Andrea Price and her artwork, “Not My Art History,” 2019.

The UToledo Department of Art is proud to feature our alumni who are supporting inclusion and diversity in their careers and artistic activities.

Artist Andrea Price, BFA ’19, resists an accepted Eurocentric perspective of art and beauty that represents people of color in positions of oppression. In her opinion, historical images of slaves that are considered beautiful are nothing more than the representations of black people created by those who colonized and enslaved them. Seeing these images in an art history class awakened a passion in Price to contribute to a new vision. “My heart literally broke, and I got angry because,” she asked, “why is the esteem that we hold in art attached to European views of what art should look like? That really began my journey to decolonize, to think … how can we create art that involves everyone; where I see myself in a piece of art; where other people of color can see themselves and know that they’re beautiful; and it’s not through the perspective of our white comforts?” Price told SHELOVES Magazine.

“Get You Some Sensitivity, Thanks” 2019, Andrea Price

Price creates art that denies those representations and introduces a different perspective that celebrates artistic diversity. Using drawing, painting, printmaking, photography and fiber art, Price weaves a new image of the African American experience through these media, focusing her work on social justice in relationship to people of color.

SHELOVES Magazine’s interview with Price features her art piece, “Not My Art History,” a powerful fiber-based work that reimagines history’s views of black art and black beauty.

“I hope that you can search your heart and see this piece and think: Huh, is art history really completely Eurocentric? Is what I’ve been taught from a very young age very Eurocentric, and why is that? Why are we not talking about all of the indigenous cultures that create beautiful things that we like to label as savage, as lesser-than, but not understanding the level of intelligence it takes to create something because they’re doing it with meaning?” Price says.

“Rug of Equality,” hand crocheted 4’m 2020, Andrea Price

Price advocates for the recognition of black artists, such as one of her favorite artists, Carrie Mae Weems. “Even throughout my whole educational experience, I think one thing that gets brought up so often is Kehinde Wiley. And I love Kehinde Wiley, but he is not the only person of color that is creating art about people of color,” Price told SHELOVES Magazine. She says that it’s necessary to backtrack through decades of the works of other artists and cultures that are “equally beautiful.” She says the writers of our history books are not telling the full story.

SHELOVES Magazine video interview.

Instagram: @andreaandherart

The UToledo Department of Art is proud to feature our alumni who are supporting inclusion and diversity in their careers and artistic activities.

Caroline Jardine, BFA ’17, BA Education ’16, identifies with art on a variety of levels — her personal artwork, the community-driven, public mural projects she leads and the creative expressions of her young students.

As a teenager, Jardine was introduced to place-making while she apprenticed for the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo. Through her passion for community-based art, Jardine became further engaged with local residents and arts practitioners, creating and leading mural projects, installations and other collaborative projects for organizations, businesses, schools and community events.

Caroline Jardine working on a mural in downtown Toledo with muralist Maya Hayuk.

Her 2020 work includes a collaboration with fellow muralist Maya Hayuk, whom Jardine assisted on a mural highlighting the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Maya Hayuk has been my favorite muralist for years, so this was so meaningful to

me to be able to not just meet her, but work with her,” says Jardine. The year also saw Jardine working on a project for local business owners of the Stubborn Brother pizza restaurant, a project in which she hand-lettered all of the text.

Two additional Toledo projects from 2020 include a board-up mural at 1105 and 1109 N. Huron, and an interactive spray chalk mural on the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art. Caroline was also the lead designer for the first Community Collaborative artwork for the Arts Commission Momentum ’20. The “art-by-number” pieces that were broken into smaller 6″ X 6″ squares completed by the community and placed within a larger installation on Adams Street.

Images: Caroline Jardine

Jardine, who teaches 6- 12th-grade art at St. Ursula Academy, blends Ukrainian symbolism into her personal, mixed media artworks to represent themes of identity, connection and history. “When working on personal artwork, I allow my own voice to guide the process,” says Jardine.

Voice is a significant distinction between her personal and public artworks, she says. “I believe that when leading a community mural, the mural must be informed by the members of the community; my voice should not be the loudest in the room. In creative place-making, community members lead the direction of the artwork. My role is to listen, ask questions, and facilitate the creation of an artwork that is representative and reflective of the voices of the community.”

