| School of Art, Art History, and Design Newsletter | SAAHD students, faculty, and alumni create extraordinary art and scholarship. Please submit your news and images for consideration for a future newsletter. We'd love to share your accomplishments! | | | | Congratulations to the SAAHD graduating classes of 2026!
MFA: Elise Dahan, Lexie Doerr, Mahsa Falahbafekrlialestani, Nicholas Goergen, Faye Hadfield, Cara Krippner, Shaun Mallonga, Tagwa Mohamedani, Rebecca Oehler, Clayton Salley, Kaitlin Smrcina, Heather Steckler, Kurt Tomerlin, Siyun Xue
MA: Theresa Afcha, Maggie Adams, Savannah Bustillo, Cory Christiansen, Jenna Davis, Aly Hurley, Delaney Hoffman, Obatola Layiwola, Emma Loy, Jada McGhee, Brianna Muchai, Embry O’Leary, Jasmine Pizano, Sophie Rogers, Aykeem Spivey, Jack G. Taylor, Shelby Welte, Lauren Woessner
PhD: Rachel Epstein | | | Congratulations to the SAAHD recipients of the 2026 Stanley Award for International Research!
• Savannah Bustillo (MFA Printmaking)
• Alexa O’Day (MA Art History)
• Sophie Rogers (MFA Printmaking)
• Jesus Santa Cruz (MFA Printmaking)
This award is given annually to outstanding students to support research abroad. Meet the recipients and learn about their projects here. | | | | Ceramics has three students and alumni selected for Fellowships as Artists in Residence at The Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT.
Kaitlin Smrcina (MFA) was awarded a Long Term Residency for 2026-2028. Smrcina makes curious ceramic oddities referencing film, video games, and our emerging digital reality.
Faye Hadfield (MFA) will be a 2026 Summer Resident. Hadfield blends Rococo aesthetics with crude hand-built textures to create material dichotomies between surface and decoration.
Abbey Peters (MFA 2024) will be a 2026 Summer Resident. Her interactive ceramic jars and furniture explore matrilineal knowledge and secret-keeping as a tool for survival. She is currently the Phipps Visiting Professor of Ceramics at the University of Denver. | | | Emma Fuchtman (BFA Art History) received the Fulbright/Maastricht University Award to study in the Netherlands.
Fuchtman will spend next year earning a Master's degree in Arts and Heritage: Policy, Management and Education at Maastricht University.
She plans to write her thesis on how museums in the Netherlands discovered and returned art looted during World War II. Learn more in an interview with Fuchtman here. | | | | riel Sturchio (Assistant Professor of Instruction in Photography) has been named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.
Working across constructed photography, large silver gelatin darkroom prints, writing, and collaborative projects, Sturchio draws on their experiences with queerness and illness to examine normative fantasies of beauty, ability, and gender identity.
Sturchio and their twin sister co-founded Begin Collective, a community-based photography initiative for LGBTQ+, nonbinary, disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people.
rielsturchio.com | @rly_riel | | | Robert Bork (Professor, Art History), received the CLAS 2026 Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Humanities Research Award.
Drawing on physics and art history, Bork applies interdisciplinary methods to understanding medieval Gothic architecture.
His research focuses on the geometric principles of Gothic design, studying both original drawings and buildings such as Reims Cathedral and Notre-Dame in Paris, often using 3D digital models based on laser scanning.
Learn more on his "Geometries of Creation" website. | | | | Jesse Albrecht (MFA Ceramics 2006) is in a feature article in Western Home Journal: The Mind & Method of Montana Artists
Albrecht is a ceramicist, draftsman, and multidisciplinary artist. Deployed to Iraq in the middle of his MFA, he served as a medic and security specialist. His work investigates the collision of war, myth, and reality.
Albrecht's work is in prestigious collections including the Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and National Archives.
jessealbrecht.com | @albrechtartco | | | Jaz Graf (MFA Printmaking 2019) has a solo exhibition, IMMANENT FRAY, at Morton Fine Art in Washington, D.C. through May 30.
A state of fray captures that in-between moment when possibility is becoming and certainty unwinds. Graf's handmade paper takes a deeper look at, into and across the raw edges of things. All edges are flows of fray. Impermanence as no arrival of home, yet emergence, ever-present.
Graf is also a Salzberg Artist in Residence at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts in South Florida.
jazgraf.com | @jazgraf | | | | Gretchen Beck (MFA Intermedia 1999) will have a solo exhibition, Laabu Kan Ga Borey, at the Sandstone Art Gallery in Laguna Beach, CA in June. The drawings, paintings, collages and mixed-media in this series celebrates the landscapes in Niger, West Africa, and Laguna Beach.
Beck served as Professor of Art, Chair of the Art Department, and Curator at Concordia University Irvine for eleven years. She also served in the Peace Corps for three years in Niger, West Africa and has conducted artistic research there.
gretchenbeck.com | | | Moses Hoskins (BFA 1981) is in Open Book(s): Observations at Mana Contemporary, NJ. This exhibition features artists who present books as objects in transformation.
Hoskins' Book of Debris is a collage-based project of nearly 100 volumes of drawings, street ephemera, and miscellany collected upon his frequent walks around New York City, creating a sprawling chronicle of layered imagery.
moseshoskins.net | | | |
