LUCIO POZZI - AUTHOR

Lucio Pozzi was born in 1935 in Milan, Italy. After living a few years in Rome, where he studied architecture, he came to the United States in 1962, as a guest of the Harvard International Summer Seminar. He then settled in New York and took the US citizenship. After a while, his art began to be seen here and abroad in galleries such as Bykert, John Weber, Gianenzo Sperone, Yvon Lambert, Leo Castelli.

Pozzi is a painter who likes to paint and pursue his painterly concerns in other media as well. In 1978 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibited his early videotapes in one of the first single-artist exhibitions of the Projects:Video series. He also sets up large installations and organizes performances. He occasionally writes and has taught at the Cooper Union, Yale Graduate Sculpture Program, Princeton University and the Maryland Institute of Art. He currently is an instructor at the MFA and BFA programs of the School of Visual Arts, in New York.

His art is represented in the collections of The New York Public Library; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Fogg Museum, Cambridge Mass.; Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy; Giuseppe Panza Di Biumo, Lugano, Switzerland; Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Museum of New Art, Detroit, MI.; Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ.; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI; Hartford Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Marzona Sculpture Park, Italy; Portofino Sculpture Museum, Italy; Museo de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, University of California Art Museum (Berkeley) and in various corporate collections.

Pozzi was honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1983. Retrospectives of his art were held at Kunsthalle Bielefeld (1982) and Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (1983), Germany, and at the Museum of New Art (2001), Detroit, MI, Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Michigan (2002). His work has been presented at Documenta 6 (1977) and at the Venice Biennale (American Pavilion) in 1980.

A selection of recent and current events by Pozzi includes:
- a retrospective of his Photoworks at The Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, '04
- besides shows of paintings at various galleries in the US and abroad, major exhibitions at: Marist College Art Gallery, Wm. Paterson University, New Jersey, '02; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI, with a performance at the University of Western Michigan, '02; Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, '02.
- a re-make of "10 Color Combinations", an installation from the original 'Rooms' exhibition, at PS1, Contemporary Art Center, New York.
- performances at the Paula Cooper, '91, and Holly Solomon, '92, galleries; 8-hour actions: "Paperswim" at the DIA Center for the Arts, '91, "Arkisex" at the Storefront for Art and Architecture '95, "Newsbands: a reading" at Esso Gallery, NYC, '98, at the Charlottesville Mall, VA, '00 .

Frank J. Oteri's voracious musical appetite finds many avenues of expression, but ultimately all lead back to his musical compositions which range from full-evening stage works to chamber and solo compositions. In all of these works, Oteri (b. 1964) combines emotional directness with an obsession for formal processes incorporating techniques from styles of music as seemingly-unrelated as minimalism, serialism, Broadway show music and bluegrass. His music has been performed in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall and the Knitting Factory in New York City to the Theatre Royal in Bath, England, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art to a Baptist church in the middle of Emanuel County, Georgia.

Among his compositions are: In Watermelon Sugar (a Richard Brautigan opera in 31-tone equal temperament); The Return of the Rivers (a Brautigan cycle for solo voice and keyboards); Two Transfers (a Brautigan cycle for tenor and string quartet); Pity The Morning Light That Refuses to Wait for Dawn (a Brautigan requiem for soloists, chorus and orchestra); if by yes (an e.e. cummings cycle for tenor and harpsichord), Take Me (a piano sonata); Brinson's Race (for trumpet and string quartet); Walking Naked (a Yeats cycle for baritone, alto recorder, mandola, eight cellos and double-bass); The Impatient Explorer (a Kenneth Patchen cycle for countertenor, theremin, clarinet, kalimba, banjo and trombone); is 5 (for solo harpsichord); and The Other Side of the Window (a Margaret Atwood cycle for female voice, two flutes, toy piano, guitar and cello) which has been performed at La Mama La Galleria in New York City and at Bennington College in Vermont.

His most recent works include: circles mostly in wood (a 1/4 tone wind quintet); as long as forever is (for two singers, two recorders, crumhorn and violone, based on the poetry of Dylan Thomas and commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death); six of one, half a dozen of another (for two harpsichords), presented by the Miami Bach Society in January 2004; Manipulacao (for solo guitar) which was published in the Summer 2004 issue of Guitar Review magazine; and Fair and Balanced? for saxophone quartet in 1/4-tones which the Prism Quartet will perform in New York City and Philadelphia in May 2005.

Other musicians who have performed Oteri's works include pianists by Sarah Cahill, Jenny Lin and Guy Livingston, harpsichordist Rebecca Pechefsky, guitarist Dominic Frasca, Pentasonic Winds, Sylvan Winds, the Roebling String Quartet and the Magellan String Quartet. His Just Salsa, for microtonal salsa band in just intonation premiered at the American Festival of Microtonal Music, will be issued on a forthcoming CD released by the PITCH label.

In addition to his activities as a composer, Oteri is a frequently published music journalist, a pre-concert lecturer at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Columbia University's Miller Theatre, and the Editor of NewMusicBox, the Web magazine from the American Music Center (www.newmusicbox.org). Described as "passionate and knowledgeable" in the San Francisco Chronicle , Oteri is an outspoken crusader for new music who has given presentations about the importance of contemporary music and the breaking down of musical barriers on television and radio talk shows as well as in conferences of musical organizations around the world. His musical articles have appeared in BBC Music , Chamber Music , Ear Magazine , Stagebill/Playbill , Symphony , Time Out New York and the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and his comments about music have been quoted in The New York Times , the Washington Post , the Wall Street Journal , U.S. News and World Report , Billboard , the Guardian (U.K.) and Jazz Times , among other publications. He has served as the Master of Ceremonies for ASCAP's Thru The Walls showcase in New York City and Meet The Composer's " The Works " in Minneapolis. Oteri holds a B.A. and a M.A. (in Ethnomusicology) from Columbia University where he served as Classical Music Director and World Music Director for WKCR-FM.

Donatas Katkus (born on September 21, 1942 in Kaunas)is a conductor, musicologist, and the artistic director of St Christopher Chamber Orchestra. In 1965 he founded the Vilnius String Quartet and was a member of it for 29 years. The quartet has won the first prize at the International Liege Competition (Belgium) and toured around the world, appearing in the most prestigious festivals of more than 30 countries. Since 1968 Katkus is a professor at the Lithuanian Music Academy where he gives chamber ensemble and string quartet classes; since 1995 he has given master classes in Pommersfelden (Germany), Spain, and Finland. In 1995 he successfully accomplished his idea to organise the Christopher Summer Festival in Vilnius. In 2001 Professor Donatas Katkus became laureate of the Lithuanian National Premium for his productive creative and musical-public activities and in 2003 he was awarded with the Prize of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).