BCAN video features the community mural work of artist/educator/muralist, Caroline Jardine.

“Henrietta Catherine Cholmley and Son,” 1761, oil on canvas, by Sir Joshua Reynolds is included in “An Inspired Age” exhibit curated by UToledo students.

(Re-posted from UToledo News)

“An Inspired Age: Selections of 18th-Century European Art From the Collection” will open Saturday, Nov. 2, at the Toledo Museum of Art in Gallery 18.

“An Inspired Age” is organized by The University of Toledo Department of Art students in Art Museum Practices Exhibition and New Media Design Practices courses under the direction of Dr. Thor J. Mednick, UToledo associate professor of art history, and Dr. Lawrence W. Nichols, the William Hutton Senior Curator, European and American Painting and Sculpture before 1900 at the Toledo Museum of Art.

The temporary exhibition, running through Jan. 5, features 13 paintings and three sculptures.

The exhibition course, which is the last of three classes in the art museum practices curriculum, offers students the opportunity to work with a Toledo Museum of Art curator to develop an exhibition using works of art from the museum’s permanent collection. The purpose is to give students a hands-on understanding of the workings of a fine arts museum and to prepare them for a career in this field.

“The Toledo Museum of Art has a vast collection, and this allows visitors to see some of the art that has been off view while providing students real-life experience in many aspects of curating an exhibition,” Nichols said. “It has been rewarding to see the next generation of museum professionals use their education to develop this exhibition.”

The opportunity has been invaluable for the students, Mednick explained.

“Working with a world-class, private museum is a rare opportunity in museum studies courses,” Mednick said. “And to have the thoughtful and generous help of a senior curator is extraordinary.”

“An Inspired Age: Selections of 18th-Century European Art From the Collection” is sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council with additional support from 2019 Exhibition Program Sponsor ProMedica.

Admission to the Toledo Museum of Art is free. The museum is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.; and is closed Monday and major holidays. Thursday evening hours are sponsored by Huntington Private Client Group.

The museum is located at 2445 Monroe St. at Scottwood Avenue. It is by the Center for the Visual Arts on the University’s Toledo Museum of Art Campus.

For general information, call 419.255.8000 or 800.644.6862, or visit the Toledo Museum of Art website.

Toledo Blade article about the exhibition

Artist Chad Rimer remembers the electricity he felt working in the foundry at the University of Toledo’s art department like it was yesterday.

“I miss the rush, the excitement, the glowing metal, the heat,” he said recently from Brooklyn, where he works as production manager for internationally known sculptor Tom Otterness. “You don’t know how your casting is going to turn out. It was fascinating to see what happened; did you do everything right, did it turn out well? It’s like opening a Christmas present.”

(Read full article – Toledo Blade online)

The University of Toledo student artwork to appear on area digital billboards January – February, 2016

In collaboration with Lamar Outdoor Advertising, University of Toledo Department of Art students have been invited to display their work on digital billboards throughout the Toledo area. Many students submitted entries. The works chosen will be on display until the end of February 2016.

Assistant professor of art, Barry Whittaker, who coordinated the project, says this is the fourth year UT art students have been invited to have their work displayed. To see the images in this year’s exhibition, visit the online photos album “UT Art Student Billboards 2016” on Facebook.

Student artists participating in this year’s exhibition:

Nikka Geiermann

Katelyn Greenhill

Crystal Hand

Isabel Isaza

Kayla Kirk

Mike Miller

Joseph Okoyomo

Emily Rose

Abbey Ruppel

Brandy Save

Chelsea Thompson

Michelle Trivisonno

Mark Yappueying

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

The billboards can be found at: Reynolds Road/Corner of Glendale, The Anthony Wayne Trail at City Park, The corner of Alexis and Lewis, Monroe Street/Corner of Laskey, Byrne Road/Airport Highway, Monroe Street/West corner of Douglas, and Erie at Monroe

Source: UT Department of Art – Facebook

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.

