Alumni

Anastasia Tumanova received her BFA in Graphic Design in 2009. She recently created a mural for Google. HQ. https://www.wcia.com/news/local-news/u-of-i-graduate-creates-mural-for-google-hq/ https://anastasiatumanova.com/  

Leah Guadagnoli ( BFA 2012 Painting) is featured in “Leah Guadagnoli’s Joyous Kitsch” by Alex Wexelman in the latest edition of Hyperallergic. Please visit: https://hyperallergic.com/690050/leah-guadagnolis-joyous-kitsch/  

Winner in Office Equipment/Stationery – “Mark of Time” People often say that "time rushes" and "time flies." Every day there are 24 hours, 1440 minutes, and 86400 seconds in a reciprocal cycle. In the rotation of the hands, "time" passes in a hurry, without leaving any mark. This stamp gives "time" a mark. It can be used to plan, record, and commemorate. These small marks witness the existence of our time in the expectation, experience, and passing. Just like carving the boat in the fast stream to mark a lost sword, we can't get it back, but when we look at these marks, they remind us of the significance of happenings. https://www.productdesignaward.eu/winners/epda/2021/10487/  

For the last two years, Motorola Solution’s artist in residence, Sebastien Johnson, has been researching the correlations between Art History’s great innovators and contemporary engineering. Here are the results presented in a video essay. Art and engineering have been correlated since the renaissance times, and even as art began to modernize, their correlations were only enhanced. Today, the interest between these two fields is as important as it has ever been. As long as we live in a world where innovation is needed, art and engineering will fundamentally be connected. Creative thinking, challenging past traditions, and constant progression lay at the core of both fields; these qualities will have an everlasting impact on our future. You may view the video here.

The School of Art + Design is saddened by the passing of alumna Louise Fishman on Monday, July 26, 2021. Born in Philadelphia, Louise Fishman studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After success at both these schools, she went on to receive both a Bachelor of Science and a BFA from the Tyler School of Fine Arts at Temple University in 1963 and her M.F.A. from UIUC in 1965. Fishman exhibited nationally and internationally in many venues  including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Denver Art Museum; the Jewish Museum; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Neuberger; the Fogg; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; and the Woodmere in Philadelphia, among many others. She’s represented by the Cheim & Read Gallery in New York. Krannert Art Museum’s retrospective, “A Question of Emphasis,” which showcases previously unexhibited works on paper and painted books from Fishman’s archive is currently being exhibited from  August 26, 2021 to February 26, 2022. She received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Creative Artists Public Service Program Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Gottlieb Foundation grant, among others. Her work has been the subject of articles and reviews in the New York Times, Art in America, the New Yorker, ArtNews, the Brooklyn Rail, and the New York Observer, among others. Many writers have noted Fishman’s re-defining the masculinist ideologies of abstract expressionist practices for her own purposes, both in service of her painterly innovation, but also personal-as-political practices—a tactic as urgent today—exploring and expounding upon feminist agency, as well as lesbian, queer and Jewish identity and the meaning of memory to history and to the body politic. Praising Fishman in Art in America, critic Miriam Seidel cites Fishman’s “tough, no-frills approach to abstraction” as “standing apart from any discernable movement, sustained by its own imperatives.” Critic and historian Jan Avgikos, writing in the Brooklyn Rail in 2017, writes, “We owe Fishman a lot. Over the course of half a century, painting in New York City, she’s legitimately laid claim to more idioms of abstraction than any other painter. She’s adamant in her embrace of gestural abstraction and its potential…no negation, no apologies…However we might choose to respond and to understand the experiences that foreground this work, Fishman’s paintings are radiantly relevant to our times.” We were fortunate to have Louise give a School of Art & Design Distinguished Alumna lecture on April 22, 2019. You may share a tribute at https://forms.illinois.edu/sec/605282538, which will be posted on the Art & Design website. More at https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/louise-fishman-painter-dead-1234599995/ and https://www.artforum.com/news/louise-fishman-1939-2021-86268. Arrangements are pending at this time.  

Alumnus Kendall Hill (BFA in New Media 2019) has been named Filter Photo’s Inaugural Fellow for May–October 2021.