Photography

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Five Students Receive Summer Grants to Create Art

Five art students were awarded TruScholar grants to pursue research this summer.  You can see their resulting work in the Atrium Gallery of Ophelia Parrish from Monday, August 30- Friday, September 3.  Below is a summary of each project:

For his TruScholar research, Kameron Clark compared struggles of contemporary wealth inequality with similar themes from the past.  Historical paintings such as “Hard Times” by Hubert von Herkomer (1885) and “Evicted” by Blandford Fletcher (1887) are reimagined in the current United States climate.

Kameron Clark

Maggie Adams conducted her TruScholars project on the fiber artist Lenore Tawney; her research combined studio art and art historical methodologies. Adams focused on replicating Tawney’s understudied weaving techniques in her body of work “Woven Forms” and its connection to Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s.

Anna Grahlherr’s summer research reclaims the female nude in art from the perspective of female-sexed people.  In this series, she rejects the tradition of the male gaze and explores diverse bodies.

Anna Grahlherr

ZuZu Smugala created artwork that explores how people use different coping mechanisms in their daily lives.

ZuZu Smugala

Kristen Buck’s project is about documenting her body to create permanence of her self-image. After going through a drastic physical change, her reality has been comprised by her own thoughts. The resulting series of photographs capture her contradictory feelings as well as igniting conversations about what an image is and how it serves to preserve truth.

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Congratulations to Professor Priya Kambli

Our own Priya Kambli has been chosen by the Missouri Arts Council as the recipient of the Missouri Arts Award for Individual Artist – our State’s highest honor in the arts. “Honorees are recognized for their profound and lasting contributions to Missouri’s artistic and cultural legacy.”

The press release says:

Individual Artist | Priya Kambli, Kirksville

Internationally recognized photographer whose art is suffused with themes of loss, love, and memory across generations of family, inspired by the archive of family heirlooms, artworks, and photographs she brought with her to the U.S. when she migrated from India at age 18.

Congratulations to Professor Kambli!

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

Professor Matthew Derezinski’s work receives honor

Professor Matthew Derezinski received Honorable Mention in 15th Pollux Non-Pro Digital Manipulation in the Landscapes and Seascapes category. The works were “Eve’s Garden” and “Forgotten Day”.
The link is here.
Eve's Garden, by Matthew Derezinski

Eve’s Garden, by Matthew Derezinski, 2020.

This 15th edition of the Pollux Awards has been pre-screened by the curators of the Worldwide Photography Gala Award and juried by Julio Hirsch-Hardy, director of the Biennial of Fine Art & Documentary Photography. A total of 439 photographers from 41 countries submitted 3,505 photographs for consideration of the pre-selection team of the Worldwide Photography Gala Awards and the final selection of the juror.

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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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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 _______.”

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Priya Kambli to Speak in New Orleans

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.

 

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Professor Kambli Honored

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.

Continue reading →

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

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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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.