This article featured in the New York Times Style Magazine is written by Megan O'Grady, Assistant Professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies. "Rather than prioritizing confession and catharsis, today’s authors are focusing on the question of who gets to share their version of things and interrogating the form, along with themselves."
For its 25th anniversary exhibition this year, Dr. George Rivera and the Artnauts decided to exhibit in a country where they saw a major crisis of contention: the United States. With increasing tensions surrounding COVID and race relations, the exhibition titled Uncanny Times aims to address the discord that divides and alienates us. Artists were asked to explore this theme using whatever medium they wished.
Roth at CU Boulder says that graduate programs are evolving to reflect students’ changing goals. In the past, most aspired to academic positions or commercial sales through gallery representation. “Now many students are exploring socially engaged, field-based practice, starting their own small businesses instead of going into the academic or gallery world,” Roth explains. “Students are looking for a third way.”
The Side by Side project teaches high school students about local birds’ ecosystems through performative arts and scientific observation. Through a grant provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), this group of 11 high school students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) spent their summer days observing the birds interacting with the environment through the guided arts and sciences approach of the project.
In lieu of a gallery, Adam Milner’s sculptures can be seen all around New York City — from a bodega to a dog’s collar. Paintings belong on the wall, and sculptures belong on pedestals, right? Maybe not, according to Adam Milner, whose current exhibition Public Sculptures is premised on spontaneous encounters with art — not in a museum or gallery, but in the spaces we least expect: those we frequent as part of our daily lives.
Sama Alshaibi talks about her experience in the MFA program at the University of Colorado Boulder and her upcoming 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Landing in Colorado just months before 9-11 Sama Alshaibi, an Iraqi immigrant, found her world forever changed. Looking for opportunities to make work about the complex history of the US Middle East relationship, CU Boulder’s Department of Art & Art History became a home for her creativity to thrive.
"It's a real testament to the excellent work of our faculty, staff, and students done across all of our disciplines that we've sustained this national ranking." says Yumi Janairo Roth, Chair of the Art & Art History Department, CU Boulder. The University of Colorado Boulder Graduate Fine Art program, has been ranked 23rd in the nation, according to U.S.News & World Report's rankings.
As a CU undergrad, Jessica Dee Sawyer (ArtHist’03) studied the bold black lines of Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky’s striking use of color. When it came time to redesign the logo and packaging for Smarties, the beloved crunchy candy pellets that have remained unchanged since the 1950s, Jessica tapped into her background as an art history major.
When Megan O’Grady looks at a painting, she doesn’t just examine its composition. She’s interested in the artist behind the brushstrokes and the social context in which the artist is working. This month she explored an extraordinary, yet little written about, history of Black abstraction in a piece for The New York Times: Once Overlooked, Black Abstract Painters Are Finally Given Their Due. CU Boulder Today spoke with O’Grady, a critic and essayist who recently joined the university as assistant professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies in Art and Art History, about why it’s important to revisit art history, its movements and its artists.
Alejandra Abad and Román Anaya, University of Colorado Boulder fine arts graduate students, developed the “Our Wishes/Nuestros Deseos” project as a way to create community art during a pandemic. The concept is to reclaim flags, using them to embody inclusiveness instead of as divisive symbols.
