Michael Chesnick, Author at School of Art

Teaching artist Campos named Outstanding Senior for fall 2023

Posted on December 12, 2023December 18, 2023 by Michael Chesnick

Alexis Campos found her passion as a teaching artist and gallery assistant in the University of Arizona’s Art and Visual Culture Education program, where “everywhere I turned there was someone always willing to guide me and share their knowledge,” she said.

And now Campos, named the School of Art’s Outstanding Senior for fall 2023, is sharing that knowledge with children from the Sunnyside Unified School District, where she attended classes while growing up on Tucson’s South Side.

“It’s just so sweet to go into the community and work one-on-one with students and show them the ways art can be a part of their lives … and one of the sweetest experiences has been visiting my old elementary and middle schools to teach kids in my own community,” said Campos, who attended Esperanza and Liberty Elementaries, Apollo Middle School, and Sunnyside High School.

Campos works as a teaching artist at the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), where she was honored with the K-12 Impact Award and led a summer camp on puppetry arts as an intern. She also is a gallery assistant at Decode Gallery, engaging the public, facilitating openings, and installing works in the downtown venue.

“Alexis is one of our strongest AVCE students. Her work includes significant contributions to museums and community arts,” wrote Associate Professor Carissa DiCindio in her nominating letter. “Alexis is a leader through her engagement in class projects and assignments in AVCE — and in teaching children through the school’s Wildcat Art program.”

At MOCA, Campos creates lesson plans and teaches in English and Spanish in K-12 classrooms, working with over 450 students each semester in art workshops. Through Wildcat Art, Campos and other AVCE students spent four Saturdays in April teaching K-12 students about art, culminating in an exhibition of paintings, collages, embroidery, clay works and drawings.

Campos became interested in art education while taking her introductory courses at the School of Art. “This is when I came across the AVCE program and learned about all of the amazing things I could do in the world of museums,” she said, “and the ways that I could create change through the arts.”

Alexis Campos works with K-12 students as a teaching artist.

As an undergrad, Campos led a grief and artmaking workshop for Tucson Compassionate Friends and worked as a visitor services assistant and intern at the Arizona State Museum. She created and organized educational activities for students in grades K-5 at ASM, where she also completed an honor’s project in which she designed and led an interactive tour on textiles for her AVCE classmates.

DiCindio worked with Campos for more than a year on the student’s Honors College thesis, which focused on curating an exhibition by Latinx artists in the Tucson community. “Dr. DiCindio’s wisdom, compassion, kindness and expertise opened my mind to the possibilities of what being an art educator looks like,” Campos said.

A thesis show fell through, but Campos said she gained “so much insight” through her paper, which “was a way to capture the things most important to me.”

Besides DiCindio, Campos also praised other instructors in her AVCE journey, including Rachel Zollinger, Hillary Douglas, Raven Moffett, Professor David Taylor and Benjamin Davis. “Without these individuals, I don’t know if my work and academic pursuits would be at the level they are.”

Campos, a member of the Phi Theta Kappa and Tau Sigma honors societies, has received multiple awards for academic excellence, such as the Dean’s List with distinction, the Honors Thesis Award and Brown Honors scholarships.

She will receive her BFA in Art and Visual Culture Education, Community and Museums, and plans to continue working for both MOCA and the Decode Gallery.

“I intend to take a much-needed year off from college,” Campos said, “and apply to graduate school to receive my MFA in photography.”

Alexis Campos takes a photograph for one of her undergrad projects.

Senior Agrella receives prestigious Centennial Achievement Award

Posted on December 7, 2023December 7, 2023 by Michael Chesnick

Senior Grayson Agrella, a triple major in Art History, Anthropology and French whose research interests center around the gender non-conforming community, has been named a Centennial Achievement Undergraduate Award recipient — one of the highest honors a student can achieve at the University of Arizona.

Agrella, who will graduate summa cum laude with honors in spring 2024, is being recognized by the Dean of Students Office at a luncheon at Old Main on Dec. 5. He’s only one of two undergraduates to receive the award, given annually to students who have demonstrated significant contribution, accomplishment, moral character and integrity among the community.

“Grayson is one of those rare intellects … who has impressed the Art History faculty with the depth of his passion for the arts and his achievement in every class,” wrote School of Art History Professors Irene Bald Romano and Paul Ivey, who nominated Agrella for the award. “He has made a strong commitment to LGBTQ+ rights and issues — profoundly expressed in his research.”

In Romano’s “Topics in Museum Studies” class, for example, Agrella wrote about how museums have historically interpreted and displayed works by queer artists or LGBTQ+ topics, and how innovative exhibitions could change the cultural dynamic. And in Romano’s “Art as Plunder” class, Agrella explored how art dealing with homosexuality or the AIDS/HIV crisis was unfairly targeted in the 1980s while the LGBTQ+ community suffered unparalleled losses.

Agrella is committed to helping trans youths and has volunteered at camps for transgender children and their families. His Honors College thesis focuses on the types of activist engagement of trans youths — and how that impacts their perceived well-being and feelings of belonging in their communities, internalized negativity and negative health outcomes.

“I plan on going to graduate school after some work experience, and plan on pursuing something akin to queer anthropology,” Agrella said. “Lately I’ve been investigating visual anthropology programs, as they require a lot of skills such as visual analysis that I’ve learned as an Art History major.”

For the last two years, Agrella has worked at the Center for Creative Photography as an archival assistant, handling and rehousing archival materials, supervising researchers, and assisting with the digital archiving of images. In 2021, he worked for the U.S. Department of State as an agent in the Passports Division, which demanded “deep sensitivity to individual claims and individuals under stressful circumstances,” Romano and Ivey wrote in their nominating letter.

Agrella “regularly engages with mutual aid efforts, including those benefitting the unhoused community and other social justice causes in which he believes, the Dean of Students Office said.

“Grayson is the embodiment of the values associated with the Centennial Achievement Award,” Romano and Ivey wrote. “He has demonstrated outstanding persistence and integrity in his unwavering pursuit of excellence in his academic work. He has contributed significantly to the well-being of the community, especially trans youth, and he embodies the University’s strategic goal of valuing and supporting the diverse experiences of our students.”

Agrella, who carries a 3.971 GPA, was a National Merit Finalist and National AP Scholar at Tucson’s University High School, where he honed his literary gifts and became the Poetry and Prose editor for the Carnegiea Literary Magazine for the youth of Southern Arizona.

He talked more about his college experience in an interview with the School of Art:

Q. How rewarding, or challenging, has it been to juggle three majors?

A. I’ve found my experiences in all my majors to be eye-opening in different ways; I love studying art as a universal human experience, as well as how it becomes part of larger machinations, and anthropology has given me a more expansive understanding of many of those processes. Through the French program, I’ve been exposed to different cultures which has likewise made me analyze parts of my own culture that I took as givens — I love escaping the America bubble.

Q. How did you get interested in Art History, and what makes it special to you?

A. I initially chose Art History as a major after taking the AP in high school, and because I come from a family of artists but can’t see myself having a professional practice. Everyone has their own relationship to art — however high- or low-brow it may be — and I’m fascinated by how those relationships are influenced by a cacophony of outside factors. Art History, for me, is a material way of understanding snapshots of the human experience. The material focus still necessitates addressing abstract concepts at play, even if they involve global power dynamics or political motivations.

