Propagation: curated by Sabrina Raaf

Artists:
Industry of the Ordinary
Patrick Lichty
Andrea Polli
subRosa
Michael Workman
Amy Youngs

also a mini exhibit: Christa Donner

Opening Friday October 13 from 6pm-10pm
October 13 - November 4, 2006

Propagation is an exhibition featuring artists, art writers, and curators who bypass traditional exhibition systems (eg. galleries, museums, magazines, etc.) by creating unique methods for distributing their art or message. Propagation focuses on how these culture authors' own systems of dispersion may - in and of themselves - be considered as art. On view are diagrams generated by each exhibitor that map out aspects of their methodology, network, and organizational patterns. Also on display are video interviews with the exhibitors, documentation of their works as well as actual works, and distributive ephemera (pamphlets, cds, and other materials). This exhibition offers an opportunity for audiences to examine the shape and phenomena of these art generation, systemization, and distribution methodologies as art forms and end products - not just as production engines.

Whether they are formulating new parameters for the way art might look, the places it might be found, how it may be defined and who gets access to it, these exhibitors are all actively repositioning the artist - and art itself - in society today. They focus on issues of sustainability and renewable materials, such as found in the Queensbridge Wind Power Project by Andrea Polli and in Prototypes for Hermit Crab Shells by Amy Youngs. They also distribute their message on a street level - directly to the public - in an unfiltered, often unsolicited, manner such as in the interventionist works of Industry of the Ordinary. They proliferate their messages through subversive tactics including skillful questioning of the impact of new bio-technologies on women’s bodies and work product - such as found in the pamphlets, websites, videos and performances of subRosa. Last, they function as cultural agents and art system generators who continuously transfigure with ease and purpose between such capacities as artist, editor, author, critic, curator, art fair director [Michael Workman] and artist, activist, editor-in-chief, author, engineer, curator, and collaborator [Patrick Lichty].

The evolution of new art systems / practices / means / and methods is being designed in part out of necessity. The lack of funding for the arts in America has caused a real attrition in the number of experimental art spaces and publications open to hosting boundary-pushing works. Many artists who are unwilling to work in more traditional media (fit for the remaining venues) are thereby faced with an imperative to actively evolve those systems around them or produce new ones. Equally as catalytic a factor in this evolution (and often also funding-related) is the degree to which white-box galleries and glossy magazines fall flat when it comes reaching audiences outside of the usual, immediate circles of arts professionals. These platforms are often too sales-driven, too rhetorical in their message, and / or too myopic in their programming to attract the attention of broader audiences. One major consequence is that, if an artist or culture author wishes to have a potentially world-changing effect via their work, than they must find access to more powerful systems for displaying and disseminating it. White-box galleries and magazines aren’t, in the end, the vehicle by which they will make their ideas heard / seen by a broader public.

There exists another heavily inertial force that artists contend with while trying to reach a wider public. This force is the seemingly benign, age-old premise that artists [must] position themselves on the fringe of culture in order to gain enough perspective to study it, process it, and to mirror back any profoundly revelatory aspects they find through their work. Over the last century, artists and art historians alike have often used this premise to excuse the type of overtly self-referential, manic, and anti-social behavior (such as the cutting off of one’s own ear) which had been heavily romanticized during the modernist era. Indeed, the popularly held belief became that having a manic-depressive personality was a prerequisite for ‘genius’ in an artist. Not surprisingly then, artists themselves began to emulate this code of behavior. That code and caricature quickly propagated into an archetype that continues to be spread like a virus by pop culture / film depictions of ‘the artist’ - as well as, unfortunately, by artists themselves.

This popular perception of artists as melancholic and self-indulgent, while not embraced by all (at least not consciously), remains an obstacle to artist/activists today whose work – no matter how serious or well researched – is prejudged by the public as eccentric and peripheral to their reality or of only mild ‘human interest’ value. Artists have therefore another impetus to circumnavigate the traditional exhibition systems where their work may be ‘ghettoized’ because the public simply doesn’t enter those spaces or, if they do, it is because they are seeking visual stimulation / distraction and not intellectual discourse. As evidenced in the works and interviews of several the exhibitors included in Propagation, the tactic of inventing alternate and even under-cover methods for reaching the public with their work can be essential in order to genuinely engage others and to communicate the relevance of their ideas.

