Faculty Scholarship and Creative Work

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Professor Aaron Fine to Present on Color Theory

The next Faculty Forum event will take place at 7 p.m. Oct. 24 in Baldwin Hall 102

“Dialogues on Color” will be a presentation of Aaron Fine’s work on color theory resulting in a book of that title. This book, an inter-genre mixture of creative nonfiction, fiction and coloring book pages, is available to read free online, or purchase at cost, at www.arenotbooks.com.

Providing an intellectual history of Western attitudes towards color, the organizing aim of the book is to reveal the ways cultural context shapes our theories of color, not excluding those we link to Newton’s work with the prism and think of as objective and universally true.

For this presentation, Fine will host a mixture of activities, mingling his own lecture style with staged readings done by theatre students in the voices of Newton, Goethe, Tom Sawyer and others. There will also be opportunities for the audience to color in their own color theory coloring book pages and to win a drawing for one of five complimentary copies of the book “Dialogues on Color.”

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New Faculty Member: Dr. Josh Hainy

Dr. Josh Hainy in front of the “American Gothic” house in Eldon, IA.

Josh Hainy joined the Truman State University Art Department in August 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Iowa with a specialization in 18th– and 19th-century European Art. Before the University of Iowa, Hainy attended the University of Oregon, where he got a Master’s degree in Classics. Drawing from his background in the classical languages, for his dissertation in Art History, he examined the ways in which British draughtsman and sculptor John Flaxman (1755-1826) depicted subject matter taken from ancient literature. Flaxman’s drawings of Homer’s Iliad received particular emphasis. These images—done in the contour style of the late 18th and early 19th centuries—became quite popular throughout Europe, but scholarly interest traditionally focused on Flaxman’s use of contour, not the ways in which he presented the narrative of the Iliad through a series of images.

“Ajax Defending the Greek Ships against the Trojans” by John Flaxman.

 

In addition to presenting his research on Flaxman’s narratives at The Art Institute of Chicago Graduate Symposium, Dr. Hainy has presented other papers about Flaxman and his interactions with classical antiquity at the annual conferences of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. He talked about the role of the human body in the lectures Flaxman delivered as the first Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art at a symposium about art, anatomy, and medicine held at the Columbia Museum of Art. This paper will be part of an edited volume about art, anatomy, and medicine since c. 1800.

At Truman State this fall, Hainy is teaching “Introduction to the Visual Arts”, the survey of Western Art from the Renaissance to the present, and Renaissance Art in the fall. In the spring he will teach the second half of the western survey, as well as one course on Modern Art and a topics (Art 428) section on art from the 18th and early 19th centuries, titled “Rococo to Romanticism.”

We extend our enthusiastic welcome to Josh Hainy, a valued addition to the Art Department at Truman!

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Professor Derezinski Designs for the Boy Scouts

Matthew Derezinski has been developing promotional materials from print to social media design for the Scouting 500 over the past six months. The Scouting 500 will be held this coming weekend at the Kansas City Speedway. The event is expecting to have over two thousand attendees, including Cub and Boy Scouts, as well as Venturers, Varsity Scouts, Explorers, leaders, family members and friends.

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Professor Lindsey Dunnagan’s Collaborative Art Project

Painting professor Lindsey Dunnagan invites people to participate in her new artwork at Paul Artspace Residency in Saint Louis, on August 6th.  She writes:

Carrying resentment, anger, or regret can negatively affect mental health and the body.  International Forgiveness Day (August 6th, 2017) provides an opportunity to shed these feelings.  In this interactive project, visitors are invited to Paul Artspace in Saint Louis where they can transfer unwanted negative emotions to “stones” through writing.

These stones are interconnected sculptural forms made of concrete that are absorbent and heavy.  Once participants write or draw on the concrete forms they may cover parts or their entire message with a black polish.  Then visitors can leave their stones in the forest.

Because the concrete is heavy, it serves as a metaphor of emotional weight.  Leaving the stones behind is physical act of literally letting go and a symbolic way of healing.

