Graduate students will exhibit their work at the Interchange Art Exchange at the StARTup Incubator Gallery, Edinboro University, March 11–22, 2013. The exhibition is part of an exchange that showcases the works of IUP MFA students in Edinboro, and Edinboro University MFA students in the Kipp Gallery at IUP.

The Emerging Artists: Annual Graduate Exhibition will take place in the IUP University Museum, Sutton Hall, from April 2–May 18, 2013. The opening reception is on April 6 from 6:00–8:30 p.m.

Works by students Eric Brennan, Liz Dabecco, Crystal Miller, Tyler David Rahl, and Erika Stearly are featured. They include oil paintings, graphite drawings, and mixed media drawings and paintings.

The artists have also been invited to speak about their works at the close of the exhibit.

The exhibit opened January 25 and continues to February 21 in Kauffman Gallery.

• "Sketching with a Band Saw: James McNabb’s Scrap Wood Cityscapes" at www.thisiscolossal.com;
• "Artist Carves Entire Micro-Cities Out Of Wood" at www.architizer.com;
• "Chippings Off an Old Block" at www.dailymail.co.uk.

Project Elevate is an initiative by Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising that gives an artist an opportunity to use billboards as canvases for art that creates a positive narrative within the community.

In this video, Brennan discusses the sequence of images he created to portray the concept of elevating oneself.

Fortushniak's mixed-media work "The Unexpected Return," which uses transferred photographs of toy army men juxtaposed with an ambiguous image of the return of Jesus Christ, is shown in "Lost Horizon: Art about History," a new exhibit at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio. 

“Focus ASIA” will also include a related curated project by the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC) and an engaging program of panel discussions and keynote presentations by leading art professionals from the international art community. This year’s feature project, “Beyond Geography,” is a thought-provoking exhibition of video work and installations that asks: What kind of art do audiences expect to be produced by a diverse group of artists who happen to have lived in Asia or are of Asian descent? When looking at specific materials used by these artists, is one more or less inclined to support or change our perceptions of Asia? Curated by Shengtian Zheng and Katherine Don.

As the presenting sponsor of Focus ASIA, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art will feature a series of 50 interviews with contemporary Chinese artists who have graced the cover of the publication from 2002 to 2012. Yishu Interviews marks the 10-year anniversary of the Vancouver/Taipei-based arts journal. A selection of these interviews will be launched at Art Toronto 2012 and will be accessible online. Yishu Interviews is produced by Shengtian Zheng, Don Li-Leger, Debra Zhou, and Lin Li.

“Palimpsest” is a Coup d’Espace project curated by Steven Silberg and Neil Jones, which explores the constant layering of information in contemporary society and the impact technological advancements have on the ways we represent and receive information.

The exhibit “Time in Change” explores differing perspectives of four artists around the notion of shifting cultural values.

Both shows open the weekend of October 12 and 13, 2012.

Department of Art

McGinnis’ sculptural installation “Greenhouse Project” will be displayed as part of the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts’ “Utopia/Dystopia” from December 21, 2012, to February 17, 2013, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Our society operates under a continual sense of fear. Threats of tsunamis, earthquakes, tribal warfare, and violent extremism circulate through mass-produced imagery and perpetuate a cultural landscape racked with apprehension. As the Mayan calendar predicts that the end of the world is coming on December 21, mass media promotes yet another fantastic apocalyptic scenario. This exhibition imagines our future geopolitical landscape—with optimism and utopian hope or cynicism and dystopian fear.

McGinnis’ body of work “Surveys Revisited” will be shown at the University of Arizona Museum of Art from November 9, 2012, through April 2013. This exhibition is part of DI:D1, a creative collaboration that brings together more than 30 leading museums, cultural centers and organizations, universities, and public agencies connecting the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin Deserts to present innovative interdisciplinary investigations of the desert, including exhibitions, lectures, and commissions.

DI:D1 events and programs will take place throughout the region between September 2012 through April 2013 and engages diverse local, regional, and international audiences in consideration of desert issues and cultures.

Wade Kramm ’97 B.F.A. won Best in Show with his sculpture String Chair, and Elizabeth Plakidas ’12 B.F.A. and Alison Terndrup ’12 B.F.A. won Juror’s Choice Award for Collaboration 4 at the Juried Visual Arts Exhibition.