Q. What advice would you have for first-time undergraduate students at the university?

A. I would say branch out. Explore. I’ve found the School of Art to be what you make of it; there are so many ways to get involved — academically or otherwise — with whatever you’re passionate about, and if you feel something is missing you can make it happen yourself. And, you know, the usual things: Make connections with professors, figure out how to feed yourself, show up to class. And lean into whatever makes you a little funky and fun.

• Learn more about Centennial Achievement & Senior Awards

Centennial Prize winner Blanchette creates living sculpture

Posted on November 9, 2023November 25, 2024 by Michael Chesnick

Growing up in Maine, Claire Fall Blanchette often tagged along with a landscaper — her mom. “I spent a lot of time outside,” the School of Art graduate student said.

The experience had a big influence on Blanchette when she began to bring nature into her artwork, including plants, grass and now fungi.

That’s right, the MFA candidate’s November-December 2023 solo exhibition at the Lionel Rombach Gallery featured two interacting walls of bricks that she “grew” with mycelium, the invisible part of mushrooms whose roots consist of minuscule fungal threads called hyphae.

“To Pass Through Two Doors at Once” features mycelium-grown bricks built into two interacting walls.

She titled the exhibition “To Pass Through Two Doors at Once” — a “physical metaphor for human interaction with the natural world,” she said. Working on the living sculpture was part of Blanchette’s reward for winning the 2023 Marcia Grand Centennial Sculpture Prize.

“Mycelium is the basis of all life on our planet and embody an array of contradictions,” Blanchette said. “It can appear as both multiple organisms and as one, create life and promote decay, give nutrients, and extract them. Entangled in almost every ecosystem, mycelium holds soils together, forms symbiotic relationships with 90 percent of plants and accelerates decay while making space for new life to emerge.”

The aspect of decay is what intrigues Blanchette. After her solo exhibition and other presentations across campus — including a fall 2024 installation at the ENR2 Building courtyard — she will move the sculpture to the Land with No Name, an outdoor art sanctuary about 35 miles southwest of Tucson.

“I’m interested in how the sculpture will decompose and change over time … given our dry climate and the monsoons,” she said. “I’m not sealing (the bricks) at all, so things could continue to grow on them.”

That’s already happening. “I’ve kept a few bricks growing, and they’ve sprouted mushrooms that are now beginning to release spores,” she said. “I’m really excited by the potential that the spores and fruiting material has in terms of future projects and using the material in other ways.”

And with the race on to help reduce the world’s ecological footprint, Blanchette hopes introducing her mycelium structure to the community “can help us understand how long alternative building materials can survive,” she said.

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The process

Exactly how did Blanchette grow her light but surprisingly solid bricks, which are 16” x 8” x 8” inches in size?

First, she had to order hundreds of bags of organic material that included mycelium spores and hemp fibers, which she then mixed with water and flour.

“The yeast in the flour gets the mycelium working,” she said. “Once activated, the material became white and then I transferred it into these wooden molds that I made outside the studio. Each mold had two dowels to provide space for the sculpture’s metal armature.”

It took five to six days to grow and form each block in the mold, and then at least another week to dry, during which Blanchette covered each block with trash bags to keep the sides from being exposed to oxygen.

For Blanchette, the biggest challenge was simply learning to work with the mycelium material.

“Since it’s a living organism, it reacted in many unanticipated ways,” she said. “Each time I filled a mold and grew a batch of bricks, the results varied. I had no way to control what colors or patterns would appear on the blocks, or if they would start growing things after I started drying them. … The bricks themselves morphed and changed throughout the de-molding, growing and drying process, so while they look uniform each one is unique in color, pattern and form.”

In all, Blanchette created 35 blocks for each wall in her sculpture.

Growing up

Blanchette hails from Farmingdale, Maine, which is 45 minutes north of Portland. In addition to her landscaping trips with her mother, she drew inspiration from her high school art teacher.

She graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, receiving a BFA in Printmaking and History of Art in 2016. She was the 2017 recipient of the Reba Stewart – Genevieve McMillan Travel Fellowship to fund her residency at Konstepidemin Arts Center in Gothenburg, Sweden.

From there, she worked as an artist in Queens, New York, and was an assistant at the Julie Mehretu Studio, where she began to experiment with mycelium art.

As a University of Arizona School of Art grad student, Blanchette was part of two other exhibitions at the Rombach Gallery in 2023: “Donors and Scholars” and “Nice to Meet You.”

She worked with lydia see, the school’s galleries director, for those group exhibitions and her current Centennial Prize show.

“Claire’s approach is thoughtful and experimental with plenty of room for finding delight in the unpredictability of material,” see said. “I’m so happy to host this sculptural installation in Rombach Gallery for students, staff and faculty to engage with before it heads to its life cycle outside of a gallery space and into the world.”

Environment on her mind

While in Tucson, Blanchette also has worked on art projects with buffelgrass – an invasive grass introduced to the Sonoran Desert in the 1930s for erosion control. “You have to use a pickax to extract them,” she said. “The root system is really tough.” She coats the buffelgrass in resin and has some of her work on display in her graduate studio.

Tucson volunteers have rallied to remove buffelgrass, and Blanchette hopes her mycelium sculpture “can spark conversations about our impact and interaction with the natural world.”

“The push and pull between me and the mycelium mimic the fallible attempts of human authority over the environment,” Blanchette said in her artist statement for “To Pass Through Two Doors at Once.” “Through this work, I examine the frailty of structures imposed onto uncontrollable spaces and the errant attempt at systemized power over the landscape.”

For more than 30 years, the Centennial Sculpture Prize has been given to an MFA candidate, specifically to support the completion of sculptural/3D artwork. The recipient is determined by a committee of staff and faculty through a proposal process. Recent honorees included Emiland Kray, Mariel Miranda, Benjamin Dearstyne Hoste, Marina Shaltout and Karlito Miller Espinosa.

The prize is sponsored by Marcia Grand, a generous donor to the School of Art who also was instrumental in supporting the school’s First Year Experience program.

“I wanted to make something big to honor the award,” Blanchette said.

Prof. Romano edits, co-authors ‘The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era’

Posted on October 19, 2023October 31, 2023 by Michael Chesnick

For University of Arizona Art History Professor Irene Bald Romano, a five-year journey with 15 other international scholars culminated last month when the authors saw their research published as a special online monograph, “The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era.”

The publication — edited and co-authored by Romano — presents for the first time a comprehensive view of the fate of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities that changed hands during the Nazi period from 1933 to 1945 in Europe, the Middle East, the United States and elsewhere.

Romano wrote the preface, an extensive introduction and the lead article for the special 2023 issue of RIHA, the journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art.

The scholars’ project, previewed by The New York Times and other news outlets in 2022, was a collaboration with the Getty Research Institute and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, an independent art-historical research institute in Munich.

“I hope this publication will become a standard reference on the subject of the fate of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities during the Nazi era,” Romano said, “with its extensive bibliographic and archival resources, as well as its methodologies, useful to other researchers, including individuals who are hoping to recover collections that belonged to family members who perished in the Holocaust.

“It also would be gratifying if this publication inspires students of art history, history, Classics, archival studies and other disciplines to become interested in provenance research, a growing field that has become indispensable to museums today and will remain so in the future.”

The idea for a publication was born at a meeting in Munich in October 2018. That’s when Romano and a group of German and American museum professionals, archivists and scholars — part of the Provenance Research Exchange Program (PREP) — realized the subject of the fate of Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities during the Nazi period had not been sufficiently addressed in the large body of scholarly literature on fine arts.

