This is what's happening at Cal State Long Beach this week. It's the Week of the Arts, or simply ARTSweek! Hooray!

Election Notebook: Hour-by-Hour Snapshots

Today is Election Day. And instead of hurrying to vote or even opening the newspaper to read whatever new controversy might’ve landed a 60-point headline, I plopped down for a nonsense breakfast at about 10 to 10. No radio. No TV. But, yes, toasty hash browns and creamy scrambled eggs interlaced with slices of garlic and onion, with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, and the clear sky allowing the intoxicating sun to shine through — I do remember thinking what beautiful day this had already started off to be!

11:07 a.m. I am somewhere racing down the 405, blasting some wild rock music, loud and for long, by Long Beach’s own, Cold War Kids. I can’t ignore the fact the band performed at the DNC, or Democratic National Convention, earlier this year.



12:16 p.m. On Facebook via mobile. All status updates look alike.

• Camilo Cruz has donated his status to remind everyone to vote for Barack Obama today. Donate your status: http://causes.com/election/25848890?m=ad1fd51b.
• Emily Sander has donated their status to remind everyone to vote for Obama & NO on Prop 8 today. Donate your status: http://causes.com/election/6213546?m=4455e771.

Cruz is an MFA student. Sander, a theater student who recently starred in the student showcased "Whose ISM is It Anyway?"

2:32 p.m. Meeting #2. This time at the University Art Museum, where I met with Nadia, the public relations assistant, for our plans to (as she put it) “take over the world.” More on that soon! *Mega-wink.* We were tucked away in the cozy Reading Room, plotting away some magical Warhol soiree, when suddenly politics and art slipped into our conversation. An undergraduate art history student, Nadia pointed out the somewhat overload amount of art shows galleries accumulated during campaign season. A lot of Obama art and a lot more subversive political art, she noted.

3:47 p.m. Immersed in the remote land simply labeled Dance Center on Cal State Long Beach maps, I encounter a flyer, “ArtsVote … Arts Positions of the 2008 Prsidential Candidates.”

Click to enlarge. LEFT Found. Evidence that dance students are interested in the campaign and each candidate's view on the arts. RIGHT Details, according to ArtsVote.

4:52 p.m. CSULB is only an image in my rear mirror now. Still in wonderment about that political video art I encountered at the galleries yesterday, I drive away wondering how Masters of Fine Art sculpture artist McLean Fahnestock is celebrating Election Day. She did mention a treat for gallery guests wearing an "I Voted" sticker. Ben & Jerry's and Starbucks are doing something like that, too. I am headed home to vote.

6:13 p.m. I am in my hometown, San Pedro. I've waited 15 minutes in a short line of about 20, finally reaching the check-in table where I present my California driver's license, sign by my name, receive a ballot, am directed to a poll station, look for the President's name, punch, turn around, deposit ballot, receive sticker. I Voted.

Photos, a la Fahnestock.
7:22 p.m. Chinese take-out, steamy. TV with Katie Couric, steamy.

8:09 p.m. Game over. Barack Obama will become the 44th president of the United States of America. Offical release by the Wall Street Journal:

Nov. 4, 2008

Barack Obama won a historic race for the White House, defeating John McCain to become the first African-American president. Obama carried Democratic strongholds such as California and New York, but also won key battlegrounds such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.

With the victory, the 47-year-old senator will become the nation's 44th president, riding a tide of voter discontent with the economy, the war in Iraq and eight years of Republican control.

Obama's party was poised to expand its majorities in both the House and Senate, setting the stage for Democrats to push an ambitious agenda from health care to financial regulation.

What are your reflections on today's results?

McLean Fahnestock:

Sculpture Act

You see the frame of a chair, there. You see the wiry skeleton of a chair, up there. A rope controls the direction of the chair, up there, which will eventually dip in a pool of bubble solution, down there. Slowly, cautiously, breath by breath, the rope lifts the wiry chair into the air, now glossed with a flimsy shell of bubble. The skeleton has transformed into an outer skin, like a fabric to fit the wooden "chair" below.

"Not in So Many Words": See this active sculpture in its breathing moments at set times in the gallery.

The Very Act

by McLean Fahnestock (Sculpture, MFA)

Max Gatov Gallery at the Student Art Galleries

Sunday, Nov. 2, to Thursday, Nov. 6

This Week at the Student Art Galleries...

