Studio Arts

Kira Dominguez Hultgren was recently featured in the New York Times Style Magazine on September 11, 2023. Read the article here.

Yvette Mayorga (BFA 2015 Painting) was recently featured in VOGUE magazine. You may read the article here.

Ellen McDowell, 1947 BFA Painting alumna, passed away Thursday, August 17, 2023. With other volunteers, she helped found the Daily Bread Soup Kitchen in Champaign, IL, which still thrives, serving meals to almost 400 individuals on a daily basis. Her obituary may be found here.

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

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.