Schemata and Ephemera

Andrea Polli is an artist-researcher who focuses on environmental phenomena in primarily urban environments. Some of these phenomena include smog systems, global warming, and air traffic control. Working with atmospheric scientists, computer programmers, and sound engineers, Polli has created immersive artworks using the pattern data (either real time or long term) from storm fronts and changes in polar ice flows (due to global warming). She accomplished this by translating that data algorithmically into complex sonic works that literally wash over the bodies of the audience members and impart a powerful and immediate sense of these globally-scaled phenomena. Polli has also more recently been working on designs for sustainable systems which could ameliorate some of the negative consequences of these phenomena. Her Queensbridge Wind Power Project exhibited in Propagation includes a previsualization of a wind farm as it might be “integrated into the landmark architecture of the Queensboro Bridge” (Polli) in New York. The energy generated by such a wind farm at that location would be powerful enough to light up many of the bridges connecting the island of Manhattan with the surrounding NY boroughs. The diagram Polli has created for Propagation depicts the timeline of her process in researching and visualizing this work as well as her ongoing process of lobbying city and local organizations to make this proposal into a reality.

Patrick Lichty is an artist who has been an instrumental collaborator in the development of a new model of artist collectives in the 80’s and 90’s; that is, a model oriented towards web activism, electronic intervention, and performance aimed at exposing the most egregious aspects of corporate culture in America. Lichty began as collaborator in several seminal artist/activist groups of that era such as Haymarket Riot and RTMark, and he continues to collaborate with the Yes Men group today. He is an avid cultural theorist and critic, at first writing for Arte Byte magazine on technology and culture, and eventually becoming the Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine in 2000. All the while, Lichty has continued to build and exhibit his own body of artwork internationally. For an individual who has maintained so many concurrent roles in the art, it is a-propos that the diagram Lichty created for Propagation focuses on identity. Due to it’s title of ‘Identity as Construct’, a viewer may at first interpret his diagram as a blueprint for how to construct an identity in the art world. In actuality, Lichy’s diagram is an intimate deconstruction of himself, his personae, his practice, his interests and conflicts. It lists many practical factors (often unmentioned) in maintaining an art career such as a falsely perceived need to package oneself in order to be accepted and understood by others. His diagram lists in detail the multiplicity of production choices a new media artist faces when filtering an art idea into a distributable form. It illustrates the complex terrain that artists navigate today – the competing interests, the ongoing responsibilities to the art community, the ever-proliferating output options for work product, and the unending search for food to feed one’s intellect and fuel one’s evolution of identity.

subRosa defines itself as a “a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work”. Their mission is to create performative events or actions – often not formally presented as art and sometimes even presented under the guise of a corporate campaign – which allow participants to engage in their research and dialog surrounding new biotechnologies. Those who attend (or stumble upon) these performances take those conversations away with them – along with booklets of essays, articles, and factoids that subRosa compiles into pamphlets. The impact that the subRosa collaborative has had in the arts and beyond is based on their consistently intelligent activisim on the behalf of women and exploited populations internationally. Through their performances, they reveal questionable trends in genetic research today such as the proliferation of patents on gene sequences. The address the politics and polemics behind rapidly burgeoning markets of living tissue (organs, human eggs and embryos, stem cells, etc.). In works like US Grade AAA Premium Eggs, 2002 and Cell Track: Mapping the Appropriation of Life Materials, 2004, subRosa exposes routine corporate practices when it comes to choosing, contracting, and harvesting eggs and embryonic cells from female donors. The results are dehumanizing at best and at worst, alarmingly exploitative, prejudicial, and injurious. The ephemera which subRosa is exhibiting for Propagation provides us with an inside look at their practice. It includes documentation of preparations before performances, lists of participants in events, charts of influences, members and notes on key concepts, recipes, pamphlets, dvds, painted illustrations of performances, and books various members have edited.

