Arts, Etc.Fine Art

Zervigon sketches new home at ULV

Dr. Andrés Zervigon, assistant professor of art, graduated with his doctorate in June of 2000 from Harvard University. He spent the last year and a half living in Spain and Germany while researching for his dissertation on "Berlin dada and photo montage." He spoke last week to an audience in the President's Dining Room. / photo by Liz Lucsko
Dr. Andrés Zervigon, assistant professor of art, graduated with his doctorate in June of 2000 from Harvard University. He spent the last year and a half living in Spain and Germany while researching for his dissertation on “Berlin dada and photo montage.” He spoke last week to an audience in the President’s Dining Room. / photo by Liz Lucsko

by Jazmine Ponce
Managing Editor

When one looks at a painting one sees many things behind the images and paint used to create it. Similarly, when encountering Dr. Andrés Zervigon, the new art history professor, one will see he brings a variety of experience, culture and a love of art to the University of La Verne.

Zervigon grew up in New Orleans, La. as a middle child. He had four brothers and sisters. He said he loved art and drawing since adolescence.

He attended Brown University. He first majored in Egyptology, but changed to art history, which he grew to enjoy through his adviser, Kermit Champa.

Zervigon said it was after taking a particular German film studies class that he wanted to be a teacher.

“There was a Professor Goodman at my undergraduate university and I took a film class with her that was really stimulating. I thought it would be great to teach this material especially the way she was teaching it,” said Zervigon.

After graduating he entered a Ph.D. program at Harvard and then taught at the Parson School of Design in New York.

Zervigon learned about ULV through an ad. He has traveled many places including Germany and Spain and speaks both languages. He likes the atmosphere of the university.

“It is very friendly and there is a good relationship between the students and the faculty, and that it is a good little solid art university and is a very comfortable place to teach and work,” he said.

He is teaching a Latin American Art course, Survey on Modern Contemporary Art from 1800-present and Women in art.

Zervigon would like to express to students a general understanding of art history as well as the critical aspects of it.

“I want them to be able to analyze images critically meaning understanding not only what images communicate but how they communicate. Art history is good for that because it gives you all those things the history of images plus the history of their meaning and the history of how they mean, how they make them. So that in terms means when your looking at MTV you can look at these images being thrown at you a little bit more critically understand how they might be manipulating you or how there are things left unsaid maybe,” said Zervigon.

He teaches art history but prefers doing research on contemporary art and artists. “I find it is more exciting to do research on more contemporary things,” he said. He is currently trying to write an article on a contemporary South African artist named Simone Allen. He plans to incorporate his interests into a course that would deal with Contemporary art from cultures in trauma or transition focusing on places such as of South Africa, South Korea and Argentina.

He would like students to take an interest in the material and in art. He said that the difference between ULV and Parson’s School of Design is students in a university are more interested in learning a variety of studies.

“At Parson’s the primary problem was most students were fashion design or other professional kind of art careers. They were taking art history as a requirement, students are largely here to study all the humanities; so there is a more general interest here. At Parson’s, sometimes they just wanted to go back to their design courses,” said Zervigon.

Zervigon wants his class to be interesting and exciting to students.

“If [students] can engage in the material and see if they can get out of it the things that would make them excited and interested, to really look at a painting and try to decide what makes this painting so amazing for me, why should I spend time looking at this painting and coming up with the conclusion like, ‘Well because it’s really well done or represents the period in a big way or alternatively this is not the best painting to look at but I now I know which ones I want to look at,” Zervigon, explained.

Zervigon’s favorite artist and paintings come from all over the globe. He enjoys Matthias Grünewald, a German artist who painted mostly religious settings and lived during the late 1400s and early 1500s. Other artists he enjoys is Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, commonly referred to as “Goya.” He was a Spanish painter who lived from 1746-1828; he focused his paintings on the political and social injustices and turmoil of his time. Goya was also inspired by another Spanish artist Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez who painted one of Zervigon’s favorite paintings. If Zervigon could own one painting it would be Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X. If he could be an apprentice to one artist and see how he worked and painted, it would be Velázquez.

“There is a French artist who went to Rome, I think it was [Jacques Louis] David who said, ‘There is no more reason to paint a portrait because when you see Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X, you see that you can never do anything better than this,'” commented Zervigon.

Overall art has somewhat always been a part of Zervigon’s life and said that in everyday life, art itself is important.

“I think it is really important I don’t find myself interested in just art, but in images. I think more than ever our lives are dominated by images more than text, with film, TV, posters and so forth. Images have become really important. Art can really be the most carefully considered images,” said Zervigon.

Faculty Taboo

A series designed to reveal questions and answers students may never ask or get answered by professors and staff.

·Biggest Pet Peeve: Students who can’t come to class.

·Perception of self in college: Endlessly excited.

·Favorite sport: Slow-pitch softball.

·Three adjectives that describe you: Happy, mellow, interested.

·Favorite motto/quote: “I can’t resist anything except temptation.” — Oscar Wilde

·Strangest job held: Interning at a museum where I had to service the conditions of the mummies.

·Favorite book: “Wise Blood” by Flannery O’Connor

Jazmine Ponce, Features Editor
Jazmine Ponce
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University of La Verne graduate Liz Lucsko, recently earned a Masters in photography from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in New York. Lucsko currently teaches Elementary Photography as a part-time faculty member. Her photography exhibit, “Banning – Stagecoach Town USA,” is on display in the Irene Carlson Gallery of Photography, and closes today. Lucsko’s interest in portrait photography has helped her personalize the photographic act for her students. / photo by Nancy Dyleuth
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