Category: Student Story

Three University of Arizona doctoral students in Art & Visual Culture Education will present their research during the 2026 National Art Education Association Convention in Chicago.

Ziyu Feng, Seoyeon Jenn Kim and Yuqing Wang will join School of Art Assistant Professor Ilayda Altuntas, who will be leading the Seminar for Research in Art Education (SRAE) Interest Group Chairperson’s Panel on March 6.

The panel features Graduate Student Research Lightning Talks — a mentored national session designed to support emerging scholars as they share current research, build professional networks, and engage in conversations about research development, publishing and academic career pathways.

Feng integrates climate data visualization with sustainable handmade papermaking to explore how knowledge emerges through embodied and ecological engagement. Rather than treating climate data as abstract information, her work re-materializes it through tactile processes, positioning fibers, water, environmental forces, and human bodies as active participants in meaning-making. This transdisciplinary approach bridges art and science while foregrounding sustainability and climate education.

Kim will present “From Page to Practice,” which investigates how picturebook pedagogy and arts-based inquiry cultivate critical consciousness in art teacher education, with attention to race-conscious and socioculturally responsive teaching.

Wang will present “Self-Expression and Body Marks: Community-Based Art Practices for Healing and Body Awareness.” Her arts-based research is grounded in embodied epistemology, and during the community engagement portion of the session, she will facilitate a participatory activity connected to relational meaning-making through body marks.

“The Chairperson’s Panel is intentionally structured as a mentorship space where graduate students not only present research, but also connect across institutions and engage with current issues in the field,” Altutnas said. “It reflects SRAE’s long-standing commitment to rigorous, community-oriented scholarship in art education.”

Altuntas will be joined by other School of Art AVCE faculty at the March 5-7 convention, including Professors Amy Kraehe and Ryan Shin and Associate Professor Carissa DiCinido.

Shin and Kraehe will co-present the Invited Studies in Art Education Lecture: “Principled Leadership in Art Education: Understanding and Promoting Change in Teaching, Research and Administration.”

Kraehe will be part of “Sociological Art Education: Methods and Applications for Today,” a panel presentation that takes stock of sociological approaches in art education and gauges interest in a book proposal on critical and reflexive sociological methods used by art education researchers and teachers. Sociological framings may be a useful pivot that keeps art education discourse mobile during trying times.

Kraehe also will participate in “Beyond Binaries: Creative Acts in Precarious Times,” a session that responds to the challenges that art educators experience in their classrooms and communities in these precarious times and the productive ways to navigate art teaching and learning.

Altuntas and Kraehe will be part of the SRAE Business Meeting session: “Networking and Research Advice for Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars.”

Shin will attend the Asian Art and Culture Interest Group executive board meeting and be part of the
Studies in Art Education Panel Session for International Authors. He also will help lead an advisory session, “Writing for Studies in Art Education,” for prospective authors interested in submitting manuscripts for review.

In addition, Shin will be a panel member of the session, “Policy & Action in Difficult Times: Supporting Art Educators’ Diverse Perspectives in Contested Art Educational Contexts.” The panelists will offer strategic policies for inclusive curricula, ethical pedagogies, and advocating for art education programs that address recent challenges to the field.

DiCindio will help present “Centering Critical Consciousness Through Local History, Public Art, and Monuments: Research Commission Sponsored.” She and the panel will discuss public art, local history and social practice to investigate the role of the arts in civic engagement, collective care and advocacy. DiCindio also will be part of the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education Author Roundtable, focusing on the theme of “Movement and Momentum.”

For her dedication to animation, illustration and creative storytelling, Sela Margalit has been named the School of Art’s Outstanding Senior for fall 2025.

The Studio Art major carries a near-4.0 grade-point average with a minor in Film & Television and Art History, is a paid intern at Arizona Public Media (AZPM) and helped produce animation projects for Biosphere 2, the Borderlands Restoration Network, Semiconductor USA and AZPM.

But Margalit has had the most blast — “no pun intended,” she said — creating her “Atomic Age Adventures” comic strip for the Arizona Daily Wildcat. Since fall 2023, she’s produced over 40 strips in the series, which features Sylvania Spaceray — a modeling-sensation-turned-government-recruited lunar ranger — and Crater the dog carrying out missions on the moon, including trying to outsmart a small alien.

