Author: Art Department

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News from Current and Former Students

We have lots of great news, from some current students:

Daniel Degenhardt and Linnea Moody both have received Tru-Scholars fellowships for undergraduate research this coming summer. Both of them will be working with Photography Professor Priya Kambli.

Art major Abby Moreno will be doing research through the McNair program this summer. Dr. Heidi Cook will be her mentor for that project.  

And Department Chair Aaron Fine writes:

Current Art Major Natalie Gruber was surprised but pleased by the response to her painting of “Mothman in Domestic Bliss” – a painting she created in her Painting I class. When she posted it on twitter it received over 23,000 likes and was shared over 8,000 times within just a few days. Comments included those begging her to sell prints of the image, so it seems this one post has led to a new side business for her.


 

And we have news from an Alumna of the department:

Painting alumna Megan Klco Kellner had her collection of poetry selected to be published as a chap book by Michigan Writers Cooperative Press. More information can be found in their Facebook Announcement:

Michigan Writers Cooperative Press — Chapbook Contest Winner

Michigan Writers Cooperative Press is pleased to announce the winner of our annual chapbook contest. This year we will be publishing one new author, Megan Klco Kellner and her poetry chapbook, “What Will You Teach Her?”

Megan’s book will be released at a celebratory reading and reception on Sunday, June 9, 2019 at 7pm. We invite the public to join us for this free event at the Writing House on the campus of the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Mark your calendars to help us celebrate Megan’s work.

Megan Klco Kellner writes poems and makes paintings in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She holds an MFA in painting from Kendall College of Art and Design. She started writing poems in earnest during late-night feedings after her children were born. She is, above all, their awe-filled observer.

 

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Field Trip to Kansas City

Truman’s Art Department rounded up a bus and the students to fill it to go on a trip March 23rd to Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.  Students from several art and museum studies classes took advantage of the day-long adventure.  Dr. Sara Orel and Associate Dean of Libraries for Special Collections Amanda Langendoerfer led the trip, and they were joined by Dr. Heidi Cook and recent Truman graduate Nick Phan while at the museum.  It was a full day, but a fun one.  Stay tuned for more student travel photos and stories, coming soon!

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Truman Student Madi McClain Makes Her Mark

Madilyn (Madi) McClain had a work accepted into the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art’s Undergraduate Juried Exhibition! The organizers of the exhibition report that only approximately 25% of the submitted works were selected for display.

Madi McClain, Recline, Watercolor and graphite

The juried undergraduate exhibition will be on view from April 13-June 2 at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum in St. Louis.  The Opening Reception is free to the public on Friday, April 12 from 4-7pm.

Congratulations Madi! We are very proud to have you at Truman.

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Truman student and professor attend Southern Graphics Council International conference

Senior printmaking major Morgan White and printmaking professor Laura Bigger attended the SGCI conference 2019 in Dallas, TX. Both participated in the open portfolio sessions, attended panels, lectures, demonstrations, and visited many printmaking exhibitions.

Photos courtesy of Laura Bigger

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Alumna Nala Turner Featured in All The Art

Nala Turner, whose 2018 BFA ceramics show consisted of a series of very large vessels inspired by important women in her life, is interviewed in the spring 2019 issue of All The Art, the Visual Art Quarterly of St. Louis.  In addition to the two-page spread on pages 16 and 17, Nala’s work is featured on both the front and back covers.

Nala Turner now attends Pratt Institute in New York City, where she is doing well.  For more information, take a look at her article.  Congratulations on your recognition, Nala!  We are really proud of you!

Posted on by Art Department Faculty Scholarship and Creative Work, News and Events, Uncategorized

Honors and Publications for Professor Priya Kambli

Truman Photography Professor Priya Kambli has had a collection of photographs added to the collection of the Duke University Library.  She received the 2018 ADA Collection Award for Women Documentarians and has been added to the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University. In addition her work has been added to the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College of Chicago. Examples of the collected work can be seen through both links.

This spring Professor Kambli was the featured artist at the Ridderhof Martin Gallery at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  In addition her work has been featured in two publications, Art India and The California Sunday Magazine, where she and other artists’ photographs were used to illustrate an article titled “Freedom is _______.”