An outside view of the installation in progress. Photo by Natalie Lanese

PANORAMA, an installation by Natalie Lanese, combines collage and pop patterns to set up narratives that address, oftentimes humorously, the more serious realities of American culture. Lanese’s massive scale patterns transform into a geometric landscape in which the collaged elements create conceptual spaces and confront ideas of image vs. reality, depth, and depthlessness.

On Friday night, August 23, from 6-8 p.m., join us for the opening of “PANORAMA,” an eye-popping installation of pulsating stripes and pastries. Meet the artist, Natalie Lanese, and experience the CVA Gallery as you’ve never seen it before.

Natalie was kind enough to tell us a bit about her art, her work process, and her inspirations.

For folks who haven’t had the benefit of watching this installation unfold over the past few weeks, what is your process for developing and creating an installation like this? How long does it take to create? Do you have help?

I usually have a general idea of the shape of the piece before I begin, but I do all of the decision-making in the gallery. Since these installations are site-specific, I have to respond to the space and design the work in the gallery. The dark gray walls in the CVA Gallery required that I paint the area white before adding color. Then I draw the pattern on the wall and start painting. For this piece, painting took almost 2 full weeks. I had the help of some very generous students in the second week. The final few days are spent working on the collage: printing, cutting out the shapes, and adhering them to the wall.

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An upcoming exhibition of prints at the Wolfe Gallery at Maumee Valley Country Day School, titled 2013 Impression Printmaking Exhibition will feature the work of college art students and their professors. The University of Toledo will be represented by works from Associate Professor of Art Arturo Rodriguez, BFA student Eric Broz, and recent BFA graduates Lisa Franko, David Folck, Kevin Leiter and Hannah Lehmann.

Other participants in the show include selected students and faculty from Bowling Green State University, Columbus College of Art & Design and Florida State University. The exhibition is directed and curated by Joseph Van Kerkhove, Adjunct Instructor of Art at Tiffin University.

The show will be on display from August 19 through October 11. A reception with the artists will be held in Wolfe Gallery on Friday, August 30, from 6-8 p.m. The gallery is located at Maumee Valley Country Day School, at 1715 S. Reynolds Road, Toledo, Ohio, 43614. For more information, contact Van Kerkhove at vankerkhovejm@tiffin.edu or LouAnn Glover at lglover@mvcds.org

UT student works on display in “Gross Anatomy” at Imagination Station

“More Eyeballs,” “Section of the Neck,” and “Relax” are a few of the 11 works of art by University of Toledo students currently on display at the Imagination Station. Using the book Gray’s Anatomy as inspiration, students in Arturo Rodriguez’s Lithography class and Ben Pond’s Anatomy class collaborated on a large bound book project called Gross Anatomy. Students used lithography as the basis for their initial drawing and then embellished the pages with additional drawing media. Two copies of the large book were created and another series of prints was made for display. One book was donated to the library at the UT Medical Center, and the other to the Toledo Museum of Art library, where it is currently on view. The project was made during fall semester, 2012.

Works on display at the Imagination Station were created by Alyssa Brown, Stacey Cruzado, Sarah Emch, David Folck, Lisa Franko & Wes Rucker, Dylan Gallagher, Katie Heft, Dingzhong Hu, Josh Klein, and Shirley Mei.

This exhibition, like Grossology, runs through September 2. For more information about admission and hours of operation, visit the Imagination Station website at www.imaginationstationtoledo.org

From mid-October through mid-December, students from the University of Toledo’s Department of Art will display work on digital billboards throughout the city. Art students from the Time, Motion, Space class, joined by others representing the BFA program, have created fictional film stills to represent “Stories from Toledo.” These images will be shown in varying locations around the city on twenty Lamar digital billboards over the course of two months. A few noteworthy locations displaying student work will be I-75 at Berdan, I-475 at Upton, and Monroe and Sylvania. Student images will be interspersed among the regular scheduled advertising throughout the period. The project is directed by Barry Whittaker, Assistant Professor of Art and Coordinator of New Media Design Practices at the University of Toledo.

For a map to the boards and a sample of the images, visit the UT Department of Art Featured Projects Gallery