ART IS MY OCCUPATION:
Activating Engagement in the Arts
Join us for a panel discussion with Bay Area artists and arts professionals about their work engaging and cultivating diverse audiences.
Featuring:
- Brett Cook, visual artist and educator
- Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez, Executive Director of MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana
- Julie Phelps, Artistic Director of CounterPulse
- Janice Ross, TAPS professor, Faculty Director of ITALIC, Founder of Dance in Prisons Project
Moderated by Aimee Shapiro, Director of Engagement at the Anderson Collection
Tuesday, April 26
12:00-1:30pm
Anderson Collection Resource Room
314 Lomita Drive
Lunch will be provided.
SPEAKER BIOS
Brett Cook is an artist and educator who uses his creative practice to transform outer and inner worlds of being. For over two decades, Cook has produced installations, exhibitions, curricula, and events widely across the United States, and internationally. His museum work features drawing, painting, photography, and elaborate installations that make intimately personal experiences universally accessible. His public projects typically involve community workshops and collaborative art, along with music, performance, and food to create a more fluid boundary between art making, daily life, and healing.
Teaching and public speaking are extensions of his social practice that involve communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught at all academic levels in a variety of subjects, and published in academic journals at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Columbia, and Harvard Universities. In 2009, he published Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits with Wendy Ewald and Amherst College Press.
He has received numerous awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Richard C. Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recognized for a history of socially relevant, community engaged projects, Brett was selected as a cultural ambassador to Nigeria as part of the U.S. Department of State's 2012 smARTpower Initiative and an inaugural A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art in 2014. His work is in private and public collections including the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and Harvard University.
Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez has institutionalized MACLA’s commitment to commission significant new work annually and to run a fiscally sound organization. She has played an integral role in community development work, which uses art as a vehicle to bring together people of various socio-economic and cultural backgrounds to promote neighborhood-based social change.
Anjee has worked as a curator, writer and cultural worker in the Bay Area for the past eighteen years. She began her involvement with MACLA in 1994 and served as Associate Director and Curator from 2004-2007. In 2009 Anjee was recognized for her dynamic leadership with the “40 Under 40” award from the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. She has served as a nominator, juror and panelist for Creative Capital, Alliance of Artists Communities’ Visions from New California awards, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She has presented at Grantmakers in the Arts (2009, 2011), the Ford Foundation’s 2010 Space for Change, and served as an advisor to the William and Flora Hewett Foundation’s Bay Area Cultural Asset Mapping project. In 2012 she joined the Knight Foundation’s National Arts Advisory Committee. Anjee earned a B.F.A. in Pictorial Studies from San Jose State University and holds an M.A. in Visual Criticism from California College of the Arts.
Julie Phelps has been with CounterPulse for over seven years. Phelps represents and engages the hybrid strategies of curator, artist, and community activist as a mode of advancing the multi-faceted mission of CounterPulse. As part of her work at CounterPulse, Phelps has led the design and implementation of numerous initiatives including transitioning from a rental venue to a curated and acclaimed program, launching community-based programming with low-income neighboring residents, and instigating cross-cultural exchange projects with Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Sweden and most recently the African continent through her membership in The African Contemporary Arts Consortium. In addition to her work at CounterPulse, she has toured nationally and internationally as a performer. Phelps is currently overseeing the design of the facility and programs at CounterPulse’s new home on Turk Street.
Janice Ross is a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies and Faculty Director of ITALIC, Immersion In The Arts Living In Culture, a new freshman residential program. Former director of the Dance Division she has a BA with Honors from UC Berkeley and MA and PhD degrees from Stanford. She teaches classes in Dance Studies, Dance History, Dance in Prison and Dance and Conflict. She is the author of four books including Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 2015). Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, (University of California Press 2007), winner of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special Citation, San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books 2007) and Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education, (University of Wisconsin 2001). Her essays on dance have been published in numerous anthologies including On Stage Alone, ed. Claudia Gittleman, (Univ. of Florida Press, 2012), Dignity in Motion: Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice, ed. by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press 2008), Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber, (Wayne State University Press, 2008), The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counter-culture and the Avant-Garde, Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press 2003), Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University press 2003).
Her awards include Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships, Jacobs' Pillow Research Fellowship, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. For ten years she was the staff dance critic for The Oakland Tribune and for twenty years a contributing editor to Dance Magazine. Her articles on dance have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She is past President of the international Society of Dance History Scholars and past President of the Dance Critics Association and a former delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies.
AiMO is an interdepartmental collaborative program presented by Stanford ARTS, BEAM, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Cantor Art Center, The Anderson Collection and the Departments of Art & Art History and Theater & Performance Studies. AiMO’s goal is to provide students with the knowledge, skills and networks they need to succeed in arts careers.
