| 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! | | | Student, Faculty, and Alumni News | | | | The School of Art, Art History, and Design recognized the Class of 2026 with a Graduation Celebration at Art Building West in May!
We also celebrated the Spotlight Grant exhibition—students supported in creating innovative new visual art—and the inaugural presentation of the Betty Braverman Award, a $1,500 annual prize recognizing excellence in Drawing and Painting, which was awarded to BFA student Alondra Michelle Escorcia Herrera.
Congratulations to all the graduates and award recipients! Please keep in touch, and we can't wait to see everyone back for the Fall 2026 academic year. | | | 3D Design attended the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York City in May.
MFA students Siyun Xue, Brianna Muchai, Cory Christiansen, and BFA Julia Correia were chosen to exhibit in the highly selective Launch Pad at WANTED, an international platform for emerging designers.
BFA students Julia Correia, James Low, Jenny Jin, Kelsey Jons, and Sarah Dockery-Jackson were awarded Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) Travel Awards to present their design research in the Schools Showcase.
@uiowa3ddesign | | | | Amelia Goldsby (PhD Art History) received the 2026 Dora Wiebenson Prize, awarded by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture for an outstanding graduate student paper, for her essay "Gendered Difference and the Tree-Human Body in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Art."
Goldsby's dissertation is titled Trees as Bodies of Communication: The Arboreal Aesthetic in French Painting, 1780-1870. Learn more about her research on her Substack. | | | YoonJee Kwak (Assistant Professor, Ceramics) was chosen as an exhibiting artist at the 2026 Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale in South Korea this fall. This international competition is one of the world’s leading platforms dedicated to contemporary ceramic art.
Kwak was also invited as a Visiting Artist at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado this summer.
yoonjeekwak.com | @yoonjee_kwak | | | | Andrew Casto (Director; Professor, Ceramics) is in a two-person show with Janet Loren Hill at Tephra ICA through July 25.
Casto’s recent work—whose formal language is based on a material study of geological processes translated into ceramic and mixed-media vessel forms—explores the connection between “macrocosmic” environmental change and interruptions in our often routine existence.
andrewcasto.com | @andrewcasto | | | | Dis/Comfort: Confronting Histories of African Art in the United States is on view at the UI Stanley Museum of Art through Spring 2027.
This exhibition was curated by students from the SAAHD and other programs enrolled in the Fall 2025 course “Curating African Art in America,” taught by alum Cory Gundlach.
Visitors are invited to acknowledge diverse and complex emotional responses to African collections in US art museums, and to confront histories of ethical debate surrounding them. | | | Patrick M. Ryan (MFA Ceramics and Sculpture 2025) is one of 20 international artists chosen to represent the Génération Céramique at the Fondation d’Entreprise Bernardaud exhibition in Limoges, France, opening June 19.
Ryan's work explores the fusion of current technology with the human form. He is also a studio assistant at the Jun Kaneko Studio in Omaha. He was recently interviewed as an emerging artist in Suboart Magazine.
patrickmryan.net | @patrickmryan23 | | | | Miriam Schapiro (MFA 1949) is in the exhibition Frida: The Making of an Icon at the Tate Modern in London, opening June 25. Conservatory (Portrait of Frida Kahlo) (1988, acrylic and collage triptych) is one of the 120 works included in five generations of artists inspired by Kahlo.
Schapiro (1923-2015) was a pioneer of the feminist art movement in the 1970s and co-founder of Womanhouse. In the 1980s, she created large-scale works emphasizing the importance of women in art history, including Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo. | | | Clayton Salley (MFA Jewelry and Metal Arts 2026) was invited to present at the SNAG x Detroit Conference in June, an international event highlighting jewelry and metalsmithing.
Salley's presentation, "Crafting Connection (within a Global Continuum)," reflects on his 2024–2025 Fulbright experience in Taiwan and explores how craft processes, tools, and objects facilitate human connection across time, place, and material practice.
claytonsalley.com | @clayton.salley | | | |
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