“I think writing comes the easiest when characters feel like real people and I’m just checking in on their lives, which is definitely how I feel about Sylvania Spaceray and Crater the dog,” Margalit said. “So much, that I also made my capstone film, ‘Atomic Age Adventures!’ about them. My favorite recurring character is definitely the alien. I have a hobby interest in alien theory, and he’s just a really funny little guy.”

Her mom encouraged her to join the campus newspaper as a sophomore. “At first I was shy,” Margalit said, but she quickly rose to become comics and illustration editor while mentoring other artists. The confidence she gained led to more successes as Margalit:

• Worked on “Small Seeds; Big Change,” a Center for University Education Scholarship-supported initiative and class collaboration with Borderlands Restoration Network (BRN), in which she developed a short animation about the Sky Islands ecosystem. The clip was shown at the “What’s Up, Docs?” showcase at The Loft Cinema, where Margalit also participated in a Q&A on stage.

• Met award-winning documentary filmmaker Lisa Molomot, who hired Margalit to deliver a short animation sequence for Semiconductor U.S.A. to help teens learn how semiconductors work and are part of everyday life.

• Participated in The Wonder Studio at Biosphere II Summer Residency, where Margalit produced a humorous short about a curious scientific researcher from Mars who investigates the history of biomes at the living laboratory north of Tucson. Following the residency, she curated a short animation program of her fellow residents’ work for First Friday Shorts at The Loft Cinema.

“Sela has sought out every opportunity in animation throughout her degree path and delivered consistently polished, creative, and conceptually impactful work,” School of Art animation Assistant Professor Nicole Antebi said in a nominating letter for the Outstanding Senior Award. “She has also positioned herself as a leader among her peers through her collaborative efforts.”

Last fall, Antebi introduced Margalit to Arizona Public Media producer Andrew Brown, who offered the student an internship with Arizona Illustrated in spring 2025.

“Sela worked successfully with our producers across a variety of projects that have helped us tell more engaging and dynamic stories and better serve our audience,” Brown said. “She has a good work ethic, is professional and easy to communicate with and takes direction well.”

Following the internship, Margalit became AZPM’s first paid student intern in animation. She contributed a key sequence to the story, “Eveli: The Algerian Born Jeweler of the Southwest” — a collaboration with Antebi’s animation class and another “high-stakes professional opportunity with a public-facing audience,” Antebi said. “Once again, Sela delivered strong, visually compelling, and polished work.”

Said Margalit: “When Eveli producer Özlem Özgür reached out to me about how she wanted more animation to be woven through the piece, I was ecstatic. It was a bit daunting as it was more animation than you typically do in the class, but with my film background I gained knowledge of editing and was able to pull it together quickly.”

In addition, Margalit pulled together her 4-minute animated senior capstone project for the spring 2025 BFA Capstone Show in Illustration, Design & Animation, despite an ambitious timeline. She “held auditions for voice talent, storyboarded the entire piece, animated and colored it, added audio, and had everything finished before the end of the semester,” adjunct instructor Valentin Mancha said.

“I’ve had memorable moments with so many of my professors,” Margalit said. “Professor Antebi really showed me the breadth of possibilities in animation, as well as offered constructive critique for my technical skills and advice about animation as a real career. I was unsure of design at first, but Prof. Watanabe made design both fun and actually digestible. Lastly … Prof. Mancha believed that I could finish my ambitious capstone and went out of his way to connect me with the resources and feedback I needed.”

Born in Los Angeles, Margalit moved to Tucson later in her childhood. “Being around a lot of art museums and media in L.A. “led me to having a passion for the arts,” she said. “Furthermore, my mom showed me so many different books, TV shows, movies — both educational and entertaining — that really ignited a spark for storytelling and creativity. I loved animated content from Cartoon Network, PBS Kids, and Disney, as well as comic books (especially X-Men).”

All those experiences helped her excel at the School of Art and with the campus newspaper.