Amy Youngs is a new media artist whose work focuses on natural life systems, sustainable design, and global ecology. Her sculptural works often include living organisms which function to control and even modify the work they are embedded in. The work included in Propagation, Prototypes for Hermit Crab Shells (2001), includes delicate and beautifully formed ‘sea shells’ made from glass and rapid prototyped plastic (photopolymer). Youngs designed these shells in collaboration with artist Matt Derksen in response to substantial drops in hermit crab populations worldwide. This drop is due to the popular human pastime of collecting sea shells on beaches or buying them in stores. Hermit crabs, which make no shells of their own, rely on recycling the shells (as their homes) that other crustaceans abandon once they have outgrown them. If humans are collecting too many of these intact shells, then hermit crabs don’t have shells to move into as they grow, and the result is that they die. Youngs and Derksen designed these shell prototypes as items that eventually may be mass-produced and introduced into natural settings where hermit crabs could find them and populate them as substitutes. The ephemera that Amy Youngs has prepared for Propagation includes raw materials from her sculptural production as well as materials she has drawn inspiration from while creating new works. Her diagram involves a sort of topological mapping of the various overlapping zones of influence, stimulus, motivation, and dialog that currently shape her work.

Industry of the Ordinary is a relatively new collaborative group, formed in 2003 in Chicago, that currently consists of two artists: Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson. Their works are created out of a love for spotlighting the extraordinary in the ordinary as well as their shared sense of humility, humanism, and a double-dose of sardonic wit. IOTO’s subject matter is not predetermined or thematic - it is for the most part formed in response to local, national, and international issues they are compelled to address as well as in response to the absurdities of every day life. Their street level and (often) unadvertised performances tackle issues in politics, race, and religion with deceptively simple gestures. For example, in their piece entitled Ten (2005), the IOTO created an ice sculpture of the Ten Commandments in response to Judge Moore’s crusade in Alabama to have a sculpture of the Ten Commandments (actually a movie prop replica) kept in the federal court house. Their performance consisted of transporting this melting ice sculpture of the commandments down Michigan Avenue (in Chicago) and giving away the run off water to the public in small bottles sandblasted with the word ‘faith’ on the side. The public was left to determine what this meant – whether this was an act of devotion or of irreverence. Their piece included in the Propagation exhibit, entitled Homeland Security (2005), consists of five barbells of varying weight and cast in ceramic. The weights are painted in the five colors of the national Threat Level System (used to communicate the likelihood of an attack on America to the public). The ephemera they are exhibiting includes t-shirts, bumper stickers, and pins neatly printed with several words in Arabic that translates into the words “Vote for me.”

Michael Workman is the current President and Director of Bridge NFP, a Chicago-based 501 (c) (3) organization which he co-founded in 2000. Bridge was created by Workman and his wife, Marie Waltz, after a brief period of owning a bookstore in Chicago. It began as an arts and literary journal which quickly developed into a contemporary arts magazine, and now, six years later, has grown to an organization which also produces / encompasses an annual art fair. The Bridge Art Fair has already reached international acclaim - hosting large-scale exhibitions in Chicago, Miami, and London. Workman walks us through the rapid evolution of Bridge – as well as his own shifts in identity and vision – in a candid video interview granted for the Propagation exhibition. Workman continues to write on visual art for NewCity, Flash Art magazine and Contemporary magazine while directing Bridge. His work exhibited in Propagation, Private Journal (Begun as a teenager as a gift for future children), is one of many, many journals he has filled cover-to-cover during his lifetime with fastidious and densely written entries. The content includes notations from in his daily life: things and ideas which fascinate him, things unnoticed by others, visions to pass on, private struggles, and they type of thoughts one wishes not to loose while battling against the chaos and weight of one’s own personal history.

I would like to thank the collective of Polvo for their 10+ years of fostering experimental arts in Chicago via exhibitions, listservs, web and print publications. The Propagation exhibition at Polvo is a demonstration of how non-profit organizations remain invaluable sites for presenting convention-breaking art to interested audiences.

Sabrina Raaf
artist, curator, Propagator

Propagation Overview
John Tillman, Chicago, 2006

"The definition of an artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution."
Marcel Broodthaers

The question of how to disperse one’s art outside the boundaries of the traditional art exhibition systems is one that has preoccupied many artists of the last 40 years. As the art world solidified into an established meshwork of galleries, museums, biennials and triennials, many artists sought out new territory in which to propagate their art; territory that more often than not required new systems and strategies as artists engaged an expanded, and many times unsuspecting, audience. From early roots in Fluxus’ happenings and mail art to present day “culture jamming” and guerilla art installations, the act of interjecting one’s work into culture at large has taken on greater complexity with each new leap in technology. And it’s precisely this complexity that Propagation hopes to explore. In a culture increasingly conscious of the ways in which information is disseminated – from the “come one, come all” video uploading of Youtube to the transparent punditry of cable news- the media is often times as cleverly cultivated as the corresponding message.

