Daily Archives: February 15, 2017

Utopia Global, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise data solutions and a long-time SAP partner, has released a new software version of its master data governance solution for enterprise asset management that SAP resells as a solution extension under the name SAP Master Data Governance, enterprise asset management extension by Utopia. The new capabilities in the solution extension will help customers to improve maintenance planning, increase regulatory compliance and advance the delivery of customer services dependent upon high availability of infrastructure, facilities and fleet assets.

This new version of the solution extension adds the ability to create and maintain maintenance plans complete with task lists, items and master data issues commonly associated with preventive and predictive maintenance program work. The enterprise asset management extension introduces the SAP Fiori user experience for selected create, review and approver functions, along with:

The new version of SAP Master Data Governance, enterprise asset management extension is a comprehensive commercially available enterprise asset management extension that integrates with the SAP ERP application and complements existing master data governance data models for material, supplier, customer and finance. It works with the SAP Master Data Governance application, SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP Fiori, and is designed to work with SAP Asset Intelligence Network.

We believe that master data is the DNA of an enterprise. We are very proud of the new release of this solution extension because it responds to client demand for solutions that accelerate movement to the digital economy, Internet of Things, Big Data analytics and commitments to SAP solutions like SAP HANA and SAP Asset Intelligence Network, said Arvind J. Singh, CEO of Utopia Global. We feel this latest version of SAP Master Data Governance, enterprise asset management extension will provide clients with the best tools and methods to build a trusted bridge to SAP HANA adoption.

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Utopia releases its next version of master data governance solution ... - SDTimes.com

A student-curated exhibition at Jacob Lawrence Gallery envisions political grandiosity.

If life-negating political structures are the result of the suppression of imagination, utopias are visions as pushback. At the University of Washingtons Jacob Lawrence Gallery (The Jake), three new curators, Nadia Ahmed, Sarah Faulk, and Anqi Peng, with support from former director Scott Lawrimore and project assistant Justen Waterhouse, have organized an exhibition series on the conceptions and present-day stakes of utopia. On the 100th anniversary of Jacob Lawrences birth, Utopia Neighborhood Club contextualizes utopia within his life. Faulk states, My hope for the relationship between utopia and the institution this show is happening within is that it can foster a community that encourages imagining radical futures.

Utopia is literally nowhere; the word comes from the Greek roots not and place. Often an ideal against which we compare current reality, utopias imagine societal overhauls into structures where the subjects lives are easier. They are fantastical, such as an island nation where queer women live free from men (but with giant kangaroos) in William Moultons Themyscira, or an alternate reality in which native populations in the Congo had learned about steam technology before Belgiums colonization, as imagined in Seattle author Nisi Shawls Everfair. Utopia as a political premise asks us to imagine something radically outside what we know, like universal basic income and prison abolition, and from there sets direction for programmatic goals. Utopias are multifarious, simultaneous, and even contradictory. When Thomas More wrote Utopia almost exactly 500 years ago, reducing the workday to nine hours was one of his farfetched visions.

Shelter-wear prototypes. Tad Hirsch and Mae Boettcher. Photo Courtesy of Jacob Lawrence Gallery.

Utopias are completely relative, Ahmed tells me. Everyone envisions something different for a perfect world. The exhibition series and public programs demonstrate this expansiveness of perspectives. The first iteration of the series exhibited Tad Hirsch and Mae Boettchers shelter-wear prototypes for homeless people, a versatile poncho formed from Tyvek construction material, which suggested the role of the artist in an idealized society as that of social interventionist. In contrast, Zhi Lins quotidian drawings of a kitchen and bedroom during Chinas Cultural Revolution demonstrated the artists preferred embrace of art for arts sake, to stay away from the intervention of the communist government.

How might Jacob Lawrences life inform our understanding of utopia? With a large exhibition at Seattle Art Museum, his profound impact on this city is experiencing a surge of recognition. Lawrence is celebrated for his depictions of 20th-century black Southern life, specifically for his documentation of the Great Migration, the relocation of more than six million black Americans from the South to the industrial North between the late 1910s and the 1970s. As LadiSasha Jones writes in Temporary Art Review, If we can understand the Great Migration at the turn of the 20th century as a radical spatial imaginary, through this lens, the Black city can be framed as an active collective imagining of utopia. During that era, the many arms of racism were still being flexed via brazen laws such as restrictive housing covenants. In response, Jones writes, Organized networks sprang up all across expanding Black urban enclaves and became a part of the fabric of Black survival and ascension in the city.

