Series: Art
Opening Reception Date: Friday, January 23, 2009
Time: 6:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Venue: Visual Arts Building

Exhibition dates: January 23 - February 21, 2009

Ticket Prices: Free

StayBite: Modes of Operation is an exhibition curated by artist Evelyn Serrano and writer Karla Diaz. The exhibition brings together a group of Southern California and Tijuana-based artists, art collectives and their accomplices whose practices enact questions and proposals about public space, personal agency, civic engagement, and models of action.

StayBite: Modes of Operation is a “walk-in tool box” for artists, educators, cultural field workers, policy makers and other curious types looking beyond art’s representational paradigm and contemplative value. The exhibition concentrates on context-based and process-focused practices that consider new territories for artistic and collaborative activity. From the direct political action of the clowns of C.I.R.C.A., to the migrant cities of Roberto Romero-Molina, the history plaques of the Pocho Research Society, and Elana Mann’s international performance exchange organized in response to the 2008 US presidential elections, StayBite is an anthology of strategies and a call to action.

As part of this exhibition the curators have also organized a screening, an expedition, and a series of lectures and Skype forums.

This exhibition is an Artists for Social Justice project.
www.artistsforsocialjustice.blogspot.com

Images of the artwork in the exhibition are available here:
http://artistsforsocialjustice.blogspot.com/2008/12/presenting-artists-and-collectives.html

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AND COLLECTIVES

Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (C.I.R.C.A.), San Diego Chapter
Colectivo Bulbo
Fallen Fruit
Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre
Ariel Kletzky / Islands of LA
Elana Mann / Exchange Rate
Amitis Motevalli
Pocho Research Society
Roberto Romero-Molina
Selah Artistic Giving Center
Shannon Spanhake
Arnoldo Vargas

Schedule of Lectures/Events

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 5:30-6:45pm
Green Center, GC1.201B
StayBite: Modes of Operation curators Evelyn Serrano and Karla Diaz will meet with UTD students in a dialog about pedagogy of the oppressed and theater of the oppressed techniques and philosophy as they relate to diaogical artistic practices.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 7:00-9:30pm
Media Room, Visual Arts Building  AS1.105           
StayBite: Modes of Operation curators Karla Diaz and Evelyn Serrano will meet UTD students in a forum about the curatorial and collaborative approaches involved in organizing this exhibition and its related program of activities. The curators will also explore some of the strategies and modes of operation used by the artists and art collectives in the show. Games will be played by all.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 10:00-11:15am           
Media Room, Visual Arts Building   AS1.105
The Boredom Patrol of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army will meet, via Skype, with UTD students in a dialog about guerrilla theater, public interventions, activism and grease paint.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 8:30-9:20am and 9:30-10:20am
Jonsson Performance Hall, JO 2.604
StayBite: Modes of Operation curators Karla Diaz and Evelyn Serrano will give a talk about orange artifice, migrant shelters, fallen fruit, pothole gardens and relational art practices.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 6:30-8:00pm
Visual Arts Building  Main Gallery
Staybite: Modes of Operation Opening
Meet the curators and some of the artists in the show, record your fruit stories with Fallen Fruit, get your picture taken with Orange Artifice, learn and exchange modes of operation, dance, taste, listen, ponder and come play with us.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 10am-12pm
Visual Arts Building, Main Gallery
Modes of Operation
This will be an open forum with artists Omar Foglio (Bulbo Collective), Arnoldo Vargas, Billy Mark (Selah Artistic Giving Center), and curators Karla Diaz and Evelyn Serrano.  The artists and curators’ will address their “modes of operation” and art-related strategies as they enact questions and proposals about public space, personal agency, community engagement, and models of action.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 1:00pm
Meet at UTD, Visual Arts Building  Main Gallery
Urban Land Use Expedition: Traffic Islands as Public Space
Led by artist Lydia Regalado
Join us for an excursion…an expedition into public space about land use. We will visit a parcel of interstitial land where we can legally assemble at any time of day or night for a group art-making activity. In large, car-centric urban cities, most of the public land where you can legally assemble at any time of day or night are traffic islands. This is part of an ongoing project called Islands of LA that has been exploring the use of traffic islands as public space to foster discussion and create community.

