Shoshana Dentz (born 1968, NYC) is a Brooklyn-based artist. Her small, seemingly abstract works are based on meticulously faithful, close-up and prolonged observation of a transparent, scotch-taped-together box that she poses with mirrors. Conceived and constructed by the artist, this barely-there still-life subject has been the singular and serial subject of her painting and drawing practice of the past decade. Chasing, over and over again, to grasp every ephemeral reflection bounding through the microworld set up on her studio table, her paintings are meditations on the workings and instability of perception itself.
Dentz received her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2004) and her Bachelors degree from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (1989). She has been the recipient of several awards such as Pollack Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Eastside Printshop and The FID Drawing Prize. Along with residencies at Art Omi in upstate New York (2005 & 2020), Dentz has been awarded 2021 residencies at Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy and at Interlude Residency in Livingston, New York. She recently completed a public, site-specific installation for Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings in New York. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The Rose Art Museum, The Graduate Center New York, MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, Rubin Museum of Art, Building 92 at The Brooklyn Navy Yard, Pera Museum Istanbul, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, Kohler Arts Center, Spertus Museum Chicago and a host of private galleries. She currently teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons The New School and School of Visual Arts, New York.
In this intensive, culturally-immersive two-course summer program, students study studio art and art history in Siena, Italy. The program offers students the opportunity to combine classroom coursework, field trips to historic cultural sites in Tuscany, and practice traditional techniques in the studio, which together give the students a holistic understanding of this unique and culturally important environment.
2021 SNF-SART Cultural Entrepreneurship Pilot Program
What are we up to in Greece?
With support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), the Siena Art Institute (SART) is launching Art Cloud Greece, a new Athens-based project during 2021 that sees the direct involvement of our former students as cultural entrepreneurs. The aim is to engage the international art community that rotates around the Siena Art Institute; to provide professional experience for young artists beginning their careers; to enrich the cultural activities of local communities in Greece with particular attention to marginalized communities. Participants are organized in small teams to work on specific project goals to be completed within December 2021.
On our visit to Athens this past weekend, we also met up with our former Siena Art Institute resident artist Alexandros Georgiou, to see some of his current work-in-progress. Our recent resident artists Vassiliki Spachou & Fotis Flevotomos also joined us for brainstorming meetings as we work towards more exciting Greek collaborations! Their residencies at the Siena Art Institute were sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation
A Conversation and Poetry Reading with Policromia Poets Past and Future
On Friday June 4th the Siena Art Institute’s series of online events continues with a poetry reading and conversation.
Mairéad Byrne and Will Schutt, organizers of Policromia, the Siena Art Institute’s annual international festival of poetry and translation, will be talking with award-winning poets John Murillo and Dirceu Villa about the purpose and practice of writing poetry today.
Live streaming on our Facebook and YouTube channels at at 6 p.m. Italy, 5pm UK, 7pm Greece, 9:30 pm India, noon NYC, 9 a.m. LA.
Bios
Mairéad Byrne’s poetry collections include Talk Poetry (Miami University Press), SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions), and The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius). Her work has been translated by Dirceu Villa in the collection Famosa na sua cabeça (Dobra Editorial). Recent work includes two chapbooks In & Out (Smithereens 2019) and har sawlya (above/ground 2019); and two essays, “Light in July,” in David (Jhave) Johnston’s ReRites: Raw Output/Responses (Anteism 2019) and “The Shed of Poetry,” in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric (Shearsman 2020). She is a Professor of Poetry at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She is a co-curator of Policromia, the Siena Art Institute’s annual international festival of poetry and translation across the arts.
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books 2020), winner of the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Award. His honors include two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a Pushcart Prize, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.
Will Schutt is the author of Westerly, awarded the 2012 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and translator, most recently, of My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin College Press 2018), Andrea Marcolongo’s The Ingenious Language (Europa Editions 2019) and Carlo and Renzo Piano’s Atlantis (Europa Editions 2020) He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Fellowship, and other awards. He is a co-curator of Policromia, the Siena Art Institute’s annual international festival of poetry and translation across the arts.
Dirceu Villa (1975, São Paulo, Brazil) is the author of 6 books of poetry, MCMXCVIII (1998), Descort (2003), Icterofagia (2008), Transformador (anthology, 1998-2013), speechless tribes (2018) and couraça (2020). He is also the translator of Joseph Conrad’s short-stories from A Set of Six (2009), Ezra Pound’s Lustra (2011), Mairéad Byrne’s Famosa na sua cabeça (selection and translation, 2015) and Jean Cocteau’s L’Ange Heurtebise (in print). Some of his poems can be found in literary publications abroad such as Rattapallax (USA), Poetry Wales (UK), Alforja (Mexico), Alba (UK), Neue Rundschau (Germany), Retendre la corde vocale (France), Atelier and Mediumpoesia (Italy), and others. He has written essas on contemporary poetry and a revision of the poetry canon of Portuguese language for Germina Literatura magazine (later expanded into a post-Doctoral study). He also organised na anthology of Brazilian contemporary poets for Mexico City’s La Otra magazine in 2009, and has written prefaces for Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire and Christopher Marlowe’s works in Brazil, as well as prefaces for contemporary authors like Alfredo Fressia and Ricardo Aleixo. He was invited to the 2012 PoesieFestival in Berlin. While working on his translation of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts to Portuguese, he was selected for a Translation Residency organised by the British Council and the Writers’ Centre Norwich, in London and Norwich (2015), and was invited for the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Granada, Nicarágua (2018), joining, also, the Policromia Festival in Siena, Italy (2019). He holds a PhD from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) on the Italian and the British poetry of the XVth and XVIth centuries (with a Doctorate internship in London, researching at the Warburg Institute Library). He taught Literature at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) and presently teaches Literary Translation at Casa Guilherme de Almeida (Centre for the Study of Literary Translation), and writing in literary workshops. He has written against the 2016 coup d’état in Brazil and the far right politics that ensued.