M.F.A. major Bryce Hemington won the Emerging Artist Award, and M.F.A. major Danna Rzecznik won second place, both in the Artists Market.

Wade Kramm, String Chair

The Juried Visual Arts Exhibition showcases the Greater Pittsburgh region’s vibrant creative community. The festival received hundreds of entries across the spectrum of visual arts, from which the jury panel selected the 61 works on display by 46 artists.

Elizabeth Plakidas and Alison Terndrup, Collaboration 4

Jurors included Adam Welch ’07 M.F.A., curator, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts; Linda Benedict-Jones, curator of photography, Carnegie Museum of Art; Murray Horne, curator, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust; and Michael Olijnyk, codirector, Mattress Factory.

The Artists Market features over 300 artists selling original, handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces of art. It is ranked as one of the top 50 shows in the United States by Sunshine Artist magazine.

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The anthology features twenty-three chapters by some of the most respected and researchers, artists, and educators in the field.

From the back cover:

“Opens up a new conversation about the technological possibilities of contemporary art education. Authors cover topics representing research projects as well as theoretical and practical issues of digital visual culture, including those connected to identity, social interaction, cultural conditions, literacy, and learning. Teachers at all levels will help to prepare their students for the future by addressing the issues raised in this text.”
—Kerry Freedman, Professor and Head of Art Education, Northern Illinois University

Department of Art

The sale will include works by students, instructors, and local potters from the Indiana regional community. Proceeds from the sale help to benefit IUP ceramics programs and events.

The sale will take place at the Robertshaw Building, 650 South 13th St., in Indiana.

The award was presented as part of the 2011 NICHE Awards ceremony, which took place in Philadelphia in conjunction with the winter Buyers Market of American Craft.

The Art Educator of the Year award was established to recognize those individuals who have dedicated their careers to nurturing and guiding the next generation of craft artists.

The NICHE Awards competition annually recognizes excellence and innovation in North American craft. Professors are nominated for the award by their students, and the recipient of the award is chosen based on student essays.

LaRoche’s students described her as “not only instilling a sense of design and appreciation for craft within everyone,” but also having a “desire to push each creative project to the next level.”

LaRoche is the sixth educator to receive the title of Art Educator of the Year from NICHE magazine.

Two of Lynda’s students were selected as finalists in the student division of the 2011 NICHE Awards competition:

• Erin Knisley for the piece “Untitled” in the Jewelry: Sculpture to Wear category and the piece “Lantern Necklace” in the Jewelry: Fine category
• Bifei Cao for the piece “No Parking” in the Metal: Sculptural category

The group exhibition is a discourse regarding the states between isolation and desperation through the figure, environment, and the object as subject matter.

To learn more about this exhibition, please visit the Arthur M. Berger Art Gallery.

The exhibition, “Consumed,” features twenty of Palmisano’s oil paintings in the three-person show.

The exhibit’s curator, Millie Burns, writes “Food is as ubiquitous a subject in art history as the Madonna and child. In this exhibition, contemporary artists bring the subject up to date amidst the current obesity, health obsessions and celebrity chefs cultures.”

The show runs January 17 through February 2, 2011. Opening reception is Thursday, January 20, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Fortushniak’s work is heavily influenced by early modern American painters Albert P. Ryder, George Inness, and Winslow Homer. He said the motivation behind his recent work is to convey the dire state of man and its need for what the gospel offers. Some of these paintings convey biblical references through collaged material from art historical texts while others use appropriated figures from Winslow Homer.

To learn more about this show, please visit the Manifest Gallery website.

To read an article about this show, please see a review on the AEQAI website.

Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art’s

Among the notables included by juror Michael Strueber are Best of Show winner Chuck Olson, for his diptych “The Land: Exploitation;” Merit Award for Drawing winner Kathleen Kase Burk for her “Circular Logic;” and Merit Award for Painting winner Ron Donoughe for “Immaculate Heart of Mary” (pictured here).

Also featuring prominently in the show are IUP graduates; sculptors Norman Ed, Peter Calaboyias, and Eric Hoover; photographer Alexis Dillon; and painters Michael Begenyi and Ned Wert. Other IUP connections include Martha Murphy and Adrienne Heinrich, both of whom are rostered with the College of Fine Arts’ ArtsPath program.

