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.
Professor George Rivera created this public art piece—his first ever billboard work—to address hate as a response to the current political climate, Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 pandemic. It seeks to confront this issue in a simple and straightforward message without specifying any specific group.
The focus on process and abstraction harnessed at CU Boulder became an essential component of Takenaga’s artistic career. Today, Takenaga, a current Guggenheim memorial fellow and professor emerita of Williams College, is celebrated for her large-scale paintings and the way in which they teeter between abstraction and something slightly representational.
For art students, it can feel like the pathway into a career should fall into one of two strictly separate categories: art maker or art historian. Starting in the spring of 2021, however, this divide will be challenged with the arrival of the University of Colorado Boulder’s newest art and art history faculty member, Megan O’Grady, who is also an art critic and essayist for The New York Times.
The works in the exhibition Citizenship: A Practice of Society exemplify how artists act as citizens. The exhibit features five new commissions approaching issues that have become more pressing this year: voter registration, native lands, access to information, legislation on citizenship and human connection. One of these, “Property Rights” by Yumi Janairo Roth, is the artist’s exploration of how our image of public land and the American West is built, maintained, accessed, controlled and delineated.