“Although in the past decades research into Nazi-era looted art has been widespread and provenance research in this field has blossomed, the fate of antiquities has rarely been in the spotlight and is far less systematically studied,” Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, wrote in the publication’s foreword.

“This volume makes a large contribution to filling this void. … It is valuable not just for readers with an interest in antiquities but also for scholars studying the art market and its mechanisms; for researchers exploring the networks and systems by which artworks were dispersed during the Nazi era and studying the history of restitution; and for art historians interested in the history of collecting and taste,” he wrote.

Parzinger went on to thank all the authors, especially Romano, “who not only put the topic up for discussion in 2018 but also persevered in the lengthy task of making this publication happen.”

“Last but not least, at a time when war is once more having a chilling effect on scholarly and scientific cooperation, this publication proves again the value of bringing experts together across disciplines and borders in the interest of scholarship and insight,” he said.

Romano talked more about the RIHA Journal special issue in an interview with the University of Arizona School of Art:

Q: How rewarding – and challenging – was the project?

Romano: I’m very pleased to see this research and publication project finally come to fruition, with the results accessible to scholars and the general public in this open-source, online format. … It was a challenging five-year-long journey for me with 15 other authors from various countries, each with their own work schedules and life issues, not to mention a pandemic that intervened, making visits to indispensable archives, libraries and museum collections difficult for many.

A challenge for anyone working on the Nazi period is that there are mountains of archival materials in many repositories in the U.S. and Europe, some of it duplicative, and only some it available online. In addition, in Nazi-period inventories and in various recent databases that have been created of works of art transferred during the Nazi period, archaeological objects are often not included or are cited in such a general way that they are not identifiable. I outline some of these challenges in the Introduction to the volume.

There was, however, a great deal of enthusiasm for getting this work published, and we had the unwavering support and expert advice of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich to bring it all about. A rewarding aspect of this was the collegiality of the authors, as well as the interest and assistance of a wider group of scholars who offered their expertise on specific issues. We have built a large research team and piqued the interest of some younger scholars who will move this research forward in the future.

Q. Could you sum up the conclusions gleaned from the broader study?

Romano: The first conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that broad conclusions are difficult. There are many individual histories of people, especially of collectors, dealers and Nazi officials, who played some role in the trade in antiquities in this period, as victims or active participants, and these are the most compelling aspects of these studies. We focus first, however, on the “lives” of objects. It is also hard to define broad conclusions because the Nazi period in various parts of Europe was not uniform vis-à-vis the collecting, interest in, confiscations and transfers of ancient objects.

The situation in Greece, for example, was quite different than that in Nazi-occupied France. In Greece there was no official Nazi policy of confiscating antiquities from museums, but we have documented cases of random looting, orchestrated thefts, and illicit excavations. The Jewish population in Greece was mostly in communities in northern Greece and they were not particularly collectors of ancient objects, as we can see from the forced inventories and confiscation of their household goods. In France, however, especially in Paris, there were major collections of wealthy Jews that were targeted for confiscation, and these included at least some antiquities.

Covers of the catalogs for the “Great German Art Exhibition”, Munich 1937 and Munich 1938.
University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson, Special Collections (photograph by Irene Romano)

For example, Alphonse Kann’s collection of 1,614 works of art, confiscated in October 1940 from his mansion in Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris, comprised at least 150 ancient objects, including Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Middle Eastern, Etruscan and Byzantine objects (in order of numbers), for around 9 percent of Kann’s eclectic collection. In general, however, Egyptian artifacts rank a close second to Greek and Roman antiquities in the collecting practices and transfers during the Nazi period in Europe.

In this publication we have tried to be as comprehensive as possible, but our impression is that we have scratched into the surface of the broad subject and there is still much more to be done — details to be uncovered about individual objects, collections, dealers and collectors, as well as perpetrators of crimes, and more data to be mined from the increasing numbers of digitized databases, auction catalogs and dealer files. In addition, scholarly examination of archival documents in many repositories and provenance research in many museum collections remain to be conducted. These will certainly add to our picture of antiquities collecting and trade in the first half of the 20th century in Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., as well as the methods and nature of antiquities’ transfers during the Nazi period.

Q. How have you incorporated the project into your teaching here at School of Art?

Romano: My interest in art and antiquities during the Nazi period began as a result of my teaching here at the University of Arizona. In 2013 I created an upper division undergraduate and graduate Art History class called “Art as Plunder: The Spoils of War, the Formation of Collections, and Trade in Stolen Art” in which the Nazi period figures prominently.

Students are uniformly interested in this topic, some of whom are encountering it for the first time. Several Jewish students have come forward to share their own poignant family stories. This class and a seminar I have occasionally offered on provenance research have inspired some outstanding research papers and M.A. theses. One of these contributed critical information about a painting in the University of Arizona Museum of Art that changed hands during the Nazi period.

Q. What are you working on now?

Romano: Among the research projects I’m involved with is one stimulated by this publication on “The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era.” It’s focused on the provenance of 11 Greek and Roman marble sculptures in the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva that were collected by Ludwig Pollak (1868-1943) — one of the most important connoisseurs of ancient classical art from the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Pollak was from a Jewish family in Prague and trained in Vienna, but he spent most of his career in Rome. He was an archaeologist and dealer, as well curator and director of the Museo Barracco di Scultura Antica, and highly respected and well-connected in the art world in Rome and internationally.

As a Jew in Rome feeling the increasing pressure of anti-Semitic policies in the 1930s and 1940s, Ludwig Pollak began to disperse some of his personal collection, including by depositing for safekeeping eleven of his ancient sculptures in the Musée d’art et d’histoire in 1940. Pollak remained in Rome, and he, his wife and two children were rounded up with other Roman Jews on 16 October 1943, and shortly thereafter they were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The museum was later given or purchased these objects from Pollak’s heir. Although some of these sculptures in Geneva have been previously published, no one has examined them with reference to the collector and their provenance — their ancient context; how, when and where Pollak acquired them; and their modern transfers.

More about Prof. Romano

University of Arizona School of Art bio
New York Times story, “New Research Tracks Ancient Artifacts Looted by the Nazis”
University of Arizona Communications story, “Telling the stories behind ancient objects: Inside the career of a university archaeologist”

“The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era”: Table of Contents

Forematter

Foreword: Gail Feigenbaum and Sandra van Ginhoven (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)
Foreword: Christian Fuhrmeister (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich)
Foreword: Hermann Parzinger (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
Preface: Irene Bald Romano (University of Arizona, Tucson; Guest Editor)

Introduction

“Antiquities in the Nazi Era: Contexts and Broader View,” Irene Bald Romano (University of Arizona, Tucson)