The exhibit, showing at the museum on the campus of St. Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania, runs through February 19, 2011.

The exhibition required artists primarily working in cutting-edge contemporary crafts to interpret “shelter” utilizing green or repurposed materials. During a time in which the society feels threatened by economic, social, and global uncertainties, shelter or the basic desire for refuge becomes a universal pursuit.

The exhibition will be on view through November 28, 2010, at 500 Grant Street in the lobby of the Steel Plaza T-Station in Pittsburgh.

The group showing includes works of Painting and Drawing, Wood, and Ceramics.

Modern Formations Gallery is located at 4919 Penn Avenue Pittsburgh, PA. 412-362-0274. modernformations@hotmail.com 

The exhibit will be on display until the end of October 2010.

Sweeny was elected editor of JSTAE in 2009 and is currently serving a two-year term. Sweeny also recently coedited The Journal of Surveillance and Society (Vol. 7, No.2), “Surveillance, Performance and New Media Art,” with John E. McGrath.

Nestor's video was shown through the month of May 2010 as part of the fifth edition “Video Potential of Experimental Sequential.” Screenings were shown in Der Haag and Milan, Italy. The festival was curated by Ryan Seslow.

To learn more, visit the International Streaming Festival.

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Nestor’s retrospective, “Elapsed: Works from 1970 to 2010,” will include sculptures and videos spanning over thirty years.

The opening reception will be held on October 14 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Nestor will also give a lecture on November 11 at 5:00 p.m. in Sprowls 118A.

The title of the exhibition is “Topographic Configurations, Perspectives Of The Landscape.” The work for this exhibition explores the shapes, forms, and marks created by the impact of man and nature upon the landscape. Works from the exhibition will also be displayed online.

To learn more, visit the Red Lodge Clay Center.

Department of Art

One of the nation's leading furniture makers, Mattia is a faculty member in the Department of Art and the Center for Turning and Furniture Design. He and also serves as senior critic in the Rhode Island School of Design's graduate program in Furniture Design. He received the award at the University of the Arts commencement earlier this month.

First awarded in 1955 to world-renowned portrait and fashion photographer Irving Penn and fashion designer Tina Leser, the Silver Star Alumni Award has been bestowed upon fewer than one hundred graduates of the University of the Arts’s College of Art and Design and College of Performing Arts. The honorees are selected because they are role models for University of the Arts students and because they represent the tradition of educational and artistic excellence that the university’s faculty works hard to achieve.

The College of Fine Arts and the Department of Art are proud to have Alphonse working with our students in the Center for Turning and Furniture Design and in all our wood classes.

This award will fund a one-year project in which Conbere will collaborate with computer programmer Ben Etten. The goal of the project is to create a large, hand-drawn landscape, projected onto a wall, which explores relationships between the man-made and natural worlds. The imagery will unfold over time as the viewer investigates the scenery and influences the look of the drawing using an Xbox game controller.

The show, curated by Jason Franz, reflects upon the allegory of time. Fortushniak’s painting “The Lone Ranger is a Dead Ranger” is highlighted in the exhibit. The show runs through May 14, 2010.

Antemann creates contemporary works in porcelain dealing with intimacy, love, and power in post-modern relationships. Her work is inspired by eighteenth-century porcelain figurines, their place in the home, and the social contexts that are inherited by such materials and history.

Department of Art

Her artistic research addresses issues related to the female body, the language of painting, and the guilty pleasures of eating. Palmisano has exhibited her paintings extensively throughout the USA and Europe. This will be her first exhibition in Spain.

The exhibit was curated by Sergio Gomez.

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The international exhibition will be held in Venice’s Arsenal, the same venue as the infamous Venice Biennial. Lindsay is an assistant professor of art at the University of Texas, Lubbock.

Department of Art

Patricia Belli is the juror for the upcoming Emerging Artists 2010 exhibition to be presented by the University Museum. The exhibit, featuring works by IUP graduate art students, will open Saturday, February 6, with a reception from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. The University Museum is located on the first floor of Sutton Hall.

Belli will be visiting IUP to select the works to be exhibited, give critiques to our students, and present a public talk about her own work.

