Assistant Professor of Art History Josh Hainy has had an article included in Visualizing the Body in Art, Anatomy, and Medicine Since 1800: Models and Modelling, edited by Andrew Graciano, and published by Routledge.
The article, “Grecian Theory at the Royal Academy: John Flaxman and the Pedagogy of Corporeal Representation,” grows out of research on John Flaxman that was a part of his dissertation at the University of Iowa.
Professor Laura Bigger recently exhibited her Elements series in a two-person show with sculptor Evan Reed at the University of Mary Washington gallery in Fredericksburg, VA.
(Photographs courtesy of Laura Bigger)
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 _______.”
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.
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!
The fall faculty show, “New Work by Truman State Art Faculty,” in the University Gallery and the Charlyn Gallery (formerly known as the Side Gallery) will be up through Friday of this week (10/5). If you haven’t caught the photographs and installation by Priya Kambli in the main gallery and “Grown-Up Games” by Danielle Yakle in the Charlyn Gallery, you are in for a treat.
Above and below, work by Priya Kambli, professor of art.
And below, students Josh Fackler and Josh Fish enjoy Instructor Danielle Yakle’s “Grown-Up Games.”
Professor Wynne Wilbur spent time this summer in a short term artist residency at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana. While there she worked on porcelain, returning to a material she has focused on during her sabbatical in China and since.
While at Red Lodge, Professor Wilbur was one of five Artist-Invites-Artist residents. Pictured below are Stephanie Craig (Ohio), Chanda Zea (Oregon), Professor Wilbur, Kyung Hwa Oh (Colorado), and Todd Leech (Ohio) horizontal!
If you are in New Orleans this coming weekend, you should take the opportunity to hear Truman Professor Priya Kambli talk about her work at the Louisiana State Museum at The Old US Mint. She will be speaking as part of the PHOTONOLA 2017 event. Priya’s talk is on Sunday, December 10th, at 10 am, and it is free and open to the public. She also has a solo exhibition in New Orleans, at the Staple Goods Gallery from December 9th-January 7th.
Louisiana State Museum Old US Mint Staple Goods
400 Esplanade Avenue 1340 St. Roch Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70116 New Orleans, LA 70117
504-568-6993 504-908-7331
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 4:30pm Hours: Sat + Sun, 12-5pm
From the PHOTONOLA 2017 website:
Priya Kambli’s artwork is intrinsically tied to her own family’s photographic legacy and her move at age 18, following the death of her parents, from India to the United States. Before she emigrated, she and her sister split their photographic inheritance in half. One portion remained in India, and the other was displaced along with Priya, in America. For the past decade, that archive of family photographs has been Priya’s primary source material in creating bodies of work which explore the migrant narrative and experience; albeit through a personal lens. Priya’s work has always touched upon universal themes, with the potential to start a dialogue about cultural differences and universal similarities. In the last year those private references and broad themes have taken on a new public significance that requires a creative response, by delving deeper into her own immigrant narrative, engaging with its personal but increasingly, if accidentally, political context.
In this free public presentation, Priya Kambli will discuss her bodies of work which explore the migrant narrative and experience as seen through a personal lens, beginning with her book Color Falls Down, and continuing through her latest project Buttons for Eyes.
Professor of Photography Priya Kambli has continued to collect recognition and honors as she comes off her sabbatical year:
The Grunwald Gallery of Art at Indiana University Bloomington will host a lecture by Priya Kambli on Thursday, November 2nd, from 5:30 to 6:30 pm. The lecture is in conjunction with the exhibition Kinship, curated by IU’s Assistant Professor of Photography Elizabeth M. Claffey and Gallery Director Betsy Stirratt.
Kinship examines the influence of family life on personal and cultural identity. Each artist delves into the complex nature of family structures to express how it shapes internal dialogue and personal narrative.