Alumni

BFA 2012 alumna, Leah Guadagnoli, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal, with Mollie Katzen, author of the “Moosewood Cookbook.” Read article here.

The New York Times featured Art and Design alum, John Miller (MFA '98, Sculpture), in a recent article promoting his exhibit at the Lowe Art Museum in Miami, Florida. The article explores Miller's 'playful' work with glass, his journey through art - including his time at the School of Art & Design - and his inspirations. Read more in A South Florida Museum Showcases Burgers, Fries and Beers, Made of Glass.

Bea Nettles will be inducted at the 2023 Hall of Fame Induction & Awards ceremony on November 3, 2023. The IPHF annually awards and inducts notable photographers or photography industry visionaries for their artistry, innovation, and significant contributions to the art and science of photography. Visit the site here.

Liza Sylvestre, alumna of the School of Art & Design, and currently a multimedia artist and research assistant professor within the College of Fine and Applied Arts, has a new exhibit in the Collective gallery in Scotland. Sylvestre's exhibition, asweetsea "explores what it means to communicate. As an artist who is deaf, and whose child and partner are both hearing, Liza Sylvestre seeks to locate where her disability lives within their family structure," according to the gallery page. Read more in the Collective's Autumn Exhibitions announcement.

Patrick Earl Hammie, Contributor, “The Lunar Codex,” Earth’s Moon, Sol System, Orion Arm, Milky Way Galaxy, July, 2023. Curator: Samuel Peralta, physicist, author, composer, film producer. The Lunar Codex is four time capsules holding digital archives that feature 30,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers from 157 countries. It will travel to the moon between 2023 and 2026 as part of The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program where it will permanently reside. Reproductions of my artwork with interviews and reviews that were originally published in PoetsArtists Magazine are included. Dr. Peralta said, "Our hope is that future travelers who find these time capsules will discover some of the richness of our world today... It speaks to the idea that, despite wars and pandemics and climate upheaval, humankind found time to dream, time to create art.” https://www.lunarcodex.com New York Times ARTnews  

1995 BFA in Painting alumna, Mary Anna Pomonis, was recently featured in Art & Cake.

1958 MFA alumna, Ruth A. Migdal was recently featured in the Chicago Sun Times and Chicago Tribune.  

Alumnus Tom Goldenberg, BFA 1970 Sculpture will be in a group show "Material Sustenance & Family Snapshots" at the Re Institute. The Re Institute 1395 Corners Road Boston Corners, New York May 27th to July 15th. Opening is May 27th from 4 to 6

Studio Art: New Media Associate Professor, Ben Grosser, was featured on April 19, 2023 of the New York Times. "The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social" by Brian X. Chen.  

My Electric Genealogy. A performance by Sarah Kanouse, Professor at Northeastern University and A&D MFA alum (2004) When: Tuesday February 14, 5:30pm - 7pm Where: Art & Design Building, room 331 What: Part storytelling, part lecture, and part live documentary film, Sarah Kanouse’s solo performance “My Electric Genealogy” explores the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles through the lens of her own family. For nearly forty years, her grandfather designed, planned, and supervised the spider-vein network of lines connecting the city to its distant sources of power: rivers that are now drying up and power plants that are finally coming down. This physical infrastructure subtended diffuse “infrastructures of feeling” that included assumptions of perpetual growth and closely held beliefs about nature, gender, race, and progress. The performance weaves together signal moments in the city’s history, episodes of her grandfather’s life, anxious fantasies about a climate-challenged future, and stories of resistance and reinvention in the face of extraction. “My Electric Genealogy” is an essayistic working-through of energy as a personal and collective inheritance at a moment of eco-political reckoning. Written, produced and performed by Sarah Kanouse Sound design by Jacob Ross LA-based musician and sonic artist Jacob Ross contributed original music and sound design for “My Electric Genealogy.” Ross has worked with wide variety of filmmakers and performers including Lucky Pierre, Terri Kapsalis, Deke Weaver, Deborah Stratman, and Califone. Sarah Kanouse is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and filmmaker whose solo and collaborative work has been presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Documenta 13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, The Cooper Union, The Smart Museum, and numerous film festivals, academic institutions and artist-run spaces nationwide.

Art History alumna María del Mar González-González was recently featured in an article at Southwest Contemporary. Read the article here.

John Avila's firm recently joined The Change Agencies. Avila graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in graphic design in 1984. He has been professionally affiliated with the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and STA (Society of Typographic Arts) in the past and often juries the International ARC Awards in New York. With a passion for typography, John also designs and prints artwork on letterpress with antique wood fonts. He is an avid runner and is on the Board of Directors for Proud to Run and Frontrunners Chicago. The Change Agencies are the first and only national network of independently-owned public relations firms focused on inclusive and authentic communications to multicultural and LGBTQ communities. They help businesses and organizations identify, assess and address DEI communications challenges and opportunities. Read the article here.

Leo Segedin was recently featured in the Chicago Tribune, "Memories of the West Side: Artist Leo Segedin’s work depicts the vanished neighborhood of his youth," by By Ron Grossman. Born in Chicago in 1927, Segedin grew up on the west side and attended Gregory Elementary School (which would show up 60 years later in a series of paintings) and Crane Tech High School. He received his BFA in 1948 and his MFA in 1950 (the first ever awarded for painting by the University of Illinois).

