The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis have selected Andréa Stanislav as the 2015-16 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow.
An associate professor of sculpture at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Stanislav is known for creating ambitious, monumentally scaled multimedia installations that explore the relationship between site and community, and between artist and audience.
For example, the video intervention “Nightmare” (2011/14) — originally launched on the Mississippi River and later reprised on the Neva River in St. Petersburg, Russia — creates the illusion of a ghostly white horse galloping for miles upon the surface of the water. “River To Infinity—The Vanishing Points” (2008) is an immersive landscape built primarily from mirrors but also incorporating video images of mirrored obelisks that Stanislav created, and later exploded, on the Great Salt Flats of Utah.
“I consider the work completed when the viewer/participant is immersed within it, both intellectually and physically,” she writes in an artist’s statement. “This immersion is amplified by a literal ‘physicality of ideas,’ whereby the metaphors and ideas within the work produce a visceral experience for the spectator/viewer, transforming them into participants.”
Other recent projects range from “Broken Obelisks” (2013), in which a holographic skin creates the illusion of movement, to a series of sculptures combining taxidermied animals with bright reflective materials such as mirror, glass, steel, crystal and rhinestone — a juxtaposition the artist describes as “anchored in a collision of beauty and horror.”
“We’re excited to have Andréa join us this year as our latest addition to the Freund Teaching Fellowship program,” said Patricia Olynyk, the Florence and Frank Bush Professor and director of the Graduate School of Art, who led the selection committee with Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art for the Saint Louis Art Museum.
“While her projects will inspire the students to consider new conceptual strategies and modes of production and display in their own work,” Olynyk said, “Andréa’s practice overall will expand discourse on American exceptionalism, affect behavior, and situated practices in the MFA program and in St. Louis.”
Supported by the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Endowment Fund, Freund Teaching Fellowships promote the exhibition and acquisition of contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles in the Sam Fox School. Each fellowship consists of two monthlong residencies, during which recipients teach in the Sam Fox School and prepare an exhibition for the museum’s Currents series.
“Andréa’s work has a strong poetic, as well as conceptual, element, and stood out in the selection process,” Kelly said. “Her ambitious engagement with a wide range of media, including sculpture, new media, painting and performance, is also impressive. We are very much looking forward to her Currents exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum in spring 2016.”
Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture
The 2015-16 academic year also will see the launch of the newly endowed Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture, which will take place each semester as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series.
Award-winning designer Natasha Jen will present the inaugural lecture Monday, Sept. 28. A partner at the international design firm Pentagram, Jen was recently named one of nine “Designers Who Matter” by Wired magazine. Her work is recognized for its inventive use of graphic, digital and spatial interventions that challenge conventional notions of media and cultural contexts.
Conceptual artist Mark Dion will present the spring Freund Visiting Artist Lecture Feb. 29, 2016. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. The job of the artist, he said, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention.
Saint Louis Art Museum
The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading comprehensive art museums with collections that include works of art of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes and European and American art of the late 19th and 20thcenturies, with particular strengths in 20th-century German art. The museum offers a full range of exhibitions and educational programming generated independently and in collaboration with local, national and international partners.
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
The Sam Fox School supports the creation, study and exhibition of multidisciplinary and collaborative work. Offering rigorous art and architecture education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, the Sam Fox School links four academic units — the College of Art, College of Architecture, Graduate School of Art and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — with the university’s nationally recognized Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
