Newsletter, January 21, 2025
Newsletter from Art & Art History

Student Opportunities
The King Awards
In 2013, Gretchen King (BA in English ’59) worked with the Department of Art & Art History to establish the King Competition and Exhibition, the department’s first juried student exhibition. The King family generously supports the annual competition and exhibition, allowing the department to award undergraduate and graduate students monetary prizes, and to showcase their work in the Visual Arts Complex.
Ten total awards are given to degree-seeking students in the Department of Art & Art History.
First Place: $3000 for one Grad and one Undergrad
Second Place: $2000 for one Grad and one Undergrad
Third Place: $1000 for one Grad and one Undergrad
Honorable mention: $500 for two Grads and two Undergrads
Deadline for Submission: Monday, February 3, 2025 at 11:59 PM
Web page with application link
Art & Art History Scholarships
The Department of Art and Art History offers merit-based awards for undergraduate and graduate students that are made possible through the generosity of our donors. Typically, the funds associated with these awards defray tuition expenses and are posted to the student's bill. A faculty committee reviews the applications each spring semester and determines the number and amount of awards. Scholarships vary from $100 – $2,000.
Questions? Please contact Katie Larson: katie.larson@colorado.edu
Deadline: March 15th, 2025
Eligibility & Rules
- Undergraduate students: Majors and BAM students in Art History or Arts Practices, may apply
- Graduate students: MFA Arts Practices students only
- Students must be currently enrolled in Art and Art History courses
- Post acceptance thank you required for distribution of scholarship funds

Ceramic Visiting Artist Lecture
Julie Poitras Santos
Monday, February 10, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20
Artist, writer and curator Julie Poitras Santos’s transdisciplinary work connects ecological thinking and earth science disciplines with immersive experience and community engagement. Her site-specific work includes video, installation, and public projects. The relationship between site, story, and mobility fuels a range of research and production, investigating the relationship between natural histories and individual story; walking as a form of listening to site; and material agency in an age of climate change.
Poitras Santos’ solo and collaborative work has been exhibited in the Portland Museum of Art, ME; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Extended, Sweden; Queens Museum, NY; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Karlskrona Konsthall, Sweden; Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain; Reykjanesbaer Art Museum, Iceland; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, among others; and at International Walking Art conferences in Spain (2024), Greece (2019) and France (2017). In 2016, with the help of a Kindling Fund Grant through the Warhol Regional Regranting Program, Poitras Santos initiated Platform Projects/Walks, a platform for curating walking artworks within local communities.

Visiting Artist Lecture
Jonathan VanDyke
Monday, February 17, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20
Jonathan VanDyke's work reflects on the unfolding of art objects in dynamic relationship to the passing of time. He seeks a reclamation of the sensorial realm, with an emphasis on modes of attention and embodiment. Manifested through installations, paintings, videos, sculpture, writings, collaborative projects, and live and durational works featuring performers from the queer community of which he is a part, VanDyke's work prioritizes slowness, pauses, subtexts, and doubt.
The artist's object-based work is often the result of "piecing": the base for his complex paintings, for example, are textiles that have been worn by friends and companions, then painted and stained through slow processes of accumulation, cut into shapes and patterns, and sewn together. The resulting double-sided works, which are often shown in sculptural and architectural installations, are conceived of as tools for long looking. His durational performances have stretched for as long as 48-hours, such as The Patient Eye, in which he asked The Columbus Museum to center itself around a collection of historic quilts, made primarily by anonymous women and most of which had never been on public view: he observed these works silently for 7 days, joined throughout by community members.
VanDyke studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow as the recipient of a Rotary International Fellowship. He received his MFA from The Milton Avery School at Bard College. He was a resident at the Atlantic Center for the Arts through a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, where he was mentored by the artist Paul Pfeiffer.
Art History Grad Student Symposium
The Art History Grad Student Symposium, Friday Feb 28, 2:00-5:00pm. Our MA and PhD students share their research!
Visual Arts Complex RM 308
Snacks and coffee provided!
Faculty News

Kim Dickey, Professor, Ceramics
Dazzle of Darkness
January 23 - May 4, 2025 @ BMoCA
Opening Reception: January 23, 2025
6-8pm, Open to the Public, Pay From Your Heart
This exhibition showcases 31 artists who illuminate darkness through diverse media, ranging from storytelling to scientific experimentation, photography, fiber optics, film, and sculpture. Their works expand awareness on personal, universal, and spiritual levels.
While forces of light and dark are often simplified as opposites in a dualistic world, the multifaceted works in Dazzle of Darkness expose this false dichotomy. The artists challenge the one-dimensional reality we have been conditioned to accept and offer a gateway into a new consciousness of the subtle and infinite nuances of the universe.

Marina Kassianidou, Assistant Professor, Painting & Drawing

Yumi Janairo Roth, Professor, Sculpture & Post-studio Practices
Exhibition: Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David, Last Year’s Wonders All Surpassed
23 January - 15 February 2025
David B. Smith Gallery
1543 A Wazee St. Denver, CO 80202
Opening reception: Thursday, January 23rd, 5—8 pm
David B. Smith Gallery presents Last Year’s Wonders All Surpassed, a collaborative exhibition by Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David. The exhibition, whose title is drawn from the advertising phrases of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, examines the place of the Filipino cowboy on the world stage.