News

Paul Ramirez Intensive

This past week, adjunct faculty member and artist in residence at the Portland Art Museum, Paul Ramirez Jonas, came to Portland to lead us in a three day intensive.

The purpose of the intensive was to collectively develop a curatorial statement for Shine a Light 2013, an annual collaboration between the Portland Art Museum and the PSU Art and Social Practice MFA program. Every year for Shine a Light, MFA students host a collection of projects that enable museum goers to engage with the art and the museum itself in unconventional ways.   

The intensive was structured around ideas of the museum as site-specific, time-specific, and people-specific.  

We read a number of articles from a variety of thinkers including Tom Finkelpearl, Miwon Kwon, Claire Bishop, and Jurgen Habermas.  We also read sections of Disenchanted Night a book by Wolfgang Schivelbusch that chronicles the effects of artificial light on our relationship to the night.  

Perhaps the highlight of the intensive was an excursion in which a dozen of us explored the city on foot and bicycle ‘observing the night’.  We split up and met back at the museum and compared notes until about 11.30 pm. 

SAVE THE DATE: Sine a Light Friday, May 17th, 2013.