| 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! | | | | Amelia Rosenberg (MFA Ceramics student) received an MFA Summer Fellowship to create and spread knowledge of her family's history regarding the Wallach Brothers, German Jewish textile producers active before and during the Nazi regime in pre-WWII Germany.
Rosenberg and other family members established The Wallach Project to preserve and promote their artistic and cultural heritage. Her award funded a symposium in partnership with the Munich City Museum to highlight her ongoing research, which was featured in the major publication SüdDeutsch Zeitung (July 2023).
The influence of Rosenberg's family history is visible in the motifs she chooses for her ceramics. They often refer to the classic motifs of the textiles and offer an insight into an idyllic Bavarian country life. See more on her website and Instagram. | | | T.J. Dedeaux-Norris (Associate Professor and Area Head, Painting and Drawing) has a solo exhibition at the Charles Allis Art Museum through January 2024.
Interwoven with the Museum's collection and history, Talk Back: Estate is an evocative journey of comparative histories: one of an institution, and the other of the lived experiences of a Black femme artist in America.
Dedeaux-Norris was also a summer resident at La Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France.
Dedeaux-Norris employs painting, fiber, performance, video, and music to explore the somatic impacts of racial, gender, and class socialization. Learn more on their website and Instagram. | | | | Rachel Cox (Assistant Professor and Area Head, Photography) recently partnered with the UK-based organization Broadly Conceived to discuss her current work with cultural historian Dr. Isabel Davis at the Natural History Museum, London.
Over the last two years, Cox has been archiving her experiences going through In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF). She has made repeated photographs of self-administered and partner administered injections, repurposed microscopic and ultrasound imagery, and used historical photographic processes to reflect on broader issues associated with bodily autonomy, power, and control.
Visit Cox's website and Instagram to learn more. | | | Daniel Miller (Associate Professor and Area Head, Sculpture and Intermedia) is showing the new work “Light Flower 4“ from his Mutual Light series in the group exhibition Plastic at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati through September 15.
In "Light Flower 4" the visitor’s invisible infrared heat signature is made visible when the participant approaches one of these interactive robotic floras. The changes in visitors' body heat and proximity to the light sculptures will cause the flower to animate with light through temporal and color changes.
This project was funded by an AHI Grant from the University of Iowa.
See more on Miller's website and Instagram. | | | | Jon Fasanelli-Cawelti (BFA, MA, MFA Printmaking 1985) has a solo exhibition, The Man Filled With Music, at the Muscatine Art Center, September 24, 2023 - February 18, 2024.
Jon served as Mauricio Lasansky's personal assistant from 1985-1998. In 1987, Jon obtained a printing press and began working on his own body of work. This exhibition spotlights works from a new series of music-based intaglio prints since his passing of ALS in 2021.
While Jon knew for many years his disease would eventually rob him of his ability to play music and engrave copper plates, he never lost his passion for either. Jon made the most of the time he had and persisted with unmatched determination to preserve his memories while maintaining the vanishing art of engraving.
See more at jonfasanellicawelti.com. | | | Jiha Moon (MFA Painting and Drawing 2002) is in the collaborative ceramics exhibition Michelle Laxalt and Jiha Moon: The Less We Say About It The Better at OLYMPIA in New York City through October 7.
Created in the joyful spirit of exchange in Moon’s studio in Atlanta, Georgia, the work embraces curiosity, intuition, trust, and delights in what can be uncovered through play and chance.
Moon's work is also on the cover of American Craft magazine (Fall 2023), which includes a feature article.
Moon will join the Florida State University College of Fine Arts as a professor of painting this academic year. Visit her website and Instagram to see more. | | | | Mary Laube (MFA Painting and Drawing 2012) has a solo exhibition, Parallel to the Earth, at the University of Southern Indiana’s New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art through September 16.
Laube’s work transforms the concept of identity in the cultural diaspora. Her practice looks at museum artifacts, architecture, and land related to historic preservation. Laube reimagines these objects as paintings which, in turn, become artifacts of displacement, reunion, decolonization, memorial, and myth.
Laube achieves this by decontextualizing the visual imagery of Korea into a distant abstract language by embracing the pictorial logic of abstract painting that can hold onto seemingly contradictory ideas while remaining whole.
Laube is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. See more on her website and Instagram. | | | Donté K. Hayes (MFA Ceramics with Honors 2020) is in the dual exhibition RESONANCE: Donté Hayes x Khari Turner at Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, opening September 2.
"My artwork is informed by researching traditional African heirlooms and initiation rites of birth, adulthood, marriage, eldership, and ancestry which are essential to all human growth and speaks to the greater African diaspora. [...]
Ceramics becomes a bridge to conceptually integrate disparate objects and or images for the purpose of creating new understandings and connections with the material, history, and social-political issues. These modern artifacts preserve, empower, and document the past and present to initiate healing and understanding for the future."
- Donté Hayes Artist Statement, 2023 (excerpt)
Visit Hayes' website and Instagram to learn more. | | | | LeAnn Erickson (MFA Intermedia 1992) is returning to Iowa City for the screening of From One Place to Another: Emma Goldman Clinic Stories as part of the Emma Goldman Clinic’s 50th Anniversary Homecoming Weekend.
The film is a portrait of the clinic and the women who sustained it and incorporates the clinic's founding ideals in its structure.
The screening will take place on Sunday, September 3, 3:30pm at Filmscene at the Chauncey, followed by a postshow conversation. All proceeds from ticket sales go to the Emma Goldman Clinic.
Erickson is a professor of film production in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University and has been an independent filmmaker for over 35 years. For more information visit leannerickson.com. | | | Melissa Kreider (MFA Photography 2018) was shortlisted for the Open Call "Synthesis" at Fotofestival Lenzburg.
Her project Catch-22 is an exploration of individuals who have been incarcerated (or are on trial) for killing their domestic or sexual abuser in self-defense and families who have lost loved ones as a result of intimate partner violence.
Kreider is a queer artist, photographer, and survivor advocate currently residing in Chicago. Her work and trauma-informed art practice are devoted to examining the systems in place to help or harm victims of sexual and domestic assault.
Learn more on her website and Instagram. | | | |
