| 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! | | | | Bjorn Anderson (Associate Professor of Art History, ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern art), Isabel Barbuzza (Professor of Sculpture and Intermedia; Studio Art Chair), and Dorothy Johnson (Roy J. Carver Professor of Art History, 18th and 19th century French and European art) all were awarded Professional Development Awards for the 2022-2023 academic year.
The intent of this highly competitive award is to provide Anderson, Barbuzza, and Johnson the opportunity to engage in intensive research, write scholarly books and articles, and create new works of art. These awards will also aid in the development of grant proposals and curricular materials. | | | University of Iowa Ceramics students and faculty recently spent a day at the Jun Kaneko Studios and the KANEKO art center in Omaha, Nebraska.
Jun Kaneko is best known for his large-scale, monumental dango (Japanese for “rounded form”) sculptures and is increasingly drawn to installations that promote civic interaction.
See more photos of this amazing trip on the University of Iowa Ceramics Instagram. | | | | Art History Assistant Professor Daniel Wallace Maze’s book Young Bellini was published in the United States by Yale University Press on November 16. Young Bellini presents a radical revisionist history of the childhood and young adulthood of the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini (d. 1516), generally considered the greatest artist of fifteenth-century Venice. Maze was interviewed about the work on the Society for Renaissance Studies Crowdcast, and an early positive review of the book has appeared in The Art Newspaper.
The book is not without controversy, however, because Maze, through document and visual analysis, locates Bellini’s birthdate in 1424–1426, some ten or fifteen years earlier than currently believed, and he attributes a number of new works to the artist. Concerning Maze's attribution to Bellini of a painting depicting the Coronation of the Virgin in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Ferrara, the Director of the museum, Martina Bagnoli, recently wrote: “Blood will be shed over this.”
Photo: Daniel Wallace Maze examining Jacopo Bellini’s drawing book at the Louvre in 2017. | | | Brenda Longfellow, Associate Professor and Division Head of Art History, co-edited the book Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples (University of Texas Press, 2021).
Literary evidence is often silent about the lives of women in antiquity, particularly those from the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Even when women are considered, they are often seen through the lens of their male counterparts. In this collection, Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland have gathered an outstanding group of scholars to give voice to both the elite and ordinary women living on the Bay of Naples before the eruption of Vesuvius.
Providing a new model for studying women in the ancient world, Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices brings to light the day-to-day activities of women of all classes in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
| | | | The exhibition HANG IN THERE, BABY, featuring works by thirteen first-year MFA students, was held in the Levitt Gallery, Art Building West in November.
Proposed by Painting and Drawing graduate student Jordan Ismaiel, this was the MFA candidates' first student-organized exhibition.
HANG IN THERE, BABY represented various Studio Art divisions including sculpture, painting, and intermedia and was organized to facilitate individuality through colors, contrast, and texture.
“We wanted to showcase our most individual studio practices in a way that collectively, we could share together and also individually in the studio,” Ismaiel said.
Learn more in a Daily Iowan feature article. | | | Susan Chrysler White, Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing, has a solo exhibition at the Catich Gallery at St. Ambrose University in Davenport through December 17.
"I want to explore ideas about climate, weather, history (both art and geopolitical), personal emotional and psychological states, what it means to have relationships, being a mother, the enormity of what it means to be human being," she writes. See more of her work on her website and Instagram. | | | | Bruce Dorfman's (BA 1958) three works The Weight of Light (2016), Enso (2011), and Kizuki (2016) have joined the permanent collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
While at Iowa, Dorfman studied with artists Stuart Edie and Mauricio Lasansky and art historian Roy Seiber. Dorfman has been teaching at the Art Students League of New York since 1964, where he studied with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Arnold Blanch and Charles H. Alston. He has had fifty-six solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad.
The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art also has a trio of Dorfman’s works in its permanent collection.
View more of Dorfman’s art on his website and Instagram. | | | Douglas Degges (Painting and Drawing MFA 2012, MA 2011) recently held a solo exhibition at the Morrissey Gallery at St. Ambrose University in Davenport.
Remembering Accardo Tackle is a recent and ongoing studio project that celebrates the formal qualities of fishing tackle, fly fishing on freshwater lakes, repetition as meditation, and connections to family and the land.
Degges is an Assistant Professor of Art in Painting and Drawing at the University of Connecticut. See more on his website and Instagram.
| | | | Liz Bucheit (MA Jewelry and Metal Arts 1986, BFA 1982) has been awarded a Scandinavian Folk Arts and Cultural Traditions in the Upper Midwest Fellowship to support her project, "Silver Threads: Discovering Norwegian Sámi Silver."
Bucheit will travel to Norway to research and study Sámi silver work in order to broaden her knowledge of historic design, tools and techniques unique to the Sámi culture of Northern Norway. Upon her return she will share her research with the Sámi Cultural Center of America in Duluth, Minnesota. This knowledge will also enhance her traditional Norwegian jewelry class curriculum at the Vesterheim Folk School in Decorah, Iowa in an effort to encourage a broader awareness of Sámi silver work within the folk culture and traditions of Scandinavian ornament.
Bucheit owns and operates Crown Trout Jewelers in Lanesboro, MN. | | | Deanne Warnholtz Wortman (MFA 1998) recently displayed her foil imaging work at her Art in the Afternoon exhibit at ArtiFactory in Iowa City.
Foil imaging is a printmaking technique invented by Professor Virginia Myers at the University of Iowa. Wortman became very interested in, one might say addicted to, hot stamped foiling after her first workshop with Professor Myers. After Myers retired, Wortman took over teaching her foil imaging classes.
Wortman says that one of the greatest parts of foil imaging is the endless possibilities. In her exhibit, she used the technique on plexiglass, linen, mirrors, silk, and even a kite. Read more in a Daily Iowan feature article.
Visit ArtiFactory’s website for more events and workshops. | | | |
