Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo

Recently Jim Wegener, from the SVA D-Crit program, interviewed me about my recent photography work.  I made this video by overlaying images of my work on the audio track he produced.  Enjoy!

I just learned that my paper “The New School, CARE & Ajkem’a Loy’a: A case study in learning in intensive and immersive global programs and in cross-cultural and bilingual collaborative work” presented at GLIDE ‘08 was selected by conference attendees as the best paper of the conference.

Quite a nice boost to start off another busy week of writing, making, and teaching!

This is the abstract (full paper is available upon request):  This paper addresses the challenges and opportunities, and suggests best practices in collaborations across year-levels, programs and divisions of a university; in external partnerships between a university and a large non-profit organization; in teaching and learning in intensive and immersive global programs; and in cross-cultural and bilingual collaborative work.

KEYWORDS
Design education, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary learning, collaborative learning, multicultural, multilingual, humanitarian design, economic development

Tomorrow I will be presenting my paper “The New School, CARE & Ajkem’a Loy’a: A case study in learning in intensive and immersive global programs and in cross-cultural and bilingual collaborative work” at the GLIDE ‘08 (Global Interaction in Design Education) conference.  However, I will not travel further than my desk and I will not see any faces other than their bio headshots on a wiki.

I will have actively participated in an academic conference, delivering a 30-minute presentation about my paper that was double peer-reviewed, and all of this, without increasing my carbon footprint.  That is precisely the premise of GLIDE ‘08 - how can we create more sustainable academic exchanges?

This conference won’t have such advanced technologies as others propose but I am certainly looking forward to the experiment.  All participants logged into an Adobe Connect conferenc room and phoned into a conference call, with all watching PowerPoint slides change as the presenter delivers the paper.

The biggest loss - the chance encounters that happen at the coffee and cookie table during the break!

It’s not every day that artists meet other artists who are interested in so many of the same things, and even have an appreciation for one another’s aesthetic.

I have known Tokyo-based Colombian artist Klaus Fruchtnis for many years, but it is just recently that we discovered our similar interests in using photography as a way to capture urban spaces, in particular public ones. We also seem to always end up in language-based exercises.

We first collaborated on the Thing-a-Day blog run by some great people over at Eyebeam, and most recently decided to continue these ideas in a project we are calling Cross Urban.

I also recently met Brooklyn-based artist Annie Leist, (we were in a group show together at Broadway Gallery) and when I read her artist statement, I had to make sure I was not reading my own.  I’m sure we’ll find a way to work together as well - something I look forward to!

More information coming soon, but in the meantime please save these dates:

Saturday, September 20, 8pm-midnight
Opening of “Scapes” at Madarts in which I will be showing new work (see image below) from my lightboxes series, this time inspired by the fabulous city of Rio de Janeiro (and JFK airport on my way there.)

Wednesday, September 24, 6-8pm
Opening of “The New School Collaborates: CARE & Ajkem’a Loy’a”, an exhibition of the work a group of 14 students, two faculty, and one project coordinator from Parsons & International Affairs started last Spring and Summer in San Lucas Toliman, Guatemala.

I am delighted to have been featured in the article 50 Cerebros fugados (50 Brains on the Run) published by the Latin American magazine Poder.  The list of professors featured is here.

I am certainly looking forward to expanding my work in Colombia, so that when featured I am not only considered “on the run!”

I just received this poem written by S. David which was inspired by a photograph of one of our Parsons students working out a beading pattern in Guatemala. I’m flattered that this image would inspire poetry!

The Patterning [untitled image 9426]
[by S. David] [art by Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo]

Math
Art
Geometric
Patterning
Whatever
It’s creative
Planning
Plotting
Is it
Homework
Or work
Sometimes
A picture
Tells a story
Sometimes
Only part
Of the story
And which
Is this

19§ [Orig 7/02/08]

This past June, while in Guatemala I learned how to bead, and became fascinated with the idea of each bead as a pixel. This concept is inspiring some new work - taking pixels into the material world. Here is a short animation that took me 3 weeks to bead.

A Group Show features the Artists Beate Landen, Kirt Markle, Ronda Johannessen, Whitey Flagg, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Annie Leist

Curated by Christine Kennedy

July 16th - 31st 2008

Opening Reception Thursday July 17th 6 - 8

The Broadway Gallery is pleased to announce Flow, a summer exhibition featuring Beate Landen, Kirt Markle, Ronda Johannessen, Whitey Flagg, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Annie Leist, artists whose work investigates the relationships between the fictional space of the artwork, the world and experience.
(more…)

I spent the month of June in San Lucas Toliman, Guatemala, with 13 students and 2 other colleagues from The New School, collaborating with the Mayan artisan women association, Ajkem’a Loy’a. I am highly inspired by this project and hope to continue practice and theory-based research on how design interventions can promote economic development.

While there, we created this blog that we updated almost daily, and of course, I also took many, many photographs of which the best are on my Flickr account.