Articles

“Collecting Classical Antiquities among the Nazi Elite,” Irene Bald Romano (University of Arizona, Tucson)
“The Role of Antiquities between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Diplomatic Gifting, Legal and Illegal Trades,” Daria Brasca (Università degli Studi di Udine, Udine)
“Göring’s Collection of Antiquities at Carinhall,” Laura Puritani (Zentralarchiv, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
“Stolen and Returned: The Marble Statue of Philippe from Samos,” Alexandra Kankeleit (Freie Universität, Berlin)
“Export Regulations and the Role of Ancient Objects in the German List of Nationally Important Artworks,” Maria Obenaus (Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste, Magdeburg)
“The Annihilation of the German Numismatic Market during the Nazi Era, with Some Observations on the Countermeasures Adopted by Jewish Ancient Coin Dealers,” Emanuele Sbardella (Technische Universität, Berlin)
“The Patronage of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum by German-Jewish Press Tycoon Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920) and the Sequestration of His Art Collection during the Third Reich,” Thomas L. Gertzen (Freie Universität, Berlin) and Jana Helmbold-Doyé (Ägyptisches Museum – Georg Steindorff – Universität Leipzig)
“The Antiquities Trade during the German Occupation of France, 1940–1944,” Mattes Lammert (Technische Universität, Berlin)
“ ‘Unclaimed’ Artworks Entrusted to French Museums after World War II: The Case of Near Eastern Art and Antiquities,” Anne Dunn-Vaturi (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), François Bridey (Musée du Louvre, Paris; French Consulate, New York), and Gwenaëlle Fellinger (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
“The Fate of the Antiquities Collection of Izabela Działyńska (neé Czartoryska),” Inga Głuszek (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń) and Michał Krueger (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)

Object Case Studies

“A Case Study in Plunder and Restitution: Three Ancient Sculptures from the Lanckoroński Collection,” Victoria S. Reed (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
“A Goddess of the Night, a Roman Gem, and the Bachstitz Gallery,” Claire L. Lyons (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

Jeehey Kim’s ‘pioneering’ book on Korean photography is published

Posted on October 6, 2023February 9, 2024 by Michael Chesnick

Nearly five years in the making, Jeehey Kim‘s new book is the first history of Korean photography in English.

Kim, an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Arizona School of Art, said she did most of the writing for “Photography and Korea” during the pandemic to go along with the book’s striking images.

“As this is the first book on the history of Korean photography from the 19^th century until now in the Western language, I hope it contributes to diversifying the field,” Kim said. “In addition, translation of the book into Korean, Japanese and Chinese is also underway to reach the broader public in Asia.”

The University of Chicago Press recently began distributing “Photography and Korea” for Reaktion Books, which published the 272-page book in the United Kingdom this summer. It features 41 color plates and 93 halftones.

Korean travelers brought photographic technology home from China in the late 19th century.

In her book, Kim presents multiple visions of Korea, including the divided peninsula, and the country as imagined through foreign eyes, key Korean artists and local photographers. Kim also explores studio and institutional practices during the Japanese colonial period, and the divergence of practices after the division of Korea.

“Kim draws on a selection of striking images to bring alive Korean politics, foreign relations and norms, making this both a comprehensive history of Korean photography and a worthy examination of Korean identity,” Publisher’s Weekly said.

Mina Kim, an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Alabama, called Jeehey Kim’s book “a unique contribution to our understanding of photography in Korea.”

“(She) shows how photography began in the region, who adopted and promoted it, and how the role of photography has evolved and diversified over periods since the 19th century,” Mina Kim continued, “as Korea developed through its colonial legacy, occupation and war, and rapid social, political and economic developments.”

Boyoung Chang, a Mellon assistant professor in History of Art and Architecture at Vanderbilt University, called Kim’s work “a pioneering study and a key resource for scholars of photography history, visual culture, Korean studies, and East Asian studies.”

“Not only does this book provide a framework for photo historians focusing on the region, but it also contributes to the decolonization and diversification of the history of photography,” Chang said.

Named an Early Career Scholar by the University of Arizona last spring, Kim is helping the Center for Creative Photography organize an exhibition on Korean contemporary photography in collaboration with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. It will open on Nov. 17, followed by a one-day symposium on Nov. 18 and a talk with four Korean photographers on Nov. 19.

In 2022, Kim created a three-part symposia centered on the history and practice of photography in Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

Kim received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Art History from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and a B.A. in English Literature from Duksung Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea.

Since coming to the University of Arizona in 2019, Kim has established nine art history classes, one of which was created in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. She also taught at universities in New York, New Jersey, and Korea and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago.

• Reaktion books web page
• University of Chicago Press web page

Mellon recipient Cordova hopes art project adds to border discourse

Posted on October 5, 2023December 18, 2023 by Michael Chesnick

As part of his fellowship to study and interpret the U.S.-Mexico border, Nathan Cordova not only is interviewing his labor-activist uncle, but the School of Art graduate student also is conceptually interrogating the border wall itself.

The result will be “Ghosts and Shadows,” a 20-minute audio/visual project that Cordova will screen locally in Tucson. Cordova, an MFA candidate in the school’s nationally ranked Photography, Video and Imaging program, is one of eight University of Arizona students to receive the 2023 Mellon-Fronteridades Graduate Fellowship.

Cordova plans to travel to Tijuana, Mexico, and has already visited the border wall in Nogales and the pre-1848 U.S.-Mexico border in Colorado. He also plans to do a second Q&A in Los Angeles with his uncle Raymond Cordova, a labor and civil rights organizer with the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez in the 1960s and ’70s.

“While the original impetus of my interview was to learn more about my uncle’s time with the UFW, he instead expanded my frame of reference for my own project to a world without borders, where all labor is dignified,” Nathan Cordova said.

In the end, the grad student hopes his project “can add to the discourse of possibilities that we collectively imagine about this material/immaterial entity we call the U.S.-Mexico border wall.”

“The part that excites me the most … is the way I’ve proposed to engage with the agency of the material that comprises a lot of the border wall,” Cordova said. “I find iron, of which steel is made, to be an incredibly poetic material — a material that is always working to return itself to the earth, despite the nation-state’s best attempts to prevent it. In this way, the iron that comprises the border wall is actively working toward its own destruction of form and its own transformation.”

Regents Professor Sama Alshaibi, Cordova’s thesis adviser, also is excited about his project.

“By mining his family history from a critical perspective on how the border permeated the lives of his kinfolk and other communities with similar consequences, and by researching the conditions of the (wall’s) structure and site through a direct and embodied presence, Nathan is forming a vehicle for an encounter at various scales of knowledge,” Alshaibi said.

“Nathan’s project shares that borders are not just facts on the ground but also penetrable material in their making and, therefore, physically functioning toward their undoing,” she said. “In other words, when borders are made, the artist, as an activist, archivist and storyteller, can similarly act as the agent remaking a radical knowledge surrounding its presence and meaning over time. The political embodiment of borders requires re-imagining the physical conditions implicated in their trespassing over land and lives.”

Sharing with the community

Cordova hopes to screen his audio/video artwork to the public by this December, followed by a community engagement discussion with group reflections and possibly guest scholars from the university community. He’ll also make the work available for classes and symposiums.

Nathan Cordova works on earlier photo project.

“Nathan’s project creates social and institutional conditions for productive dialogue about what borders are, what they mean, and what can be imagined otherwise,” Alshaibi said.

Cordova, 38, received his undergraduate degree in Journalism from the University of Oregon. He spent more than a decade running a freelance commercial photography business, including weddings, which took him throughout the U.S. Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

A multidisciplinary artist who works primarily with photography, video, sound, sculpture and performance, Cordova joined the MFA program at the University of Arizona in fall 2021. He’s independently published four artists’ books, including “One Man’s Body Family Album” (2020), and his commissioned work has appeared in WIRED.

“I learned a lot about myself in those early years,” Cordova said about his wedding and commercial photography. “I built a ton of self-confidence through the practice of showing up in a new place and immersing myself in a group of people I’d never met before.”

