Austin Caswell, a recent University of Arizona School of Art MFA graduate, has landed a studio technician position in digital fabrication at the prestigious Anderson Ranch Arts Center near Aspen, Colorado.
Starting Feb. 16, Caswell will support, maintain and help run the digital fabrication studio, working with workshop participants, artists in residence, and visiting artists and instructors.
Anderson Ranch, established in 1966 in Snowmass Village, Colorado, brings together aspiring and internationally renowned artists to its campus nestled among the Rocky Mountains. Caswell knows the area well. He grew up and attended college in Colorado and still has family there, including his mom in Denver, where he was born.
“I’m thrilled for the opportunity to support such an amazing and storied art center and its participants,” Caswell said. “They just shared their workshop lineup for the summer, and it looks awesome. I’m really fortunate to be in a place where I can come into contact with such a vast array of ideas and processes. The location definitely isn’t bad, either.”
Anderson Ranch Arts Center, 15 minutes from Aspen, Colorado, hosts workshops for aspiring, emerging, established artists, children and teens in seven disciplines: photography & new Media, ceramics, painting & drawing, furniture design & woodworking, sculpture, printmaking and figital fabrication.
Caswell received both a BA in Integrated Visual Studies and a BA in History from Colorado State University before earning his Studio Art MFA in 3D and Extended Media at Arizona in May 2025. He then taught at the School of Art as an adjunct during the fall 2025 semester — drawing on his experience as a graduate teaching assistant.
“I loved my experience teaching at the School of Art,” Caswell said. “Working with students in 3DXM courses and being there to witness their discoveries and successes was really rewarding.”
He also enjoyed his time as a student, including being featured in the 2024 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art, where his installation “The Finder” was a speculative, future archaeological site that used lifespans of plastics to seek meaning and knowledge within lost contexts, including playground slides found around Tucson. The installation won the Biennial’s Pat Mutterer Sculpture and Architecture Award.
Caswell’s “The Finder” included playground slides found in Tucson, scrap rebar, Palo Verde branches, a shark tooth from Cape Hatteras (N.C.), Nike running shoes found under a bush near campus, a serenity prayer gold chain necklace found in Hollywood, fragments of a dinosaur bone from a dig site in Southern Utah — and an In-N-Out french fry from under his car’s driver seat.
“My MFA gave me the time, feedback and additional resources to develop a stronger foundation in navigating between material processes and conceptual inquiry,” Caswell said, “which I think translates well to supporting artists in a studio environment where they’re working through both technical and creative challenges.”
Calling him “a model student,” Professor Gary Setzer worked closely with Caswell and chaired his MFA thesis exhibition committee.
“Austin has a tireless work ethic and a sharp intellect with a distinctive command of metaphor,” said Setzer, associate director of the School of Art. “His layered and sophisticated approach to content in his artwork stems from his developed scholarly curiosity. And while studio art and history are separate fields, his practice appears to be a unique hybrid that employs strategies from both.”
Caswell’s thesis installation, “The Fault, the Raft, and the Current,” presented a landscape of human stewardship and consumption.
“The Fault, the Raft, and the Current,” by Caswell, featured pine wood sculptures, acrylic paint, medium-density fiberboard, steel, fossil, pearl and fragments of asteroid and flint. (Photo by Alexis Joy Hagestad)
“Austin’s installations address the quandary of human ‘progress,’ and they do so through a nuanced approach that grapples with consumerism — highlighting its necessary evils, its glory, and its long-term impact on our planet,” Setzer said. “Never shying away from the true complexity of what is at hand, Austin’s artworks are as frank as they are guised in a thick and wonderfully bewildering poetry.”
Added Setzer: “Lensed through a distanced and futuristic anthropological look at humanity and our shortsightedness, Austin creates installation-landscapes riddled with the detritus of a people long gone. A future that’s not necessarily apocalyptic — but definitely bleak. A future that’s not necessarily beautiful — but seemingly romantic, nonetheless.
“Austin is a young Caspar David Friedrich for the Anthropocene,” said Setzer, referring to the famous 19th century German Romantic landscape painter.
Caswell has exhibited across the United States in venues such as the parkeralemán-El Paso Community Foundation in Texas, the Museum of Art- Fort Collins in Colorado and 311 Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina. He also holds professional experience as a studio instructor, carpenter, landscape designer and fabricator.
Caswell, with University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella and current School of Art Interim Director Karen Zimmermann, during a 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition reception.
While at Arizona, Caswell was awarded a summer residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Maine and was a resident at the School of Art’s Lionel Rombach Gallery. He also received the school’s coveted Helen Gross Award, which provided generous funding for his thesis project, and a Medici Scholar travel grant to support his research.
In Caswell’s new role at Anderson Ranch, Setzer said the artist’s supportive teaching methods will help him excel.
“Austin meets people where they are, builds trust, and leads them to new things,” Setzer said. “Wherever there are complications, he sees possibility and problem-solving.”
• Artist’s website: austincaswell.com
• On Instagram: @austinmcaswell