...Rammed and Romantic

Intensely developed work is being showcased at the Student Art Galleries this week, and I'm feeling the romance this time. TOP PHOTO Highly textured clay is glazed and oozing in the Dutzi Gallery for ceramics student Maile Iwanaga's show "Bittersweet." BOTTOM PHOTOS Through a maze of long, swaying curtains in the Marylin Werby Gallery, metals student Chloe Ching shows the best of her sculpted jewelery pieces and other rare, dreamy objects. Most mesmerizing to me was a foot-high sculpture of stacked jade gems, held in place by cooper-toned pins and topped off by a bronze Buddha baby swimming in what resembles a soapy bath of pearls.

This Week at the Galleries: Pasty and Pretty

TOP Trina Turturici and Travis Ott-Conn recreate "Broadway and Junipero" in this reused carboard, mixed media mural. It hangs in Gatov Gallery West for this week's drawing and painting exhibition, "Ties United." MIDDLE Summer Merritt's work is in the Merlino Gallery where you will find delicate paper things (left: "Portrait of Mantel"; paper, wood and acrylic) and heavy-duty pieces like a chimney face ("Show Piece") that is half wood, half 500 pounds of periphen wax. BELOW In the Dutzi Gallery, Linda Clare Larson's ceramic pieces are inspired by abstract symbolisms and challenge the illusions of structure and permanence.

WEEKLY SHOWS AT THE CAL STATE LONG BEACH

STUDENT ART GALLERIES END THURSDAY.

Lovely Lookers at the Student Art Galleries

A captivated crowd. In a recent poll, I asked "When was the last time you visited an art show on campus?" 78% of pollsters responded, "It was just last week." Some visual evidence? Gallery-goers and freshmen friends Charlee Vickers (in pink), a liberal studies student, and Katie Oserall (in biege), a music major, muse over Laura Duphily's hand-dyed and felted wool creation, "We See You, Steve Zissou." Duphily's BFA fibers show in the Dutzi Gallery closed Thursday evening.

Professional Grade: Student Art Work on Display (... and Where You Can Find It at CSULB)

If the Student Art Galleries of Cal State Long Beach have accomplished your undetection, be suspicious of your senses!



The galleries are nestled between Fine Arts buildings 2 and 3. (FA3 is the same building where you'll find the Student Art Store, which is ground-level.) Here is map of South Campus where the buildings are clearly labeled.

The handful of galleries range in size and name—Gatov Gallery West, Gatov Gallery East, Merlino Gallery, Dutzi Gallery and Werby Gallery. There are over 180 shows at these galleries in the span of a school year, shows rotating on a weekly basis.

Shows are erected Friday or Saturday; then, the openings come every Sunday evening from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.; and then the usual hours are as follow: Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, noon to 5 p.m., and Wednesday from noon to the extended hour of 7 p.m. The shows end on Thursday, and the process starts all over again.

To view the fall's schedule of shows, view the fall's exhibitions schedule here.

And here is what you missed last week...

top, left Drawing and painting student Emily Neptune grips gouache and acrylic in "I can't, I don't know how." Neptune showed Sept. 21 to 25 in the Dutzi Gallery. Her show's name: "Nothing Is Satisfied." top, right "Just ignore them and pretend like it doesn't matter." Another mesmerizing piece by Nepune. bottom A secret paradise imagined and constructed by ceramics students Julia Haft-Candell (left) and Alexis Gregg (right). Their show "Mesh" paired the two in Gatov Gallery West from Sept. 21 to Sept. 25.

Must-Attend (FREE) Events this Week

Sure, we all complain about higher tuition costs, the inflated prices on textbooks and paying exorbitant amounts of money on a parking permit when parking isn't even guaranteed.

Pencils down, big spenders! Jolt your brains' right-sided hemispheres, and absorb a few special and inspiring art shows happening now at the grand Cal State Long Beach. Oh, and, ahem!, all for free.

1. The Doodle Show, Merlino Gallery

Illustration student Beverly Bartolome (pictured above) did the right thing and celebrated her opening night at the Merlino Gallery with pink cupcakes. Art show runs through Sept. 18.

2. UAM@Noon, University Art Museum

Photo taken at Saturday's opening of "art/tapes/22."

An amazing show, "art/tapes/22," is not complete without a noontime walk-through with curator Alice Hutchison and artist Simone Forti. Be around Tuesday, Sept. 16, for UAM@Noon, when the museum opens its doors and our minds to the historical making of Maria Gloria Bicocchi's video visions.