He and fellow graduate classmate Jacqueline Arias are active in the Southwest Photo Collaborative, which includes MFA students from the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and the University of New Mexico. Their recent artwork is part of the “Land, Body & Archive” traveling exhibition, which ran until Sept. 22 in Albuquerque and is slated to be at the School of Art’s Lionel Rombach Gallery from Oct. 26 to Nov. 3 and in Tempe in early 2024.

Cordova said his artwork maps the poetic, philosophical and historical exploration of family testimony by making meaning out of sites of struggle and locations of identity.

That’s where his uncle comes in. A civil rights champion, Ray Cordova spent 18 months in the ‘60’s with the “Freedom Summer Movement.” He served in the U. S. Army Airborne and was a sergeant in Vietnam.

“My uncle and I talked for six hours straight. He’s done so much in his life that I felt like we only got to skim the surface,” Nathan Cordova said. “Perhaps, the most surprising part was learning more about the truly international scope of the labor organizing he’s been involved in … Palestine in the two years leading up to the first Intifada, Rio under the (Brazil) dictatorship, and the Mexican port city of Lázaro Cárdenas during attempts to halt the passage of NAFTA.”

‘Honored’ and ‘validated’

The Mellon-Fronteridades Graduate Fellowship is run through the university’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry and the Mellon Foundation. The program supports current UArizona graduate students to carry out interdisciplinary humanities-centered research projects, and creative scholarly activities focused on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I feel incredibly honored to have received this fellowship,” Cordova said. “I also feel incredibly validated. I proposed a project and methodology that I would personally describe as ‘out there.’ When thinking about art as research, the outcome is not yet known.”

“I think mentoring/teaching will always be a part of my life,” Nathan Cordova says.

In addition to visiting the border in Nogales, Cordova plans to collaborate with 2023 MFA graduate Mariel Miranda in Tijuana, Mexico, in November for a portion of his “Ghost and Shadows” project. A section of the border wall, made of steel slats, ends in the Pacific Ocean in Tijuana.

Miranda helped give Cordova feedback for his fellowship project draft.

“Mariel and I became close friends during our time together here. Her work addresses issues of labor, among other themes, as does my project,” Cordova said. “We feed off each other’s ideas, passion and support.”

Cordova, who teaches as a graduate assistant at the School of Art, grew up in Portland, Oregon, and started “making photographs with intention” after attending the Young Musicians & Artists (YMA) program the summer before his junior year, he said.

“I couldn’t articulate this at the time, but the way I see it now, and encourage my students to see it, is to use the camera and the photographic idea to be the authors of their own meaning,” he said. “Every picture we make, even if it’s just a quick snapshot on our cell phone will always tell us something about ourselves.”

Added Cordova: “I always make sure to say that I don’t care what they (the students) make work about, so long as they care about the topic or issue, that’s what matters. Sometimes this initial exploration via an art project will lead a student to pursue an interest in this topic in other classes or other departments outside of the School of Art.”

Why the University of Arizona?

Cordova said he chose the School of Art because of the Photo, Video and Imaging faculty and reputation, and conversations with then-current MFA students.

“Marocs Serafim, David Taylor, Martina Shenal and Sama are all amazing,” he said. “They are incredibly dedicated to their students. And not just that, they are driven and dedicated to their own art practices.”

One pleasant surprise, Cordova said, was connecting with Art History Assistant Professor Jeehey Kim, whose groundbreaking “Photography and Korea” book was just published. “I’ve loved her classes, and the material she teaches is robust and complex, yet totally relatable. She’s on my thesis committee as well,” he said.

Cordova is keeping his career options open after graduation in May 2024, but he said “mentoring or teaching will always be a part of my life.”

“Knowing what I know now because of my MFA experience thus far, I feel even more capable of sustaining a robust art practice while also maintaining a freelance career,” he said. “What I’m certain of is that I don’t want an office job. …

“I want to have and sustain a nourishing and impactful art practice that positions myself as an active agent in shaping the world, as much as that practice allows the world, in all its infinite complexities, to shape me in return.”

• Nathan Cordova’s website and Instagram
• Raymond Cordova bio, and online interview and radio interview about 1973 killing of Yemeni immigrant Nagi Daifallah

School welcomes 4 new faculty members

Posted on August 24, 2023December 19, 2023 by Michael Chesnick

From accomplished artists to cutting-edge educators, the University of Arizona School of Art welcomes two full-time faculty members and two visiting professors as the 2023-24 school year begins.

Yana Payusova has rejoined the school as an assistant professor of practice in First Year Experience, while Jenn Liv has been hired as an assistant professor in Illustration, Design & Animation.

Meanwhile, Kate Collins (visiting associate professor) and Shivani Bhalla (visiting assistant professor) have joined the school’s Art and Visual Culture Education program.

Here’s a closer look at the four new faculty members:

Yana Payusova: Received her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and worked full time in the Student Services area of the School of Art here before becoming an assistant professor of painting, area coordinator of painting and assistant chair of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Arlington three years ago. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Epperson Gallery in Crockett, California, and Conduit Gallery in Dallas. She is also in the permanent collection at the Crocker Art Museum and was recently commissioned to create work for the new Meow Wolf location in Grapevine, Texas. Website

Jenn Liv: Is an award-winning Chinese Canadian American illustrator who had been based in Toronto. Among her prestigious clients include The New York Times, Washington Post, Google, Microsoft, All Nippon Airways, AirBNB and NPR. Liv received her Bachelor of Design and Master of Design from OCAD University in Toronto and has taught at both OCAD and Sheridan College. Her personal research interests focus on investigating the intersections between gender studies, feminism, decolonization, and Asian diasporic identity. Jenn also has a keen interest in emerging technology, particularly in mixed reality, searching for new and innovative ways to expand upon her artistic practice through interdisciplinary methodologies. Website

Kate Collins: Received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University and spent eight years as assistant and then tenured associate professor at Towson University before joining the Baltimore Museum of Art as director of Learning Communities in July 2022. As a community arts scholar/practitioner/leader, she has been published in the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance and Public: A Journal of Imagining America. Her most recent project, YAAS (Youth Artists and Allies taking Action in Society) provides arts programing to resettled refugee youth in partnership with the BCCC Refugee Youth Project and Patterson High School in Baltimore. Bio

Shivani Bhalla is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Dissertation title: “Visual Autoethnography: Exploring my Disability Experience Through Art Works, Written Narratives, and Conversations”). Prior to that, she received her MFA in Painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara in India. During her Ph.D. program, she has been teaching at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as well as SUNY New Paltz. Her research exploring art and disability in art education spaces has been published in Art Education and presented at a long list of conferences and professional gatherings, including the Art Education Research Institute (AERI) and National Alternative Education Association (NAEA).

The four professors recently reflected on joining the School of Art:

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO IN YOUR FIRST SEMESTER?

Payusova: I am looking forward to welcoming all the incoming BA and BFA art students in my First Year Experience classes. I love the energy of the new academic year and the usual excitement of seeing both familiar and new faces. I am also quite looking forward to studio time. In June I finished a big project (“The Real Unreal” exhibition in Grapevine, Texas) that monopolized all my time last year and then took a short break to develop new ideas. I am now fully rested and eager to get back to work. I am looking forward to experimenting and working on a few projects that have been sitting on the backburner.

“Kunstkamera,” by Yana Payusova, part of “The Real Unreal” exhibition

Liv: I’m looking forward to making new meaningful connections and sharing my knowledge about the illustration field with the students. My goals are to help demystify the inner workings of the industry and to help the students to develop their own visual stylistic identity.

