| 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 Laura Napier, Visiting Assistant Professor in Photography!
Napier's work explores behavior, sociology, and place through still and moving image, installation, and participatory and collaborative performance. Her current project, Sea of Oil, focuses on places where oil, gas, and petrochemical industries are embedded, including Houston, Texas, where she resided for six years. Gathering stories and objects through personal exchange, Sea of Oil looks at how oil and gas culture intersects with everyday life, as we are faced with massive, global climate change.
Recently Napier presented Sea of Oil as a lecture-performance for the closing of the online conference Experiences of Oil, co-produced by Stavanger Art Museum and Curatorial Practice, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen, Norway. In 2019, she released her artist book, “Sea of Oil: Story Circle Show & Tell,” alongside a solar powered video installation and exhibition of objects at the Solar Studios at Rice University, with the Center for Environmental Studies, supported by a Houston Arts Alliance grant and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology. She is an alumna of the Creative Climate Leadership programme, led by Julie's Bicycle in partnership with global collaborators at Biosphere 2 in Arizona.
Napier earned a M.F.A in Photography with the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and holds a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. | | | Tony Orrico, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Intermedia, and David Hurlin, Sculpture and Intermedia graduate student, are in the exhibition signs and symbols: artists & allies IV through September 15, co-presented by The National Exemplar (Iowa City) and signs & symbols (NY).
CROSSWAKE (2021) is the documentation of a 4-hour performance in which Orrico and Hurlin integrate sonic and movement practices that test physical limits and sustain a co-authored presence. Rabalais navigates their improvisational terrain from behind the lens, amplifying aspects of the soundscape while formalizing two mobile vantage points. Orrico’s sound is a consequence of physical parameters that respond to Hurlin's interpretative play. Their sensing is circuit-like; reflexive sound and action that seems to evade absolute silence or physical release. Site: Visual Arts Building, University of Iowa.
Orrico is also in the exhibition This Mortal Coil, a collection of works by seventeen prominent contemporary artists, at Kennesaw State University's Zuckerman Museum of Art through December 11. This exhibition seeks to mitigate emotional suffering and corporeal pain, with works illuminating empathy, grief, and loss as shared universal themes.
Orrico will present an Artist Talk and Live-Streamed Performance associated with the exhibition:
Artist Talk: Thursday, September 9, 2021 | 7:00 pm
Live-Streamed Performance: Saturday, September 11, 2021 | 6:00 pm | | | | Andrew Casto, Ceramics Program Head, was recently featured in the exhibition Andrew Casto & Catherine Howe at Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York.
Casto conceives of his ceramic sculptures as a series of images as he works. Layering slips and glazes through multiple firings, his creative process is decidedly physical, and intentionally strains the material. Drawing inspiration from nature and geology, Casto considers how stress can also shape people physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Casto was also in the recent exhibition Order and Chaos: Audrey Stone, Iván Carmona, Andrew Casto, Chris Trueman, and Michael Schultheis at Winston Wächter Fine Art, Seattle. | | | MFA Painting and Drawing student Sean Elizabeth Tyler has painted two murals inspired by Iowa's natural landscape, prairies, and native plant species on buildings near downtown Waterloo, with the help of fellow MFA students Kayla Rumpp and Lachlan Hinwood.
The Waterloo Center for the Arts worked with MFA students at the School of Art & Art History to design and install the public murals meant to reflect the city's values, stories, and identity, and to serve as an informal gateway into downtown Waterloo.
Hannah Givler, Lecturer in 3D Design, led the course in Public Art.
See more photos in a feature article: New Murals Along Hwy 218 Brighten Up Downtown Waterloo | | | | YAZZIEWONPHON (Olive Phan) (BFA Printmaking with Honors and High Distinction 2020) is producing a fashion show called Threads and Powders: An Iowan Fashion & Textile Exhibit. The show will take place at the Englert Theatre on September 10th, with the Textile Exhibition available for free public viewing from 1:00 pm - 5:30 pm.
Makers and designers of Iowa will share their collection on the runway. The fashion show is broken into three major themes: Sustainable, Transformative, and Opulent.
View the event schedule and see more of YAZZIEWONPHON's art on her website. | | | Hamlett Dobbins (Painting and Drawing MFA 1999, MA 1998) has a solo exhibition, I Must Keep Reminding Myself of This, on view at The Brownstone. "Since 2002 my paintings have focused on experiences with particular people, hence the series of initials in the titles," he writes. "Since each painting is based on a specific experience with a particular friend or family member each painting tends to have its own sets of parameters and challenges. I use painting to focus on an experience and to wrap myself in the moment. By building the experience I begin to understand what about the moment moved me to paint in the first place."
Untitled (For J.A.S./W.D.), acrylic on canvas, 46 x 54”, 2021.
Visit his website for more images of his art. | | | | Rachel Singel (Printmaking MFA 2013, MA and UICB Certificate 2012), Associate Professor at the Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, is harvesting invasive plant species for papermaking and print projects.
Singel, a printmaker who also specializes in papermaking and book arts, earlier this summer produced paper from yellow flag iris (Iris pseudacorus), which is often considered an invasive plant species. Her project was an extension of one she first started in 2018 as artist-in-residence at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Bullitt County, where she made paper from plants that threaten local ecosystems.
Learn more about this project in a feature article: UofL art professor gets creative with invasive species | | | Nicole Donnelly (Painting and Drawing MFA 2009, MA 2008) was recently interviewed about her creative process combining nature, sculpting, and papermaking, the history of paper, and Paper Think Tank, the community-accessible hand papermaking studio she founded in Philadelphia. Watch the full interview here.
Donnelly's work is focused on the environmentally sustainable possibilities and beauty of handmade paper. Images of her art are available on her website. | | | | Sarah Marshall (Printmaking MFA 1999, MA 1998) is in the exhibition Transient Machinations: Sarah Marshall and John Klosterman at the Gadsden Museum of Art in Alabama through September 24.
Influenced by interests such as language, reading and book objects, architecture and biological science, Marshall focuses on the processes of printmaking and drawing. Their collaborative exhibition is an expression of skilled printmaking techniques.
Marshall is an Associate Professor of Art in Printmaking at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Visit her website for more images of her work. | | | Jered Sprecher (Painting and Drawing MFA 2002, MA 2001) has a solo exhibition, Summer Noise, at the Todd Art Gallery, Middle Tennessee State University, through September 11.
He writes: "My work compresses time into the surface of painting, that old technology. Increasingly flora, fauna, and natural phenomena hold my attention as I wrestle with this imagery that we daily experience through our technology. Birds, plants, flowers, stones, and fires dissolve into the light of the screen, the digital lens, and the glowing tablet."
Sprecher is a Professor of Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, School of Art. See more on his website. | | | |
