Summer Salon Series 2012: Beyond the Banner

Art Making Activity
Join Museum Educator Daniela Kelly for a hands-on workshop about Zen painting that's sure to be fun for all ages and skill levels.  This workshop will take place in The Studio gallery.

Mark Tribe
Mark Tribe is an artist whose work explores the intersection of media technology and politics. His installations, videos, and performances have been exhibited most recently at the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín, G-MK in Zagreb, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Tribe is the author of two books, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010) and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), and numerous articles. He teaches courses on radical media, the art of curating, open-source culture, digital art, and techniques of surveillance at Brown University, where he is an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies. He also teaches in the Art Practice MFA program at School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 1996, Tribe founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. He splits his time between New York City and Providence.  Tribe's artist talk will take place in Gallery 18.

The Dystopia Files
The Dystopia Files is an archive of video clips depicting public interactions between police and protesters in North America since 1999. Typically shot on city streets during protest actions of various kinds, this footage portrays scenes of ritualized conflict that are by turns familiar and shocking. The Dystopia FIles was named one of the top five films of 2010 by French film critic and curator Nicole Brenez in Sight and Sound, a publication of the British Film Institute.  

This performance of The Dystopia Files will feature Michael Trigilio on guitar.  Trigilio is a nationally recognized artist and professor of art at the University of California San Diego.  His work, Everything is Up, was presented at the 2010 Summer Salon Series. This performance will take place in the auditorium.

The Donkeys
The Donkeys are best friends from Southern California; Timothy DeNardo, Jessie Gulati, Anthony Lukens and Sam Sprague.  If their backstory contains those top-down cars and suntanned utopian surf tableaus of Southern California, it also contains the malaise and the escape fantasies familiar to all suburban kids of the 80s and 90s. Miraculously, the music manages to comfortably communicate both moods at once. Any expression of existential ennui — "is this all there is?" — is simultaneously soothed by an unrushed guitar lick and a harmonized twang that becomes almost, dare we say, meditative. 

Part of this magic comes from the fact that there's no artifice to the Donkeys' songs, from the matter-of-fact breakup blues of "Boot on the Seat" to the playful recollections of a late, drunken night narrated on "Nice Train." These are everyday lives in the postmodern world expressed with a deep respect for classic songs from the 70s through the 90s -- for spacey grooves and soulful, jangly swagger -- that elevates the subject matter beyond the ordinary.  Imagine Ray Davies jamming with the Byrds, or a Gene Clark-fronted Buffalo Springfield -- and you'll get a sense of the tradition that informs this band. 

This concert will take place in Gallery 12.  

Support for Summer Salon Series 2012: Beyond the Banner, provided by Wells Fargo, Mr. Brent V. Woods and Dr. Laurie C. Mitchell, the Museum’s Contemporary Arts Committee, the Members of The San Diego Museum of Art, and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program. Institutional support for the Museum is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. Curated by The San Diego Museum of Art and agitprop.