Alumni

Elizabeth Jane (Manley) Delacruz, 69, of Champaign, died the morning of Dec 9, 2021. She was known to her family and close friends by her nickname, Betsy. The core of her being was her love for her daughters. Her daughters returned this love by caring for her in her final days at home in hospice care. She passed in comfort and peace surrounded by her daughters, her close family members, and her best friend. She grew up in Rantoul, IL where she graduated from Rantoul Township High School Class of 1970. She has resided in Champaign for the last several decades. Betsy received a BFA and MA in Art Education from the University of Illinois and received her licensure as an art teacher from University of Florida. She taught K-12 art across several schools in Illinois and Florida. She was passionate about the vital role creativity and artistic expression play in life and her mission as an art educator was affirming to students that creativity and the ability to make art exists in everyone. She also took joy in supporting students and opening her classroom as a space to come talk or just hangout if they needed. She joked that her only request was that they bring a piece of trash from the school grounds as an entrance fee. After completing her doctoral degree at Florida State University, she was hired by the University of Illinois Art & Design Department and spent 24 years as a Professor of Art Education teaching students in the US and from around the world how to become art teachers. She mentored many students through the doctoral program and cared deeply about supporting young researchers, writers, and teachers. During her time at the University, she served as the Chair of Art Education, editor of Visual Arts Research, a leading scholarly journal in art education, and was active in publishing research. Her scholarly interests included art traditions of culturally diverse societies, new digital and multimedia art forms in contemporary culture, the convergence of technology and education, and how art education practices advance social justice and civil society. She was a nationally recognized professor receiving multiple national awards including NAEA Higher Education Art Educator of the Year. After retirement she continued mentoring and teaching students in online graduate programs for the University of Florida and Eastern Illinois University. To her, art education was a vessel for engagement: with art, with people, and with the world. Her loved ones, friends, colleagues, and anyone who met her will never forget her playful and vibrant nature that she brought to everything she did. She enjoyed spending hours on Saturday mornings tending to her large side garden and chatting with passersby who would stop and admire it. She ran an antique store in Rantoul called the Crystal Ship in her young adulthood and has always been an avid thrifter. She had a full and adventurous spirit, always looking for new projects to take on and creatively make her own. She loved fixing stuff up (she joked her tool of choice was duct tape) and restoring and painting old furniture. Her faith and the McKinley Presbyterian Church community were also very important parts of her life. She was caring and generous and always sought out opportunities to help and give back to those around her. It was not uncommon for her to open her house to people needing a place to stay. She will always be remembered for her open and willing spirit, courage to be exactly who she was, and immense strength through the challenges she faced. She is survived by her daughters Emily and Grace, her sister Margaret Greenway, brother-in-law Roger, and her brother Lynn Manley. She was preceded in death by her parents Warren and Lois Manley and her brother John Manley. A Memorial Service will be January 29^th, 11 a.m., at McKinley Memorial Presbyterian Church, 809 S 5^th St., Champaign IL 61820. A virtual option will be available through Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/McKinleyChurch A reception will follow, pending Covid restrictions. In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory may be made to McKinley Memorial Presbyterian Church: https://tithe.ly/give_new/www/#/tithely/give-one-time/2133263 Condolences and messages for the family may be sent to the following address: Delacruz Family, in care of McKinley Presbyterian Church, 809 S 5^th St., Champaign IL 61820

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumnus John Hrehov (BFA 1985 Painting) as the 2021 recipient of its Recharge New Surrealist Prize. The $7,000 award was created for painters living in the U.S. and U.S. Territories who are working in the New Surrealist Style. Hrehov, who lives in Fort Wayne, IN, portrays objects and scenes from his home and neighborhood in paintings and drawings that underscore the miraculous in the everyday. The Recharge New Surrealist Prize is supported by funding granted to NYFA by the Gu Family of The Recharge Foundation, a private non-profit organization that aims to promote cross-cultural craftsmanship preservation and create dialogues between antiques, high jewelry, fine arts, and technology. For more information: https://www.nyfa.org/blog/introducing-john-hrehov-receives-2021-recharge-new-surrealist-prize/ https://johnhrehov.com/  

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.