Announcing the The UT Biodesign Challenge Team, Madeline Tomczak, who graduated with a bachelor of science degree in environmental science in May; Domenic Pennetta, a sophomore majoring in art; Jesse Grumelot, who graduated in May with a bachelor of science degree in bioengineering; and Lucya Keune, a senior studying visual arts. The team competed on June 21 and 22, 2018 and are the winners of the Outstanding Field Research Award at the 2018 International Biodesign Challenge Summit in NYC. The Biodesign Challenge course was taught by Department of Art, assistant professors, Eric Zeigler and Brian Carpenter Read more…

SEPTEMBER 13-15

DOWNTOWN TOLEDO (PROMENADE PARK, IMAGINATION STATION OUTDOOR AREAS)

University of Toledo School of Visual and Performing Arts faculty and students are involved in the festival in a BIG way! We are presenting several attractions this year. Look for us on Saturday afternoon at the Mini Maker Faire (Noon-6 p.m.).  The Faire is the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth—a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker Movement. It’s a place where people show what they are making, and share what they are learning. Makers range from tech enthusiasts to crafters to homesteaders to scientists to garage tinkerers. They are of all ages and backgrounds. The aim of Maker Faire is to entertain, inform, connect and grow this community.

UT ATTRACTIONS AT MOMENTUM

ALL TOGETHER NOW

JULIA LABAY DARRAH + YUSUF LATEEF (ALUMNA AND UT PART-TIME FACULTY)

All Together Now combines aspects of play, sculpture, and installation using interchangeable life-size forms. These lightweight sculptures will feature a conglomerate of images of the human body and will be placed on a stage, inviting participants to interact with the forms to create a “family photo”.

DIALOGUE WITH THE RIVER

BARBARA MINER (UT PROFESSOR OF ART, CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ART)

Dialogue With The River will be a group completed project, enabling hundreds of people to participate in the creation of an aesthetically engaging, temporary work of art. Based on Tibetan Prayer Flags, hand silk-screened flags with environmental information about the Maumee River and Lake Erie printed on the colorful fabric will be created. The flags will be available for individuals to write on and create “dialogues”, “wishes” or “pledges” for the health of the river and the lake. The customized flags will then be strung on the tent like uprights, creating a moving wind-driven sculpture. The idea is that the wind will carry the good wishes and the promises out into the world in hopes that the newly gained awareness of the river’s plight will influence the choices each of us makes. Didactic materials from regional and national groups such as Partners for Clean Streams, The Black Swamp Conservancy, and the Nature Conservancy will be available for visitors.

ECO PARADE

MATT FOSS (ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF THEATRE, UT DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE AND FILM)

Eco Parade showcases our community water source biodiversity, ecological need, and health with aims at improving our collective relationship and stewardship of the system as a whole. The parade will feature large format puppets and performance, live music, and community created objects; everyone will be invited to participate in the processional.

BUBBLE BUTT

SABA: SAM SHEFFIELD + BARRY WHITTAKER
(SHEFFIELD – BALTIMORE ARTIST, WHITTAKER – ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART, UT DEPARTMENT OF ART)

Players will work as a team to explore a surreal and humorous landscape as a pair of sentient pants. Players must work together by bouncing on a convoluted, two-person, human-powered interface to control each leg of the pants avatar as it journeys through a series of ridiculous obstacles and distractions. Enjoy this work on Saturday, September 15th at the Toledo Mini Maker Faire.

STEM

MATTHEW DANSACK + SEBASTIEN SCHOHN (UT ART ALUMNI)

Stem is a digital interactive media project using multiple song stems (tracks of one or two instruments used to make a song) to allow participants a chance to create new song compositions. By interacting with an installation of amps, record crates, and digital technology, users can arrange the stems to create and download a song. Special thank you to Vincent Chiaverini for guitar samples.

UT BIODESIGN CHALLENGE PROJECTS AND BIOMATERIAL DEMONSTRATIONS

Professors Brian Carpenter and Eric Zeigler, along with UT students, will present Biodesign Projects by student teams that will engage with the greater public in a dialogue about real-world issues and potential solutions through biotechnology. Students will exhibit their prototypes along with their research.  Many of the prototypes made use of a 3D printer, CNC lasers, and CNC routers.  Additionally, UT faculty Brian Carpenter and Eric Zeigler will be performing simple biomaterial demonstrations. These demonstrations explore low-tech methods and materials that encourage playful interactions, to stimulate creativity, enabling the end user to tinker, design and build their own devices and realize the potential of imagination.

Learning by Doing & Pouring (from April JJC Newsletter)

The basement of the Juvenile Justice Center served as an art studio for University of Toledo students enrolled in the “Media and Methods in Therapeutic Art” course, on Monday, April 2.

Instructor Renée Obrock had her students convene at the Juvenile Court, meeting up with court-involved youth and Probation staff Tim Bauerschmidt, Bill Weis, Lisa Demko, Kristen McClain, Angie Morgan, Elizabeth Sepeda, Kineka Wallace, and Ed Cox, and East Toledo Family Center staff, Makayla King, Onna Moore, and two interns.

The group activity involved a combination paint and resin pour on top of wood plaques. Over 60 wood plaques were prepared for the two different art sessions. The work space was broken up into stations for each of the precise steps involved: from mixing the paint, combining the components for the resin, to selecting paint colors and creating.

The UT students, whose majors ranged from Psychology to Disability Studies to Women & Gender Studies worked alongside youth and staff.
     

Ms. Obrock, who has a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts and a Masters of Art Education, said class, “Media and Methods in Therapeutic Art,” hadn’t met the minimum number of registrants in a while, so she created a flier to drum up participation. The flier, circulated beyond the Art Education department to the Psychology department, helped promote the class beyond the usual majors. In short order the class filled, resulting in an opportunity for expanding the teaching of therapeutic art to non-art majors. She first became aware of the Juvenile Court’s Positive Youth Justice focus in probation through Joe Szafarowicz.

While waiting, the UT students shared the stories of the paths that brought them to this particular class and inspired their career choice. One of the students shared that while on a mission trip to Central America a language barrier was easily hurdled by “communicating through doing,”
-Marty McIntyre, JJC

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.