(New Brunswick, NJ) -- The Mason Gross Visual Arts Department is drawing on its roots as a locus of experimental work, hosting a free performance festival and open studios headlined by a seminal Fluxus artist, Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hendricks, as well as performance artists Brian Belott, Maiko Kikuchi, and Ronnie Bass. The event is set for Sunday, April 26, 2015, in Piscataway.
The LIPS Inaugural Performance Festival and LAB Open Studios is open to the public and runs from 2 to 8 p.m. The festival will include access to 10 MFA student studio spaces, a display of undergrad student sculptures (among them, work by student Will Tutino of Maplewood), as well as performances by students and visiting artists such as East Orange-native Belott and student Jordan Wason of Atlantic Highlands. Activities will take place on Livingston Campus in Piscataway, at the Livingston Arts Building (LAB) and the neighboring Livingston Installation and Performance Space (LIPS), a quirky cross between a barn and a gymnasium.
The festival is a nod to the department’s roots as a seedbed of radical, mid-20th-century performance art, as professors, students, and friends of the university created ephemeral, sometimes outrageous situations such as Fluxus and Happenings. These situations--a papier-mâché loaf of bread smashed with clubs at a Flux-mass; a musical score created with the help of the New Jersey police who fired a machine gun into sheets of music--often mixed media and blurred the boundaries between art and every-day life.
“This was a chunk of history that Rutgers played a very significant role in,” Hendricks has said of Fluxus. Hendricks’s last exhibition at Mason Gross took place in 2003. “Pop art wouldn't have happened without what happened here. Conceptual art, minimal art, process art all had roots here.”
This “living art,” as Hendricks has called it, and its inherent irreverence, remains vital to the mission of the Mason Gross School Visual Arts Department, according to LIPS festival organizers, Mason Gross School sculpture faculty members Aki Sasamoto and Patrick Strzelec, as well as part-time lecturer and alumna Patricia Brace.
Brace says she hopes visitors will “see and experience the rich interactions between sculpture and performance art,” and that they will be reminded of “the strong performance-art presence” that continues within the program.
The festival will take place from 2 to 8 p.m. Sunday, April 26, 2015, at 39 Road 3 on Livingston Campus. All events are free. More information is available by calling 617-515-6204.
The schedule is as follows:
2 to 6 p.m.: Open studios at LAB, student performances at LIPS. FREE food.
6 to 8 p.m.: Featured performance program at LIPS with Geoffrey Hendricks, Brian Belott, Maiko Kikuchi, and Ronnie Bass.
PHOTO: Mason Gross School Professor Emeritus and seminal Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks will be part of the LIPS Inaugural Performance Festival and LAB Open Studios in Piscataway on Livingston Campus of Rutgers University on April 26. Photo credit: Courtesy of Geoffrey Hendricks