In the last 25 years, the dispersion of art has taken on a new dimension. Art that engages with themes outside of the dominant discourse(s) in art has found a more viable voice outside of the more cloistered Art world, and a more nuanced __expression of public art has emerged. From artist Paul Chan’s widely circulated map of the 2004 Republican National Convention and it’s various events, to RTMARK’s open forum for project proposals aimed at disrupting corporate practices, an “open source” attitude has begun to emerge, where strategies of propagation are exchanged free of charge to be revised, enacted and disseminated by any and all comers, artist or otherwise. With this spirit of openness, the “work” that we traditionally associate with the artist is contingent upon these utilized systems, and may be adapted from other sources, personally constructed or some amalgamation of the two. A greater understanding of this overarching “work”, the work of systematizing and dispersing art into the public at large, will show that propagation, far from simply being a means to an end, is in fact an art in itself; an art used to generate and disperse work that might not otherwise be seen. With that in mind, an exploration of the systems used by contemporary artists to propagate their own work is necessary to shed light on this sort of generative art; an art that perpetuates work while expanding the context and audience that receives it.

About the curator:
Sabrina Raaf is a Chicago-based artist working in experimental sculptural media and photography. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Mejan Labs (Stockholm), Wendy Cooper Gallery (Chicago), Espace Landowski (Paris), Ars Electronica (Linz), Opel Villas Foundation Art Center (Rüsselsheim), Artbots 2005 (Dublin), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), San Jose Museum of Art, Museum Tinguely (Basel), Kunsthaus Graz, ISEA (Helsinki), Klein Art Works (Chicago), Wynick/Tuck Gallery (Toronto) and Painted Bride Center (Philadelphia). She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 & 2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Leonardo Magaine, www.lab71.org, The Washington Post, and New Art Examiner. She received an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Amy Youngs - http://accad.osu.edu/~ayoungs/

Amy M. Youngs creates mixed-media, interactive sculptures and digital media works, that explore the complex relationship between technology and our changing concept of nature and self. She has exhibited her works nationally and internationally at venues such as Springfield Museum of Art (Springfield, OH), Pace Digital Gallery (New York, NY), the Biennale of Electronic Arts (Perth, Australia), John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, Wisconsin), Circulo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, Spain), the Visual Arts Museum (New York, NY) the Art Institute of Chicago's Betty Rymer Gallery, Vedanta Gallery, Northern Illinois University Art Gallery (Chicago, IL), the San Francisco Public Library, Blasthaus, (San Francisco, CA) and Works (San Jose, CA). Her artwork has been reviewed in publications such as, The Chicago Sun Times, The Chicago Reader, San Francisco Bay Guardian, RealTime and Artweek. Youngs has published several essays, including one on genetic art in the journal Leonardo and another on art, technology and ecology in the international art publication Nouvel Objet in 2001. She has lectured on her work widely, including at the California State University, Long Beach, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston, Massachusetts), the Australian Center For the Moving Image (Melbourne, Australia) and the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art (Perth, Australia) and has participated in panels at conferences such as the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, the College Arts Association and the Biennale for Electronic Arts in Australia. Youngs is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and and the Art and Technology Program in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University. She was born in 1968 in Chico, California.

Andrea Polli - http://www.andreapolli.com/

Andrea Polli is a digital media artist living in New York City. She is currently an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Hunter College and received a Master of Fine Arts in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Polli's work addresses issues related to science and technology in contemporary society. Her projects often bring together artists and scientists from various disciplines. She is interested in global systems, the real time interconnectivity of these systems, and the effect of these systems on individuals. She has exhibited, performed, and lectured nationally and internationally.

She is currently working in collaboration with meteorological scientists to develop systems for understanding storms and climate through sound. For this work, she has been recognized by the UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2003 and has presented work in the 2004 Ogaki Biennale in Gifu, Japan and at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, Switzerland. Her work in this area has also been presented at Cybersonica at the ICA in London and awarded funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Greenwall Foundation. As a member of the steering committee for New York 2050, a wide-reaching project envisioning the future of the New York City region, she is currently working with city planners, environmental scientists, historians and other experts to look at the impact of climate on the future of human life both locally and globally.

