Truman Art/Art History Alumna Featured in National Geographic

Lori Nix, who graduated from Truman (then called Northeast Missouri State University) in 1993, is featured in the April 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.  Lori double majored in Photography and Art History and she has continued to work as an artist from her MFA at Ohio University through to her successful career in New York City.

The article is available at the National Geographic website.  Just to give you a taste of the full writeup (which has several photographs of her work), here are the first two paragraphs:

It’s the end of the world as we know it, but Lori Nix feels fine. In fact, she and Kathleen Gerber, her partner in art and life, are the cheerful architects of this apocalypse. On a gray winter day in Brooklyn, the two women are working in their chockablock apartment cum studio, carefully building small-scale dioramas of disaster.

Their goal, says Nix, is to create and photograph “open-ended narratives—models of a post-human metropolis in the future, after an unknown catastrophe.” To “unlock, engage, and provoke” viewers’ imaginations, “we want [them] to contemplate the present. Do we still have a future? Will we be able to save ourselves?”

The article also links to a short video, produced by The Drawing Room, which shows Lori and her partner Kathleen Garber working on creating one of their elaborate dioramas.

 

Art Faculty and Alumnae at CAA

Several Art faculty attended the annual meeting of the College Art Association in New York this past week.  Professor Aaron Fine had the launch of his book on color theory (Dialogues on Color), while Dr. Heidi Cook (Truman alumna and now a faculty member here) gave a paper on Croatian art.  Dr. Julia DeLancey hosted a reception for art faculty from institutions that are members of the Consortium of Public Liberal Arts Colleges, and Dr. Sara Orel co-chaired a workshop on undergraduate research in Art History with Dr. Alexa Sand of Utah State University.  Dr. Cole Woodcox also attended the conference, taking advantage of the wide range of sessions and museums available in New York.

In addition to the Art faculty, several alumnae attended the conference or otherwise participated in the week’s events.  Dr. Jasmine Cloud (now a professor at the University of Central Missouri) gave a paper, and we saw Emily Nickel (now an MFA student at the University of Iowa), Lori Nix (an artist working in New York), and Emily Hagen (a graduate student at Penn State).  Some of the alumnae and faculty got together for lunch at the conference.  Although not shown in the photograph, we have Aaron Fine to thank for the record of the event.

From left to right:  Dr. Julia DeLancey, Dr. Cole Woodcox, Dr. Jasmine Cloud, Emily Hagen, Dr. Heidi Cook.  Photo courtesy of Professor Aaron Fine.

Congratulations Professor Aaron Fine!

Department chair and painting professor Aaron Fine has a new book out!

Are Not Books will have his new book, Dialogues on Color, for sale at the 2017 conference of the College Art Association, which starts on Valentine’s Day in New York City.  If you will be at CAA, drop into their booth and take a look.  And keep your eyes peeled for many Truman faculty who will be presenting in various sessions at the conference.

Visiting Scholar: Jasmine (Fry) Cloud, class of 2005

Last week the Art Department was pleased to welcome back Dr. Jasmine (Fry) Cloud, who completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Art History at Truman in 2005. After Truman, she earned her Master’s in Art History from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her PhD from Temple University in 2014. Currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Missouri, Dr. Cloud has published her research in Reflections on Renaissance Venice, Perspectives on Public Space in Rome, from Antiquity to the Present Days, and Venice in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Patricia Fortini Brown. Dr. Cloud was the recipient of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation’s Institutional Fellowship which included a residency at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. While at Truman, Dr. Cloud gave a public talk on her research in Early Modern Rome, as well as meeting with members of the Art History Society (of which she was an active member during her undergraduate years) and the juniors in our Historical Methods seminar class.  Her visit was funded by an Alumni Visit Grant from the School of Arts and Letters.

Jasmine Cloud (at right) meets with Art History students in the library coffee shop.