A glimpse into Greek artist Fotis Flevotomos‘s spring 2021 residency at the Siena Art Institute: inspired by the 14th century Sienese school of painting, exploring the potential of color through brightness and intensity.The work of the Siena Art Institute’s Greek resident artists is co-sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Our spring 2021 series of online talks StARTers LIVE concludes on Tuesday May 25 with Dr Lyndsey Bakewell. Join us for the live broadcast at 6pm Siena / 5pm London / noon NYC / 9 am LA / 9:30 pm Delhi. Streaming simultaneously from the Siena Art Institute’s Facebook and YouTube channels.
Dr Lyndsey Bakewellis a Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her research focuses on the exploration of key societal issues through applied storytelling and performance.
She is currently working on two international research projects that consider how storytelling, drama and creative practice can teach lifelong educational skills for higher education and employment, and is currently developing a new strand of research into the experiences of parenting and motherhood through the pandemic.
She has published in the area of applied practice on a range of topics, including mental health, education and environmental issues.
Born in Columbus, Ohio Nanette Carter spent most of her childhood in Montclair, New Jersey. Her first art classes started at the age of six in the Montclair Art Museum. She attended Oberlin College majoring in Studio Art and Art History. During her junior year she studied abroad in Perugia, Italy, traveling through Europe and Northern Africa. Nanette received her MFA at Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, New York. She has recently retired as an Associate Adjunct Professor teaching Drawing at Pratt.
Over the years Nanette has received several grants which include the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and more. She has had international solo exhibitions in Japan, Syria, Cuba and Italy. She is now represented by the Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea, NY and the Ami Kanoko Gallery in Osaka, Japan.
Working with intangible ideas around contemporary issues has been Nanette’s modus operandi. How to present these ideas in an abstract visual vocabulary of form, line and color has peeked her imagination for decades.
On Tuesday May 18th the Siena Art Institute’s series of online talks StARTers LIVE continues with Sara Maccagnan, teacher, researcher and blogger of Più Arte Studio! This online event is part of our April-May series of talks on the theme of Art & Education, discussing ways of engaging in creative and critical thinking through art in a variety of subjects and contexts.
The conversation will be live-streamed on the Siena Art Institute’s Facebook page and YouTube channel at 6pm Siena / 7pm Athens / 9:30pm Delhi / noon NYC / 11am Chicago/ 9am L.A. As always, comments and questions from viewers are very welcome during the broadcast. We hope you can join us!
Body and Nature are not disconnected: the body needs nature and is part of it. In her residence at the Siena Art Institute, dance artist and educator Vassiliki Spachou experimented, through dance, by exploring the movement of the body in relation to nature, reflecting on the importance and need for this harmony. The work of the Siena Art Institute’s Greek resident artists is co-sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Corpo e natura non sono distinti, ma il primo è parte integrante della seconda. Nella sua residenza al Siena Art Institute, l’artista Vassiliki Spachou ha sperimentato, attraverso la danza, il movimento del corpo in relazione alla natura, riflettendo sull’importanza e sul bisogno di questa armonia.
On Tuesday May 11th the Siena Art Institute’s series of online talks StARTers LIVE continues with Allen Frost and Will Schutt, teachers of English, creative writing, and humanities! This online event is part of our April-May series of talks on the theme of Art & Education, discussing ways of engaging in creative and critical thinking through art in a variety of subjects and contexts.
The conversation will be live-streamed on the Siena Art Institute’s Facebook page and YouTube channel at 6pm Siena / 7pm Athens / 9:30pm Delhi / noon NYC / 11am Chicago/ 9am L.A. As always, comments and questions from viewers are very welcome during the broadcast. We hope you can join us!
Allen Frost is the Director of the Innovative Teacher Program at The Nueva School, a PreK-12 school for gifted students in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works with teachers across the school, helping them to grow their pedagogical practice, and he also teaches several humanities courses, including “Rage, Romance, and Resilience: A Cultural History of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic” and “Close Readings in Everyday Life.” Before Nueva, Allen received his PhD in English at Stanford University in 2015. His dissertation focused on representations of geography and space in 20th century American novels, from William Faulkner to Jonathan Franzen. While pursuing his doctorate, Allen spent several summers teaching literary theory to high school students at the Arkansas Governor’s School in his home state. He began his teaching career in public high schools in Pennsylvania and then taught at the Chinese International School in Hong Kong. Allen received his BA in English literature and educational studies from Swarthmore College. He lives in San Francisco, where he plays oboe in the San Francisco Philharmonic and the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony.
Will Schutt is a poet and translator. His book of poems, Westerly, received the 2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. His most recent translations include My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin College Press, 2018), Atlantis by Carlo and Renzo Piano (Europa Editions, 2020) and Fleeing for Safety: From Mantua to Switzerland by Corrado Vivanti and Clelia della Pergola (CPL Editions, 2020). He lectures at Goucher College, where he directs the Goucher College Young Writers’ Camp. He is also the co-curator of Policromia, the Siena Art Institute’s poetry and translation festival in Siena.