Collins: I get to teach TWO community arts courses — one for grads and one for undergrads and both in my very first semester. What a dream! I’m just thrilled that the AVCE program has an emphasis on community and museums. Looking nationally at art education programs, it’s a unique focus and one of the things that made this opportunity so appealing. I’ve been cultivating a passion for community arts since I finished my MFA at Arizona State in 2002, so coming back to Arizona to teach and engage in community arts research is deeply gratifying. One of my initial goals is to become familiar and build relationships with the various community art organizations in Tucson so we can hopefully find some fruitful opportunities to collaborate.

Bhalla: To connect with students, learning from and growing with them. I see teaching as a form of collaboration, and classrooms as community spaces to support, nurture and help each other grow.

CAN YOU RELATE ONE OF YOUR MOST REWARDING EXPERIENCES?

Liv: What I find the most rewarding about being an educator is seeing all the wonderful work that comes out of my classes. It brings me great joy to see students demonstrate growth and development under my mentorship and guidance. A recent experience as an artist that has been rewarding for me was finally being accepted into the American Illustration 42 Book this year. This is an achievement I’ve been working toward for nearly a decade now, therefore having this recognition means a lot to me.

Payusova: There are so many rewarding experiences in both teaching and doing my creative research that it’s difficult to think of one. The most rewarding experience for me always in teaching is seeing the students’ “light” go on, so to speak. I love helping the students discover their voice, the direction, their passion. It never gets old. In my creative research, I just finished a large sculptural installation for Meow Wolf (which was the big projects I was referring to earlier). The experience has been the most rewarding and challenging (in all the right ways).

Kate Collins has directed the YAAAS! (Youth Artists and Allies taking Action in Society) at Towson University.

Collins: Building and leading an interdisciplinary arts graduate program over the course of eight years at Towson University in Maryland was incredibly rewarding. During that time though, I was able to design and lead a program called YAAAS (Youth Artists and Allies taking Action in Society) and out of that has evolved a highly impactful pedagogical framework that simultaneously supports learning and wellbeing. Creating YAAAS and the research and publications that have followed have made it a truly a transformative experience that I hope to reinvent here in Tucson. The project embraced collaborative artmaking as a vehicle to build a dynamic partnership between working educators and newly resettled refugee youth in high school. It was beautiful in that it evolved into something that was mutually beneficial and valued by all. Partnering teachers expanded their global competency and gained confidence with employing arts-based strategies to support the growing population of English learners in their classrooms in a manner that is culturally sustaining, and trauma informed. Meanwhile our young partners gained a sense of agency and belonging, built critical relationships, expanded their facility with English, and through artmaking, enjoyed a critical outlet for self-expression that isn’t always possible when you don’t speak the language. It’s incredibly rewarding work that I can’t wait to dive into here in Tucson.

Bhalla: While I taught a disability studies course to preservice art education teachers, it was most rewarding when I realized students were already applying the theory that we were studying to the real-life classroom’s settings. They had become self-critical and reflective of how they were perceiving disability and responding to students with disabilities.

WHAT ADVICE CAN YOU GIVE TO STUDENTS?

Payusova: Get off social media! No, really. It’s a great tool for networking and showing your work but it can also feel very intimidating to see so much good work. It can feel as if everything has already been done by someone else. It’s important to take breaks from hearing other people’s voices out there so that you can hear your own. Be patient and kind with yourself. It takes time to develop both techniques and ideas. And finally enjoy this time at the university. It’s a fantastic experience to be a part of this great institution; to learn and grow with faculty and students from all over the country and the world.

Jenn Liv, “All Nippon Airways,” Advertising illustration series

Liv: My advice for students learning illustration is to identify what are the values that are most important to you as a person. This will be fundamental in helping you to develop your own visual identity as an artist. Illustration is a challenging career that rewards persistence over artistic talent alone. It is more important to strive for continuous growth and self-improvement rather than perfection.

Collins: Get to know Tucson. Go hiking and get out in nature. Got to the local farmer’s markets. See the local art shows and support the local artists. Find every cool mural in the city. Tucson as a city has SO much to offer. Go be a part of it! Bring a friend, bring a group, or go solo. Having been a college student for ELEVEN years of my life, I realize how insular we can be on campuses, often barely ever leaving the immediate vicinity. I know now I missed out by not spending more time getting to know the spaces and places and people around me. If I had the chance to do it all over again, I’d work much harder to get out there, especially here in the Southwest when there’s so much beauty and richness all around us.

Bhalla: Be yourself, and value your experiences. Grad school can be tough, but the fact the fact that you made it here is a proof that you are wonderful and your experiences matter. So never doubt that!

As honors flow, Macias hopes to expand border discourse

Posted on June 23, 2023December 18, 2023 by Michael Chesnick

For years, Alejandro Macias shied away from using his experience growing up on the Texas-Mexico border as the subject of his figure paintings. “I felt everyone around me knew this experience,” he said, “so why speak on it?”

But during his first residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2016, Macias witnessed other young contemporary artists drawing inspiration from their life journeys. “This gave me the confidence and validation to speak on the bicultural experience, assimilation, acculturation, and use sociopolitical subject matter to exercise my voice,” he said.

Now, the University of Arizona School of Art assistant professor is being honored for embracing that voice.

Not only did Macias land a prestigious three-month CALA Alliance residency this summer for Latinx artists, but he also received the Lehmann Emerging Artist Award from the Phoenix Art Museum and saw his “Man on Fire” painting acquired by the University of Arizona Museum of Art for its permanent collection.

Alex Macias, School of Art Assistant Professor

Macias will focus his residency work on the U.S.-Mexico border, including systems of repression, oppression, erasure, disappearances and stories of migration.

“It’s content that I’ve been wanting to investigate using multimedia approaches, such as painting, drawing, printmaking and video,” said Macias, who plans to interview people across the borderlands, collaborate with local organizations and research statistical data.

“I’d like to explore this content with sincerity, and I’m hoping that my work can do these experiences justice and expand the U.S.-Mexico border discourse,” added Macias, who said the project will exhibit in yet-to-be-determined spaces in Phoenix and New York.

Macias is sharing the Lehmann Emerging Artist Award with Yaritza Flores Bustos, who migrated from Mexico to Phoenix at a young age. The two will be part of a joint exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum, starting July 19, along with Fronterizx Collective, the Scult Artist Award recipient.

“These artists each explore identity in distinct ways but through a shared lens of life on the borderlands, defined by varying migration patterns and transnational identity,” said Christian Ramírez, the museum’s assistant curator of contemporary and community art initiatives.

For Macias, “I couldn’t be more excited to exhibit within such an incredible museum and alongside such esteemed and accomplished artists,” he said.

Macias is also excited about the residency program at the CALA Alliance (Celebración Artística de las Américas), which provides artists with housing, studio space, a generous stipend and future exhibition opportunities. The group’s executive director and curator is Alana Hernandez.

“I truly respect Alana’s mission on making this opportunity a reality for so many emerging and established Latinx artists,” Macias said. “Her goal to uplift Arizona Latinx artists is beyond admirable because southern Arizona is a unique experience within the United States socio-political climate. … I feel it’s a place where many artists are tucked away and go unnoticed, due to the magnitude of the East Coast and West Coast art scenes. Alana is uncovering and contributing to the contemporary Latinx art canon in a regional, national and international way. I’m happy to even be a small fragment of CALA Alliance’s history.”

