UAAC Conference Here!

The Department of Art and Design is pleased to host the 2009 Universities Art Association of Canada conference. Bringing together Canadian academics from the fields of Art History, Fine Arts and Design since 1967, the UAAC is always an occasion for stimulating discussion about innovative research. Visit the website.

Welcome New Faculty!

The Department of Art & Design is pleased to announce the arrival of two new faculty members to the University of Alberta:

Amanda Boetzkes is an art historian with research interests in contemporary art, theory and criticism, especially as it relates to earth art from postminimalism to the present, new media technologies, aesthetics, ecological ethics, and historiography. Amanda earned her PhD from McGill University in 2007 and held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University from 2007-2009, where she completed her book At the Limit of Form: The Ethics of Contemporary Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). She has taught modern and contemporary art history at McGill University and Tufts University. Her current research focuses on the topic of waste, consumption and contemporary art.

Maria Whiteman is an artist, photographer and writer who has taught studio art, multimedia, and visual and cultural studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Maria has exhibited her work at the McMaster Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary), the Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum (Helsinki), and Urbanscape Gallery (Toronto). In addition to writing several catalogue essays, she has published in Resources for Feminist Research and contributed to the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Maria’s current projects include “Critical Peripateticism,” a multimedia project she began during a two-month residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2007. In spring 2009 she will be working at the Ross Creek Arts Centre to complete work on “natural histories,” and in summer 2009, she is teaching a course in Vilnius (Lithuania) on urban practices and critical theory. Maria Whiteman has an MFA from Pennsylvania State University.

Major Awards in Art and Design

From December 16, 2008 – January 17, 2009 the Fine Arts Building Gallery (FAB) presented WAVE: Blurring Boundaries. WAVE brought together 165 pieces of staff and student work from five international Art and Design programs including the School of Design, Ewha Womans University, Korea; the Camberwell College of Arts, London, UK; the University for the Creative Arts, UK; the Cardiff School of Art & Design, UK; and the Department of Art & Design, University of Alberta, Canada. After the successful presentation at the FAB Gallery with close to a thousand people attending, the exhibition was then presented in Seoul, Korea, at Ewha Womans University where the WAVE Awards were announced. Three U of A students were honoured with the following awards: Nathan Grimson won top overall prize for his work landmeasure 1 and WAVE Young Artist Prizes were given to Matthew Arrigo for his work A Cognitive Lesson in Primitivism and to Jaime Calayo for his work The Best Things In Life Aren’t Things.

Landmeansure 1
Etching, Chine Colle, Mezzotint
Winter, 2009

Each year the Lyvia Stoyke Foundation provides three awards to graduating Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Design students. Lyvia Stoyke was a young artist, designer, business woman and adventurer dedicated to making a difference in the world. Through this foundation created in her name she has been able to live out her desire to foster the arts, aid women in need, help children, alleviate poverty, and protect the environment. This year Alaine Mackenzie received the Leadership Award and Sergio Serrano won the Best in Show award for the BDes 2009 Exhibition. Jennifer Poburan received Best in Show award for her work in the BFA 2009 Exhibition. Link to Stoyke Foundation website: www.livia.ca/

For the last 13 years, the artwork of a student from the department of Art and Design has been chosen as the promotional image for the Nextfest Festival. This year, Brian Lee, a graduating Bachelor of Fine Arts student from the University of Alberta; was chosen to visually represent Nextfest. His painting Green Brian will appear on all Nextfest 2009 promotional material. Giving an opportunity to new and vibrant young artists, Nextfest 2009 exhibitions will showcase thirteen U of A students. Jonathan Kaiser, Chelsea Boos, James Boychuk-Hunter, Eric Burton, Jeannette Egan, Jessica Kowalchuck, Galia Kwetny, Brian Lee, Martina MacFarlane, Hui Yang, Kristen Keegan, Micheal Cor, and Lisa Rezansoff, all recent Bachelor of Fine Arts graduates (2009) or alumni will be featured in the visual art component of NextFest 2009. Visual Art Exhibitions were organized by curator and 2007 BFA graduate Josee Aubin Ouelette. Nextfest’s visual component remains an exciting aspect of the festival and an important venue for University of Alberta Art and Design students. Link to NextFest: http://www.nextfest.ca/

University of Alberta students are getting great jobs!

Jesse Sherburne (MDes 2007) has received a full time continuing faculty position at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, where he will be working in the design foundation program. Sherburne’s most recent project, Art Bar, was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Alberta and set all attendance records for the gallery as well as being held over twice. Art Bar consisted of a fully functioning bar environment housed in the exhibition space of the gallery. Stemming from Sherburne’s research interest, the project challenged definitions of participatory art work, conceptual and installation art, the practice
of design, and social engagement in a context generated by the experience of art. Sherburne has also recently received a number of public art commissions including a large scale architectural installation for the City of Edmonton’s Centennial Transit Garage.

Michelle Murillo (MFA 2006) has received a tenure-track position at the University of Texas in Arlington. Michelle’s most recent project, an installation titled Destinations, presents two hundred silkscreen-on-glass reproductions of old postcards. The postcards are objects of personal history, records of travel and lived experiences that become metaphorical keys to maps of memory, place and identity. Destinations was exhibited at the end of Murillo’s artist residency in the SUB30 PROGRAM in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Matthew Rangel (MFA 2008) and Amie Rangel (MFA 2008) have received teaching jobs at Sequoia College in their home state of California. Matthew will be teaching drawing, 2D design and is already involved in a regional community project entitled, the Kaweah Land and Arts Festival, which will focus on connecting the community to the surrounding landscape through a wide range of narratives and story telling. Amie will be teaching drawing, 2D design and/or gallery studies. The two of them look forward
to returning to their childhood home of California’s great Central Valley.

More Student News

Jingjing Zheng, (MA candidate, History of Art, Design and Visual Culture) has been invited to participate in the International Consortium on Art History’s (ICAH) 7th International Springtime Academy, at the Université de Montréal from May 11-15, 2009. The theme this year is “Art and the Notion of Civilization.” Zheng’s talk, based on the first section of her thesis on three female Asian North American artists (Liu Hung, Jin-me Yoon, and Nikki S. Lee), is titled “The Alterity and Fluidity of Identity in the Globalized World: Works by Asian American Artist Liu Hung.” Identity, globalization, and pluralism provide the theoretical framework of her thesis.  Zheng’s presentation at the Springtime Academy is supported in part by the ICAH organizing committee.

Samantha Mallett (MA candidate, History of Art, Design and Visual Culture) has had her paper, “Pop Culture on the Path to Sustainability,” accepted at the upcoming Environmental Studies Association of Canada (ESAC) Annual Conference, to be held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, at Carleton University, May 27-29, 2009. Building on Stuart Hall and John Fiske's critical theories of popular culture, Mallet argues that TV shows like The Simpsons can become important political vehicles by regularly addressing the ecological problems that confront today's world.