A recent review from the  exhibition,

“Heterogeneous: States of American,” Josh Byers, David Cuatlacuatl, and Faith Goodman @ River House Arts

 curated by Brian Carpenter and the Contemporary Art Toledo exhibition that is currently up at River House Arts (featuring UT Art Department alumna Faith Goodman).

https://loranitude.wordpress.com/tag/toledo-contemporary-art/

Just wanted to share the release of the Nat.Brut article featuring Beryl Satter’s essay and art work from the CVA’s gallery exhibition Piece it Together.

http://www.natbrut.com

© Mysoon Rizk, PhD / November 2016

On November 3, 2016, a colleague and I drove six students for an hour and a half to Oberlin, Ohio, to hear African-American artist Fred Wilson (b.1954) speak about his work on the occasion of two exhibitions he installed this past year at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum in this small college town (my alma mater). We were already familiar with the artist, each one of us having often admired his black glass sculpture Iago’s Mirror (2009), acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) in 2010 — and currently on view in the TMA’s Gallery 6 for the temporary exhibition Shakespeare’s Characters: Playing the Part. Listening to a talk by the 1999 recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant was inspiring and exciting. Getting to see his work in both a solo exhibition (Fred Wilson: Black to the Powers of Ten) and in the site-specific installation Wildfire Test Pit was amazing.

As a generous, instructive, insightful orator, Fred Wilson was spectacular, sharing slides as he described an artistic trajectory and longtime interest in understanding museums through their collections (“what’s there, what’s not there”). Starting out by invitation from the Maryland Historical Society, his attention began training on the Atlantic slave trade, the Indian slave trade, and movements of oil — or as he came to call such dynamics, Movement of Blackness. Giving form to institutional memory by “mining” museum collections, Wilson would feature decommissioned possessions, like slave shackles or a public whipping post, side by side with an institution’s finest silver and furniture. He spoke about installing over 50 portraits of Daniel Webster at the Hood Museum, in Dartmouth College, at the same time as a series of plaster cast busts identifying human specimens from around the world. In the case of the latter, Wilson hid racial inscriptions with sashes of mourning, to encourage viewers to see them as people, including a cast of Ota Benga, the Congolese youth exhibited at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904 who would end up committing suicide in Virginia 12 years later.

In mining the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin, Mr. Wilson found himself magnetized by Edmonia Lewis whose story “remains obscured by rumor and mystery” as one scholar puts it. An orphan of African-American and Native-American heritage from New York, Lewis began to study art at Oberlin College in 1859. A few months after the Civil War had begun, she was accused of poisoning two (white) friends, beaten by a mob, arrested, and tried. Although acquitted, she remained a target and eventually left without graduating. Heading to Boston, she secured further artistic training, before taking up residency in Rome, Italy for a few years, where Lewis enjoyed success for her marble statuary. After returning to the States she disappears from the historical record. Wilson called the nineteenth-century sculptor a “guiding light” for his site-specific installation at the Oberlin museum, which he entitled Wildfire Test Pit for the Indian name given to Edmonia Lewis and the “archaeological term for a site you dig to see what’s there.”

Our field trip to Oberlin proved intensely rewarding, inspiring reflection long afterward: on the creative process, erasure and exclusion, the construct of race as well as concepts of time or memory, the roles of museums in compressing histories, individuals recorded and those forgotten, objects acknowledged and those to be buried. In the coming weeks, students will be sharing their own thoughts about the opportunity to hear from a practicing contemporary artist and to experience the work firsthand. Please stay tuned! Fred Wilson’s work remains on view at the Allen Memorial Art Museum until June 2017.

More than 20 advanced students from the University of Toledo’s Concepts in Art, Studio and Theory course will exhibit their work at the annual holiday exhibition – ‘Tis the Secor, Saturday, December 12. The event features work from the community of artists who maintain studio space inside the historic Secor building as well as 30+ vendors offering handmade goods and crafts for holiday shopping at the Market Place area. Live music will fill the air as local bands perform throughout the night. Admission is free.

The students’ unique and personal practices explored current and complex issues through a diversity of works ranging from sculpture, photography, design, and ceramics. Spanning the mystical, ideological and political, the exhibition is the culmination of each student’s investigation into both the practice and theory of their chosen subject.

The Concepts in Art, Studio and Theory (C.A.S.T.) course prepares studio art majors for their Bachelor of Arts degree through an exploration of what it means to construct a creative and meaningful life as an individual focused on the arts. The course provides an experiential and creative forum that is bound by theories and practices of contemporary art, inspired by visiting artists, and embedded in the Toledo art community. It is in this context that emerging artists hone previously acquired skills and knowledge to create self-directed works of art based on concepts, research, and class critiques. These works of art are at the center of this exhibition.

