Despite bidding adieu to eight longtime professors this week, University of South Florida's art department is clearly on a roll.
This is because a trio of USF artists, graduate students Leslie Elsasser and Kalup Donte Linzy and USF Assistant Professor and Director of Digital Media Robert Lawrence, have distinguished themselves, their department and a university banking on increased international connections.
Can lightning strike twice in one place? Seems it has. Elsasser and Lawrence have both won Fulbright awards, while Linzy's video has been accepted into the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, the largest of its kind in the world.
The Planet has had its eye on Elsasser for some time, recognizing her as Best Emerging to Emerge Artist in 2001 and Best Emerging Artist in 2002. The write-up ended prophetically, asking "Need we say that WP predicts an incredibly bright future for the Ms. Leslie Elsasser?"
Seems the Planet crystal ball was right on target.
She's one of only 11 student Fulbright recipients for the academic year 2003-04, a figure culled from a field of approximately 500 applicants nationwide. USF painting professor Mernet Larson says this is "a great honor for us. No USF fine arts graduate student ever received the Fulbright."
Initiated by Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946, the Fulbright Program, now administering a wide range of categories, is one of America's most prestigious awards. The mission is to "increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries, through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills." Student awards are based on the applicant's creative program or unique field of study and include travel expenses, tuition and a stipend.
After a summer in Paris where Elsasser will show work, in September she heads for Banares Hindu University in Varanasi (a.k.a. Banares), India, where she'll be in residence for the 2003-04 academic year.
Elsasser will study miniature painting and research the Hindu goddess Kali's relationship to contemporary women, part of her search for a personal mythology. During her residency, she'll arrange exchange programs, both with scholars and artists in residence, and create dialogue between USF and Banares.
I've been following Elsasser's work since discovering her unfinished painting in the Honors Studio at USF's Arthouse 2001, the annual spring event in which the public is invited into undergraduate and graduate studios. I've been scouting out these studios for years, but seldom do I walk away hunting for an artist, much less one of this caliber.
One couldn't help but be captivated by her work. Her figurative painting was saturated by theatrical shifts of bold color and splashed with hints of contemporized noir flavor. After seeing more of her work, I noticed her mirrors, reflections, curious tilted perspectives and hands reaching and grasping but never touching. They were mini-psychodramas staged with young characters — typically centered around a young female — and posed in intimate, claustrophobic interiors. In wordless spaces sometimes bathed in intelligent golden light, her figures remained isolated, like a sweetened twist on that masterful, quiet Hopper-esque American sensibility for loneliness, clothed in 21st century crowded Technicolor splendor. We also detect a tribute, however distant, to the elegant oddness of Balthus — aesthetic voyeur and painter of young women — an artist Elsasser greatly admires.
And how refreshing to share her love for paint medium, not only its surface seduction, but also the way she blends color — daring in the way it screams with formal hedonistic pleasures. All this, but never at the expense of her search for meaning. She is always the storyteller. While she's devoted to Eastern art, at this moment her canvases remain connected to Western art history, evident in her unmistakable debt to Caravaggio's dramatic interior light and circular compositions.
If her canvases are legacies of a Western tradition, her computer manipulated, digitalized Indian miniatures speak of the Eastern traditions and scholarship that she plans to pursue. In her USF solo exhibition, Gods, Demons and Others, Elsasser showed her miniatures, each sporting a small magnifying lens on a silk ribbon, the kind of exquisite ordering that illuminates this artist's meticulous process. Nearby, tumbling teddy bears in classical charcoal on paper are metaphors for the unfathomable, representing, according to Elsasser, World Trade Center victims falling to their deaths.
An artist with a unique combination of intense focus and sunny personality, she seems to have all her ducks in a row. Professor Larson calls her student "a mover and shaker and an exceptionally effective teacher. When you want someone to do something you go to Leslie."
Yet Elsasser's bio reveals several decades of skirting around the edges of fine art, not "knowing if I'd have something to say," she says. After attending Rhode Island School of Design, she moved to Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, worked successfully in fashion design, the corporate business world and makeup artistry, all the while traveling the globe, particularly within the Far East. Her interest in Hindu mythology was piqued during a trip to Bali.
Robert Lawrence, technology-based conceptual artist, will head for University of Malaysia in Kuching, Borneo, in November for his Fulbright year.
Spreading himself between research and teaching, he'll combine themes based on geography, nature and culture with various technologies, including the Internet and international communication. Like Elsasser, Lawrence will develop exchange programs between USF's art department and its Malaysian counterpart.
Kudos also to new MFA graduate Kalup Donte Linzy, whose thesis video, Conversations Wit De Churen: All My Churen ("churen" as in "children"), has been accepted into the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival. Linzy, who grew up in rural Florida, is interested in language; his videos highlight the African American experience and dialect, especially Ebonics. Another of his videos, juried into the recent student show by Elyse Goldberg of New York's James Cohan Gallery, caught my attention because of its intriguing "bleached" texture. The artist typically plays most of his own characters, and most are women.
The message here is one of optimism. Just when you think you've seen it all, new talent bubbles up from the local cauldron. All you have to do is look.One-night StandThe photos are long gone — hung for just one Friday evening (May 9) at "Optimo and Fotografia" at Gallery 1906, one of the old cigar factories. The show was uneven but really ripe with rising talent. I can't resist mentioning several photographers to keep an eye on; most have shown only informally. Look for work by Erin Dougherty, Chaz Meissner, Maida Millan, Christine Tekautz, and Lori Ballard, exhibition initiator and organizer.
Ballard approached Hillsborough Community College Professor Suzanne Camp Crosby to show work along with a number of her former students, much as USF professor Richard Beckman lends his support to student shows. This was less of a curated affair than a one-time opportunity; work from other community artists filled the space. Ballard calls it a "hang at your own risk" opportunity. Be that as it may, the opportunity is there for the public to look for these exhibitions and support rising artists.
Gallery 1906 is at 1906 N. Armenia Ave., Corner of Spruce and Armenia in Tampa, 813-598-3785.
Art Critic Adrienne M. Golub can be reached at randagolub@aol.com.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2003.