Christina S. Chae's journey writing her book, which can be ordered in Korea at https://bit.ly/3fh0amO A quote from her about her journey writing the book... "The biggest project I took on this year, and the most challenging launch I experienced to date, is finally shipped 100% to Korea! The book is about work cultures I've learned during my times in Silicon Valley – It is 50/50 tips and my personal stories as examples. The title came from the questions I got during the coffee chats I had with Korean leaders in Tech. "How does Silicon Valley do ___?"  

Illini Union Art Gallery, 1401 W Green St, Urbana, IL Wednesday, October 6 – Sunday, October 30, 2022 Opening Reception: Friday, October 14, 2022 | 4:30 – 6:30 p.m. Organized by alumnus Howard Kanter, and Jennifer Bergmark, this exhibition features alumni art and work by students enrolled in ARTE 475, Art Exhibition Practices, to honor a shared history and to continue a shared future.

Roger Colombik (BFA 1984 Sculpture) was recently interviewed at CanvasRebel Magazine. The interview may be found here. More on Roger Colombik: www.rogercolombik.com

Join us for a screening of the documentary, Still Life in Lodz (Poland, 2019; 75 minutes), followed by an online discussion with its co-creators Lilka Elbaum and Paul Celler, and a slide presentation by HGMS graduate and artist Tamar Segev. The film tells the story of the vibrant life of Lodz Jewish community before the war, its destruction during the holocaust, and its post-war halting rebirth. All told through the history of ownership of one painting, a still life, that hung in the same apartment for over 70 years. Tamar's paintings explore the connections between familial memory, historical narratives, and contemporary culture, as they are embedded in the architectural surfaces of the former Lodz ghetto.   Register in advance: https://illinois.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUvf--rpzopGdImzk563yJUZPNVsYJQ2JFr   Hosted by the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies, University of Illinois

David Reisman (MFA 1982 Painting) will have his video Office Window Au Revoir screened at the Millennium Film Workshop: "Nighttime" NYC at MOMA on Thursday, February 17, 2022. MoMA https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/7534 Thu, Feb 17, 7:00 p.m. MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

Deana McDonagh (Professor of Industrial Design + Designer in Residence at the Beckman Institute) and Amanda Henderson (ID Alumni) have reimagined the East Wing of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. They have brought in playful elements to create a more welcoming environment. This is a long-term project with the Beckman utilizing empathic design research to energize their working environments.

Robert Cumming, MFA 1967, passed away December 16, 2021. Desert Hot Springs, CA — Robert Cumming, an artist of exceptional versatility who could work in several media simultaneously and was a leading proponent of conceptual photography in the 1970s, has died at age 78. The cause of death reported by his partner of 33 years Margaret Irwin-Brandon was complications of Parkinson's disease. Cumming left his mark on modern art as a multidisciplined contrarian, who viewed life with an eye for the quixotic, absurd, mind-expanding, and amusing, translating his observations through painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and photography into engaging visual essays touched with Surrealism and always tugging at the boundaries of what is real and what is artifice. A brilliant draftsman, he started making art at age 5 with small, precise renderings of different scenes that sometimes won prizes awarded by his local newspaper-- precision and clarity of line remained a hallmark of his graphic work for the rest of his life. His paintings, always representational and often large in scale, probed the perplexities of life and art and such complex themes as the interweaving of vision and imagination. It is Cumming's photography from the 1970s and 80s, however, that constitutes his greatest legacy. Black and white prints distinguished by acute detail made possible by large negatives were his stock in trade, and he was at his best as a provocateur in scenes he constructed himself with an intention to tease, trick, or stimulate the mind. Crazy quilts of patterns, a slice of bread embedded in a watermelon, movie sets as uncanny stand-ins for reality, and plays on negative and positive relationships are just some of the head-scratching tableaux that populate his work with both wit and philosophy. Robert Cumming was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1943. Always interested in art and especially draftsmanship, he earned his BA in 1965 at the Massachusetts College of Art and his MFA in 1967 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, with a concentration on painting, drawing, and printmaking. After graduation he taught studio art at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he began working with conceptual art of different forms including mail art, illogical sculptures, and performance skits. In 1970 Cumming took a teaching position at California State University, Fullerton, and occasionally taught at other colleges around Los Angeles. Surrounded by a creative arts community in Southern California with a trend toward conceptual work, and influenced by Hollywood set photography, he developed his own strain of conceptual photography, with a sensibility reminiscent of the satire, irony, and linguistic play of Marcel Duchamp. He first exhibited his photography in 1973 at California State College, Long Beach, and group shows followed at such prestigious institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. By the end of the 1970s, Cumming's interests began to shift again toward painting and drawing, and while he continued his photography, it was mostly of a documentary nature. In 1978 he moved back to New England with a teaching job at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut, and he later established a studio in Whately, Massachusetts. In the later 1980s he met Irwin- Brandon, who was teaching at Mount Holyoke College in the music department, and they became life partners. Her specialty is Baroque music, and after having founded Arcadia Players, a period instrument orchestra based in Northampton, Mass., she decided to move back to her home state of California in 2013, where she purchased a house in Desert Hot Springs, California, near Palm Springs. Before long, Cumming joined her, and he happily lived out his life with her in that desert community in pleasant seclusion. Cumming's work is included in many art museum collections across the country, and it appeared in numerous group exhibitions as well as solo shows, both in the United States and abroad. He was the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants (1972,1975,1979) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981). He is survived by his sister, Virginia, and brother, Edward, both of Southborough, Mass., nephews Andrew and Christopher Cumming, and extended family. Published by Daily Hampshire Gazette on Jan. 7, 2022.   https://www.palmspringslife.com/robert-cumming-artist/ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-12-21/robert-cumming-photographer-obituary