On January 24th, we will take the DART to a traffic island in Dallas. After a confab about the use of public space and the history of the island we will visit, we will engage in a group art-making activity that combines phenomenological experiences of the interstitial piece of land we will visit with critical dialogue and creative expression. The result of our activity will be installed in the gallery the following week. Everyone will be invited to participate in the installation. The activity is a collaboration between LA-based Ari Kletzky, founder of Islands of LA, and Dallas-based Lydia Regalado, founder of Skirt Project, aka TRIKS.

When: 1/24 from 1pm – 5pm or so
Where: Meet at the gallery in UT's Visual Arts Building at 1pm. The building is located at 800 West Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080
What to bring: Money to ride DART, a chair or blanket for sitting, snacks/water
Note: If the weather is bad, the event will be postponed for February 7th.

MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 7:00-9:45pm
Media Room, Visual Arts Building AS 1.105
Screening of the film Maquilapolis by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre
Synopsis:
Carmen works the graveyard shift in one of Tijuana’s maquiladoras, the multinationally-owned factories that came to Mexico for its cheap labor.  After making television components all night, Carmen comes home to a shack she built out of recycled garage doors, in a neighborhood with no sewage lines or electricity.  She suffers from kidney damage and lead poisoning from her years of exposure to toxic chemicals.  She earns six dollars a day.  But Carmen is not a victim.  She is a dynamic young woman, busy making a life for herself and her children.    As Carmen and a million other maquiladora workers produce televisions, electrical cables, toys, clothes, batteries and IV tubes, they weave the very fabric of life for consumer nations.  They also confront labor violations, environmental devastation and urban chaos -- life on the frontier of the global economy.  In MAQUILAPOLIS, Carmen and her colleague Lourdes reach beyond the daily struggle for survival to organize for change:  Carmen takes a major television manufacturer to task for violating her labor rights.  Lourdes pressures the government to clean up a toxic waste dump left behind by a departing factory.
As they work for change, the world changes too:  a global economic crisis and the availability of cheaper labor in China begin to pull the factories away from Tijuana, leaving Carmen, Lourdes and their colleagues with an uncertain future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
StayBite: Modes of Operation and its related program of activities have been a true collaborative process from its inception. The curators Karla Diaz and Evelyn Serrano would like to thank all the artists and art collectives in the show: it's been a great pleasure and an honor working with you. To the University of Texas at Dallas and its staff, faculty and students thank you for hosting this exhibition and its associated lectures, panels and activities.  Very special thanks go to Greg Metz, who teaches in the Visual Arts Studio Program and is Main Gallery Coordinator, for his generosity and extraordinary support of all curatorial efforts. Greg, you made it all happen!!

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Evelyn Serrano is a Cuban interdisciplinary artist, educator, independent curator, community organizer, and mother currently living in Los Angeles County, California. Serrano obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, School of Art, in Valencia, California. Prior to that, she studied visual arts, design, art theory, epistemology, and literature in Havana, Montevideo and Miami. She has exhibited her work in many solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. In addition, she is honored to have worked with talented artists, choreographers, writers and performers in many exhibitions, projects and art events she has organized and curated throughout the United States as well as in Montevideo, Tel Aviv, Tijuana, and La Habana. Serrano currently teaches at the CalArts School of Art and the School of Theater, and has lectured and led workshops at the New World School of the Arts in Miami, the CEART in Mexicali, the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock, the University of Texas in Dallas, and the Instituto Superior de Diseño Industrial in La Habana. She is also the Assistant Director of Programs at the CalArts Community Arts Partnership (CAP). Her work as artist, educator and arts administrator focuses on context-specific practices that advance the impact of the arts as a tool for social change.

Karla Diaz is a writer, artist and curator. She is a professor at California State University Long Beach and Harbor College. Diaz has read her work and exhibited projects in venues throughout Southern California including the Getty Museum of Art, REDCAT, the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Zocalo in Mexico City. She writes for several art magazines including Beautiful Decay, FlashArt and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Karla is a founding member of Slanguage, an artist collective in Wilmington, CA and curator at the New Chinatown Barbershop gallery in Los Angeles.