Studio Arts

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

Ben Grosser was recently featured in La Presse, Montreal’s main daily. Ben Grosser, l’antinumérique (Ben Grosser, the anti-numerical), focuses on his social media research broadly, from Demetricator projects to Zuckerberg film to Minus. À la recherche du réseau social idéal (In search of the ideal social network), quotes Grosser extensively and discusses his Minus project.  

1969 MFA alumnus, Vernon Fisher, has passed away. Obituary from the Fort Worth Star Telegram. Article from Denton Record Chronicle.

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.  

School of Art & Design Re-Fashioned Fashion Show Saturday, May 6, 2023 6:30 p.m. Siebel Center for Design

Olivia Howell, Studio Art senior, earned her first NCAA Indoor Mile Championship Title and claimed her second-straight Indoor First Team All-American nod. Olivia broke the Albuquerque Convention Center facility record that was set by three-time Olympian and Nike athlete Shannon Rowbury on Jan 16, 2010! The article may be found here.

Studio Art: Painting Professor Laurie Hogin was featured in the Winter 2023 edition of Chicago Life Magazine. Print copies were available to New York Times and Wall Street Journal subscribers and online here. About Chicago Life Magazine Chicago Life, an award-winning, 4-color glossy magazine with articles on politics, home design, health, the environment, economics, arts, culture, book and restaurant reviews, is celebrating 26 years of bi-monthly publishing. Chicago Life is distributed in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal in the Chicago area with a circulation of more than 80,000. By CHICAGO LIFE MAGAZINE The 2023 Winter Issue by Chicago Life Magazine can now be seen online! Simply the following link to view the as-printed version. https://online.fliphtml5.com/crwsg/nfdb/

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.

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).

ARTS 280 Exhibition: Paper Parade Bloc Gallery October 9 - October 15, 2022 Join us in celebrating an exhibition of personae in paper and cardboard. Students in ARTS280 (beginning sculpture) have crafted masks from cardboard and paper, revealing aspects of their identities and narratives of personal importance. Works explore ideas on anxiety, space-making, fantasy, myths, legends, family, and storytelling.

Congratulations to Clinical Assistant Professor, Chiara Vincenzi, who recently won the 2022 Fiber Art Now Teacher Excellence Grant. The teacher grant is awarded to educators who bring fiber and textile art into the classroom. Teachers are encouraged to inspire students with hands-on experiences that enrich students’ lives. She was awarded the Fiber Arts Now Teacher Excellence Grant for her project that involves teaching students to design, laser cut, and construct a rigid heddle loom. The article is in the October issue. Fiber Art Now may be found here.  

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

 

Professor Ben Grosser with the School of Art and Design was recently named an Assembly Fellow for the Berkman Klein Center’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM) at Harvard University. This inaugural cohort of fellows includes thirteen interdisciplinary practitioners from a range of industries who will work together to "build new interfaces, implement novel protocols, and create additional artifacts that reimagine digital social space in service of democracy and the public interest." The fellowship will allow Grosser to expand his work on artistic counter-approaches to mainstream social media design, especially those that decouple online sociality from big social media’s drive for endless growth. Specifically, he will study, refine, and extend his social media platform Minus. Minus is a "finite social network" where users get only 100 posts—for life. The work's rejection of big social media's relentless focus on more radically reimagines the rules of today’s most widely used networks by focusing, simply, on less. The platform aligns with RSM’s broader goal to develop and demonstrate what a healthy information ecosystem could look like, particularly in how it approaches metrics and feeds. Minus shuns growth-inducing metrics such as “likes,” “followers,” or “shares.” Its feed is reverse chronological, meaning there is no algorithm that preferences the most polarizing posts or that constrains what a user sees to content the platform identifies as most engaging for them. The only visible metric on Minus is the dwindling number of posts each user has left out of their original allotment of 100. The idea behind the “less” approach is to see what online social interaction feels like when the underlying platform isn't designed to induce user engagement, and to evaluate how this approach might foster a healthier environment for online sociality. “Visible metrics and the algorithmic profiling of individual interests for the purposes of driving user engagement is largely responsible for many of the problems we see with social media today, from extreme polarizing speech to trolling and misinformation, as well as the ways these platforms damage human psychology and threaten democracy,” explained Grosser. The project launched in 2021 as part of a solo exhibition at the arebyte Gallery in London; arebyte also commissioned the work. Grosser’s interests lie in how the growth-obsessed designs of today's social platforms direct how users behave and how online community develops in ways that are most in service of big tech's obsessions with infinite growth and endless profit. A finite social network like Minus, which limits lifetime participation, invites users to think differently about how they use their precious time and space. “Part of this design is a reaction to how mainstream social media treats our time and attention as if they are infinite,” said Grosser. “These platforms craft interfaces that make us feel like we should keep contributing as much as possible to be visible, to feel good about ourselves. But the reality is we don’t have forever. Our time and attention are not infinite. So, what if a social media platform reflected that?” With the Harvard fellowship, Grosser will analyze how people’s behavior and experience with Minus is different from that of other platforms. The research will explore what is possible when you alter or simply eradicate some of the ubiquitous fundamentals of mainstream social media  like visible metrics and feed algorithms, and how designing intentional limits can transform activity on a platform. The findings will help him make revisions to Minus and to generate a set of guidelines or rules for designing healthier interfaces at scale. “Some people have shown up on Minus with trolling activity and hate speech like any other platform,” said Grosser, “but those users and their posts fade away very quickly.” Without visible metrics goading users to post whatever gets the most reaction or a feed algorithm preferencing harmful posts that activate users into compulsive engagement, an online social network can foster a healthier, safer, and more contemplative environment. This Berkman Klein Assembly Fellows cohort is comprised of practitioners who are actively engaged in changing the online landscape to benefit all people by using their industry expertise, whether it be technology, journalism, child development, or litigation. As an artist practitioner and an interdisciplinary scholar at a major research university, Grosser is in an unusual position to approach RSM’s charge to solve social media’s most challenging problems. “It’s that way in which art has license to rethink everything–to change all the rules as opposed to tweaking what exists already,” said Grosser. “So, I’m looking at what big tech makes and how their designs affect and change culture, individuals, and human psychology, and then imagining and crafting radical manipulations or reimaginations that people can try.” In addition to teaching at the School of Art and Design, Grosser is the co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a faculty affiliate with the School of Information Sciences and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

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

Spring 2022 Re-Fashioned Fashion Show May 7, 2022 6:00 p.m. (immediately following the BFA Exhibition Opening/Reception at Link Gallery & Krannert Art Museum) Siebel Center for Design, 1208 S. 4th Street, Champaign

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

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      

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/