New Art + Design Department Building and Location

By next fall, several elements of the Missouri State University Art + Design department will have a new home – a renovated building located at 305 West Mill Street in downtown Springfield.

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Geoffrey Kunkler , a recent BFA Ceramics graduate, has been accepted into the MFA program at the University of Kansas where he has received a Teaching Assistantship Award to pursue his graduate degree.

Art + Design
Scholarship and Award Winners

The department of Art + Design presented their 2008/2009 scholarships and awards on Thursday, May 8th at 5:30 PM at the Student Exhibition Center; speakers were Kevin Hughes and Cedomir Kostovic.

Winners were: Sarah Gorski, Amanda Adams, Jessica Bebout, Brittany Birk, Adam Harris, Thomas Hardwicke, Zachary Tate, Kyla Byers, Megan Hensley, Brett Leeper, Rachel Aubuchon, Kara Horton, Hillary Croan, Sara Copeland, Jared Earnhart, Daniel Zender, Nicholas Venn, Tonia Maggart, and Frank Norton, Jr.

The 2008 International Research Conference on Service-learning and Community Engagement has selected a proposal by Steve Willis to present "Perceptual Changes Found in Engaged Service Learning.” The conference will be held in October in New Orleans. The IARSLCE is a new international nonprofit membership organization devoted to promoting research and discussion about service-learning and community engagement.

Dryden Wells, BFA Ceramics 2004, has accepted a position to become the Design Studio Manager at the PWS Experimental Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. Dryden will begin his duties starting in June of 2008, after he receives his MFA from Texas Tech University. Dryden's duties will be quite varied as he helps to run this successful ceramic facility in China's Porcelain City, where the translucent white clay body has been in use for more than 1000 years.   

Keith Ekstam has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Plinth Gallery in Denver, Colorado (May 2-31, 2008). The show is titled "Return To the Source" and includes 16 new ceramic sculptures made during the 2008 winter and spring. The Plinth gallery is a prestigious venue for ceramic artists and features fine ceramics and sculptural ceramic vessels. Details at: The Plinth Gallery

Elizabeth Atchley, a double major in Art History and Anthropology, was selected to be a student speaker in the April 2008 Student Anthropology Conference.

In her presentation on Forensic art, she discussed how her skills in both art history and anthropology assisted her in accurately reconstructing a man's face from a skull in a forensic art project.

Elizabeth is already an experienced speaker, having been selected as a presenter in the 2006 Intercollegiate Art History Student Symposium and having presented talks on the museums of Paris for the Springfield-Greene County Library System in 2007.

For more information on the student competition to be in the conference:
Student Anthropology Conference

For the preliminary program:
Student Anthropology Conference 2008 Program

Bruce West's photograph, Reverend H.D. Dennis #12 was recently included in an exhibition and publication entitled "Myst, Mistica e Mistero de una Collezione Fotografica at the Centro Internationale di Fotografia Scavi Scaligeri in Verona, Italy. Other artists in the exhibition included Paul Strand, Jerry Uelsmann, Mario Giacomelli, Keith Carter, and Michael Kenna.

In April, 2008 Bruce West participated in a panel discussion entitled "Perception and Potrayal: How We see Ourselves" at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Other members of this panel included Rick Looser, C.O.O. of The Cirlot Agency; costume designed,Myra Colley-Lee; Julia Reed, author of "Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena"; Ray Mabus, former governor of Mississippi and U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and artist, Ed McGowin. This panel discussion was part of a three day symposium and celebration about the history, practice, and future of the arts in Mississippi.

Andrea Land, Missouri State BFA in Photography graduate and current graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute, recently was won First Place Award in the Photo District News magazine's Student Photography Contest. Andrea is pursuing an MFA degree in photography and was chosen by the San Francisco Art Institute for a full-support scholarship.

http://contest.pdnedu.com/

Former MSU photography student, Gayle Babcock, (Art minor and Interior Design major) was featured in a Springfield Business Journal article recently. Babcock is owner of Architectural Imageworks, LLC and specializes in architectural photography for a large number of commercial and residential clients. The article quotes Professor Bruce West, who was her first photography teacher in the program. For more, see: www.sbj.net

Several ceramic artists were invited to the Ozarks to participate in a three- part art related event. During their stay from March 24-29, they demonstrated their techniques in a workshop at MSU, exhibited their artwork at Springfield Pottery and participated in a wood-kiln firing at the College of the Ozarks. There was an international flavor to this event as five of the artists hail from northern Europe, while the others came from Pennsylvania.