Belli is also founder of La Espira, a place for artistic reflection and creation. To date, she has brought hundreds of emerging artists from Latin America, particularly Central America, to Nicaragua for an artist residency, where artists of the region work with international visiting artists. Workshops and other activities of La Espira have expanded the role of art in Nicaragua from traditional painting and sculpture to interventions, performances. and interactive works in the public sphere.

This visit is sponsored by the Graduate Art Association, University Museum, Student Art Association, Kipp Gallery, sculpture and print media areas, the College of Fine Arts, and the Student Cooperative Association.

“Camuflaje @ 12°9'19"N 86°16'19"W” references cells, protrusions, mines, or camouflaged contaminants within an architectural space that feeds on the environment they occupy. The building and its exhibition space serve as “biological host” to these elements and become a metaphor for symbiotic or parasitic relationships where both host and appendix become a new hybrid site/being. The title points to the coordinates of the National Palace of Culture in Managua, Nicaragua. It alludes to two realities.

First, to the transformation of architectural spaces in Managua (the National palace of Culture used to be the National Palace of Government, which was taken by “Comandante Cero” in the 1970s), as well as to other spaces of the city of Managua whose walls reveal a state of perpetual transition.

Second, it alludes to seemingly inoffensive situations or elements which are simultaneously harmful to power and dependent relationships and to systems of latent movement that may imperceptibly transform an entire entity.

A three-person jury selected fifteen artists for the Biennial of Visual Arts: Elvis Fuentes, curator of the Museo del Barrio in New York City; Dr. Ivonne Pini, professor at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia; and Antonio Martorell, internationally renowned artist from Puerto Rico.

The three-person jury also selected six of the artists in the Nicaraguan Biennial to represent the country at next year’s Central American Biennial in Panama City, Panamá. The VII Biennial of Visual Arts of Nicaragua will be on view from November 12 to December 14, 2009.

Projects awarded include Mike Stofiel’s (Furniture Design) “Sustainability in Furniture Design, Materials and Finishing,” Chad Whitaker’s (Print Media) “The New Pittsburgh Daguerreotypes,” Emmanuelle Wambach’s (Ceramics) “A Dreamlike Installation,” and Erica Kempler’s (Ceramics) “Crystalline Glazes.”

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The competition invited artists to propose temporary public art projects in the Eastman Reading Garden. The program commissions innovative, thought-provoking works of art that add to the library’s already broad range of educational and cultural programming. Each year, one artist or team of artists is selected to exhibit an installation from May until October in this highly visible space.

IUP Department of Art

The exhibit, “Paper or Plastic?” continues through January 16, 2010.

IUP Department of Art

A Canadian-Chinese artist, Yan states “Making art is a transmigration of my ideas, and thus my spirit, into the physical world. As an artist migrating from China to North America, both my identity and my sculpture pass through the complex filters of different countries, languages, and cultural expectations.”

Her solo exhibition, “Floating” is supporting by a grant from the Canadian Council on the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council.

IUP Department of Art

Transfer Lounge is a project that involves art professionals from Spain and the U.S.A and creates a unique opportunity for artists from different parts of the world to actively exchange their views and ideas around current issues of mobility and transition. The exhibition is in Valencia and Pittsburgh.

The Spanish part of the proposed project is principally coordinated by Toni Calderón, art critic and curator, and Ima Picó, artist and curator. Residencies, events, and exhibitions will take place in Forja ArteContemporáneo, Valencia, in September 2009. c/Lebón 19; Valencia 46023, Spain; Tel: 963-512-080; info@forjaarte.es

The opening of the event in Forja ArteContemporáneo was on September 17, 2009. The exhibition will be open until October 23, 2009.

The U.S.A part of the proposed project is principally coordinated by Carolina Loyola Garcia, artist and curator. Residencies and events will take place in Space, Pittsburgh, from October 2 to November 17, 2009.