It was at Utopia House in Harlem, a community center started by three black women, that young Lawrence took painting classes. Building a utopia involves rearranging social codes to either change laws or sidestep them, and this art club, where Lawrence laid the foundation for his training, was one example of the many outerworlds within the country built for and by black people.

Jacob Lawrence (second from left), Harlem, 1933-34. Photograph by Kenneth F. Space. National Archives, Harmon Foundation, College Park, Maryland

In early 2016, Lawrimore brought in as the Jake Legacy Artist-in-Residence artist Steffani Jemison, whose work is inspired by Utopia House; her show Promise Machine, Jones writes, utilizes utopia as a discourse of abstraction within Lawrences work and a century of imagining the Black city. Jemison drew the connection between Lawrences work and the utopian impulse in collective migration and community network-building: within her project, Jemison created reading groups around books such as Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America by William Pease, Black Empire by George Schuyler, and Light Ahead for the Negro by Edward A. Johnson.

On the Utopia Neighborhood Club website, a quote from cultural critic Stephen Duncombe reads Utopia is No-Place, and therefore it is left up to all of us to find it. It is clear that the curators placed emphasis on all of us. Public programs pack the exhibition series calendar, such as multiple forums on the meanings of neighborhood and club; How to Organize a Public Library with Professor Michael Swaine; and a workshop on DIY Venue Harm Reduction with architect and curator S. Surface. The exhibition series ends with works by Lawrence, including The Legend of John Brown, a 22-part serigraph series depicting the life and contribution of the important abolitionist, and features a gallery talk by Royal Alley-Barnes, former executive director of Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute and Jacob Lawrences first graduate student.

Utopia Neighborhood Club Opening reception. Courtesy Jacob Lawrence Gallery

Utopianism may seem naive as we question the viability of creating societies separate from the ones weve already clumped together with the bulky shrapnel of history. In recent decades techno-utopianists have dominated the discourse with their zealous belief that technology could bring forth a just society, promising that we can invent our way out of our social problems and that new-media technologies and the Internet contain portals to non-hierarchal cybersocieties. As weve seen this pipe dream rust and corrode, its spirit persists in political partnerships, product marketing, and even art exhibitions that promise disruption of the status quo through invention-solutions.

Nadia Ahmed states her hope that many students outside of the art program will join the conversation: People do not take enough advantage of the Gallery, which is why we wanted to ask what people want from it. What could The Jake become to make itself a more accessible space? This receptiveness to input, instead of a patronizing assertion of solutions, is the first step toward collective accountability.

Im struck by the relationship between the utopian no-place and no-place as a geographic negation, a term for an absence of a national identity by law or faith. There are those with no place in America: the fugitive, the refugee, the immigrant; for these, no-place is the purgatory state of inhabiting a country that has denied your legal stake in it. Utopian thinking carries varying weight depending on whether you believed you ever had a country to lose. When no inhabitable places are in sight, devising new social orders is less an indulgent fantasy exercise than a means of survival.

In America 2017, these ideas are highly relevant. How will Jacob Lawrence Gallery continue to account for the utopian tradition of Lawrences life after this exhibition is over? How can the rich trajectory of utopian thought extend our capacities for imagining and acting beyond what we have known to be possible?

Its useful for me to think of a utopian mindset as one committed to hope, creating new possibilities, and new landscapes, Sarah Faulk says, but with the knowledge an end is probably never going to be in sight. The work never ends. A Student Response Part II The Jake Legacy Residency and The Legend of John Brown + Other Works, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, 1915 N.E. Chelan Lane, jacoblawrencegallery.hotglue.me. Through Sat., March 4. Gallery Talk with Royal Alley-Barnes, 10 11 a.m. Wed., Feb. 15.

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Plotting 'No-Place' in 'Utopia Neighborhood Club' - Seattle Weekly

Hows this for a New York Fashion Week party in the age of anxiety? No guest list, no VIP labels, no PR squadron to tussle with at the door. Everything is designed by real people and made in America with ecological sensitivity, and you can buy it on the spot (much of it for less than $100). Anybody can come in off the streetand all sorts of people do.

