News from the School of Art and Art History
News from the School of Art and Art History

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!

SAAH News

Clayton Salley

Clayton Salley (MFA Candidate in Jewelry and Metal Arts) is a finalist in the Expo 42 International Juried Competition at b.j. spoke gallery in Huntington, New York. 

Ten finalists, including Salley, were chosen for the exhibition. The Juror, Kiko Aebi, is a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art and chose Salley’s work from hundreds of artists’ entries totaling over 1,000 images and videos.  

"My artworks are made using traditional metalsmithing techniques which start by bending, stretching, and compressing sheet metal into forms. Creating repeated forms allow me to reflect, speculate, and flow in the subconscious. I intent to embed an energy into my artwork through repeated hammer blows onto metal. I think of the resulting objects as having their own agency.  Textures, colors, tactility, and sound allow me to tune the experience of the artwork for the wearer," he writes.

See more on Salley's website and Instagram.

Image: Chaotic Untitled Spicule Necklace VIII, Copper, Phosphorous Bronze, Patina, 4.5" x 20.5" x 18.25"

Elizabeth McTernan

Elizabeth McTernan (Visiting Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing) has been invited to lead a group for Field_Notes, an art and science field laboratory that will take place in the Sami region of Finnish Lapland in September 2023. The project is organized by the Bioart Society at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station of the University of Helsinki. 

During this year’s edition, three groups of five will work in sub-arctic Lapland for two weeks developing, testing, and evaluating specific interdisciplinary artistic approaches under the theme of ‘The North Escaping,’ which aims to address the rapid transformation of northern life-worlds in the current climate crisis. The deadline for the open call is March 17.

‘Field_Notes – The North Escaping’ is funded via Rewilding Cultures, a Creative Europe collaboration project aiming to reposition the wild after COVID-19 and focus on inclusivity and ecology within the art, science, and technology.

Covering similar themes, McTernan’s article ‘Andscapes: As the Bug Crawls’ (2021) was recently selected by the Nýló Reading Club for a public event at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland. Learn more on her website and Instagram

Tony Orrico

Tony Orrico (Assistant Professor in Sculpture and Intermedia) has a solo exhibition, THIS ONE HERE NOW, at signs and symbols gallery in New York City through March 25.

Since 2011, Orrico has been generating Textiles, an ongoing series of hand-written tessellations derived through a somatic ritual that amasses memories from his attentive body. THIS ONE HERE NOW marks Orrico’s first exhibition solely composed of these drawings, all graphite on archival paper, engendering new meaning through deliberate thought-interventions that abruptly shift the regenerative patterns and stage tension between building forms.

Learn more about Orrico's performative art on his website and Instagram.

Sue Hettmansperger

Sue Hettmansperger's (Professor Emerita of Painting and Drawing) drawing installation Paragraph 1 is in the exhibition 75 Years of Iowa Art at the Des Moines Art Center through May 7.

Celebrating the Art Center’s 75th anniversary year, this exhibition reflects the work of artists who have lived and worked in Iowa and their connections to the Des Moines Art Center. 

See more of Hettmansperger's work on her website and Instagram.

Alan Ross

Alan Ross, Visiting Artist in Photography, will be giving a public lecture, "Sharing the Light…A Photographers Journey," on Friday, March 24 at 6:00 pm in E125 Visual Arts Building.

Ross is a renowned photographer whose unique vision combines traditional photographic methods with today’s technology. He is best known for his tonally exquisite black-and-white photographs of the American West. He worked side-by-side with Ansel Adams as his photographic assistant, and was personally selected by Adams to print his Yosemite Special Edition negatives, a role he has maintained since 1975. Ross lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lauren Frances Adams

Lauren Frances Adams, Visiting Artist in Painting and Drawing, will be giving a Zoom lecture on Thursday, March 2 at 7:00 pm.

Adams is a painter who lives and works in Baltimore. Her work engages political and social histories through iconic images and domestic ornament. Her work has been exhibited across the United States at museums, university galleries, and artist-run spaces, with a recent project at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award, and a 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. She was a founding member of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a project space in New York. Adams teaches painting full-time at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Alumni News

Jeremy Chen (MFA Printmaking 2006) has a solo exhibition, Devices, Tools, Objects, and Props: Recent Work, at Grinnell College Museum of Art through April 8. 

This exhibition of sculptural artworks invites contemplation on the manifold meanings and uses of objects or things, and our complex entanglement with materials. Consisting primarily of humble objects of pathos or humor, many works in the exhibition have a purpose or use with the human body. 

Chen is the Assistant Professor of Studio Art and Chair of American Studies at Grinnell College. Learn more on his website and Instagram.

Claire Whitehurst

Claire Whitehurst (MFA Painting and Drawing 2019) is the Artist in Residence for the spring semester at Furman University in Greenville, SC. She will be studying a set of petroglyphs at Hagood Mill and making a body of work expanding on nuances in abstraction in prehistoric work, a continuation of work she did in graduate school. 

In 2018, Whitehurst was the recipient of the Stanley Fellowship at the University of Iowa. She lived and worked in the Dordogne region of southern France where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings. Her research focused on the relationship between surface and image, and the compositional complexities of abstract narrative.

Whitehurst has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been featured in numerous publications. Visit her website and Instagram to see more.

Jaz Graf

Jaz Graf (MFA Printmaking 2019) was recently published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA). “Jaz Graf: The Art and (Im)possibilities of Belonging” is an article about the conservation of endangered practices, the experience of being multiracial, and engaging the arts as a catalyst for social responsibility.

ADVA is a peer-reviewed journal that features multidisciplinary scholarship dedicated to the examination of visual cultural production by and about Asian diasporic communities in the Americas and largely conceived within a globally connected framework.

In this special ‘Eco Focus’ issue, the contributing artists, curators, and scholars look deeply into the collective trauma of the shared legacies of colonialism and violence that tie our climate pasts and our ecological landscapes of the future.

Graf's Virtual Art Talk, hosted by the NJCU Center for the Arts, can be accessed via Brill Online or YouTube.

Visit Graf's website and Instagram to learn more.

Oliver Lee Jackson

Oliver Lee Jackson (MFA Painting and Drawing 1963), groundbreaking painter and founding member of the Black Artists Group, recently gave a public talk at the Stanley Museum of Art. Jackson's career began at Iowa and now his monumental Painting (4.78-I) and Painting (4.78-II) are proudly featured at the Stanley Museum's Homecoming exhibition. Read a reflection on Oliver Lee Jackson by Director Lauren Lessing.

Over the span of five decades, Jackson has developed a singular body of work, creating complex and layered paintings in which figural forms meld with abstract fields of vivid color. While tightly composed, Jackson’s paintings feel improvisational in approach, as gestural marks become intertwined with vivid swaths of paint and color. Building over time, each work becomes a synthesis of references that may span from the Renaissance to Modernism, filtered through what Jackson terms his “African sensibility.”

Jackson lives and works in Oakland, California. Learn more about his art and career on his website.

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