The Long Night of Arts & Innovation showcases Riverside’s exceptional talent in the arts, the performing arts, science and technology, and the culinary arts & sciences. Between 5 p.m. and midnight, you will have a chance to see more than 130 world-class projects, all in several venues throughout Downtown Riverside, including UCR ARTSblock.
Support has been provided by UCR College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) and the City of Riverside
Culver Center of the Arts
Melanie Nakaue’s Eclipses is a multi-channel video installation comprised of a series of experimental animations. Through an amalgamation of collages,digital graphics, and stop motion animation, Nakaue depicts a disjunction between psychological and physical entities associated with “eclipses.” For this presentation at the Culver Center of the Arts, the idea of an “eclipse” is manifested through explorations of physical dimensions associated with layering and shadows. Nakaue unites these elements to illustrate the liminal space of passing between two states of being, consciousness and the unconscious.
Jeanette Kohl, chair of the Department of the History of Art, gave the commencement speech at UCR’s partner university in Germany, Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg.Kohl was invited by FAU’s chair of the art history department, Professor Christina Strunck. The visit was part of an ongoing collaboration between the two universities. The partnership began in 2013, after a graduate student workshop with faculty and students from FAU in Riverside. Kohl and another UCR art history professor, Kris Neville, took a group of seven graduate students on a summer study trip abroad to the German university in 2014. Read more
Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest
2015,University Of Minnesota Press
Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood’s iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision’s fundamental contribution to regional identity—to Midwesternness as we understand it.
Born and raised in Buffalo, New York and transplanted to Southern California at age 8, she has been captivated by the power of museums from a young age. Trips to art museums, historical houses and centers, parks, and other cultural attractions pepper the landscape of her childhood memories and in turn dictated her educational path. In pursuit of her passion for the history of art, she completed a Bachelor’s degree, Magna Cum Laude, in Art History and Administrative Studies and a Master’s degree in the History of Art, both from the University of California, Riverside.