“The Daily Wildcat is truly my home on campus,” Margalit said. “Coming into the comics desk, it was a great opportunity, but I wondered how it could be better. With the support of my fellow student members, as well as our advisor Susan McMillan, the comics desk has grown so much and I’ve had the opportunity to guide so many artists in creating their work, both in comics and editorial illustrations.

“Making art that supports the journalistic work the paper does is so important,” she said, “but it is also awesome that the completely creative pursuit of comics also has a place in the Daily Wildcat.”

As for the future, “I feel like being open to any creative opportunity is crucial,” Margalit said. “I’m planning on staying in town for a while and continuing to seek out as many opportunities as I can while promoting my work and continuing to develop my portfolio skills. I plan to do freelance work, try to participate in local events and keep integrated in the community.”

In her recent Halloween comic strip for the Wildcat, Margalit’s Sylvania Spaceray creates a lunar latte for Crater the dog, similar to a pumpkin latte. Crater doesn’t like it, calling it “dirt in a cup,” and Slyvania admits, “I didn’t say it was going to be good.”

For Margalit, though, even Crater the dog would agree that her future looks bright.

“Sela’s consistent determination, forward-thinking, and ability to creatively perform at a high level will ensure that she will make a significant impact wherever her career takes her,” Antebi said. “Through her numerous successful collaborations and the positions mentioned here, Sela has already taken the first steps in positioning herself on a strong career trajectory.”

The School of Art at the University of Arizona is thriving and ready for its next chapter. If you believe art is not just a discipline but a transformative force that shapes culture and society, this is your opportunity to lead one of the nation’s most distinctive and forward-thinking art schools.

Our programs rank among the best in the country, guided by faculty who are internationally recognized artists, educators, and scholars redefining creative practice. With revitalized facilities, robust resources, and a student body that is diverse, curious, and fearless, we stand at the forefront of innovation and impact. We seek a director who will harness this momentum. Someone who honors our achievements, expands our reach, and leads with imagination and purpose.

This is a rare chance to lead from strength and shape the future of a school grounded in excellence, both academically and operationally. We are looking for a leader who values creative inquiry, champions interdisciplinary connections, and cultivates an environment where faculty, staff, and students thrive and push boundaries.

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.”

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.

Carrying on a tradition that began in 1970, 11 graduate students from the School of Art will present their work in the 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition in collaboration with the Center for Creative Photography.

The exhibition, with four installations in the school’s Joseph Gross Gallery and seven in the CCP, will run from April 23 to May 16. A public reception will be held May 1 from 5 to 7 p.m. in the CCP lobby, 1030 N. Olive Road.

Featured in the Gross Gallery will be the work of graduating MFA students Triston Blanton, Claire Fall Blanchette, Semoria F. Mosley and Mehraveh Vahediyan. And in the CCP, graduating MFA artists Karina Buzzi, Austin Caswell, Vanessa Saavedra Ceballos, galen dara, Benjamin Davis, Claire Taylor and Camille Trautman will present their work.

This annual MFA Thesis Exhibition, the culmination of the Master of Fine Arts Studio Degree, is presented during a graduate student’s final semester in the three-year degree program. During the last year of their coursework, graduates work closely with faculty to develop a body of original art to present to the public in lieu of a written thesis. The result offers visitors the opportunity to see new, cutting-edge art in a variety of mediums and styles.

“This is the next generation of artists who will be going out and impacting the discipline and thinking about what their next chapter looks like,” outgoing School of Art Director Colin Blakely said.

• MFA Exhibition Photo Gallery by grad student Alexis Joy Hagestad
• MFA Exhibition Audio Guide by PhD student Jenna S. Green
• May 1 Public Reception Photos 
• April 22 Sneak-Peek: Photo Gallery

A look at the artists and their MFA thesis titles and statements:

In Alexis Joy Hagestad’s new solo exhibition, viewers can walk through a fictional burned forest, watch a video with a fire map of the western United States and listen to trees moving and creaking in the wind.

“This Forest Remembers Fire” not only explores the effects of fire suppression in the United States in the face of climate change, but it also allows the School of Art graduate student to reflect on the death of her beloved grandmother in 2017, when Hagestad started working as a seasonal worker in Montana battling wildland fires.