She has recently presented the installation and digital print project The Fly's Eye, (2002) which creates a live movement and light analysis and deconstruction of the video image, at Le Centre de production DAÏMÕN in Quebec, the Politecnico di Milano University in Milan, Italy, at The Kunstgewerbe Museum in Berlin, Germany, at The Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, OH, at Apex Gallery in New York City, at the V Salón y Coloquio Internacional de Arte Digital in Havana, Cuba, and at SIGGRAPH '03 in San Diego among other venues.

Polli's longest running performance project, Intuitive Ocusonics, a system for performing sound using eye movements, began in 1996 and has been shown at V2 in Rotterdam, Holland; at the N-Space Art Gallery of SIGGRAPH '01 in Los Angeles, CA; at the Subtle Technologies Conference at the University of Toronto, Canada; and at Immedia, at the University of Michigan. Other performances and presentations include: The Monaco Danses Dances Forum, Monaco; ISEA, International Symposium on Electronic Art, Paris France; Invencao, Sao Paolo; and Imagina 98, Monaco. To support this work and the production of an Audio CD, Active Vision, she was awarded a 1999 artist's residency at The iEAR Institute at Rensellaer Polytechnic, a Harvestworks Recording Production Grant in New York, an Artist's Residency at The Center for Research in the Computing Arts at The University of California at San Diego, and a residency at Franklin Furnace in New York as part of The Future of the Present. She has also shown this work in venues throughout New York City, Chicago and the Midwest; in San Francisco, and in Finland, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Greece, and the Phillipines.

Her performance work and research is documented in the article Active Vision in the October 1999 issue of The Leonardo Journal. A retrospective article about her work from 1991-1998, Virtual Space and the Construction of Memory, is published in the Spring 98 issue of The Leonardo Journal.

Industry of the Ordinary - http://www.industryoftheordinary.com/

Through sculpture, text, photography, video, sound and performance Industry of the Ordinary are dedicated to anexplorationand celebration of the customary, the everyday, and the usual. Their emphasis is on challenging pejorative notions of the ordinary and, in doing so, moving beyond the quotidian.

Industry of the Ordinary were formed in 2003. Their first performance, Dropping 163 lbs: Daley Plaza, involved approximately 75 performers who dropped 163 lbs of white clothing on Daley Plaza in Chicago. 163 lbs is the average weight of an American adult.


subRosa - http://www.cyberfeminism.net

subRosa’s name honors feminist pioneers in art, activism, labor, science, and politics: Rosa Bonheur, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks and Rosie Franklin.

subRosa is a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work.

subRosa produces artworks, activist campaigns and projects, publications, media interventions, and public forums that make visible the effects of the interconnections of technology, gender, and difference; feminism and global capital; new bio and medical technologies and women’s health; and the changed conditions of labor and reproduction for women in the integrated circuit.

subRosa practices a situational embodied feminist politics nourished by conviviality, self-determination, and the desire for affirmative alliances and coalitions.


Michael Workman - http://www.bridgemagazine.org/online/

Michael Workman is the President and Director of Bridge NFP, a Chicago-based 501 (c) (3) organization. Workman is President of the Bridge Art Fair, an international exposition of new art that hosts large-scale exhibitions in Chicago, Miami and London. Bridge manages commercial leases for several properties in Chicago, including the Network of Visual Art space at 840 West Washington and unit 3D at 119 North Peoria, providing affordable studio and exhibition space to dozens of individual artists, graphic designers and gallery/artist-run spaces including Bucket Rider, F2 Lab and Garden Fresh.Workman writes a column on visual art, Eye Exam, for the Chicago alternative weekly NewCity, serves as Chicago correspondent for the bi-monthly Italian art publication, Flash Art and the UK-based art magazine Contemporary. Workman regularly lectures at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. His writing has appeared in catalog essays for the Chicago Cultural Center and his fiction, journalism and critical writing has appeared in New Art Examiner, The Chicago Reader, zingmagazine and elsewhere.


Patrick Lichty - http://www.badideamachine.com/lichtyfolder/ and http://www.voyd.com/voyd/

Patrick Lichty (b. 1962, Akron, Ohio) was born into a family with a long involvement in and support of the arts. His mother, a exhibiting artist of numerous art and craft media, immersed him in textiles, painting, ceramics, print and other techniques during his upbringing. Simultaneously he was also exposed to technology in the form of the emerging genres of electronics, video games, and later personal computing when his parents bought him an Atari 800 computer in 1978. Instead of following the desires of many adolescents of the late 70's in wanting to program the next Pac-Man or Space Invaders, he was interested in drawing and creating music with his personal computer.