The artists invited to participate in the event were:
Gregory Miller, Denmark; Eva Zethraeus, Sweden; Janne Hieck, Germany; Ann Charlotte Ohlsson, Denmark; Anne Mette Hjortshov, Denmark;
Dale Huffman, Pittsburgh, PA; Justin Rothshank, Pittsburgh, PA; Ian Meares, State College, PA.

This event was funded in part by the Student Involvement Fee, and approved by the Student Organization Funding Allocation Council (SOFAC). Additional support came from the MSU Art and Design Department, the MSU Clayworks Student Organization, Springfield Pottery and the College of the Ozarks Art Department.

On November 2007, the Student Photographic Society hosted a visiting artist public lecture by renowned photographer Emmet Gowin. Emmet Gowin, professor of the Council of the Humanities and Visual Arts at Princeton University, has published many books of his photographic work, has received NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, a PEW Fellowship in the Arts, and has been exhibited internationally.

The Art and Design faculty and the students of the Photographic Society were delighted to have a photographer of Gowin's stature come and speak on campus.  Emmet Gowin is certainly one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century and is reinventing himself in the 21st. His work has both broad appeal and critical acclaim.

Geoffrey Kunkler ,a recent BFA Ceramics graduate, has been accepted into the MFA program at the University of Kansas where he has received a Teaching Assistantship Award to pursue his graduate degree.

Keith Ekstam was awarded the First Prize in the Missouri Art Professors' Show at the Columbia Art League in Columbia Missouri.

Columbia Art League

MSU alumnus, Dryden Wells, recently was invited to Shanghai for a week long series of events surrounding an exhibition at the Shanghai Art and Craft Museum. Wells was a featured artist in the exhibition which was a significant event attended by the Mayor of Shanghai, the head of the Chinese Consulate/US Embassy, and the Director of the Musueum of Modern Art in Shanghai.

The exhibition is the first of a series of shows that will culminate in the exhibition, "2010: China, China."

Dryden Wells, BFA Ceramics 2004, and a current graduate student at Texas Tech University, is in a three-person exhibition at the Las Cruces, New Mexico, Museum of Art titled "After China" from Feb. 1-April 5, 2008.

He also had an image of his sculptural work published in the February 2008 issue of Ceramics Monthly magazine. It was in the national juried exhibition "Clay on the Wall" at Texas Tech University.

Art and Design student Jennie Ziverk Carr, Art History alumnus, has been selected for admission to the competitive Teach For America program and has been offered a position on the Teach For America 2008 corps.

Teach for America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates and professionals of all academic majors, career interests, and professional backgrounds who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity.

During the summer of 2007,  Ms. Ziverk Carr held a nationally competitive internship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and in Spring 2007 was a featured presenter at the intercollegiate Missouri State / Drury University Art History Symposium; she is also a student associate for the University undergraduate research journal, Logos.

Five of our Art and Design majors (one Ceramics major, Art History minor; one Drawing major, Art History minor; and three Art History majors) were selected to present public presentations for the Springfield "Sample the Arts" program at Springfield-Greene County libraries in October and November.  

They have worked very hard to develop illustrated presentations on the art and museums of certain cities or regions (Florence, Houston, Chicago, Paris, and the Ozarks region) and to present them as a public community service to Springfield-Greene County. Presenters included Kate Foster-Gaska [Florence] and Jennie Ziverk Carr [Houston], Liz Atchley [Paris], and Erin Dooley [Ozarks], and  Niki Eaton [Chicago]

Nicole D. Eaton, who graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Art History in December 2007, has been accepted into the competitive Master of Arts program in Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  Nicole was also awarded a graduate assistantship in the program, with full tuition and a stipend.

Rachel Skidmore, an Electronic Arts student, was recipient of several awards for her independent study film project at a festival of short films held at the Moxie Theater in Springfield.