“Fire can be remembered in forest ecosystems as both a destructive force and a catalyst for renewal,” said Hagestad, part of the school’s Photography, Video and Imaging graduate program, ranked third nationally by U.S. News & World Report. “I wanted to create a space where people can reflect on fire’s dual nature and how grief — a feeling we all experience as humans — is also part of the lives of other species within our ecosystem.”

Hagestad (she, they) received the school’s 2024 Marcia Grand Centennial Sculpture Prize, which provides an MFA-seeking student with up to $10,000 to support completion of work in the sculptural/3D arts. The annual award is sponsored by Grand, a generous donor who funded the First Year Experience program and other school renovations.

“This Forest Remembers Fire” — on display at the Lionel Rombach Gallery from March 18 to April 18, with a March 21 reception from 4-6 p.m. — features Hagestad’s photographs of isolated, burned tree structures printed on kozo paper and arranged to allow viewers to walk through the space, resembling a forest.

The installation also features a zine and a video. The zine explores two realities, one where a wildfire has just happened and the other many years after a wildfire. The video presents a fire map created from satellite images of fires that have occurred over the years in the western United States.

The map also includes an audio element: the sounds of trees moving and creaking in the wind, captured using contact microphones. “When layered together, the audio resembles the sound of fire, which I found interesting in the context of a forest remembering fire,” Hagestad said.

Family influence

Growing up in Missoula, Montana, Hagestad witnessed fire season every summer.

“Smoke was constantly present,” she said, so much that it burned her eyes and diffused the sun, transforming the landscape by making it darker.

Her stepfather, Dan Martin, introduced her mother, Monica Martin, to wildland firefighting. The two run Aries Fire Service in Florence, Montana.

Hagestad followed in their footsteps and joined the wildfire effort after graduating with a BFA in Art from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia in 2016.

“After the death of my grandmother (Mary Wasson), to whom I was very close, wildland fire and the community involved in wildfire became a space for me to grieve,” Hagestad said. “And in the wildfire community, you meet some of the best folks around.

“As I worked through my initial grief of losing her and look back on those moments now, I realize that it was just what I needed. Being in that field and engaging in the labor and demands of the job helped me understand myself better and the person I was becoming after her passing. Grief changes you, and I felt like I was growing into a whole new person, a person shaped by her death.”

Thoughtful installation

School of Art Galleries Director lydia see, who helped advise Hagestad during the planning of “This Forest Remembers Fire,” was not only impressed with the grad student’s knowledge of wildfires but also with her sense of empathy.

“Alexis has approached this installation thoughtfully, with deep reverence for the subject matter and keen attention to the experience of the gallery visitor,” see said. “I’m excited for this iteration to be on view in a controlled setting, and then to be pushed outside the gallery walls in other forms in the future.”

Hagestad’s photographic prints depict the trees as isolated forms and stripped of their original locations. “Therefore, they could exist anywhere,” she said.

Meanwhile, the fire map’s images in the video overlay one another to form a new map that visualizes the history of the fires. A red line on the map represents the fire boundary, an average derived from actual fire boundaries combined with online data. “The map was inspired by an Introduction to Cartography class that I took last spring in the School of Geography,” Hagestad said.

Although she admits being “no expert or scientist in the field,” Hagestad said her time working in the wildland — and her childhood spent exploring public lands and national parks with her mom and sister — had a major influence on her artistic research.

“Wildfires are dangerous, especially as homes encroach on natural areas, leading to devastating impacts on communities,” the photographer said. “However, there is such a thing as beneficial and good fire. Indigenous peoples used fire to manage their lands before colonization. Many cultural burning practices were banned after colonization, and suppression became the policy.

“Many researchers in the field realize now that reintroducing Indigenous fire management practices is essential for healthy ecosystems, and using controlled burns can help clear underbrush and promote specific plant growth. These burns can help save our forests from catastrophic wildfires.

“This is also one of the reasons why I decided to title my show, ‘This Forest Remembers Fire’ — because it does. Fire, metaphorically speaking, is written in some forests’ DNA. Just as fire and grief are written in our DNA as human beings, to be human is to experience grief, a feeling we all share no matter our upbringing.”

