Art: Law: New Media: free public talks at Hastings Law School

Hastings Law School, in collaboration with the San Francisco City Arts Commission, along with visiting professor Sonia K. Katyal, invite you to an exciting new lecture series on art, law, and politics. Inspired by the San Francisco art world and the rise of new media, the Law School has asked a variety of award winning emerging and established artists to share their perspectives on the role of art, the law, new media, and the public and private domain. Each talk features a different topic and is designed to facilitate a collaborative dialogue between the artists, members of the public, and the community on the role of art in law – or vice versa.

The lectures are free and open to the public, although RSVP is required.  To attend, as seating is limited, please contact Roslyn Foy at foyr@uchastings.edu, and specify the date you plan to attend, your name, and the number of participants.

In this talk, continuing the themes of civic engagement and interruption, we present the work of four artists who are pushing the boundaries of the individual and collective experience in urban environments through both verbal and visual participation. Each of the artists for today-one a well known "street poet," another a painter who re-appropriates American history and 19th century advertising ploys, a third artist who created a trailer and traveled through America to record the mantras and self-talk of passerby and a fourth artist who concentrates on the notion of social sculpture - demonstrate that art is created, everyday, through the lived experiences of citizens forging unique boundaries in the public realm.

Speakers

With a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Bard College, and a Masters of Theological Studies from Emory University, Sherri Lynn Wood is an artist, activist, and healer, based in Durham, NC and San Francisco, CA. Sherri combines her knowledge of craft, sculpture, theology, and system centered theory to reacquaint people with personal agency, community, care, love and the basic skills of living.Her project, the Mantra Trailer is a new media tool, documenting the people's prayers, petitions and aspirations for self and society. Parked at the intersection of imagination, evangelism and propaganda, it is a traveling mediation space, recording studio and site of mysterious broadcast in the form of a 1972 breadbox trailer.Wood began the tour in March from her home base in Durham, North Carolina. The project includes a website, video blog and podcast and is fiscally sponsored by the Southern Documentary Fund. The Mantra Trailer has received foundational support from the North Carolina Arts Council, The MacDowell Colony, The Blue Mountain Center, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Southern Documentary Fund.

Alison Pebworth has been making "street side" projects locally and nationally since 2004 under the rubric of the Roadside Show & Tell, a series of interactive roadside attractions and related projects created in the spirit of the 19th century American traveling road show. In 2006, she traveled cross-country for eight months developing Looking for Lost America, a research project of the Roadside Show and Tell. This trip was the inspiration for Beautiful Possibility, her forthcoming exhibition and research project that will take Pebworth and her work from the west to east coasts of the United States in 2010 and 2011. The Center for Cultural Innovation has supported the Beautiful Possibility project through a planning grant (2007) and marketing grant (2008). Other recent awards include an Alternative Exposure Grant, Southern Exposure Gallery (2007) and an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission (2007). Pebworth's work has been featured in Ground Scores for Bay Area Now 5, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2008) at Southern Exposure Gallery(2008) and "Front and Center" at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2009). Her work may be viewed at www.roadsideshowandtell.com.

Zach Houston operates a "performance/business/literature project" informally referred to as "the poem store". It consists of selling spontaneous free verse poetry composed on a manual typewriter at a variety of public events. Providing his primary means of economic support for the better part of the last three years, the poem store has been a successful launching pad for any number of diversified artistic theory and practice. It has received press coverage from CBS Sunday Morning, CBS Evening News, the Osgood Files, The New York Times and the SF Chronicle, spawning numerous imitators. Additionally, he has shown his visual art at the YBCA, the Di Rosa Preserve, Oakland International Airport, Creative Growth Art Center, Galerie d' Impaire (Paris), Aqua Art Miami, and a host of local and national galleries.  Read more about Zach Houston in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Born 1975, Johannesburg, South Africa. Lori Gordon is the co-founder of Social Evolution Research Gang, Little Red Hen Collective and You Can Have It All. As an artist and curator, Lori Gordon investigates the structure and power of belief, creating projects that attempt to decipher both humanity's and her own connection with the universe. Through collaborative endeavors, she explores the distance between coincidence and intention, with an emphasis on setting up moments that deviate from the expected. In some cases, she is more interested in providing the organized framework around which potential interactions may occur. With all her work, she is more interested in the journey than the destination. She is forever attempting to make the ineffable visible.  An associate curator at Ampersand International, Gordon lives and works in San Francisco. Gordon received her MFA at the California College of the Arts. She is a former San Francisco Foundation recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Fellowship, and a nominee of the SFMOMA SECA Award. Exhibition venues include San Jose Museum of Art, Richmond Arts Center, Mission17, Southern Exposure, Temescal Amity Works, RockPaperScissors and The Kitchen (NYC).