| 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! | | | | Please welcome Sydney Ewerth, newly appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of Ceramics! We are excited for the experience and energy Sydney brings to the program.
Check out her work on Instagram or her website. | | | | Painting and Drawing Professor T.J. Dedeaux-Norris’s solo exhibition T.J. Dedeaux-Norris: Second Line opens August 4 at University Galleries of Illinois State University. In this exhibition, Dedeaux-Norris critiques systems of race, sex, gender, religion, education, healthcare, and class, as well as the complexities of family dynamics and histories.
Through their multidisciplinary practice, including painting, fiber, performance, video, and music, Dedeaux-Norris questions how these systems—and the visible and invisible trauma they induce—exploit people of color, women, Queer folx, and the elderly.
Their work Pass Road #1, 2014, 60x40" (The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris) was recently acquired by the Figge Art Museum, where their solo exhibition T.J. Dedeaux-Norris Presents The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris was held in 2020-2021. | | | Daniel Miller, Sculpture Program Head, has a new permanent installation on Main Street in Ottumwa, Iowa. The sculptures are activated by light throughout the day and engage the history and future of Ottumwa. Learn more and view the sculptures in detail on his website. | | | | The Oracles of Iowa City murals project has begun!
The two 60-foot murals on the Capitol Street parking ramp in downtown Iowa City represent the start of a larger conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion in Iowa City, particularly as it concerns the lives and well-being of Black people.
More than a one-time project, the Oracles will establish consistent community chats, provide paid opportunities for BIPOC artists, and foster public discourse and action toward racial justice in Iowa City and beyond. The goals for the mural are for those in positions of power and privilege to acknowledge the systemic oppression of Black people and begin structural change.
The project was conceptualized by Antoine Williams and Donté K. Hayes (MFA Ceramics 2020). Both artists are Black men that conceptualized their ultimate vision for this mural to be a visual call out or beacon to the Iowa City community and to the greater region of people that might visit concerning Black people and their lived experience. The murals will be painted by Jill Wells, Janiece Maddox (BFA Ceramics student), and Marissa Hernandez.
Learn more about the artists, vision, and goals of this project.
The Oracles of Iowa City is coordinated by The Center for Afrofuturist Studies at Public Space One, with funding assistance from the City of Iowa City and the University of Iowa Office of the Vice President of Research. | | | Katie Hargrave (MFA Intermedia 2012), Meredith Laura Lynn (MFA Painting and Drawing 2011), and Donté K. Hayes (MFA Ceramics 2020) are in the 2021 Atlanta Biennial exhibition Of Care and Destruction curated by Dr. Jordan Amirkhani at Atlanta Contemporary.
Hargrave and Lynn's commissioned new project Cumberland Island (Sea Camp) explores tourism on the National Seashore. Dr. Amirkhani writes: “Tennessee-based artist Katie Hargrave and Florida-based artist Meredith Lynn work collaboratively to explore the historical, cultural, and environmental impacts of public lands and to grapple with the far-reaching implications of American mythologies of open space, frontiers, and freedom. For this project, Hargrave and Lynn traveled to Cumberland Island on the coast of Georgia—the state’s largest and southernmost barrier island, and home to 9,800 acres of Congressionally-designated ‘wilderness’—to experience and seek to understand this site as tourists and artists. Hargrave and Lynn’s tent, printed with open access images of Cumberland Island’s campground, stands as a modest monument to those who have claimed these lands across the generations and asks questions about what and who ‘public’ land is for.”
Hayes, Hargrave, and Lynn are included in a New Art Examiner review of the exhibition. Dr. Tenley Bick writes: "Two black sculptural objects by Donté K. Hayes—Fade and Lantern, both 2020—are highlights. Their dark matte color makes it difficult to see textured surfaces that seem covered in woven thread or hair but are ceramic with black clay bodies. They both compel and defy visual perception as a way to know the world." | | | | Katlynne Hummell Underhill (BFA Painting and Drawing 2019 and Grant Wood Public Art Resident 2019) has painted a public mural for her hometown of Eldon, also home of the famous farmhouse in Grant Wood's American Gothic.
Each letter of the town's name in the 20'-by-30' mural features something unique to Eldon. Read the feature in Iowa Magazine: Iowa Artist Honors Her Hometown, Grant Wood in Public Mural.
Visit Underhill's website for more views of the mural and her work. | | | | A. Malcolm "Mac" Gimse (MFA 1967, MA 1966), Professor Emeritus of Art at St. Olaf College, recently celebrated 50 years as an artist and educator in Northfield, MN, at a community event highlighting his life in art. He continues to assist in the bronze foundry, weld, and build models that are translated into large sculpture by computer.
His commissions include casting bronze sculptures with poetry for Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, including Jimmy Carter (2002) and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964). The latest were to honor Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, Nobel Peace Prize Co-Laureates (2014).
Gimse fondly remembers his years on the Iowa campus with Humbert Albrizio and Mauricio Lasansky, and especially taking a Life Drawing class taught by David Hockney, which he describes as "the most creative, mystifying, challenging art course I've ever had."
He writes, "Iowa prepared me to teach sculpture, ceramics and art history as a professor in a liberal arts college. [...] What I enjoyed most was watching my students go on to achieve their goals in art."
He is pictured with his 24' steel sculpture Striving for Peace on Horizon's Brim (2019). | | | Sarita Zaleha (MFA Printmaking 2015) has a solo exhibition, Minnesota Mines, in the Outlook Gallery at Minnesota Center for Book Arts through August 22.
This installation explores Minnesota’s history of extraction with a list of every mine in the state. Though Indigenous Peoples have mined for pipestone for at least 12,000 years in southwest Minnesota, since 1882 white settlers have commercially mined for iron ore, taconite, manganese, silica, aluminum, and other natural resources, quickly and cumulatively transforming the area. Currently there are over 1,300 registered mines in Minnesota. Additional images can be seen on Zaleha's website.
Minnesota Mines (as an accordion book) is also included in Solastalgia: Book Art and the Climate Crisis at Minnesota Center for Book Arts through October 17. The show is also available via virtual tour at the above link.
Zaleha's letterpress print installation something worth searching for is included in Reclamation: Artists’ Books On The Environment at the San Francisco Center for the Book through September 26. These prints are enlargements of newspaper articles from the 1880s tracing an attempted oil drilling effort in Geneva, NY.
Solastalgia and Reclamation are both parts of EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, an international series of projects and events focused on resource extraction. | | | |
