understanding through advocacy, intellectual engagement, and a commitment to the diversity of practices and practitioners.

CAA’s 2019 Annual Conference will feature over 300 sessions. Over four days in the spectacular setting of New York City, CAA will host 500 events on-site and off, including distinguished speakers, business meetings, art making and professional development workshops, gallery tours, a book and trade fair, receptions, and more.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art hopes to connect with its alumni network that is over 10,000 strong as well as professionals associated with the School of Art at the annual conference. In the spirit of alumni connection, the School of Art has planned its Alumni Reception at the Massey Klein Gallery around the work of Alumn Sarah Irvin. Irvin earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from the Lamar Dodd School of Art in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from George Mason University in 2016. She is an American artist who lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Irvin describes her work as existing within the context of motherhood as a lived experience and social construct. By responding to the biological act of bearing an infant and the discipline of care-taking that is the commitment to “mother” a child, she seeks to open up a dialog about what it means to take on these responsibilities and how these actions shape the individual performing them.

The pieces are derived from the every day, but the interface of materials and processes of art making with the every day provides an entry point into broader topics of gender, production, reproduction, care, biological processes, and cultural systems. Accompanying the objects and the time-based performances that created them are annotated prose poems that function as another descriptive system of the work.

Sarah Irvin’s graphite drawings on paper featured in the exhibition record the experience of new life and motherhood.  At various times while breastfeeding, the artist created drawings that codified her daughter's action of eating. Loops go up with a suck and round down with a swallow, transcribing the unreadable language of a baby at the breast.  Also while breastfeeding, Irvin used a digital program to track the start time, breast side, and duration of each feeding.  From this immense amount of data, the artist created an interactive sculpture resembling a card catalog that allows the viewer to not only review different sessions, but physically acknowledge the significant amount time and energy needed for an often unacknowledged task.

In the artist’s rocking chair series, the act of caring for a baby is codified as a form of mark-making. Pieces of graphite hung from the underside of Irvin’s glider rocking chair and created marks on a piece of paper attached to the stationary base. The series began when her daughter was born and was completed the day she turned one. Anyone who used the rocking chair during the first year of the child’s life participated in the creation of the works.  In addition to the original works on paper, the Gallery will release a limited print edition of the first and last breastfeeding and rocking chair sessions as well as a small edition of breastfeeding record logs for the collector to “complete” on their own.

Massey Klein Gallery in NYC is a contemporary art gallery located in the Lower East Side of NYC that specializes in figurative painting, contemporary sculpture, and mixed media design. The gallery is run by husband and wife team Garrett Klein and Ryan Massey and supports both local and international mid-career and emerging artists.

Link to the Alumni Reception on CAA's calendar of events: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Session/4374

Link to Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/257267531648214/

DODD FACULTY PRESENTATION SCHEDULE:

Mark Abbe

The Complex Cultural Biography of the Raleigh “Bacchus”

Session: Ancient Sculpture in Context 2: Reception

Wednesday, February 13, 2019, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

New York Hilton Midtown - 2nd Floor - Gramercy East

Janice Simon

The Critical Voice in Art of the United States 1776–1917

Thursday, February 14, 2019, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

New York Hilton Midtown - 2nd Floor - Clinton Suite

Katie Geha with Kaleena Stasiak

SEWW: Women's Wrestling and the University Art Gallery

Session: Redefining the University Art Gallery

Thursday, February 14, 2019, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

New York Hilton Midtown - 2nd Floor - Nassau West

Nicolas Morrissey

After the Golden Age: Apogee or Decline? Resituating Regional Buddhist Visual Cultures in Medieval South Asia (8th–13th Centuries CE)

Friday, February 15, 2019, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

New York Hilton Midtown - 2nd Floor - Sutton South

Courtney McClellan

The Practice and the Other Practice: The Relationship Between Making Art and Teaching

Friday, February 15, 2019, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

New York Hilton Midtown - 2nd Floor - Bryant Suite