Growing as an artist

At an early age, Hagestad said her mother “taught us the importance of the natural world” and how “being connected to nature is essential to being human.”

At Big Sky High School in Missoula, Hagestad said three teachers helped push her to grow as an artist and a writer: art instructor Dan Degrandpre, who also taught Hagestad’s mom years before; the late Lorilee Evans-Lynn, a literary magazine adviser; and R. David Wilson, a Spanish teacher who also is an artist. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without them,” she said.

At the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Hagestad learned the importance of creating conceptual projects, which gave her “a great foundation in photography,” she said while praising faculty members Tom Fischer, Zig Jackson, Craig Stevens, Rebecca Nolan and Jacklyn Cori Norman.

In pursuing her MFA, Hagestad chose the University of Arizona School of Art after being impressed by previous and current students in the program and the faculty, including Sama Alshaibi, Ellen McMahon, Yana Payusova, Marcos Serafim, Martina Shenal, David Taylor and Cerese Vaden, along with see. “Their guidance and support have profoundly shaped my voice as an artist.”

“I came to the U of A because I wanted to be part of an artistic community,” Hagestad said. “I’m thankful to have such an amazing and supportive cohort of peers. I genuinely do not know what I’d do without them.”

After earning her MFA, Hagestad hopes to teach at the college level but also to “continue discovering my voice as an artist and keep creating and growing.”

In the meantime, she hopes the people who see her exhibition reflect on how fire plays a vital role in healing ecosystems.

“Learning to co-exist with good fire will ultimately benefit us and the future of our ecosystems,” Hagestad said. “I hope the audience can walk through this fictional forest and recognize that their own grief — whether it stems from the loss of a loved one or ecological concerns — does not make them alone in their healing journey.

“Just as a forest takes many years to renew after a wildfire, so do our personal healing journeys as we navigate our feelings of grief.”

More about the artist

• Website
• CV

After they found discarded passports near the U.S. border wall with Mexico, graduate students and Professor David Taylor from the University of Arizona School of Art decided to create signs in different languages with the message: “Keep your passport | Guard your papers | Save your identity.”

“In only 15 minutes, we saw some 20 passports from all over the world, from places like Nigeria, Congo, Bangladesh, India and Cameroon,” Taylor said. “It’s a strategy, on the advice of the cartel guides, for migrants to have a better chance at pleading asylum. But border humanitarians maintain there’s no scenario in which that helps people. In fact, you want to have your documentation.”

So, in November, Taylor typeset poster boards in a dozen languages with an accompanying graphic designed by Assistant Professor Nicole Antebi. Some in the class then helped him post the signs at the end of the border wall, east of Sasabe, Arizona.

The project was just a small part of Taylor’s field-study graduate class (ART 504), which lets students explore the Sonoran Desert borderlands and understand its ecology, people, history and narratives.

His fall 2024 course, titled “Border as Network,” included weekend field trips to Southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico — including the San Rafael Valley, Bisbee and Naco, Ambos Nogales, Patagonia and Hermosillo. Students also visited San Xavier del Bac and barrios in downtown Tucson, toured museums and attended several photography and art lectures.

“I grew up in Tucson and have been to a lot of these places before, but I was really excited to take this class because I wanted to see them through a new lens … and really understand the systems that make up the border,” said Porter McDonald, one of a dozen grad students in the course.

MFA student Andrés Caballero, a Fulbright scholar from Mexico City, took photos in Nogales for an earlier fellowship project about Lucha Libre wrestling. Going on the field trips in Taylor’s class also helped Caballero “put a face” to the borderlands, rather than relying on information from others that could be inaccurate or biased.

“You don’t understand what the spaces truly look like until you’re there,” Caballero said.

At mid-2024, the United Nations Refugee Agency database estimated there were 122.6 million people forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order — including 37.9 million refugees and 8 million asylum seekers.

“You don’t have a yardstick for global migration until you’re standing at the end of the border wall, and you realize that you’re surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of passports that people discover,” Taylor said.

The professor typeset signs in Bengali, Italian, Nepali, Sudanese, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Thai, Lao, Chinese, Arabic and English.

