Whitecliffe Busy Over Summer

For many educational institutes summer is a quiet time, where everyone takes the opportunity to renew and refresh, but at Whitecliffe there was plenty afoot.  

The Masters programmes are low-residency and they make use of the facilities when the undergraduates aren’t onsite.  So after a short, wet Christmas break the staff and students were back on 16 January with the first post-graduate seminar week of the year. 

The Masters of Arts, Arts Therapy students embarked on their clinical year with an intense but rewarding week.  The Master of Fine Arts seminar had a mix of students who were starting, mid-way or completing their programme. 

Those completing had their end-of-programme exhibition, which was well attended by the art community and demonstrated quite a depth of work and range of media.  Whiteclife has a relationship with Montclair State University in New Jersey and this year their Head of Fine Arts, Andrew Atkinson, was the visiting scholar for the MFA seminar.  He was most impressed with both the programme and the level of the graduating students and is keen to have some of them exhibit at Montclair State University Gallery, situated only twelve miles from New York City.

Takuro Kotaka of Japan has joined Whitecliffe for 12 weeks as the artist in residence.  Takuro is a multi-media and conceptual artist who films everyday life but also engages with people through his performances or through his imaginary narratives and hypotheses. In 2008, after hearing a rumour that ‘there are no potatoes in Egypt’, he bought a potato in South Africa and travelled across the continent for seven months to Egypt, visiting 14 countries along the way.  This resulted in a video installation - “Travelling Africa with a Potato”. Whitecliffe looks forward to the work he will produce while he is here.

Whitecliffe has a new Director of Research, Anthony Byrt, who comes with an international reputation for his work in publications such as Artforum and Frieze.  Anthony has commented on the how successful he felt the Whitecliffe programme was in both research and the variety of areas the students are pursuing along with the added human touch that is unique to Whitecliffe.