SAINT LOUIS, MO.- The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis jointly announce the selection of artists Bruce Yonemoto and Ian Monroe as the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellows for the academic years 2009–10 and 2010–11, respectively.
The Freund Fellowship consists of two month-long residencies in the Sam Fox Schools Graduate School of Art, and a Currents exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The collaboration was established in 1995. Currents 103: Claudia Schmacke, featuring work by the 2008-2009 Freund Fellow, is on view at the Museum through July 5, 2009.
Bruce Yonemoto, 2009–2010 Freund Fellow
Yonemoto is known for imaginative and theoretically sophisticated multimedia artworks that explore intersections between the world of the gallery and the world of the television screen. Through films, videos, installations and sculptural objects, Yonemoto plays with the conventions of Hollywood and Post-War American iconography—incorporating narrative, kitsch and formal experimentation—while also investigating the role of visual culture in both describing and colonizing non-Western cultures.
Yonemoto's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including solo exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH, among others. In 1999 the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles presented a retrospective of works created in collaboration with his brother, Norman Yonemoto. Other major exhibitions include the 2002 Corcoran Biennial, the 1993 Fukui International Video Biennale and the 1987 and 1993 Whitney Biennials.
In 1972, Yonemoto earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, then studied at the Sokei Bijitsu Gakko (Sokei Art Institute) in Tokyo before earning a master of fine arts degree from the Otis Art Institute in 1979. He currently serves as professor and chair of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine.
Ian Monroe, 2010-2011 Freund Fellow
Monroe creates large-scale collages from everyday materials—including vinyl, Formica, linoleum, Perspex, aluminum, foam-core and leather—that seem to recall the design aesthetic of 1970s suburban America. Yet with their day-glow colors and fractured modernist geometries, Monroe's cavernous-yet-depopulated spaces also suggest a corporate vernacular of hotel lobbies, conference halls and airport terminals, while at the same time holding out the promise, never quite fulfilled, of rational, human-scaled Renaissance perspective.
Based in London, Monroe has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions throughout Europe. In 2007 he created Planit, a citywide installations of 100 Perspex cubes, for the Vienna Art Week. He recently contributed an essay to "Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art" (Black Dog Publishing, 2008), the first authoritative survey of the history of the collage artform.
Monroe earned a bachelor's degree from Washington University in 1995 and a master's degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2002. He most recently served as a visiting artist at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University; and as an associate lecturer at the Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London.
The Freund Fellowship
The Freund Fellowship is supported by the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Endowment Fund, which was established to support both the exhibition and acquisition of contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles in the Sam Fox School. Previous recipients include Matthew Buckingham, Michael Byron, Ellen Gallagher, Angelina Gualdoni, Cameron Martin, Catherine Opie, Sarah Oppenheimer and Claudia Schmacke.
The open-call search for the 2009–10 and 2010–11 fellows was led by Patricia Olynyk, the Florence and Frank Bush Professor and director of the Sam Fox School's Graduate School of Art; and by Charlotte Eyerman, curator of modern and contemporary art, and Tricia Paik, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Paik will curate Yonemoto's and Monroe's Currents exhibitions.
The Sam Fox School supports the creation, study and exhibition of multidisciplinary and collaborative work. Offering rigorous art and architecture education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, the Sam Fox School links four academic units — the College of Art, College of Architecture, Graduate School of Art and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — with the university's nationally recognized Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