After seeing the discarded passports, a student “said this amazing thing to me,” he recalled. “What does it mean for somebody to travel around the world and shed their identity in this spot?”

That statement helped Taylor realize the emotional impact his class has had on his students — and himself.

“The trips are a real bonding experience for the students,” he said. “It can be very heavy content, but within that, it’s a real joy and privilege to get to work with them.”

Taylor is part of the School of Art’s Photography, Video and Imaging program, which is ranked third in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. He holds the experiential learning course every three or so years.

Students plan to showcase their work from the fall 2024 class in a public presentation, “Border as Network,” Aug. 9-30, 2025, at Pidgin Palace Arts, 1110 S. 6th Ave. The reception is Saturday, Aug. 23, at 7 p.m.

“There’s a lot of writing, photographing and sketching happening,” said Taylor, whose past classes included trips to Tijuana and Winkelman, Arizona, which would have stayed a border town if not for the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, when the U.S. acquired southern Arizona from Mexico.

The field trips help students become “seasoned border travelers” and can inspire future MFA thesis projects — such as those by acclaimed Southwest-based artists Bella Maria Varela (MFA ’21) and Mariel Miranda (MFA ’23), he said.  

The course parallels Taylor’s own research projects. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, the photographer and now associate dean for the College of Fine Arts has focused on the borderlands’ nature and changing circumstances for over two decades.

In 2023, he helped launch a public archive, “Detained,” containing the stories of asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants incarcerated in Arizona. In 2024, his installation “Complex” also documented the industrialization of borderland security regimes.

“The whole class is about unflattening the narratives of the U.S.-Mexico border and the Sonoran Desert borderlands,” Taylor said, “whether it be environmental, the history of labor and mining, Buffalo Soldiers and their role in the settlement or conquest of the West, or trips to San Xavier del Bac and thinking about Spanish settlement, or going to the barrios in downtown Tucson and learning about urban renewal in the 1970s and the dislocation of the barrios.”

Here’s a closer look at some of the field trips:

San Rafael Valley

Students and Taylor camped here, not far from the border in eastern Santa Cruz County. With rolling hills, native grasslands and oak trees, the valley forms the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River, which flows south into Sonora, Mexico, before turning back north into the U.S. and joining the Gila River.

“It’s rugged, beautiful and one of my favorite places in all of Arizona,” Taylor said.

For Beihua Guo, a first-year MFA candidate in Photography, Video and Imaging, the San Rafael Valley was his first introduction to the border area.

“The landscape was so serene and pristine that it seemed impossible to associate it with violence or crime,” Guo said. “That night, I also saw the most stunning Milky Way I’ve ever experienced.”

Previously based in Los Angeles and Shanghai, Guo holds a BA in studio art and environmental analysis from Pitzer College in Claremont, California. His work has been exhibited internationally and he’s been awarded artist residencies in Yellowstone, Lassen Volcanic, and Petrified Forest National Parks.

Before the fall semester started, Guo took a self-portrait photo at Jacumba Hot Springs at the California-Mexico border, which was a major crossing point for Chinese migrants in 2023. “I could feel the rising tension and increased surveillance in the area,” he said. “Diesel generators ran constantly, and there were powerful floodlights.”

“I’m interested in continuing to document the evolving political climate and landscapes along the border while exploring my identity as an immigrant,” Guo said.

Camp Naco and Buffalo Soldier Cemetery

For MFA students Semoria Mosley and Maya Jackson, their research interests in Photography, Video and Imaging as well as African-American history intersected perfectly during these two trips, Taylor said.

The Buffalo Soldiers, a group of African American army regiments, fought Native Americans to help settlers move west in the late 1800s and defended the border during the Mexican Revolution at Camp Naco near Bisbee, where students also toured the Copper Queen Mine.

Students also visited a Buffalo Soldier cemetery, about a mile north where they had found the passports. From 1916 to 1921, the black soldiers of the 10^th Cavalry were a fixture around the nearby town of Arivaca. Several soldiers were laid to rest in the desert, although there’s no hard evidence as to what killed them. Some historians have said they died from the flu epidemic of 1918.

