This January, a dozen Columbia College Chicago arts and media students will be earning three credit hours in Humanities in a cultural adventure in Shanghai. The course, History, Culture and Art of Shanghai, will immerse students in the history and contemporary culture of the one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities.
According to the New York Times (October 15) Shanghai is "China's showcase city … banking on long-term, hyper-growth." For students of arts and culture, Shanghai is much more than the latest hot tourist destination. The metropolis offers a rich architectural history that reflects the city's relationship to foreign powers and world culture. In addition to history and architecture, Columbia students will visit universities and museum for an overview of art history and will connect with the contemporary arts scene, artists and galleries through BizArt, a not-for-profit arts center and organization dedicated to furthering contemporary arts in Shanghai. This course represents BizArt's first partnership with a U.S. college and this collaboration will provide students with an insider's access to Shanghai's contemporary arts scene.
The students, most of whom have never been out of the Midwest, will engage in several days of intense preparatory coursework in Chicago before leaving for Shanghai. While in China, the photography, art & design, film & video, fiction writing, radio and cultural studies majors will participate in daily activities and document their experience through journal both an academic and artistic journal. They will then develop a capstone project within their area of creative expression. The artistic work produced during the course trip will be mounted in a gallery exhibition during the college's spring term.
The "J-Term" course [a short-term intensive offered during semester break] was developed by Dr. Elena Valussi in collaboration with the college's department of liberal education. Valussi, who teaches Eastern Humanities at Columbia, lived in Shanghai for a year while doing research on her dissertation. While there her strong interest in art led her to develop a relationship with BizArt. "Columbia students are interested in the same areas of creative expression that BizArt is trying to promote - video art, multi-media installations that incorporate elements of performing art with visual art," Valussi explains. "I realized that a connection between Columbia and BizArt would be an ideal cultural and educational exchange and I proposed the humanities course for our J-Term intensive."
The course will be co-taught by Natasha Egan, associate director of Columbia's Museum of Contemporary Photography and curator of the museum's recent Made in China exhibition. Egan, who spent a year as an undergraduate studying in Southeast Asia, also teaches the Senior Thesis capstone course for the Photography Department's BFA program.
Elena Valussi teaches part time in the liberal education department of Columbia while continuing her research and writing on the history, religion and culture of East Asia. With a particular focus on the interplay of East Asian and Chinese religions, medicine and gender, Valussi has presented at conferences in Germany, Italy, England, the Netherlands and the United States and spent more than four years, on and off, studying in China, including two years doing fieldwork in Daoist temples. She is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Daoism (Curzon Press, 2005) and the forthcoming Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard University Press). Valussi earned her undergraduate degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Venice, Italy. She holds a Master's Degree in Religious Studies and a Ph.D. from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies where she wrote her dissertation on "Beheading the Red Dragon: A History of Female Inner Alchemy in China"
Natasha Egan is associate director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. Aside from the administrative duties, Egan serves as a member of the curatorial team and has organized over a dozen international and national single artist exhibitions such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Anne and Bernard Blume, Sophie Calle, Anna Fox, Oliver Boberg, Nikki S. Lee, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and Seydou Keďta. Her larger thematic exhibitions and essays have included Alienation and Assimilation: Contemporary Images and Installations from the Republic of Korea; Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: The Transportation of Place; Consuming Nature, focusing on the relationship between man and nature; Manufactured Self, how we identify ourselves through what we consume, and Made in China, focusing on the global impact of manufacturing in China. Egan has contributed essays to such publications as Shimon Attie: The History of Another, Descry: Antonia Contro and Maurizio Pellegrin, and Contemporary Magazine's special issue on photography with an essay titled Photography Plugged and Unplugged. Natasha has taught in the photography department at Columbia College Chicago since 1997 and juries local and national exhibitions. She holds an MA in museum studies and an MFA in fine art photography from Columbia College Chicago as well as a BA in Asian Studies from the University of Puget Sound. As an undergraduate, Egan participated in the Study-Travel program spending nine month in Southeast Asia. Her undergraduate thesis compared the role of Buddhism in the politics of Vietnam and Thailand.
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Chicago, IL (November 17, 2006) -- Dress Up Against AIDS, which opened Thursday evening November 16 at Columbia’s Glass Curtain Gallery, presents fourteen couture dresses constructed out of thousands of dyed and stitched latex condoms. The crowd at the opening night reception with the artist admired both the artistry and the meaning of the art.
Brazilian artist Adriana Bertini, a former fashion designer, goes beyond the obvious in her use of condoms as an artistic medium. While the artistic medium is admittedly tounge-in-cheek, the sculptural objects are deeply conceptualized and finely crafted. Bertini’s dedication to AIDS awareness and how critical it is for people to stop avoiding the topic of sex charges the work with gravity and social importance.
