Columbia University Center for Jazz Studies

Improvisation in Everyday Life

Presented by:

The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University

The School of the Arts at Columbia University

In conjunction with:

2008 Visual Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition

Panelists: Arthur Jafa, Marina Rosenfeld, and Amy Sillman

Moderator: George Lewis

May 6, 2008, 6:30 pm

38-27 30th Street, Long Island City, New York (map)

Visual artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, composer and sound artist Marina Rosenfeld, and painter Amy Sillman discuss the role and practice of improvisation in cross-disciplinary artmaking. Read more >>

Please click here to register for this complimentary event. For more information on the MFA Thesis show please visit the Visual Arts website.

Arthur Jafa, a celebrated cinematographer, has worked with directors Spike Lee (Crooklyn), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut) and Martin Scorsese (The Blues: A Musical Journey). Jafa was the lead cinematographer on Isaac Julien’s Darker Shade of Black, John Akomfrah’s Seven Songs for Malcolm X, and Manthia Diawara’s Rouch in Reverse (2000). His work exploring photo-collages, installations, and conceptual pieces has been shown at Artists Space and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Jafa studied architecture and film at Howard University, and was as a fellow at the Program for Media Artists in New York City. Jafa also served as an international artist-in-residence at Artpace in San Antonio , where one of his installations, “My Black Death,” was explored in an essay of the same name in Greg Tate’s anthology, Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture.

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York. She has deployed both musical and visual media to create performances, installations, video projections, photography, and hybrids forms drawing on these. She is also a noted improviser, playing original ‘dub plates’ (one-off acetate records) on turntables. In recent years, her work has been commissioned by the Whitney Biennial 2008 and 2002; Creative Time; Tate Modern; The Kitchen; Artists Space; Contemporary Jewish Museum; Electronic Music Foundation; and festivals including Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll/Steirische Herbst, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Wein Modern and The Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music, among many others. She has performed with Christian Marclay, Tony Conrad, Sonic Youth, DJ Olive, George Lewis, Ikue Mori and Kaffe Matthews, among many other artists; and has recorded on Charhizma, Softl, and Room 40. In March 2008, she premiered Teenage Lontano, a work for 35-voice teenaged choir and “phonographic” speaker installation, in the vast Drill Hall space of New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Rosenfeld is co-chair of the Department of Music/Sound at the Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Amy Sillman lives and works in Brooklyn NY and in Tivoli NY. Her work is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York, and she has been exhibiting in museums and galleries in the US and Europe since 1990. Her solo show “Third Person Singular” is currently on view at The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC., until July 6th, 2008, and then moves to the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs NY. Other recent solo exhibitions include “Person, Place or Thing” at Carlier-Gebauer, Berlin in 2007; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, in 2006; “The Other One” at Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles CA, in 2005; and “Procession,” at The ICA Philadelphia’s Ramp Project in 2004. Sillman has recently been awarded a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, where she will be in residence for the first half of 2009. She has also been the recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Her work is held in many public collections, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Recent publications include “Third Person Singular,” the book that accompanies her shows at the Hirshhorn and the Tang; “Amy Sillman-Works on Paper,” published by Gregory R. Miller, NY, in 2006; and “Amy Sillman/Gregg Bordowitz,” published in 2007 by A.R.T. Press’s Conversations Between Artists series. Sillman is Co-Chair of the Painting Department of Bard College’s MFA Program in the summer, and during the year she is an adjunct faculty member of Columbia University’s MFA Program.

George E. Lewis serves as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work as composer, improvisor, performer and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 120 recordings. His published articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes, and his book, Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008.

The Conversations Series at the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University aims to explore the role of improvisation in the widest array of fields and practices, in a format designed to be as intimate and inviting as possible. The guiding premise of the series is that the study of improvisation can present not only a new animating paradigm for scholarly inquiry in the humanities, the arts, and the social, political, and even natural sciences, but also a set of trenchant models for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action that can foster community building across national and cultural boundaries. These discussions encourage an interdisciplinary expansion of the intellectual conversation surrounding jazz, and especially its lifeblood practice, improvisation, as a means toward developing new knowledge that illuminates the human condition.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Jazz Studies and the School of the Arts

The Conversations Series at the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University is underwritten by generous support from the Ford Foundation.

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