This was the premise of last nights opening fete for the brand Everybodys new Lower East Side pop-up: fashion as humanist utopia. As part of Informal Shop, a four-day installation hosting experiential commerce and cultural programming in a temporary Henry Street storefront, founders Iris Alonzo and Carolina Crespo gathered friends and strangers for a sort of antiValentines Day, anti-fashion event to celebrate the newest offering in their ongoing series of collaborations with non-trained designers: a tracksuit created by model and activist Adwoa Aboah.

Adwoa Aboah in her Gurls Talk T-shirt, made with Everybody Photo: Courtesy of Everybody

Aboah first worked with Alonzo and Crespo when she asked them to produce the T-shirts for her Gurls Talk feminist action project, which are available at the store.. I just like their aesthetic; I like that they use recycled cotton; I like that theyre women; I like that we talk about our ideas over home-cooked meals, Aboah said.

Alonzo and Crespo also confessed to having a style crush on Aboah. I know shes been called an It girl, Alonzo said, but shes so much more than that.

The tracksuit they designed together consists of a boxy, high-collared sweatshirt top and higher-rise pants in buttery fleece accented by gold zippers with circular pulls. It will debut on Everybodys site this spring and will be sold in black, navy, and pink.

The fit is as effortlessly cool as Aboah herself. I didnt want it to have a saggy crotch; I wanted it to look good on the hips; I wanted it to look good on the bum; I didnt want it to look too girly, she explained of the design. Her references? Roller disco 60s tracksuits meets Wimbledon tennis players meets RunD.M.C.

Photo: Courtesy of Everybody

And though you cant buy the tracksuit yet, the pop-ups other merchandise is equally compelling. We wanted to do something that really felt immersive, where you can escape into some strange fantasyland, Alonzo explained. The brands signature trash teesthick, vintage-style staples made from 100 percent cotton recycled in the U.S. from cutting-floor scraps, priced at $25 eachhang beside a mini-exhibition detailing the industrial process.

To showcase a pair of jaunty mens cotton shirts designed by chess master Prakash Gokalchandwhom Alonzo met by chance in Los Angeless MacArthur Park, where he plays every daya chessboard and chairs rest beneath an enormous palm tree cut-out and a Hockney-esque pool graphic. (Later in the night, a pair of models, or Gen Z-ers who could have been, wearing tracksuits of their ownhers a pink Juicy-ish number paired with rainbow platform sneakers, his a Royal Tenenbaums burgundysat down for a serious match. No, Alonzo insisted, they were not part of the installation, and she had no idea who they were.)

Downstairs, an indigo-belted jacket with pockets galore, designed by artists Mae Elvis Kaufman and Kalen Hollomon, is modeled by mannequins sporting Kaufmans formidable wig collection. (Behind them, posters designed by Hollomon juxtapose 80s-hair-salon-goddess photos with on-point fortune cookie messages: This is not a day to take risks. Diplomacy rules today.) In a neon-lit corner, African-print body pillows shaped like snakes that have swallowed houses, designed by the art collector Jean Pigozzi, were styled as a plush conversation pit. But conversations ground to a halt last night when a pair of go-go boys showed up and stripped down to their contoured briefs, then writhed away before a circle of mostly female onlookers on what became an impromptu dance floor. (Who needs a valentine?)

Photo: Courtesy of Everybody

A table with postcards and stamps for visitors to send handwritten correspondencebright yellow pens at the readyfeels, in the smartphone era, almost like a provocation. Alonzo and Crespo have more where that came from: Tonight, Kaufman and Hollomon will lead a workshop called An Hour of Escapism, in which Kaufman will transform participants with makeup and wigs, with results documented by Hollomon. Tomorrow, landscape architect Margot Jacobs and producer Ed Brachfeldwhose military-style jumpsuit and sturdy cotton outerwear are part of the collectionwill hold court alongside complimentary astrology readings; on Friday, artist and writer Kiki Kudowho designed a little black stretch dress with playful round cut-outs, also available at the storewill serve a Japanese bento breakfast whose probiotic count, Alonzo made a point of noting, will be off the charts.

Is it all some sort of illuminati-grade branding exercise? Or homespun creativity seasoned with a dash of silly fun? Maybe its both. As the crowd thinned out late last night, Aboah, ready to rest up for one more day of runway shows, walked out carrying a plant housed in a pot shaped and painted like a pair of naked boobs. Across the room, a political action plan was hatched.

Open 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. through February 17 at 142 Henry Street, New York; everybody.world .

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Everybody's Pop-Up Shop Throws a Wild AntiFashion Week Party With Adwoa Aboah - Vogue.com