Alumni

Posted on by Art Department Department, News and Events, Uncategorized

2003 Alumna Dusty Folwarczny Visits Campus

Dusty Folwarczny, Studio Art graduate, and co-founder of Chicago’s Ink Factory, visited Truman in October to talk about her post-Truman career and provide a workshop on Visual Note Taking.  She spoke to classes, including the Senior Capstone Seminar, and explained to students what she does as part of this innovative Chicago start-up, and gave them a chance to practice visual note taking themselves.

Dusty and Art Department chair Aaron Fine talk after her presentation. Student tries out visual note taking.

 

Posted on by Art Department News and Events, Uncategorized

Graphic Design Alumna Visits Campus

On Friday, October 13th, Gretchen Claire, a Truman Alumni and Graphic Design major, gave a presentation to design students about her work experiences. Gretchen works for environments WORKS, a Community Design Center firm that is based out of Seattle, Washington. She had been with the company for over eight months. The presentation discussed her ability to get job, what employers are looking for and what students need to think about after graduation. Once the presentation was over Gretchen met with seniors and juniors about their portfolios.

Gretchen Claire (left) meets with design student on her recent return to Truman State University.

Posted on by Art Department News and Events, Uncategorized

Dusty Folwarczny (BFA 2003) to Talk to Art Students

2003 Sculpture graduate Dusty Folwarczny will return to Truman to speak with students on Monday, October 23rd. She will be working with Priya Kambli’s Art Foundations II class in the morning and will speak to the Senior Seminar class in the evening.   In addition to her active work as a sculptor in Chicago, she co-founded a company that provides illustration services where the client is an active participant in the creation process.  ink factory has developed murals, videos, and installations of various sorts for a wide range of clients, both private businesses and community and non-profit groups.Two views of “Give,” by Dusty Folwarczny, made of salvaged steel, and 14 feet tall.

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

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.

Posted on by Art Department News and Events, Uncategorized

Congratulations to Art Graduates (and all other grads as well!)

Truman split their commencement into three parts this year because of construction and track improvements.  So the BA and BFA students were honored at a 9 am ceremony on May 13th, which also featured an address by Dr. Cole Woodcox of the English Department, who has also taught Art History for several years. Congratulations to all graduates!  We will miss you as you go on to your exciting futures.  Please keep in touch and let us know what you are doing.

Photo courtesy of Tim Barcus

Posted on by Art Department Art History, News and Events

Spring 2017 graduate-to-be admitted to graduate school in Paris

Over spring break, Emma Shouse (senior Art History major) sent us the following message:

“I will be working towards a Masters of Arts in Fashion Studies at The New School: Parsons Paris in Paris, France. It is a two year program that looks at fashion through an interdisciplinary lens (art history, anthropology, sociology, film studies, design, fashion theory, etc.), which allows for students to find their niche while still having to push themselves to analyze fashion in new ways. Students get access to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Fashion Week, and numerous other design houses and museums around Paris. Each student is required to complete an internship, and many find placements in design houses, museums, fashion magazines, and retail headquarters…  I could not be more thrilled with this program!”

Congratulations, Emma!  We look forward to hearing from you next year (send pictures)!

Emma traveled to Iran last summer to study traditional and contemporary Iranian art. Here she is in Esfahan.

 

Posted on by Art Department Uncategorized

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.

 

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

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.

Posted on by Art Department Art History

Alumna Publishes First Article

April Johnston (Art History 2014) works in St. Louis as a curator for a private art collector, and she sent us the following message this spring:

I wanted to share with you that I’ve had my first piece of art-writing published! I was invited by the editors of All the Art, St. Louis’s new visual arts quarterly, to contribute to their Art + Money issue. The piece is a short interview with my boss, John Horseman. It’s been a little over a year since he hired me and managing the collection continues to be extremely fun, rewarding, and educational! The entire issue can be read with this link; my piece is on page 12-13 of the print edition, and on page 15-16 in the digital edition.

Congratulations, April!  And if you are an alumna/alumnus of our program and have some news to report we would love to hear from you.  Our email address is art@truman.edu.

Posted on by Art Department Art History, Weblogs

News from Alumni

We are always happy to get news from alumni of our Art and Art History programs, some of whom are involved with Art careers and others who have really exciting careers in other fields.  Here are some of our latest updates from Art History majors:

From Bryna Campbell:

In May 2015, I graduated with my PhD in Art History & Archaeology from Washington University in St. Louis, with a dissertation titled “The Comic Grotesque: Troubling the Body Politic in American Graphic Satire from World War I to the Great Depression.” I also received a graduate certificate in American Culture Studies. Since graduating I have been teaching as an art history instructor at Portland State University in Portland, OR. I am also the co-creator and founding editor of The Art and Place Blog (theartandplaceblog.wordpress.com) and the co-creator of the creative writing project Un/Settled (un-settled.org), which focuses on themes related to rural diaspora.

Brian Dale (who wrote his senior thesis the same year as Bryna):

I work in financial services as an Asst. Vice President with Wells Fargo Advisors in St. Louis. I live with my family in Webster Groves, MO, and my involvement with art does not extend beyond drawing with my daughter and the odd trip to the museum.

Katherine Eusey:

My love of Islamic architecture led me to pursue an MA in Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. Although my thesis was on the topic of mosque architecture, real-world pressures (ya know, needing to eat and pay rent) ended up pushing me into the field of security and intel. After working for a year as an intelligence analyst at a large security and executive protection firm in Tel Aviv, I joined a small startup called Levantine Group (also Tel Aviv-based) as the Director of Partnerships. In that role, I work with diplomats, journalists, corporate security managers, and even a few university study abroad program directors who are based across the Middle East.

If you are an alumn(-a/-us) of Truman’s Art programs and have news of your post-Truman activities, we would love to hear from you.  Please send us email at art@truman.edu.