Month: August 2025

For Eden Squires and Corbin Rouette, skateboarding has inspired their artwork and photography. Now, the sport is helping the two University of Arizona School of Art students soar even higher in the classroom.

Both have landed prestigious national scholarships from the College Skateboarding Educational Foundation (CSEF).

Squires, a second-year MFA candidate in 3D & Extended Media, received the 2025 “Rollin’ From the Heart” Zane Timpson Art Scholarship for $5,000. Rouette, a Studio Art major in Photography, Video and Imaging, earned a 2025 general scholarship from CSEF after receiving a $4,000 Atiba Jefferson Photography & Film Scholarship in 2024. The two were among 32 college skateboarders honored nationally this year.

The awards are based on their portfolios and involvement in the skateboarding community in Arizona, where Squires grew up in Tucson and Rouette in Prescott.

“We skate together and work together on projects,” said Rouette, who encouraged Squires to apply for a CSEF scholarship. “Eden started building skate sculptures after I had built my first one. I’m super-stoked that he’s getting support and recognition because he’s an extremely talented artist.”

For Squires, graduate school “has been an incredible opportunity to expand and challenge both my creative process and approach,” he said. “With funding from opportunities like CSEF and grants from the University of Arizona, I have been able to work on a larger scale.”

Squires’ skateboard-themed work was featured in two recent exhibitions: “Border as Network,” at the Pidgin Palace Arts, through August; and “Surface Tension,” at the School of Art’s Lionel Rombach Gallery, through Oct. 2. His featured piece in “Surface Tension” was a sculpture designed to be skated, incorporating graffiti-inspired art, modern technology and cameras.

Rouette, meanwhile, has started a magazine — Fine Art — that will debut Oct. 25, highlighting the collective community he’s created through college and skateboarding. He discovered his love for art after an injury forced him to stop skateboarding for months.

What started with drawing developed into working with a camera, and now Rouette’s photographs have been featured in Thrasher Magazine and Arizona Highways — and he’s exhibited his work at the Tucson Museum of Art, Praxis Photo Arts Center in Chicago and Hidden Light Gallery in Flagstaff.

“Being involved in skateboarding made me a better skateboarder and photographer because it immersed me in the culture of the lifestyle,” Rouette said. “It’s something that I’m around constantly, documenting the world and culture that shaped me.

“In this culture, you can’t just show up and photograph it like other sports. There’s a relationship between knowing skateboarding and the tricks and photographing them.”

Rouette’s 2024 scholarship honors Atiba Jefferson, whose skateboarding prowess served as an introduction and training space to an acclaimed career in photography and videography.

“This is what sets skateboarding photographers apart from someone who wants to just take photos of skateboarding. … These tricks are all different, like art,” Rouette said. “We all skate differently, but being involved in the culture of skateboarding, you begin to understand that it’s something that runs deeper than just a kid’s toy.”

Squires said he’s gone through 40 skateboard decks in the last nine years. And when he’s not skating or studying, the grad student is mentoring other students at U of A’s makerspaces and plans to continue serving the community through creating functional public works that bring people together.

“Eden learns fast and gets excited about everything all at once,” said Joseph Farbrook, an associate professor in 3D & Extended Media. “Eden is discovering ways to make art that is driven by his lifelong passions, so it cannot help but be genuine and authentic. His approaches are new and fresh, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets recognized by magazines such as Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz or Hi-Fructose.”

After graduate school, Squires plans to move to a larger city to pursue a career in large-scale art installations and fabrication, potentially in Europe. He’s both a German and British citizen.

Meanwhile, Rouette hopes to work in skateboarding after graduation “to give back to the community that shaped and gave me everything,” he said. “Skateboarding got me here and has kept me alive.”

“Corbin is one of those rare people who pours passion into everything he does, whether it’s making art, skating or cooking for friends,” said Trent Pechon, a School of Art adjunct instructor. “He has a way of lifting up the people around him and helping them see the beauty in life, even when things are difficult. His generosity, kindness and steady presence make him someone others naturally gravitate toward.

“His art is deeply tied to who he is, and the care he brings to his relationships is the same care that comes through in his work,” Pechon said. “Corbin inspires not only through his talent, but through the way he lives.”

More work by Eden Squires

Digital Thoughts (2024)

Man’s Best Friend (2025)

Self Portrait (2025)

Prev Next

More work by Corbin Rouette

Skateboarding’s Shape (2024)

Prev Next

Website links

• Eden Squires: www.edensquires.com
• Corbin Rouette: www.corbinrouettestudies.com
• CSEF: www.collegeskateboarding.com

Entering its 19^th season, the University of Arizona School of Art’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment (VASE) lecture series will feature Yoshua Okón, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Lauren Bon and Cannupa Hanska Luger in 2025-26.

The free, hour-long VASE presentations will be held at 5:30 p.m. at the Center for Creative Photography auditorium, 1030 N. Olive Road.

“VASE creates a space of encounter where artists, architects and scholars meet our students in the fertile ground between disciplines,” Regents Professor Sama Alshaibi said.

Here’s the lineup (go to vase.art.arizona.edu for more bio details):

Oct. 16, 2025, Yoshua Okón: The Mexico City artist blends video, installation and performance to engage viewers in a dialogue concerning the complexity of contemporary society. He received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship and co-founded SOMA, an artist-run school in Mexico City dedicated to cultural exchange and the teaching of the arts.

Jan. 29, 2026, Ananda Cohen-Aponte: An associate professor of History of Art at Cornell University, she specializes in the visual culture of pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America. Her talk will explore the trafficking of portraits, talismanic objects, albums and numismatics that put the Andes, the Caribbean and North America into dynamic contact at the twilight of the 18th century. She is author of Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes (University of Texas Press, 2016).

Feb. 11, 2026, Lauren Bon: The Los Angeles environmental artist and activist is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Her studio’s ongoing civic enterprise, “Bending the River,” is an ambitious plan to redirect and reuse water flowing beneath the concrete channel known as the LA River.

April 2, 2026, Cannupa Hanska Luger: A contemporary artist indigenous to North America, he aims to reclaim and reframe a more accurate version of 21st century Native American culture and its global relevance. He uses clay, textiles, steel and digital media to distill cultural reflection into an object, installation or action. “Whether working with institutions, communities or with the land itself, my work is inherently social and requires engagement,” Luger says.

“During this season of VASE, voices like Yoshua, Ananda, Lauren and Cannupa will bring with them a world of imagination, experience and urgency,” Alshaibi said. “For our students, these moments aren’t just about listening. They’re about stepping into the creative currents shaping art and culture today.”

Bon’s talk is co-sponsored by the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA). Last year the School of Art also collaborated with CAPLA on Ronald Rael’s talk.

The series is made possible by the School of Art Advisory Board Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment, the National Endowment for the Arts, the School of Art, the College of Fine Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence, the Center for Creative Photography and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Tucson.