Rash, detail, EPS Foam, wall installation, 2009, by Patricia Villalobos Echeverría

ESCaperucita & LIttle Flying Hood, detail, Digital Archival Print, 2009 by Nayda Collazo-Llorens

The exhibition, showing in the annex at 1414 Monterey Street, Pittsburgh, is guest-curated by Katherine Talcott and also features artists Stephanie Armbruster, Jeremy Boyle, Jonny Farringdon, Victoria Hruska, La Toya Frasier, Gary Huck, Andrew Ellis Johnson, Amanda Long, Lindsay O’Leary, Drew Pavelchak, Renee Piechocki, John Riegert, The Urban Gardener: Joan Kimmel and Lynne Weber, and Dror Yaron.

The exhibit opened July 24, 2009, and runs through January 10, 2010.

(Right) Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, “Parasite (40°27’25"N 80°00’48"W)”

This is a site-specific installation that alludes to contaminants and occupied territories. The architectural site becomes a “host” to elements that protrude from the walls as a metaphor to symbiotic and parasitic relationships. The work references camouflage, intrusion, and disease, where both the host and its appendage transform into a new hybrid site/being. Parasite (40°27’25"N 80°00’48"W), detail, installation, EPS Foam, Wexler apartment and building façade, dimensions Variable, 2009

(Above) Nayda Collazo-Llorens, “Unfolding the Triangle”

A mixed-media wall installation, 2009. This site-specific project explores location as an imaginary, physical, geographic, and psychological territory. The Bermuda Triangle, an area that encompasses the artist’s native Puerto Rico, becomes distended, its coordinates stretched and its area unfolded into her current site. A series of connections, multiple narratives, and images are interwoven into a visual structure that explores navigation and displacement. (Image: source material/archive)

The exhibition is curated by Raúl Quintanilla and Rodrigo Gonzales and will be part of a conference that speaks of the state of the environment globally.

The Kerameikon International Competition is one of the most prestigeous venues for the ceramic artist. This year, 170 artists from forty-three countries were accepted, and it is the first first year any artist from the USA was juried into the exhibition. Turner was one of only fourteen USA artists accepted. Out of fifteen awards announced at this year’s competition, Turner’s work received an Honorable Mention and was the only award received by an artist from the USA.

Please visit the Kerameikon International Competition website.

IUP Department of Art

Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s department of art is partnering with the Indiana County Recycling Center for “Animals in Your Trash,” an exhibition of art made from recycled plastics.

The exhibition is on display at the Indiana County Solid Waste Authority’s recycling center at 1715 Route 119 South, Homer City, through Nov. 21. The center is open to the community from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. There is no admission charge for the exhibition.

The project is directed by Steve Loar, a faculty member in IUP’s art department and director of IUP’s Center for Turning and Furniture Design. The artwork on display was created by 21 students who completed Loar’s three-dimensional design course in 2007.

The class emphasized creative problem solving with skills in cutting and building methods. Loar asked the students to translate the idea of bird or dinosaur by using primarily postconsumer waste plastic, most coming from detergent bottles.

The items were created with simple tools like scissors, hole punches, pinking shears, pop rivets, wire and screws, nuts and washers.

Loar’s work with David Edgar, a visiting artist at IUP in November 2007, was the impetus for the “Animals in Your Trash” exhibition. Edgar is known for his creation of artwork from recycled materials in the form of fish and other animals.

“As a teacher of three-dimensional design, I have been experimenting for years with student assignments that used recycled materials, but without great personal satisfaction. When I stumbled upon the new work of David Edgar, whom I had previously met in 1999, I had a true ‘a-ha’ moment,” Loar said. “It seemed that all the hopes of my previous attempts were embodied in his one plastic fish.

“The (2007) IUP common freshman reader, ‘Field Notes from a Catastrophe,’ added fuel to my longtime interest in physically heightening my students’ awareness of our planet’s limited resources, our country’s nonchalant view of waste and the creative individual’s potential role in initiating action.”

Loar’s students began work with the recycled materials by making a fish brooch, followed by the creation of a fish using Edgar’s basic procedure. Students in Loar’s fall 2007 class were asked to create birds, and the spring 2008 class was asked to create dinosaurs.

“The assignments were not about making a model of a real dinosaur or making a true likeness of a bird, but rather to attract the viewer, activate their imagination and have them understand the idea without being told,” Loar said.

For information about tours of the recycling center, contact Vikki Saltsman at (724) 479-0444 or via e-mail at vikki76@gmail.com. For information about the exhibition, contact Loar at (724) 465-0758 or via e-mail at slowtech@iup.edu.