“Nepal en la Frente” (“Father as a Child)” / 2022 Alex Macias painting

Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, Macias received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2-D Studio Art from the University of Texas-Pan American in 2012.

“Brownsville is full of rich history and is a safe haven for many Mexican migrants and families struggling to survive,” Macias said. “It was an atmosphere and experience that I felt truly enveloped by, especially as a child, because I traversed between Brownsville and Matamoros in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Brownsville has an approximately 94% Hispanic population, and I’m second-generation Mexican American myself.”

One of Macias’ mentors was Carlos G. Gomez, his painting professor at UT Brownsville and a friend who migrated to the U.S. from Mexico City as a young child. Gomez died from brain cancer in early 2016, and Macias said, “the culmination of his teachings and guidance still affect my artistic practice today.”

Macias was a lecturer at UT Brownsville, which later became the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, before accepting a position at University of Arizona School of Art in 2019 as a painting and drawing assistant professor.

“We spent two years actively looking for a faculty member who could make positive contributions to our Painting program while also speaking to the unique experiences of the region in which we reside,” School of Art Director Colin Blakely said. “When we came in contact with Alex, we knew we had found exactly what we were looking for. He brings an important perspective and voice to our programs, and it’s exciting to watch the well-deserved success his work has garnered.”

In addition to Vermont, Macias also participated in residencies at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France, The Studios at MASS MoCA and the Wassaic Project in New York. He’s been a part of recent group exhibitions at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, Amarillo (Texas) Museum of Art, Carlsbad (N.M.) Museum of Art, Las Cruces (N.M.) Museum of Art and Arizona State University Art Museum.

Macias held solo exhibitions at Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, Texas; Presa House Gallery in San Antonio and Tucson Museum of Art, and was featured in the West Issue #156 of New American Paintings, juried by Lauren R. O’Connell, curator of contemporary art at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Man on Fire” / 2022 Alex Macias painting

Just recently, the University of Arizona Museum of Art acquired Macias’ 2022 “Man on Fire” painting — a work inspired by his first visit to the UAMA gallery in 2019 and seeing renowned artist Luis Jimenez’s sculpture with the same title.

Jimenez, who died in a studio accident in 2006, was a central figure in the Chicano art movement, known for his small drawings and prints to monumental sculptural works. Jimenez’s “Man on Fire” work, Macias said, speaks on the Spanish colonization of the Aztec empire and the torture of its ruler, Cuauhtémoc, the Buddhist monk who set himself ablaze to protest the Vietnam War, Thich Quang Duc, as well as Chicano identities along the Southwest.

“I felt inspired to … pay homage to such an iconic Chicano figure,” Macias said. “In this case, I am critiquing my own American assimilation through an image of myself burning. The serape Mexican textile, which reinforces my ethnic and cultural background, burns away in the shape of a flame over my head. … As a side note, I am also honoring Presa House Gallery within my T-shirt, a San Antonio art space that centralizes the voices of Latinx artists within central and south Texas.”

School of Art alumna Olivia Miller (BFA ’05), new director of UAMA, said she was “struck by Alex’s approach. … He was inspired by (Jimenez’s) sculpture, but he created a painting unique to his aesthetic and his personal experience.”

“While it’s exciting to see how Alex’s painting connects to existing works in the collection in provocative ways, it’s also important for the museum to support the perspectives of contemporary Latinx artists in our region,” Miller said.

Those words mean a lot, Macias said.

“I’m happy to hear that UAMA is investing in Latinx voices and continuing the legacy of Luis Jimenez through his influence,” he said. “I’m humbled and honored to be included in a such an important collection.”

Macias’ website: alexmaciasart.com
Instagram account: @alex.macias.art
2021 Borderzine interview with Macias

Wellesley Fellow Smith latest alum to earn national recognition

Posted on June 16, 2023December 18, 2023 by Michael Chesnick

When Kaitlyn Jo Smith received a prestigious early-career artist fellowship from Wellesley College, she thanked her professors at the University of Arizona School of Art for “believing in me and my work.”

“Graduate school taught me to think bigger, dream bigger and trust in my instincts,” said Smith, a 2020 Master of Fine Arts graduate in Photography, Video and Imaging whose interdisciplinary art focuses on America’s working class and the implications of automation on labor and religion.

Smith joins a long list of other recent alums and current students in the MFA and Art History/Art & Visual Culture Education programs to earn national recognition and realize their dreams. Some examples include:

Kaitlyn Jo Smith, in front of her “American Standard” installation at Tucson Museum of Art (Photo by Julius Schlosburg)

Ricardo Chavez (current Ph.D. student): Tyson Scholar in American Art
Kendall Crabbe (Ph.D. ’22, AVCE): Elliot Eisner Doctoral Research Runner Up-Award in Art Education
Karlito Miller Espinosa (MFA ’19): Whitney Independent Study Program
Tehan Ketema (MFA ’22): First Wave Arts and Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Martin Krafft (’20 MFA): Residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York
Naseem Navab (MFA ’19): Artists in Residence, Art Produce Gallery, San Diego
Marina Shaltout (’20 MFA): Residencies at the Creative Centre in Stodvarfjordur, Iceland and at New Mexico State University
Alex Turner (MFA ’20): Grand Prize, FOCUS Photo L.A. Summer 2021 Competition
Bella Maria Varela (’21 MFA): Early Career Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin
Kenzie Wells (’20 MFA): Residencies at the Wassaic Project Artist Residency in New York, Oxbow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Michigan, and Penland School of Craft in North Carolina

“Our graduate programs are incredibly strong right now, and there is no better evidence of that than the success of our students after graduation,” School of Art Director Colin Blakely said. “Kaitlyn Jo is a perfect example. She pushed her work in new and truly innovative directions during her time here, and the recognition associated with this fellowship is a great and well-deserved validation of that.”

Kaitlyn Jo Smith’s workspace (ArtConnect photo)

In late April, Smith received the 2023-2024 Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship in Studio Art at Wellesley College near Boston. The $35,000 award is intended to support outstanding artists at an early point in their career, by providing the necessary time to develop their art relatively independent of financial pressures.

“The work that I make is a direct reflection of my experiences growing up in a working-class family in rural middle America,” she said. “The fact that these stories resonate with others is validating for me not only as an artist, but as a young adult trying to understand my place in the world.”

Smith is from Sycamore in northwest Ohio, a town of about 800 people, where she joined 4H in fourth grade and took one of the youth organization’s photography classes. “I’ve been obsessed with images ever since,” she said. “I’m extremely fortunate that my parents have always been incredibly supportive in all of my creative pursuits.”

She was just a teen when the housing market crashed in 2007-08, leaving most of the adults she knew out of work. She earned her BFA in Photography from Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio before joining the University of Arizona School of Art’s Photography, Video and Imaging MFA program in its first year of expanding into technology.

“Kaitlyn entered as a traditional photographer-based artist but quickly pushed the limits of the medium and her own work to compel viewers to feel the despair of the U.S. manufacturing labor market’s waning,” Regents Professor Sama Alshaibi said. “Many of her art pieces involve the use of material that has been altered, replicated, exploited and out of place.”

Added Alshaibi: “I’m thrilled that Kaitlyn’s practice has been recognized by the Wellesley College Art Department as spanning Sculpture through an expansive lens, including new media and deep-learning production, social practice and virtual domains.”

