Annual Gretchen Hupfel Symposium

SUPERstructure:
city/building/interior/object

Related Exhibitions 2012

Image: Susie Brandt Five Stumps, 2011	*Five Stumps* E. Avery Draper Gallery October 21, 2011 - February 19, 2012 In her stump series, Brandt examines the city environment through a group of hand-hooked wool rugs made from recycled thrift store clothing and blankets. Their designs are based on rubbings taken directly from tree stumps in Baltimore City. Brandt’s exploration of the city through the metaphor of the tree stump suggests the relationship of rus in urbe (the garden within the city).
Image: Amanda Burnham Walkshed, 2011	Amanda Burnham *Walkshed* Beckler Family Members’ Gallery December 16, 2011 – February 26, 2012 Creating an installation of drawings based on her explorations and encounters with the city, Burnham works on site, producing drawings either in the out-of-doors or sitting in her car. She says that she “reads the landscape for found fragments of language and records the poetics of vacant lots, movable type signs, billboards, and row houses with ink and water and other media on paper.”
Image: Joe Netta, 2010	Under Construction: Part I Curated by J. Susan Isaacs Carole Bieber and Marc Ham Gallery February 4 – June 3, 2012 Artists Leah Bailis, Anthony Cervino, Robert Guevara, Joe Netta, and Adam Weir explore the intersection between construction, architecture, design, and sculpture. Utilizing ordinary building materials like cement, electrical tape and wire, plywood, drywall, PVC tubes, insulation, and fastenings, they create works that address issues related to the urban experience, rus in urbe, suburbia, consumption, liminality, memory and nostalgia, and states of reality.
Image: The Dufala Brothers, 2011 Courtesy of the artists and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia.	*New Work by the Dufala Brothers* Curated by Maiza Hixson Constance S. and Robert J. Hennessy Project Space February 10 – May 13, 2012 Considering ideas of space and efficiency, the Dufalas create an original, site-specific sculptural installation that responds to the concept of a compact domestic dwelling. Taking resourcefulness to an extreme level, these two Philadelphia-based artists will build a highly contradictory design for survival and household comfort.
Image: Ron Longsdorf, 2011	Under Construction: Part II Curated by J. Susan Isaacs DuPont II Gallery February 17 – June 10, 2012 Artists in Part II: Alexis Granwell, Ron Longsdorf, Michael Jones McKean, and Yoonmi Nam.
Image: C. Grant Cox, III, 2011	Contraption: Devices in Art Curated by Maiza Hixson DuPont I Gallery February 17 – June 24, 2012 Contraption is a thematic exhibit featuring ingeniously playful sculptural works that invite interactivity. Wearable, audible, and usable, these works encourage audience participation. Artists: Tim Eads, Tracy Featherstone, C. Grant Cox, III, Tyler Held, Cynthia Norton, Lauren Ruth, and Joanie Turbek.
Image: Rebecca Murtaugh, 2012	Rebecca Murtaugh *Intimate Constructions* E. Avery Draper Gallery February 28 – May 20, 2012 Intimate Constructions seeks to create a sense of of ethereality through the use of repurposed Styrofoam packaging and discarded house paints. The insular nature of Styrofoam is used both metaphorically and literally. The installation places the viewer in a position to question scale, the nature of structures, and our place within our environment.
Image: Erin Murray, 2012	Erin Murray *Municipalia* Beckler Family Members’ Gallery March 2 – June 3, 2012 In her paintings and drawings, Murray investigates the architecture of bureaucracy through the stripped down buildings of odernism’s municipal structures, revealing the protocols of officialdom by careful observation and interpretation of what she believes to be the underappreciated beauty of buildings of authority and procedure. Working with flat planes of color and contrasting textures, the artist creates powerful images of the American architectural scene, revealing an architecture that exclaims its purpose.

2012 Gretchen Hupfel Symposium

SUPERstructure: city/building/interior/object

March 23 – 24, 2012

Keynote Speaker: Marshall Brown
Professor of Architecture
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago

Friday, March 23, 2012: 7 - 9 pm

Keynote Lecture & Cocktail Reception

Saturday, March 24, 2012: 8:30 am - 12:30 pm
Breakfast & Lectures

SUPERstructure serves as the larger theme for seven individual but interrelated DCCA exhibitions taking place in Spring 2012. The symposium will present interdisciplinary scholarship and examine artistic/architectural practice as a platform for discussion of the built environment, including the urban and domestic, the environmentally sustainable and unsustainable, the beautiful and repellant, and the permeable boundaries between design, craft, and fine art.