Jackson, a landscape-based, conceptual photographer from Richmond, Virginia, said it “would be powerful, even on a community level, for more people to have the experiences we had” to better grasp the borderlands’ beauty and challenges.

Mosley, a social justice-oriented photojournalist who grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, said she spent the semester “trying to understand the desert from a spiritual point of view — how it’s continuously rebirthing itself and going through these renewal cycles.”

“It’s interesting how the animals, desert and water — and the cities built around them — are being altered forever,” Mosley said.

Hermosillo, Sonora

Students visited massive aquaculture projects, including where they cultivate fish and camarones, in Hermosillo. “The class saw the places where they terraform the desert to let the sea into the desert,” Taylor said. “We literally went and had seafood in the afternoon on the beach.”

The class met students from Unison — the University of Sonora — took an architecture tour and heard how the campus operates.

“They also saw some incredible photography exhibitions there,” Taylor said. “They toured the Ford Maquiladora factories, where all the Mavericks and Broncos that you see in U.S. dealerships. And they met the people who inspect the car carriers before they come across the border to make sure drugs aren’t being smuggled.”

Patagonia

During their final trip, students visited Patagonia, about 50 miles south of Tucson, where the Borderlands Restoration Network is located and retired University of Arizona research scientist Gary Nabhan has a five-acre homestead.

The Borderlands Restoration Network, which includes a wildlife preserve, aims to help rebuild healthy ecosystems, restore habitat for plants and wildlife and reconnect border communities to the land through educational programs.

Alexis Joy Hagestad, a Photography, Video and Imaging MFA student from Missoula, Montana, was intrigued by the animal crossings at the border, along with bats and butterflies who’ve seen their migration paths to and from Mexico affected by the border wall.

Hagestad, whose recent project involves using photography and digital imaging techniques to isolate the bodies of burned trees from old fire scars, said meeting Nabhan at his homestead “was really a transformative experience for me.”

“He has so much wisdom and so much hope,” Hagestad said about Nabhan, a renowned Southwest agricultural ecologist, ethnobotanist and author who is considered a pioneer in the local food and heirloom seed-saving movements.

In his 2024 book, “Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance,” Nabahn wrote about “how cultural resistance — aside from political action — needs to occur whenever the dominating forces of industry, governance or media oppress or suppress the very people most in need.”

“I sometimes forget that hope is something I can feel,” Hagestad said on the final day of class, a roundtable discussion in the School of Art building. “We can make differences in a certain way, regardless of the situation.”

After comments like that one, Taylor paused to reflect on the semester.

“I can’t begin to express the gratitude and the honor I feel to have spent these shared spaces with you,” he told the students.

Creating a more “communal atmosphere,” the School of Art has completed a full interior renovation of the grad studio building.

Now called the Visual Arts Research Studios, or VARS, the 25,000-square-foot facility includes a reconfigured gallery, a new seminar classroom and more studio space for graduate students, faculty and visiting artists and scholars.

The public is invited to see the studios and facility on Saturday, April 5, from 3 to 5 p.m., followed by a closing reception from 5 to 6 p.m. for “Influx” — an exhibition featuring work from 18 MFA students in the new VARS Project Space gallery. VARS, 1231 N. Fremont Ave., is just north of Speedway and the School of Art’s main building.

“I am incredibly excited about the renovation,” said Yana Payusova, assistant professor of practice for the First Year Experience program. “It’s fantastic to have a bright, freshly painted new studio with great lighting and soaring ceilings.

“I also appreciate being able to work alongside fellow faculty members and our wonderful graduate students. The communal atmosphere of the space is truly inspiring.”

The grad building now has 53 studio spaces, including six AV studios, and new features such as a paint booth, a sleek break room and other areas to sit and relax, two gender-neutral restrooms and a lactation space. The Book Art and Letterpress Lab, in the northeast corner of the building, received some lighting upgrades.

“The additional studios incorporate various configurations to better serve graduate students working in all media,” School of Art Director Colin Blakely said. “The added faculty studios add an extra layer of opportunity for interaction. It’s a safe, secure and ventilated building and a convenient asset to our program.”

A major gift from a donor funded most of the renovation.