| School of Art and Art History Newsletter | The students, faculty, and alumni of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa create extraordinary art and scholarship. Our monthly newsletter will keep you up to date.
Please submit your news and images for consideration for the SAAH newsletter. We'd love to share your accomplishments! | | | | Professor Isabel Barbuzza (Program Head, Sculpture and Intermedia) and alumna Eun-Kyung Suh (MFA 3D Design 2002) are in the exhibition Soft Power: Regional Faculty Exploring Fiber Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design through April 16.
Presented in conjunction with the MCAD MFA Program, this exhibition spotlights fifteen faculty members from colleges and universities across Minnesota and adjacent states who work primarily with fibers or textiles. With an emphasis on experimentation with wide-ranging materials and forms, the artworks selected for the exhibition highlight the complex relationship between objects, space, and human perception.
See more of Isabel Barbuzza and Eun-Kyung Suh's art online. | | | A Home and Studio of One's Own: The 7th Biennial Grant Wood Symposium will be held April 8-10, 2022.
The Grant Wood Art Colony at the University of Iowa will host a compelling series of presentations investigating 20th-21st-century artists who, like Grant Wood, extended their practice to creating distinctive homes and studios. They will explore how these environments reflect or shape an artist’s output and how they can be considered independent works in their own right.
This three-day-long symposium will explore the intersections of home, creativity, and identity. Our prototype is Grant Wood, who renovated a hayloft into a studio and home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and restored and furnished a significant mid-nineteenth-century historic home in Iowa City where he lived and worked.
This event is free and open to the public. | | | | Adjunct Assistant Professor Heidi Casto has been selected as one of Ceramics Monthly’s 2022 Emerging Artists. Ceramics Monthly is the top publication in the field. Her work and interview will be featured in the May 2022 issue.
See more of Casto's ceramics on her website and Instagram.
| | | Ian Berry, director of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, will be giving a public talk on April 7 at 7:00pm in 240 Art Building West.
Berry is the founding director of the art museum at Skidmore College, and his ambitious vision has shaped the Tang’s mission to spark curiosity and foster collaborative learning through active engagement with ideas, artworks, and exhibitions. | | | | Ana Mendieta, born November 18th, 1948, in Havana, Cuba, was a performance and video artist, sculptor, and painter. At 12, Mendieta fled her home in Cuba due to Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Mendieta and her sister moved between orphanages and foster homes throughout Iowa until finally reuniting with their mother in 1966.
Mendieta earned her B.A. from the University of Iowa, later acquiring her M.A. in painting, and M.F.A in Intermedia. Mendieta remains one of the most influential artists to pass through the University of Iowa, pioneering the Intermedial world of performative and video art. Her most notable work, Silueta Series, depicted sculptural body-earth works created in the landscape around her. Creating a dialogue between nature and her body, Mendieta reestablished bonds with the land–a commentary on her early life being torn away from home.
The University of Iowa strives to honor Ana Mendieta and her influence by naming Gallery Space E260 in the Visual Arts Building the Ana Mendieta Gallery. Here, students can share their work in a space that celebrates the work and legacy of an alumnus that innovated the performative and new media arts.
—Statement by Gracie Baer, Graduate Student in Sculpture and Intermedia | | | | Kuldeep Singh (MFA Painting and Drawing 2015) is in the inaugural exhibition of the National Indo-American Museum in Chicago. E/Merge: Art of the Indian Diaspora features contemporary art by nine emerging Indian American artists.
Statement from niam.org: Working through interdisciplinary means, Kuldeep Singh creates a hybrid system of fragmented narratives in paintings, and multi-media installations charged with immersive performance and films. His interests range from identity, queerness to environment – all informed through a decolonial thought. Through his decade-long intensive training in Indian classical dance of Odissi, with critically acclaimed exponent Madhavi Mudgal in New Delhi, he brings an array of deconstructed elements from its compound expression.
Learn more in a Daily Iowan feature article and follow his website and Instagram. | | | Hilary Lorenz (MFA Printmaking 1993) has an installation at Denver Botanic Gardens through April 3.
Cross-Pollination: The Moth Migration Project features more than 16,000 printed paper moths alighted on surfaces throughout the gallery. Each unique artwork was created by the artist or crowd-sourced via social media from individuals across 27 different countries.
Discover this collaborative project celebrating moths as pollinators, but also as metaphors for the exchange of art and ideas, connecting friends and strangers across the globe united through their love of nature.
Lorenz is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersections of nature, community building, and printmaking. Her immersive installations highlight the capacity of artmaking to forge powerful and unexpected connections between people.
Follow her work online:
mothmigrationproject.net
hilarylorenz.com
hilarylorenz.blog
@StonetriggerPress | | | | Rodolfo Salgado Jr. (MFA Printmaking 2012) owns and operates River City Tintype in Louisville, KY.
Tintype is a photographic process that dates to the 1850s and creates an image on a thin sheet of metal that has been coated with a dark lacquer or enamel.
Learn more in a feature article: "A lost artform: Why this Louisville artist is resurrecting tintype portraits in his studio" by Pat McDonogh, Louisville Courier Journal.
With Susanna Crum (MFA Printmaking 2012), Salgado also co-founded Calliope Arts, a printmaking studio and gallery dedicated to increasing knowledge and practice of contemporary print media. | | | Katie Hargrave (MFA Intermedia 2012) and Meredith Lynn (MFA Painting and Drawing 2011) have a solo exhibition, Mirror Muir: The Cumberland Mountains, at the Gadsden Museum of Art through April 29.
The exhibition explores 19th-century American environmental writer John Muir and his continued legacy in the Southeast. Included in the exhibition are new sculptures, videos, and collages made with imagery captured during a visit to the John Muir Trail in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area.
See more of Katie Hargrave and Meredith Lynn's work online.
Instagram: @katie_hargrave_ and @meredithlauralynn | | | |