Computer-generated factory workers from “Lights Out,” 2020. See a video excerpt.

Smith calls the graduate program at the School of Art “a pressure cooker of brilliant minds and high expectations.”

“Throughout my entire experience, I felt supported by a group of (faculty) mentors who I genuinely believe wanted me to succeed: Sama, Martina Shenal, David Taylor, Cerese Vaden and so many others,” Smith said. “I miss the intensity of critiques and the space for criticism in a nurturing environment.”

Smith’s “American Standard” MFA Thesis Exhibition project, put on hold until 2021 because of COVID, reflected her roots in the Midwest. She was longlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize in Art and Technology (London) and received the College Art Association’s Services to Artists Committee Award for her video “Lights Out.”

Her “Fixtures” and “Lights Out” installations, which make the workers and the products they produce visible, are on display at the Arizona Biennial exhibition until Oct. 1 at the Tucson Museum of Art.

“American Standard pushed me both conceptually and technically,” Smith said. “I’m even prouder of my most recent exhibition ‘Mass Production.’ It was the first solo show I have had since grad school and consisted of four entirely new projects. Since its installation, I have noticed a big shift in the way I see myself — I no longer felt like a student, but a professional.”

“Mass Production” ran from March 19 to April 30 at Bells Projects in Denver. The exhibition connected the repetition of Catholic mass to the rituals of factory production, Smith said.

“Each of my Catholic grandmother’s seven sons has worked in a factory,” she said. “When I think of their collective prayer at her funeral mass, I think of my father and his brothers on the assembly line. ‘Mass Production’ questions whether the learned rituals of Catholicism have conditioned them, and other blue-collar workers, for habitual lives of monotonous labor. …”

“Confessional Kiosk,” 2023, from “Mass Production” exhibition in Denver

During her fellowship, Smith said she’ll continue “to explore the ways that automation and artificial intelligence are rapidly changing our understanding of work and how we structure our lives.”

Smith will take several trips to Wellesley, Massachusetts, but will remain based in Tucson and continue as an adjunct instructor at the School of Art. She’s taught various classes, including Introduction to Photographic Concepts.

“Kaitlyn has been a great asset to our extensive image/photography program because she has the ability to uniquely link established artistic techniques with cutting-edge technologies for relevant purposes,” Alshaibi said.

Smith’s work uses 3D printing and scanning “as a way to visually present the monotony of both automation and skilled manual labor,” she said.

“I love teaching. I love learning from my students,” Smith said. “There is something so inspiring about being surrounded by and helping realize so many wildly different ideas. I’m incredibly passionate in what I do and hope that I encourage that love of exploration and discovery in my students. Art is not easy, but I can think of nothing more rewarding than creating something out of nothing. I love watching my students experience that accomplishment.”

As part of her fellowship, Smith will give an artist’s talk at Wellesley this fall and work with students there. “While many of the subjects in my work have roots in the Midwest and Rust Belt, I believe that a lot of the themes are universal,” she said.

Smith’s work and teaching are important now more than ever because they combine science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, with the arts, Alshaibi said.

“While Kaitlyn produces exquisite and poetic work in photography and found archives, it’s her capacity to fully embrace innovation and creative risk-taking that sets her apart from others,” Alshaibi said. “She has personal experience with what it takes to uphold tradition while developing and inventing for the future.”

As for her own work, Smith said both her “American Standard” and “Mass Production” projects have left her with “more questions than answers, but I think that is why they’re successful.”

“I make art to try and understand the world around me,” Smith said. “I don’t understand it yet; there is more art to be made.”

• Kaitlyn Jo Smith’s website
• ArtConnect interview

Top senior Olander takes her Art History talents to Columbia

Posted on May 8, 2023December 18, 2023 by Michael Chesnick

Calista Olander traded one canvas — the ballet floor — for another in Art History when she enrolled in the University of Arizona School of Art.

But her love for learning and performing arts didn’t stop there, as she minored in Japanese and mathematics, learned two other languages, helped curate multiple student exhibitions, interned at MOCA Tucson … and studied the history of Korean and Italian cinema.

That explains why Professor Irene Bald Romano calls Olander a “modern-day Renaissance woman” — and why Olander has been named the spring 2023 Outstanding Senior in the School of Art for the College of Fine Arts.

Olander, who carries a 4.0 grade-point average, has been accepted into Columbia University’s Art History and Archaeology master’s program in New York.

“I’m very excited for grad school,” she said. “I’ll be studying European art between 1700-1900 and working with Professor Anne Higonnet, whose extensive study of Berthe Morisot will aid in my research of Morisot’s contemporary, Mary Cassatt.”

Olander’s first love was dance. She joined the Arizona Ballet Theatre when she was 8 and began teaching ballet, tap and jazz to children and teens when she was 16.

“I absolutely loved teaching and choreographing,” Olander said. “I unfortunately had to stop because of the pandemic, but the experience helped me in my college career … and in my research at the U of A.”

Olander became interested in Art History at Tucson’s University High, where she was a National Merit Scholar. Her Art History teacher’s “passion for the subject made me absolutely love it,” Olander said. “I learned how collections came to be and how museums can improve their exhibition practices to better represent the communities they serve.”

As a University of Arizona student, she continued her research on museums, which culminated in her Honors College thesis about “Decolonize This Place,” a newly formed collective dedicated to challenging issues found within art institutions that affect marginalized communities.

Her adviser, Dr. Sandra Barr, said Olander has “proven herself to have integrity, intelligence, humor and resilience” – in class and in her research on the “Decolonize” group.

“Decolonize This Place is trying to garner attention and protection for Native American art and grave goods,” Barr said. “Calista wrote a very thoughtful account of what the group is and what their aims are.”

Barr, Romano and Gallery Director lydia see nominated Olander for the outstanding senior award.

“Calista is a rare talent of a serious young scholar of art history and mathematics, with outstanding foreign language skills, and a love of the performing arts,” Romano said. “She is a modern day ‘Renaissance woman’ and justly deserving” of the award.

Olander can speak Japanese, Korean and French, and impressed the Art History faculty with “her thoughtfulness, thoroughness and excellence in every aspect of her work: writing, speaking and mentoring other students,” the nominating letter said.

Under see, Olander co-curated the “Donors & Scholars” exhibition in February and served as student gallery manager for the school’s Joseph Gross Gallery, assisting with four exhibitions.

“Calista has been a pleasure to work with and I have enjoyed co-creating exhibitions with her as she expands her curatorial practice,” see said. “She throws herself headfirst into experiential learning opportunities and … has already developed a skilled eye for exhibition design and a keen understanding of how the often-unseen tasks of preparatory and registration work contribute to this overall process.

“She has a bright career ahead, and I’m grateful I was able to work alongside her for a year.”

Olander volunteered at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) last year and interned there this spring.

In spring 2022, she also studied abroad in Seoul, South Korea, taking an intensive language course and a History of Korean Cinema class, which Olander said “connected well” with two courses she took on campus: Art History of the Cinema, with Anthropology Regents Professor David Soren, and an elective class in Italian cinema.

“It was really interesting to compare film made in Korea, Italy and the U.S., and helped me to appreciate this different art form,” Olander said.

During her final two semesters, she flourished under the guidance of Barr, Romano and see.

“Each of these three people helped me grow, both academically and personally,” Olander said. “They helped me find my path forward and I would not be where I am without them.”

Author: Michael Chesnick