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Riverside, CA - 2006 was a year of changes for
the Sweeney. The gallery moved to downtown Riverside, joining the
California Museum of Photography and the future Barbara and Art Culver
Center of the Arts to form the UCR ARTSblock. LA-based Architect Peter
Zellner redesigned the gallery into a state-of-the-art facility for
contemporary art exhibitions that has been featured in Museum News,
Artweek, and The Architect's Newspaper. The new year begins with another major change - an exciting new face. Tyler Stallings has been hired as the new director of the University of California-Riverside's Sweeney Art Gallery. He began his position on December 18, 2006. Tyler was chief curator at Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California from 1999 to 2006. Prior to that position, he was the director of programs at Huntington Beach Art Center in Huntington Beach, California, and has also worked at the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department at the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park and in the Public Art Division. He received his Master of Fine Arts in 1992 from the California Institute of the Arts. His writings on art have appeared in Art Papers, Art.issues, Poliester, zingmagazine, and the LA Weekly, among others. He is also the co-editor of the anthology, Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994). In addition to his own writing, Tyler is a prominent face of the art world in national media: His curatorial work has been profiled in several articles; he has appeared as a commentator on the arts on regional and national TV and radio; he has also lectured at museums and universities around the U.S. The Sweeney Art Gallery was established on the University of California- Riverside campus in 1963. In April of 2006, the gallery moved to the UCR ARTSblock on Riverside's historic Main Street pedestrian mall. For Stallings, "The Sweeney Art Gallery is an artistic laboratory that engages diverse audiences with exhibitions and programs that are committed to experimentation, innovation, and the exploration of art in our time. The Sweeney places a special emphasis on inspiring new projects that explore new ideas and materials, and re-envision the relationship between art and life. At the center of the Gallery's mission is an appreciation for the role of artists in developing the intellectual and cultural life of society." In addition to leading the Sweeney Art Gallery, Stallings will play a significant role in the development of the new UCR ARTSblock: "I am looking forward to being part of the unique collaboration between the Sweeney, UCR's California Museum of Photography, and the soon-to-be-built Culver Center of the Arts. Together, they will form a unique institution, making Riverside the only city with three centrally-integrated UC art institutions. This opportunity simply does not exist anywhere else in the country." His curatorial projects focus on contemporary art and popular culture, with a special emphasis on the exploration of identity, technology, and urban culture. Most of his exhibitions have been accompanied by major catalogues. Some of Stallings' of the more well-known solo exhibitions Tyler has organized include Pervasion: The Art of Gary Baseman and Tim Biskup (2006), which explored how both artists are at the forefront of blurring the lines between fine art, toy culture and other forms of media. Deborah Aschheim: Neural Architecture (a smart building is a nervous building) (2003) was an installation based on the structure of the cerebral cortex, and appeared to "synapse" with the gallery's existing motion sensors and security devices, quietly highlighting the building's surveillance of its occupants. Desmothernismo: Ruben Ortiz Torres (1998) was the first survey of this artist who used different media --paintings, photographs, altered baseball caps, videos, and installations -- to explore and participate in the linguistic, aesthetic, social and cross-cultural influences of Mexico and the U.S. Kara Walker: African't (1997) was the artist's first solo exhibition in Southern California. She employed the old-fashioned craft of black-paper-cutout silhouettes, transforming them into mural-size figures that were glued to the wall. She created bawdy, pre-Civil War scenarios that depicted interracial encounters among a cast of characters ranging from Confederate soldiers to young slaves, transforming the innocuous 19th-century technique into a biting social commentary. Some of Stallings' group exhibitions that he has organized include Whiteness, A Wayward Construction (2003), which was a group exhibition that explored the identity politics of white culture in the United States. This exhibition approached whiteness as being not about biology but about ideology. It was the first museum exhibition in the US to explore the cultural study of whiteness. Surf Culture -- The Art History of Surfing (2002) was an exhibition that examined the history of modern surfboard design from 1900 to the present, linking that history to the development of the Pacific Rim culture and technology. Grind: The Graphics and Culture of Skateboarding (1995) was an exhibition that presented a historical perspective on skateboard graphics from the 1960s to the present. It looked at how they have changed from simple logos for skateboard companies into a vast array of highly personal graphics. |
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The Sweeney Art Gallery is located at 3800 Main Street, on the downtown pedestrian mall in Riverside, California. The gallery is open to the public from Tuesday through Saturday, 12 to 5 PM. Admission is free. Children 12 and under must be accompanied by an adult. For further information, please call the gallery during its hours of operation at 951-827-3755 or visit us at http://sweeney.ucr.edu. |
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