Upon graduation from high school, family convinced him that computers and electronics was a field with great potential. Lichty then followed this advice to complete two degrees in electronic engineering at the University of Akron (Ohio, US), but also followed studies in Art and Asian Studies. In addition, free time was devoted to continuing interests in design, painting and digital imaging.

In 1990, while studying postgraduate Glass and Art History at Kent State University, Lichty met theatre historian Leigh Clemons and Sociologist Jonathon Epstein. Clemons would later become Lichty's scholarly collaborator (and spouse), and Epstein became partner in the media group, Haymarket Riot. During the first half of the 1990's, Lichty and Epstein created a number of works on media and culture, including Americans Have No Identity, but they do have Wonderful Teeth, The Sociology of Jean Baudrillard, and Haymarket Riot's MACHINE.

By the mid 1990's, the World Wide Web burst upon American culture, and advances in personal media production allowed the individual to create media art available only to institutions. From this, early web artworks following his love of art and theory, such as (re)cursor and video like Haymarket Riot's WEB were created, which caught the attention of corporate activists cum art group RTMark. From the mid 90's to the early 00's, the critical work started with Haymarket Riot continued in collaboration with RTMark in creating visuals and animation for exhibitions and video, culminating in 1999's Bringing It to YOU!, which was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Solo work continued as well, exploring the nature of narrative structure in online spaces. These include 1998's Metaphor and Terrain, a 'sculptural' essay examining interface as art object, 1999's Grasping @ Bits, another hyperessay looking at issues of art and intellectual property rights, and 2000 Smithsonian American Art Museum commission SPRAWL: The American Landscape in Transition. This last piece consisted of a hyperdocumentary consisting of over 190 minutes of interviews, various texts, and 32 panoramic vistas of areas in his home town of North Canton, Ohio that were in the midst of rapid change due to the housing boom of the late 90's.

After 2000, Lichty's artistic and scholarly practice would further expand from solo and collaborative works to include numerous curatorial projects, including (re)distributions: Mobile Device and PDA Art, columnist for ArtByte Magazine, and the assumption of the Executive Editor position at Intelligent Agent Magazine (NYC), in partnership with Whitney Museum of American Art digital arts curator, Christiane Paul. In addition, his service to the New Media community also expanded by becoming Chair of the Inter-Society of Electronic Art's (ISEA's) Cultural Diversity Committee, and Executive Curator of Microcinema International's Mobile Exposure cellphone video festival.

In 2001, the RTMark visual collaborations would catch the attention of another activist group, The Yes Men. This group's comical stunts, calling for humane treatment of global populations by organizations such as Dow Chemical, EXXON, the US Government, and the WTO, were featured internationally from ArtNews to the BBC. Lichty's slapstick animations from bizarre management schemes to fast-food waste reclamation projects were core illustrative components of the group's presentations, and featured in Bluemark's documentary, The Yes Men, which showed at the Sundance, Berlin, and Sydney film festivals.

After over a decade in the New Media art world, a desire share his experience through teaching required that Lichty seek a terminal (MFA) degree. In 2004, he entered Bowling Green State University's Digital Arts program under advisor Gregory Little. While planning to graduate in 2006, Lichty has served as Representative-at-Large for BGSU Graduate Student Senate, the BGSU Public Arts Committee, and is member of Phi Kappa Phi with a 4.0 GPA. He remains in his former duties, and is most recently featured in the exhibition, Dreaming of a More Better Future, at the Cleveland Institute of Art with Kevin and Jennifer McCoy and Vito Acconci.

DOWNLOAD a PDF Press Release

Polvo
1458 W 18th Street 1R(entrance on Laflin St.)
Chicago, IL 60608
773-344-1940
hours: saturdays from noon-5pm or by appointment

This exhibit is part of Chicago Artists Month, the eleventh annual celebration of Chicago’s vibrant visual art community. In October, 250 exhibitions of emerging and established artists, openings, demonstrations, tours, open studios and neighborhood art walks take place at galleries, cultural centers and arts buildings throughout the city. For further information, call 312/744-6630 or visit www.chicagoartistsmonth.org. Chicago Artists Month is coordinated by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.