This year’s Master of Fine Arts Exhibition is here! The exhibition will be in the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut from April 9th – May 8th.
There is an opening reception on Wednesday April 20th from 5pm-7pm.
The exhibition features Amanda Bulger, Don Burton, Kacie Davis Kamar Thomas, and Neil Orians.
Meet our grads here!
The MFA Students of UConn proudly invite you to the 2016 Spring Semester Open Studios Event! There will be food, music, art and a chance to learn more about each MFA student’s work.
Thursday March 10th from 7-9PM at the Visual Arts Research Center (VARC) located on UConn’s Depot Campus in the Lebanon and Colchester buildings.
The VARC is located on the UConn Depot Campus, just off Rt. 44.
*BY BUS: From the UConn main campus, take the Purple Line and get off at the Lebanon Cottage stop
*BY CAR: From 195, take Rt 44 West.
At the stoplight next to the former prison, make a left onto Walters Avenue. Stay right at the fork to merge onto Ahern Lane.
Just past the abandoned buildings, you should see Lebanon Cottage and a blue sign that says “Visual Arts Research Center.” Parking is FREE.
See the Facebook Event Page for more information
Our alumna, Justine Braisted, who graduated in 2013 with a BFA concentrating in Communication Design has been offered a position at Pentagram in NYC—one of the most prestigious studios in the country. This brings the number of Graphic Design graduates who have worked there over the last few years to three (Haley Taylor ’15 and Emily Makarainen ’15). But the good news does not stop there for Justine, she has also been accepted in to the MFA program in Graphic Design at the Royal College of Art in London for the Fall 2016 semester. She will be joining UConn BFA graduate Sara Jamshidi who also graduated in 2013.
Congratulations, Justine!
Our new Stop-Motion Labs in Bishop Center are open and Professor Alison Paul is teaching her first classes there. The students will experiment with a range of materials and methods in creating their stop-motion animations. The shooting stations in the lab are state-of-the-art and were built for maximum installation flexibility and image quality. Graduate students in the class have a separate lab. Demand for the course is high, with students from Puppetry and Digital Media joining our Art & Art History students.
Alum Chris Cater (Illustration) published his first New Yorker magazine cartoon on August 1, 2014. Chris’s hard work and creativity has landed him a spot in the magazine noted for a being a venerable showcase of the smartest cartoonists publishing today.
Design Center students Haley Taylor, Gina Croteau and Natalie Sequeira created editions of two broadsides they designed for visiting poet Paul Muldoon’s new poem “Firing Squad.” The works were published under Counterproof Press, a collaborative initiative between the Creative Writing Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Communication Design, Illustration and Printmaking in the UConn Art & Art History Department.
Paul Muldoon has published over thirty collections of poetry and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is Poetry Editor at The New Yorker. In an event that was very special to us all, Paul Muldoon read “Firing Squad” from the Counterproof Press broadside during his reading for the Wallace Stevens Poetry Program.
Counterproof Press facilitates collaborative studio projects in which students, faculty, and visiting artists/scholars from various disciplines work together to produce limited edition art objects, artifacts, and publications.
Across higher education and in industry, the familiar acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) is morphing into STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics).
Why add art to the mix?
Because innovation and creativity are vitally important to our economy, and artists and designers are innovators and creators. They ask questions. They come up with unusual solutions to problems. They take risks.
Artists and designers are skilled at critical making as well as critical thinking – and that gives them common ground with engineers and chemists.
The STEAM initiative has its roots in a cooperative effort by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts to explore how they could better support innovation together. Both agencies have called for a renewed emphasis on the role of creative fields in scientific experimentation and the arts as a vehicle for disseminating and debating scientific knowledge.
At a recent conference on transforming STEM to STEAM, Shirley Malcom, Head of Education and Human Resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science asked, “Why choose just one? What was this artificial bifurcation [between art and science] and how can we reconnect it?”
Research universities are an essential forum for connecting art and science, in ways that are both structured and unstructured. STEAM happens every day on the UConn campus when:
* an engineering student takes a ceramics class or a painting student double-majors in physics
* sculptors and materials scientists on the faculty meet to discuss how they use computer-controlled routers
* a graduate student in studio art and a mathematics professor together design a microprocessor to support interactive art
* a visiting artist creates a multimedia work about the nature of time with collaborators from physics
To find out more about STEAM:
A new academic journal, STEAM, includes scholarly articles as well as reports from the field.
The President of RISD, John Maeda, recently wrote an opinion piece forWired magazine arguing for the value of the STEAM concept.