| 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! | | | | The Ceramics Program attended the first University of Iowa European Ceramics Studio Study Abroad Program in Rome, Italy!
Partnering with C.R.E.T.A. Rome, the students created amazing works using the traditional Italian glazing technique of Maiolica, attended lectures on the history of medieval ceramics, and visited historical sites including a Renaissance kiln in the Roman Forum.
See more travel photos @uiowaceramics. | | | Ivy Jewell (BFA Ceramics student) received the Donna Friedman Curry Spotlight Grant from the School of Art and Art History and the Scholarship/Fellowship Committee.
Jewell will exhibit her work in the Spotlight Exhibition from April 16-30, 2023 in the Levitt Gallery, Art Building West.
See more on her website and Instagram.
Image: Ivy Jewell, Broken Bones, porcelain and glaze
| | | | Congratulations to Josie Duccini, sophomore art major, winner of the 2022 Art Library Bookmark Contest! Visit the Art Library to grab an inspiring read and a copy of the bookmark.
Lya Finston, graduate student in Printmaking, and Rachel Geyer, senior in studio art, tied for 2nd Place. Click here to view the winning designs. | | | | Heidi Kraus (Ph.D. Art History 2010) was recently appointed Associate Provost for Academic Affairs at Hope College. Kraus is an Associate Professor of Art History specializing in art from the Early Modern through Contemporary periods. Kraus joined the Hope faculty in 2012, serving as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History and the Director of The De Pree Gallery.
A student of Dorothy Johnson, she has written on the work of Jacques-Louis David and been published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Vols. 44 and 48) and Art Inquiries (2017). Kraus co-authored with Nicholas K. Rauh A Short History of the Ancient World (The University of Toronto Press, 2017).
Her current teaching and research focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century iconography in contemporary French visual culture. Kraus co-founded and co-directs the Hope College Paris May Term, an interdisciplinary, faculty-led study abroad program focusing on outsiders and identity in French culture.
In 2019, Kraus published “Looking to the Past: Street Art, Public Spaces and Contemporary French Identity,” in the edited compendium The Revolution Will Be Live! Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times (Routledge-Taylor & Francis Group, 2019). Her current research project, Lessons to My Students: On Art History and Why it Matters, is contracted with The University of Toronto Press. | | | Donté K. Hayes's (MFA Ceramics with Honors 2020) solo exhibition Donté K. Hayes: Objects of Tomorrow is on view at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham through March 25.
Hayes’ work is inspired by researching traditional African heirlooms and initiation rites of birth, adulthood, marriage, eldership and ancestry, which are essential to all human growth and speak to the greater African diaspora.
Artifacts are a tangible history that have the capacity to retain, transform, destroy, erase and evoke lost knowledge, according to Hayes’ artist statement. Hayes utilizes ceramics as a historical and base material to inform memories of the past. The handling of clay reveals the process and shares the markings of its maker. By using a needle tool, he creates individual marks on the surface of the clay with each strand becoming a collective form. The repeated texture and patterns on the surface of his sculptures imbue a visual language of memory, ritual, comfort and a sense of familiarity to viewers. Hayes’ sculptures are vessels that are turned upside down, symbolizing “the crazy world we live in.” These modern artifacts preserve, empower and document the past and present to initiate healing and understanding for the future. — UAB News
See more on Hayes's website and Instagram. | | | | Robert Sunderman's (MFA Jewelry and Metal Arts 1982, MA 1981) sculpture "Grand Canyon Reliquary" was recently in the group exhibition Vessel at the Dairy Art Center in Boulder, CO.
Sunderman is a Fine Artist, Scenic Designer, Scenic Artist, and Associate Professor Emeritus of Theatre. He was the Resident Scenic Designer/Scenic Artist and Associate Professor of Theatre Design at Iowa State University for 21 years. Prior to his work at ISU, he was the Scenic Designer at Iowa Public Television for 16 years. He has designed and scenic painted over 284 shows and exhibited his work in over 288 exhibitions regionally and nationally.
Sunderman studied with Chunghi Choo at the University of Iowa and his work was recently published in the book Chunghi Choo and Her Students.
Learn more on his website and social media. | | | Christy Carleton (MA Painting 1965, MFA Printmaking 1974) studied with Professor Mauricio Lasansky and Professor Keith Achepohl and wrote her Art History Thesis "Contemporary Brazilian Printmakers" under the tutelage of Professor Ronald Johnson. She has since taught in various colleges in the United States and in the Canal Zone College in the Republic of Panama. She has also exhibited her work, both etchings and paintings, in these locations.
Carleton was recently honored by having one of her etchings acquired into the permanent collections of the newly established MAC PANAMÁ, The Museo De Arte Contemporáneo (Museum of Contemporary Art). The etching displayed is called Retrato de la Ostra (Portrait of an Oyster). For a clear picture of the permanent collections, in celebration of the new museum, click here to view the entire exhibition.
See more of Carleton’s art on her website. | | | | Bruce Dorfman (MA 1958) has two works in the permanent collection exhibition Tensile Strength at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art through February 12.
This exhibition calls upon the history of assemblage and the found object, popularized by avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century such as Dadaism and Conceptual art. These influential movements developed as a result of the immense trauma of global war and rapid industrialization. Following in this legacy, the artists on view utilize everyday materials or create works that approximate everyday life by combining materials in unexpected ways, among which are those of Bruce Dorfman's The Weight of Light (2016).
This exhibition arrives at a moment of deep social tension and infrastructural adversity in the United States. Tensile Strength marks our current state of fragility by focusing on the impermanent but lasting materials within our everyday lives. These materials, which often serve as apt representations of our lived experiences, wear and break under duress, but nonetheless persist through steady care, collection, and reinvention.
brucedorfman.com | @brucedorfman | | | JD Whitman (MFA Photography and Sculpture with Honors 2019) was awarded a NaturArchy Residency for 2023 at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy.
The selected artists propose to engage in the theme of NaturArchy in transdisciplinary and original ways, interweaving science art and policy to develop discourse and narratives, widen perspectives and pose issues and challenges of re-imagining a common ground between humans, nature, and the environment.
Whitman's proposal is Nanoplastic digestion by bioindicators. She will collaborate at the JRC in Ispra to develop a community-specific, immersive art installation illuminating JRC research on nanoplastic (pNP) digestion by bioindicators, threats to human health as pNP enter the food chain, and potential creative solutions. Discarded plastic will be collected from the community and used to construct a site-specific, large-scale, enterable plastic inflatable—similar in form to an actual digestive system. The walls of the inflatable will be projection-mapped with larger than life images and videos of pNP research, surrounding viewers with wonders from the nanoscopic world. Read the full description here.
Whitman currently serves on the University of Iowa's Graduate College External Advisory Board. See more of her projects on her website and Instagram.
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