After the event, stones will be collected for a sculptural altar in a gallery where the project can continue. In the gallery, new visitors may write on new stones while sifting through the ones others have left. My hope is that this project can help people feel less alone and provide some peace for people who are dealing with difficult issues.

The details:

When: August 6th, 12 – 6pm

Where: Paul Artspace 14516 Sinks Rd, Florissant, MO 63034

For more details, including a map to the location, take a look at her website.

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Photography Professor Priya Kambli exhibits in Jaipur, India

Professor Priya Kambli’s photographs were displayed at the JaipurPhoto show in late February/early March.  JaipurPhoto is an international open-air travel photography festival held every February in the Pink City.

For the 2017 edition, JaipurPhoto’s Artistic Director, Lola Mac Dougall, invited Federica Chiocchetti, Founding Director of the photo-literary platform Photocaptionist, to be the Guest Curator and respond to the theme of wanderlust. As a Westerner, who works on the relationship between photography and fictions, images and words, and who had to ‘imagine’ and ‘study’ Jaipur and India from far away, Chiocchetti felt inclined to search for photographic works that subtly connected the notions of travel with ideas of the imaginary and the unexpected.

Professor Kambli’s work on display in Jaipur.  These are from her series “Kitchen Gods,” which takes inspiration from her own family’s photographs from India.

As the festival writeup proclaimed: “In this unique family pantheon, Kambli labours to afford her ancestors the same treatment as given to kitchen deities. The act of transforming simple snapshots into gods that watch over the nourishment of the family makes this series–although aesthetically rooted in India- a universal story.”

Priya Kambli is back in the classroom in the fall of 2017, after taking a sabbatical to work on her art full time.  Congratulations on the show, and welcome back!

 

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News from Printmaking (student travel and Prof. Bigger’s summer adventures)

 In April, during the last full month of the (academic) year, art students Jennifer Reagan, Nick Phan, Claire Nipper, Morgan Price, Morgan White, Greta Dellinger, Cassie Koelling, and Madi Pearson all went on a trip with Professor Laura Bigger, our printmaking instructor.

The trip took them all to the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and its Print Study Room, Cave Paper, The Minnesota Center for Book Arts, The Walker Art Center, Midway Center for Contemporary Art, two graduate programs (at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), Leg Up Press, and the Highpoint Center for Printmaking.
They also made requisite stops to eat doughnuts and yummy food.
Professor Bigger herself writes that this summer she will be heading to Documenta and Berlin to research a study abroad trip for the Art Department. She will also mount an exhibition at The Holland Project in Reno, Nevada, and the Silverwood Park Gallery in St. Anthony, Minnesota. We hope to have pictures from those adventures in the fall.
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Congratulations Dr. Heidi Cook!

Assistant Professor of Art Heidi Cook completed her Ph.D. this year in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh with advisor Barbara McCloskey. Her dissertation was titled “Picturing Peasants: Maksimilijan Vanka’s Folkloric Paintings and the ‘Croatian Question’ from Habsburg Empire to Croatian Nation-State.” Using the work of Croatian-American artist Vanka as a linking thread, her project explored how the production, circulation, and reception of objects and images related to Croatian folk culture played an active role in imagining a spectrum of competing national and imperial identities in early twentieth-century Yugoslavia. She received an American Councils Title VIII Fellowship, Foreign Language and Area Studies Academic-year Fellowships, and a Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship from the University of Pittsburgh among other grants to fund her research and writing. Her research will continue to focus on visual constructions of nationalisms and other competing political identities in the modern art, architecture, design, and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe.

Dr. Cook and Dr. McCloskey at the University of Pittsburgh Commencement.

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Faculty in New York for Research and Book Signing

Dr. Julia DeLancey’s current research into melancholy in the Italian Renaissance, perhaps a manifestation of what we now call “depression,” led her to research in New York, at the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  She has shared these two images taken during the research trip, funded in part by a fellowship established by former Truman State University president Barbara Dixon.

The New York Public Library, photo courtesy of Julia DeLancey.

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art walk past Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia I, photo courtesy of Julia DeLancey.

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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.