CAF- Clemson Advancement Foundation for Design + Building

02/01/2011

Eleanor Heartney Lecture-

Critic and author Eleanor Heartney will discuss her recently published survey of contemporary art, which examines the complex diversities of work being produced today. Her presentation "Art Today: Tales of Plastic Surgery, Genetically Altered Rabbits, and Other Acts of Art" is at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 3, in Lee Hall, room 111.
Heartney served as curator for an exhibit currently on campus. The State Art Collection: Contemporary Conversations Part II, an exhibition of nearly 52 pieces of original art produced by notable South Carolina artists, is on view until Wednesday Feb. 16. The free exhibition can be seen at three locations: The Arts Center in Clemson, Clemson University's Lee Gallery, and the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts.
Contemporary Conversations Part II is composed of work by 47 artists. "The exhibition includes everything from hard-edge geometric abstractions to surrealist tinged landscapes. Works are inspired by social issues, memory, local and national history, imagination, art of the past and aesthetic theory," said Heartney, adding, "The exhibition is designed to suggest both the quality and diversity of the state's cultural heritage."
Heartney has written for major cultural publications, including Sculpture magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times and many others. She is a contributing editor to Artpress and Art in America, two influential publications on contemporary art.

01/29/2011

Clemson mourns the death of Harold Cooledge, retired professor

Harold N. Cooledge Jr., 88, Alumni Professor Emeritus of Art and Architectural History, died Jan. 27 at Clemson Downs Health Care Center.
Cooledge joined the Clemson faculty in 1956 and retired in May 1996. During his 40-year association with College of Architecture, he was a well-respected teacher, research and author. He was instrumental during 1960s in the effort restore Thomas Green Clemson's collection of paintings and funded a professorship in architecture. He also served as adviser to Sigma Alpha Zeta, which later became Pi Kappa Alpha, among the first of Clemson's national fraternities.
“One of the most distinctive things about a university is the relationship between students and faculty, and Hal Cooledge established that quality at the highest level,” said President Jim Barker, who was a student in a number of Cooledge’s classes and seminars while a student in the College of Architecture. Barker said his professor demonstrated that quality in a very direct way when the Barkers lived in married-student campus housing while Jim completed his architecture degree.
“Marcia and I moved into a metal prefab on Jersey Lane in August 1969,” said Barker recalling the extreme temperatures of that South Carolina summer and fall. “When Dr. Cooledge heard about our situation, he gave us one of his air conditioners to use. I am very proud to have been his student.”
A Georgia native, Cooledge graduated from Harvard University, spending a year in Heidelburg as part of an exchange program during the early years of Adolph Hilter’s regime. After World World II, he held a research position with an oil company until the Texas City Disaster in 1947, the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. History, which involved a chain reaction of fires and explosions that killed almost 600 people.
He returned to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania to study art and architectural history and taught at several other institutions before accepting his Clemson position in 1956.

01/24/2011

01/11/2011