Friday, March 23rd, 7 pm – 9 pm

7 pm Maxine Gaiber, Executive Director, DCCA, Introduction
7:15 pm Marshall Brown, Keynote Lecture, Constructing Futures
8 pm Cocktail Reception

Marshall Brown will discuss the roles of futurism, scenario planning, and uncertainty in the production of space. The talk will consider examples from across the creative fields as well as examples from his own architecture and urban design work and will be followed by Q & A.

Saturday, March 24th, 8:30 am – 12:30 pm

8:30 - 9 am - Continental Breakfast
9 am - Maxine Gaiber, Welcome
9:15 - 10:30 am - J. Susan Isaacs, PhD, Introduction to Under Construction with artists Anthony Cervino and Leah Bailis from Under Construction, as well as painter Erin Murray, and installation artist Amanda Burnham

The intersection between construction, architecture, design, and sculpture occupies a number of artists today. A number of artists in these exhibitions address one or more of these themes by producing installations and sculptures that utilize the forms and materials found in the large, home-building store. Others create drawings and paintings that address related themes such as the rural vs. the urban and the ethereality of structure. All comment on the significance of shelter in a world of shifting values, meanings, and social constructs.

11:00 am - 12:45 pm Maiza Hixson, Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art with the Dufala Brothers and select Contraption artists: Tim Eads, Grant Cox, and Lauren Ruth

Philadelphia-based artists, satirists, and siblings Billy and Steven Dufala design and fabricate wildly awkward and inefficient versions of consumer goods using mass-produced materials. The artists’ prior constructions include a fiberglass furniture suite and chain-link house. Hixson discusses the artists’ wry cultural commentary and pragmatic design approach to absurd objects and skillfully crafted sculptural lemons. Contraption focuses on several distinct artistic practices in which sculpture functions as machine, prop, and/or prosthetic device. Approaching art with mad-scientist style invention and often constructing objects from discarded and repurposed materials, artists Tim Eads, Grant Cox, and Lauren Ruth create works that ask the viewer to experience them rather than gaze at them from a distance. Often audible, wearable, usable, and playful, the work in Contraption encourages a sensory connection.

About Marshall Brown: Marshall Brown is an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture where he teaches architecture and urban design. He was a 2010 MacDowell Fellow, and is also currently teaching as the first Saarinen Architecture Fellow at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Brown received his Masters degrees in architecture and urban design from Harvard University where he won the Druker Fellowship for urban design. Brown also participated in Chicago Humanities Foundation “City of the Future Series.” Brown’s publications and presentations address the urban environment, a pressing issue in the 21st century. Brown is a teacher/scholar who examines the ways human beings can or should construct, design, and live in the built environment.

Download full schedule of events here.

Two-day symposium
$85 Members, $100 Future Members, $45 Students

Friday evening only
$35 Members, $40 Future Members, $15 Students

Saturday only
$60 Members, $70 Future Members, $35 Students

Teachers can receive credit for the Symposium through the Delaware Teacher Center.

The Gretchen Hupfel Symposium is named for Gretchen Hupfel, a conceptually oriented artist who worked in many different disciplines. She passed away in 2002 at the age of thirty-nine. This named lecture furthers the legacy of a passionate and remarkably talented artist and will not only commemorate her death, but celebrate her life.

For more information on the Gretchen Hupfel Endowment Fund visit: http://thedcca.org/content/gretchen-hupfel-endowment-fund.

This program is partially funded by a grant from the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

DCCA Education Programs are made possible, in part, by individual contributions; member support; and by major grants from Bank of America, Borgenicht Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, DuPont, ING DIRECT, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware in partnership with National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities; United Way of Delaware; The First State Gridiron Board; The Gilliam Foundation; I Could Do Great Things Foundation; Puffin Foundation; Wilmington Flower Market; The Christmas Shop Foundation; Walmart; and by Amtrak – Official Transportation Provider for the DCCA.

Annual Gretchen Hupfel Symposium

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