Posted on by Art Department Faculty Scholarship and Creative Work, News and Events, Uncategorized

New Gallery Shows Opening This Week

We have three great exhibitions opening in the University Art Gallery this week.

Retrospective: Wynne Wilbur – in the Main Gallery

Wynne Wilbur, Flower (2017).  Image courtesy of the artist.

View a career-spanning retrospective of work created by Truman ceramics professor Wynne Wilbur.

Emily Nickel, Undoing. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Dreamwork: New Work by ceramicists Leah Bowring, Emily Nickel, and Alexander Thierry – in the Main Gallery

Dreamwork features three ceramic artists, Truman alumni all, who encompass a broad range of approaches to ceramics: Leah Bowring, Emily Nickel, Alexander Thierry. Dreamwork refers to the psychoanalytic concept that our unconscious often disguises truths in our dreams from our conscious mind, but, more broadly, the works in this exhibition address the work the mind undertakes when creating memories, fantasizing, meditating, and dreaming.

Harry Tjutjuna, Wati Nyiru Munu Wati Wanka. Photo courtesy of the University of Virginia.

Claiming Country: Western Desert Painting from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection – in the Charlyn Gallery (Exhibition on view until March 22).The Western Desert, located in west central Australia, is home to many of Australia’s indigenous communities and is seen as the birthplace of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement. Indigenous Australian art is often based on Dreamings, called Tjukurrpa in the Western Desert region. Dreamings link Aboriginal peoples to their sacred lands, often referred to as Country, through narratives of ancestors and creator beings. Western Desert artists bridge the gap between traditional Aboriginal practices and the contemporary art world by expressing Tjukurrpa in their work through ceremonial iconography and aerial perspectives of sacred landscapes associated with creator beings and ancestors. The paintings in Claiming Country explore the essential role that Country plays in the identities of Indigenous Australians. This exhibition brings together paintings by prominent Western Desert artists Pansy Napangardi, Makinti Napanangka, Weaver Jack, Harry Tjutjuna, Kathleen Petyarre, Tjumpo Tjapanangka, and Paddy Japaljarri Sims.

These works have graciously been loaned to Truman State University from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to the exhibition and study of Indigenous Australian art.

Opening reception for all three of these exhibitions will take place Friday, January 25, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

 

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Welcome Back! With snowy images from new Lindsey Dunnagan show

Truman’s Spring 2019 semester begins on Monday.  We are getting about six inches of snow before classes start, so be safe as you come back to campus.

Moonlit Crossing, courtesy of the artist.

Painting professor Lindsey Dunnagan begins 2019 with a new show in the Twin Cities area (in Silverwood Park, Saint Anthony, on the northern side of Minneapolis). Her exhibition, “Skimming Boundaries,” was rooted in her experience with her grandmother, who battled Alzheimer’s Disease for the last ten years of her life.

In her artist’s statement, Professor Dunnagan writes:

A Familiar Face, courtesy of the artist.

 

In the beginning, her illness showed in small ways as she repeated stories she told just days before.  Toward the middle of the disease, she began reinventing the history of her life. Toward the end, my grandmother didn’t know who I was.  She lost the ability to recognize family.  Conversations with her became circular as her short-term memory began to fail as well.  In the moments when the recognizable parts of her seemed to flicker in and out, I often wondered where she had gone.  It seemed as if a part of her was testing the waters of another realm even though her physical body remained vital.

 

In this series, I explore the intangible world of the spirit and the boundary that separates us. Religion maps out worlds of before and after death, but even the most secular are confronted these questions. What is the journey between life and death?  Where are the edges?  In this series, I search for what is felt but unseen.

Blinking Current, courtesy of the artist.

Much of the work experiments with natural dyes, a technique I learned while serving in Morocco as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  Vegetation such as raspberries and cabbage are boiled and poured over mordanted paper, resulting in permanent reds, blues, and greens.  Rocks and black walnuts provide tones of sepia and simultaneously act as a resist, allowing the places they weigh down in the paper to remain white.  Sometimes paper is buried overnight and exposed to the rain or wrapped around trees to capture the imprint of bark.

The dying process, courtesy of Lindsey Dunnagan.

Stay tuned for all the exciting events coming up this spring semester at Truman.  And Welcome Back!