take the show on the road

FotoFest pairs with Singapore Airlines to keep the Russian art party going

St. Basil's Cathedral
Been There Done That
One of the main sponsors of Fotofest's 2012 Biennial, the Garage Center hasushered in a thriving new era of contemporary art in Moscow.
Photo by Roman Suslov

While FotoFest's Biennial of Russian photography may be behind us, the organization's partnership with Singapore Airlines has left Houstonians with a pair of affordable trip options to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

"The huge number of art museums and palaces in both cities was one of the main reasons we first started our Russia packages 15 years ago," said Edwin Choy of GloboTours, the company that arranges and customizes itineraries for the tours.

Explore Moscow's current art scene at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture or Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, both of which provided support for Fotofest.

Starting at $2149, the Moscow itinerary offers a six-day, four-night stay at the recently-built Lotte Hotel at the edge of the historic Arbat District, a tangle of old city streets that became home to countless artists and musicians in the 1960s and '70s.

Pre-arranged morning tours of landmarks like the Kremlin and the St. Basil's Cathedral free up afternoons to explore Moscow's current art scene at newer institutions such as the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, a non-profit art space that served as one of the main sponsors of FotoFest 2012 Biennial.

Also not to miss is the Lumiere Brothers Photogallery with its newly-founded Center for Photography, which served as another major supporter for this year's Biennial. One of Russia's first galleries dedicated to Russian fine art photography, Lumiere opened in 2001 to focus on Soviet photographers and photojournalists. A museum, lecture hall and public library were added in 2010.

A second package option that starts at $3399 adds St. Petersburg into the mix with an eight-day, six-night tour covering both cities.

While Moscow represents a more avant-garde spectrum of Russian art, St. Petersburg has been the country's artistic heartbeat since Peter the Great founded the city in 1703 to compete with Europe's greatest cultural centers. While the Hermitage Museum is a must, be sure to see the legendary Pushkinskaya-10 — a hive of contemporary art and music located inside an abandoned Soviet apartment block — as well.

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Literacy Through Photography

FotoFest caps off a successful Biennial with a look at work from Houston areaschools

After regrouping from the six-week barrage of talks, tours and reviews that made up this year's International Biennial, FotoFest turns its sights on Houston schools with its annual FotoFence show — a week-long exhibition celebrating the work of area students participating in the organization's Literacy Through Photography (LTP) program.

In advance of Sunday's opening reception from 2 to 4 p.m., CultureMap stopped by FotoFest headquarters at 1113 Vine Street for a preview tour of the exhibit with LTP program director Kristin Skarbovig. First, we had to resolve the issue of the event's mysterious name.

"The very first LTP exhibition in 1990 . . . was literally hung on a fence," she laughed. "It was when the Biennial was in the George R. Brown and as they took down the international art, they brought in student work and displayed it on this moveable fence."

The name stuck and the event has since been held each spring.

FotoFence 2012 displays a whopping 900 end-of-year student projects from nearly 30 schools that use LTP lesson plans designed to increase both visual and verbal literacy.

On view from Sunday through May 26, FotoFence 2012 displays a whopping 900 end-of-year student projects from nearly 30 schools that use LTP lesson plans designed to increase both visual and verbal literacy.

"Traditionally the very final lesson in the LTP curriculum is a photography and writing collage," Skarbovig explained. "The students have all studied art history at this point in the program so they've looked at Picasso and Braque and how artists combine imagery and text."

Projects ranged from small digitally-rendered assemblages to works pieced together with hand-cut prints and construction paper. The only parameter is that a corresponding personal essay must be integrated into each piece.

"The written portion is always inspired by the photography — and vice versa," she said, motioning towards a set of the exhibition's most pared-down projects, which employ only a photograph of the student and a brief self-reflective paragraph for a rather powerful result.

"Students have several major exercises that influence the work they do throughout the school year," Skarbovig noted. "The main task is 'reading' photographs, learning how to look at visual imagery and analyze and comprehend it in the same way you'd examine text. They also reverse the process to explore written words with photography."

She stresses that the curriculum is geared to enhance writing and critical thinking skills with the development of personal creativity a happy byproduct of the year-long process.

This year's FotoFence stretches across two floors of the Vine Street Studios complex FotoFest calls home, offering one of the largest exhibits of student work the organization has ever staged. Free and open to the public, Sunday's opening reception from 2 to 4 p.m. includes music and talks as well as a variety of food options.

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