Lucy Raven: China Town

Lucy Raven was born in 1977 in Tucson Arizona. She studied at Belles Artes, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, at Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, at Escola Massana, Barcelona, Spain, before receiving her BFA from the University of Arizona in 2000. She received her MFA from Bard College where she graduated with Honors in 2008. She is founding editor, along with Rebecca Gates, of The Relay Project audiomagazine, and is Managing Editor of Bidoun magazine. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Sculpture at Cooper Union in New York. Raven has been a resident artist with The Center for Land Use Interpretation, The Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Atlantic Center. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen, New York; Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; In Situ Gallery, Paris, France; The Boise Museum of Art, Idaho; The Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio, and Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York.

Her movie China Town, an experimental photo animation about global copper production, was screened at art, film, and industrial spaces around the country, including Mass MoCA, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Bureau of Land Management (Ely), the Robinson Mine, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

Her earlier significant project in stop motion animation, When the Ceiling has Become Visible, explored the landscape and ethos of the dustbowl era and took inspiration from photographer Walker Evans among other sources.

The archive "Lucy Raven: China Town" contains materials related to the creation of the film China Town, an experimental work of 7,000 still digital images stitched into a continuous stream of images accompanied by ambient sound from locations where the photographs were taken. The video was originally conceived of as an animated sequence about the Bingham Pit in Utah to be made while Raven was in residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation facility in Wendover, Utah. Once she realized that the mines of eastern Nevada had reopened in response to China's demand for the metal, she followed copper ore as it was mined in eastern Nevada, transported by truck to Wendover, Utah where it was loaded on trains, then transhipped across the Pacific for smelting in China
where the metal was spun into electrical power lines running from the Three Gorges Dam to Beijing.

Work on China Town was begun while Raven was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover in 2006 and was edited at the Wexner Center. Materials include interview notes, brochures, sketchbooks, articles, business cards, maps, presentation notes, animation stills, and production notes.

• CAE0902: Land Arts of the American West
• CAE1041: Center for Land Use Interpretation: Wendover Residencies