Bertini worked with children with AIDS for a number of years; this was the catalyst that got her thinking about how she could use her creative skills to make people aware of the growing problem of HIV & AIDS around the world. She spent nearly a decade researching and developing the processes that allow her to craft these remarkable garments. The project was launched in 1997.
Exhibited in Europe, Asia, and Canada, the condom dresses garner a great deal of interest from the media due to her controversial and activist approach to her art, but the work is not compromised. Dress Up Against AIDS is an impressive and politically charged exhibition.
Dress Up Against AIDS runs through January 5, 2007 at the Glass Curtain Gallery, 1104 S. Wabash, Chicago. The exhibition will also be mounted later this year at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and subsequently at the United Nations. For Glass Curtain Gallery hours and further information call 312-344-6650.
Dress Up Against AIDS is one of a number of exhibitions and programs that Columbia College Chicago is presenting as part of Critical Encounters, an ongoing series of yearlong college wide examinations of important social issues, specifically HIV & AIDS, that focus and challenge the thinking of all members of the college community. Visit www.colum.edu/criticalencounters for more information.
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Chicago (November 3, 2006) - Columbia College Chicago's explosive enrollment growth continued this fall, with the South Loop institution's student population growing by 6.1 percent, to a record 11,499. The number includes 10,771 undergraduates, making Columbia the second-largest private undergraduate college in Illinois.
Since 2000, when Dr. Warrick L. Carter became president, the arts and media college's enrollment has grown by nearly 30 percent.
"Today, Columbia is one of the 'hot' colleges at college fairs across the country," says Mark Kelly, vice president for Student Affairs. "Students flock to our booths because they recognize the value in what the college offers - an outstanding education in the creative disciplines, offered in the heart of one of America's great cities."
Kelly attributes Columbia's success to a number of factors, including its Chicago-Loop location. "We like to tell prospective students that we don't have a traditional college quad," he says. "Grant Park is our front yard, and Chicago - with its great music venues, museums, theaters - is our classroom.
"It's a compelling message."
In addition, Kelly believes that Columbia's growing residential student population has dramatically improved the student experience. In the past three years, Columbia's residential population has grown from 450 to nearly 2,400, making the school one of Illinois's ten largest private, residential colleges. This year, Columbia received applications from students in all 50 states and more than two dozen foreign countries, with a 17% increase in total applications. This residential growth has transformed the Columbia student experience with Columbia students filling the coffee houses, bookshops, and galleries and restaurants that have recently opened to serve them.
Some 56% of the college's 2,000 freshmen are living on campus. About 40 percent are from out-of-state, and almost a third are minorities. With an additional 1,504 new transfer students, Columbia's total new student population is 3,490 - the greatest concentration of young creative talent of any of the nation's colleges and universities.
Kelly says, "these students are attracted to Columbia because of our singular educational environment including a faculty of working professionals, the breadth and depth of our arts and media curriculum within a liberal arts context, the cultural buzz one finds in our galleries, performance places, and screening rooms, the rich diversity of the student body, and our expectation that our students will graduate with a substantive body of work.
While most colleges boast of their selectivity, Columbia boasts of its generous approach to admissions. Kelly notes that the freshman class includes "valedictorians and high school 'mavericks' - incredibly bright and creative students whose skills and talents are not accurately measured by a standardized test, but whose creative accomplishments and passions are palpable." Kelly argues that "American education is wedded to a narrow interpretation of intelligence and learning. It's an interpretation that devalues creativity and fails to recognize the skills and talents of creative individuals."
Columbia is also responding to the national issue of college affordability. Over the past three years, Columbia's tuition has risen by only 9.5 percent, less than two-thirds of the national average for private institutions and only one-third of the average for public schools over the same period. The college's tuition - $16,400 this fall - is among the lowest of all private colleges in Illinois and the lowest of all private arts and media colleges in the nation.
To provide additional opportunities for students with limited financial resources, the college has dramatically increased the number of low-income scholarships for students who demonstrate academic or creative merit. For example, this fall 75 Chicago Public High Schools graduates received significant institutional support.
Kelly says that Columbia's efforts to create a more "student-focused" environment have also contributed to record retention of students who return to continue their coursework at the college.
"Recently," Kelly says, "the college engaged a national research firm to evaluate our progress in 'satisfying' students. The research firm concluded that 'students at Columbia are significantly more satisfied than students attending peer institutions.'"
The study focused on such areas of student satisfaction as instructional effectiveness, academic advising, campus climate, student centeredness, services, campus life, and diversity.
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