’Tis the Secor Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/events/172608433084158

Concepts in Art, Studio and Theory (C.A.S.T.) EXHIBITION
Saturday, December 12th / 5pm – 11pm [one night only]

Secor Building [6th floor of the Secor Building]
Room 650 and 645
425 Jefferson Avenue Toledo Ohio

Contact: Brian Carpenter | Brian.Carpenter@UToledo.edu

At the April 1, Assessment Appreciation Lunch, Dr. Mysoon Rizk, Associate Professor of Art History, received the Academic Program Award for excellence in assessment. This is the second year running that professor Rizk has been recognized for this achievement. The Art History program was nominated this year due to the strong assessment measures its faculty employ to determine how and what students are learning, and the clarity with which they link those measures to the results and subsequent actions they take in response to the results received. To do this, the Art History faculty designate particular assignments, which are then evaluated against a common rubric. The results are totaled, and shared with all faculty, who meet together to determine if any results are lower than expected, and what should be done to address any such result.

Image of space by Xueling Zhao

The University of Toledo Department of Art will be among the stars this spring, beginning Tuesday, April 14 in Ritter Planetarium. As part of the Planetarium program “Stars: Powerhouses of the Universe,” photographs made by students will be on display in the lobby gallery and on the dome as well.

The exhibition, titled “Faux Space,” is the third such photo show at the planetarium. The image on display were made in the Department of Art’s Fall 2014 introductory photo course, ART 2030: Photography, taught by Professor Deborah Orloff. Students were challenged to create photos that evoke a sense of space – in the extraterrestrial sense. They used a diverse range of materials to create their images including food, toys, pots, glitter, fire, lasers, smoke, and oils. All images were made with a DSLR camera; they are not computer-generated or taken from space.

The gallery images will be on display throughout the summer whenever Ritter Planetarium is open to the public.

Student artists featured in the exhibition include:
Shalissa Bailey, Jamie Campbell, Andrea Fackelman, Emily Frank, June Galvin and Danielle Hedger; Qiong Jia, Leanne Jones, Chariti Lockhard, Nicelle McCuchen, Kathlynn Meyer and Kayla Perez; Alexandra Ray, Daniel Rivera, Madison Roy, Jamie Snyder, Drew Tansel, Chelsea Thompson, Xueling Zhao and Yue Zhao.

The work of Eric Zeigler, who teaches photography and new media at The University of Toledo, is the subject of a photo exhibition on display now at The UT Center for the Visual Arts, Clement Gallery. This free exhibition is open daily from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and will be up throughout the summer.

Zeigler says the photos were a happy byproduct of pursuing other photography projects. As such, the photos cover a broad range of subject matter from a damaged car whose missing front end allows it to slip neatly into its unusual parking space, to images of outdoor scenes that will have you asking curiously, “what is that?”

More information about Zeigler and his work can be found on his artist’s web site at http://ericzeigler.com/

Visit the UT Department of Art at www.utoledo.edu/comm-arts/art/index.html

Eric Zeigler
Photography & New Media Faculty
The University of Toledo, Department of Art
Eric.Zeigler@utoledo.edu
419.530.8300

A million ceramic and biodegradable bones are installed on the National Mall to represent lives lost to genocide and mass atrocities worldwide. Over three thousand bones were made by UT students and community members. Photo credit: Karen Roderick-Lingeman

Senior Lecturer Karen Roderick-Lingeman and Professor of Art Tom Lingeman traveled to Washington, D.C. in June to deliver and install nearly 3000 ceramic bones made in Toledo to an international art installation on the National Mall called “One Million Bones.” Participants from across the world contributed bone sculptures in an effort to raise awareness of the scale of the loss of life in ongoing genocide and mass atrocities worldwide.

Beginning last fall, Roderick-Lingeman worked with her students in 3D Fundamentals of Form to create hundreds of ceramic bones. The campus community was engaged during an afternoon of bone-making on Centennial Mall, in front of the Student Union, with her class and with Adam Shiverdecker and his Ceramics I students.

To extend the reach of One Million Bones locally, Roderick-Lingeman and her students set up on-site studios for members of the public to make bones during community events, like the UpTown Association’s PARK(ING) DAY, the Arts Commission’s Holiday Loop gallery hop, and at Artomatic 419.

During the 2011-12 school year, students in the University’s residential Arts Living Learning Community, led by director Kate Abu-Absi and Lecturer Jeanne Kusina, made more than a thousand bones to contribute to the project.

From June 8-10, the bones, made of ceramic or other biodegradable materials, were ceremonially installed by hundreds of volunteers dressed all in white.

For more information, visit the project’s website.