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!

Faculty News and Events

Kee-ho Yuen

Kee-ho Yuen, Program Head of Jewelry and Metal Arts, is one of the invited artists for the Dubuque Museum of Art Craft Invitational, on view through October 2.

The Craft Invitational highlights a select group of regional artists who are pushing boundaries in ceramic, glass, metal, paper, textile, and wood. Each artist combines high levels of skill and craftsmanship with conceptual rigor. Playful and expressive details emerge throughout.  

He writes: "Regardless of vast social and technological changes, basic human emotions and interactions remain the same. Fascinated and inspired by how timeless some old Chinese literature is in this subject, my work is a collage of what I learn from it. I prefer to capture it by resonating between seriousness and whimsicality. I do not intend to use my work to convince anyone but use it as a reminder for myself not to drift too far from important attitudes in life."

See more of Yuen's work on his website.

Heather Parrish

Heather Parrish, Program Head of Printmaking, had a solo exhibition, Seeing Out the Other Eye - A View Through Waller Creek this summer at Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Austin, Texas. 

Bearing the name of Austin’s first city planner, this cretaceous limestone waterway is inscribed with legacies of racialized division and displacement. As an Austin native with family traces to the city’s founding, Parrish explores these threads through historical layers of terrain and urban development. Her exhibition at Flatbed uses images sourced from historic photographs of Waller Creek, remembered (sometimes forgotten) as a dividing border line that runs through the city of Austin.

The exhibition had a feature article in Sightlines Magazine by award-winning arts and culture critic Jeanne Claire van Rizyn and was listed in their Top 8 to see in Austin in June. It was also included in Glasstire (Texas Visual Art) Top 5 across Texas. Visit Parrish's website to see more.

Isabel Barbuzza

Isabel Barbuzza, Professor of Sculpture and Intermedia, was invited to participate in the 12th From Lausanne to Beijing International Fiber Art Biennale at Yunnan Provincial Museum in China, September 1 to October 31. 

The Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University established the From Lausanne to Beijing International Fiber Art Biennale in 1999 to continue the rich heritage of international fiber art. Since then, the biennale has evolved into a globally renowned exhibition, both academically rich and enjoying wide popular appeal, and has become known as the most influential fiber art exhibition worldwide.

Visit Barbuzza's website and Instagram to see more.

Dan Miller

Daniel Miller, Program Head of Sculpture and Intermedia, unveiled a new permanent sculpture at the Pappajohn Biomedical Discovery Building.

An original piece commissioned by the Iowa Neuroscience Institute, Receptive Field is an interactive light sculpture. This project was inspired by the artist’s many family visits to pediatric neurology and how the slightest bit of external noise or other stimuli would trigger brain wave response. Visitors can interact with microphones and distance sensors to trigger illuminated response in the brain sculpture’s audio and visual cortex regions. Most of the time the brain will shift through random sequences of color to emulate the constant activity of the human brain.

Receptive Field is made from more than 100 stacked pieces of acrylic, aluminum and over 3000 individually addressable LED lights, that are controlled by Arduino microcontrollers and sensors. See more of Miller's public art and projects on his website

Elizabeth Kindall

Elizabeth Kindall, Visiting Scholar in Art History, will present “A Chinese Geo-Narrative painting at the Stanley Museum of Art” on October 26, 5:30pm, 116 ABW and on Zoom (register here).

Kindall is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. She investigates functional visual experiences captured in Chinese paintings of real places through examinations of their distinctive topographical vocabulary and site-specific views.

Her work has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Toung P’ao, Artibus Asiae, and Ars Orientalis, and her book Geo-Narratives of a Filial Son: The Paintings of Huang Xiangjian (1609–1673). Her current research focuses on farewell culture and landscape biography, and representations of the Yandang mountain range in Chinese painting.

Huang Xiangjian (1609-1673), Scenery on the San-tu Pass, UI Stanley Museum of Art.

Susan White

Susan Chrysler White, Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing, has a solo exhibition, MOTHER TONGUE, through October 21 at Wege Center for the Arts at Maharishi University in Fairfield, IA.

"My recent paintings strive to represent interior experience and its transitory connections among ideas and emotional states," she writes.

"Bilateral symmetry with its reference to the body plays a main role in my new work. Having explored that in much of my earlier work, I return to it as the work becomes more specifically personal.

"The longing for spiritual and physical connections, the playfulness of my granddaughter’s obsession with train horns and my love of cosmological charts are all woven into my desire to make images."

See more on White's website and Instagram.

Alumni News

Abel Ortiz-Acosta

Abel Ortiz-Acosta (MFA Painting and Drawing 2002) organized the painting of 21 portrait murals to honor the children and teachers whose lives were lost during the Robb Elementary mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. 

“[T]he most important thing is to tell their stories, to remember them forever, and, of course, continue the healing,” he says.

Ortiz-Acosta is the owner of ART LAB Contemporary Art Space and Associate Professor of Art at Southwest Texas Junior College.

The project received support from a GoFundMe managed by Mónica Maldonado of the nonprofit MAS Cultura in Austin and the Facebook group Collectors of Chicano/Latinx Art and Allies led by Dr. George Meza.

Read more about the Healing Uvalde murals in Iowa Stories.

Kuldeep Singh

Kuldeep Singh (MFA Painting and Drawing 2015) has been selected as the Artist Faculty in Residence at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design in Seattle from Fall 2022 to Spring 2023.

Singh is an interdisciplinary artist who creates through short films and sound, painting, mud sculptures, and immersive performance in installation based environments.

See more on his website and Instagram.

Alex Jesko

Alex Jesko's (MFA Painting and Drawing 2019) first solo exhibition, Alex Jesko: Particle Displacement is on view at the Medici Museum of Art in Warren, Ohio, through January 30, 2023.

Jesko is passionate about both art and music. “A lot of my work is inspired by sound and the complexities of how we perceive sound,” he says in a Tribune Chronicle feature article. “When we think of a pin dropping, we don’t think of how we’re perceiving that sound. There are so many complexities involved with hearing and I try to depict that in my work.”

The large canvases feature geometric designs, many of which have a three-dimensional quality.

“Some have more of a beat to them,” Jesko says of his paintings. “That one over there has a pulsating rhythm. Others are more architectural explorations, landscapes turned into architectural environments for people to explore.” 

Follow Jesko's work on his website and Instagram.

Manion and Masterson

John Manion (MFA Sculpture 2008) and Leopold Masterson (BFA Ceramics 2008) currently have a two-person exhibition, Under The Big Tops: Collaborative Sculpture by John Manion and Leopold Masterson, at a space gallery, 315 West 39th Street (809), New York, NY.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Thems and Theys, Boys and Girls, Children of all ages, genders and ethnicities, welcome to Under The Big Tops. In this space we dazzle the mind, marvel at the various ways of occupying a male body, and postulate just why the old patriarchal representation of men as hard, erect and tough has dominated for so long."

Manion lives and works in Albany, NY, and Masterson in New York, NY. See more:
johncmanion.com | @johncmanion
leemasterson.com | @leopoldmasterson

They and Them, John Manion in Collaboration with Leopold Masterson, Glazed Ceramic and Hardware, 2021-2022.

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