Fine Arts Center Gallery

The University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery is pleased to announce Non-equilibrium, an exhibition of recent work by artist Carol Prusa.

Prusa’s three-dimensional, dome-shaped drawings simultaneously evoke vastness and intricacy, creating a zone of experience in which the language of physicists and mathematicians might describe the mystical. Employing a range of media that spans centuries, from silverpoint to fiber optics, Prusa conjures the ever-shifting boundaries between the finite and the immeasurable, the ordered and the chaotic.

Carol Prusa is represented by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, Jennifer Kostuik Gallery, Vancouver, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco and New York City, and Tinny Contemporary, Nashville. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the country, and is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Miami Art Museum, Museum of Art – Ft. Lauderdale, Arkansas Arts Center, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Telfair Art Museum. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the South Florida Cultural Consortium (2008), the State of Florida (2008), and the Howard Foundation (through Brown University, 2007). Prusa was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. She lives and works in Florida.

Non-equilibrium will be on view from January 17 to February 17, 2012. Prusa will visit the University of Arkansas campus to deliver a lecture on her work on January 26, 5:30 pm, in room 213 of the Fine Arts Center building, with reception to follow. The lecture and reception are free to attend and open to the public. Carol Prusa’s work can be viewed online at carolprusa.com.

Shown above: Pentacle, 2010, Silverpoint, graphite, titanium white pigment with acrylic binder on acrylic hemisphere with lens, iPod, video, 50” x 50” x 10”. Courtesy the artist and Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, FL.

untitled / MFA Exhibition features works of sculpture, painting, video, drawing, printmaking, mixed media, installation, ceramics, design, and photography, created by Master of Fine Art students of the University of Arkansas Department of Art.

Graduate-level art students aspire to extend the depth and breadth of their artistic practices. They research content to develop conceptual frameworks, and explore both familiar and unfamiliar media in order to better realize their ambitions. This exhibition features works by first, second, and third year graduate students, providing a glimpse into each stage of development toward the Master of Fine Art degree.

The exhibition will be on view at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery, December 1 through December 14. A reception for untitled / MFA Exhibition will be held on Thursday December 8 at 4:30 pm.

Soma: An Exploration into Architecture and Decay is a collaborative sculpture class project involving the transformation of a raw space it into a torso-like cavity, complete with representations of multiple organs and systems. In addition to actually designing and renovating the interior of the space, the University of Arkansas sculpture students have individually worked on elements of the human body to integrate into the architecture of the space. Students participating in this installation are currently enrolled in Sculpture II: Construction Methods and Alternative Media course instructed by Bethany Springer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art. The process will culminate with a one night only gallery opening and reception, and progress may be followed here.
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 1st
Time: 5-8 PM
Location: Lalaland behind The Art Experience, 641 W MLK Blvd, Fayetteville AR
Parking available in the Fastenal lot next door

Featuring work by

Jeff Baumann
Kaity Davis
Eric Jackson
Luke Knox
Thomas Krapausky
Ashley Lindsey
Justin Luzius
Paul Skains
Ron Watson
Ven Yates

John Salvest’s mixed-media objects and installations have been presented in solo and group shows throughout the United States, including one-person exhibitions at Phoenix Art Museum; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville; and Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock. His work has also been shown in many group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, including recent shows at Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville; The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis; and The National Gallery of the Cayman Islands, Georgetown, Grand Cayman.

Salvest is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1991 and 1993 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1998, as well as State Arts Council Fellowships from New Jersey and Arkansas. He has recently completed public art projects for the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts in Memphis and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The Cannon Center project was cited as one of the country’s best public art projects by Americans for the Arts Public Art Network’s 2004 Public Art Year in Review.

Salvest has presented lectures and workshops at universities and other institutions throughout the United States. He has also curated several exhibitions, including Kim Levin: Notes & Itineraries, which has traveled internationally to critical acclaim. His work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as Art in America, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Sculpture, Art Papers, The New Art Examiner, NUMBER, and ArtLies. Salvest received a B.A. in English from Duke University and an M.A. in English literature and an M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Iowa. He lives in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where he is Professor of Sculpture at Arkansas State University.

Salvest will deliver a lecture on his work November 29, 2011, 5:30 pm, in room 213 of the Fine Arts Center building. View information about Salvest’s very recent large-scale work, IOU/USA, at grandarts.com.

Shown: IOU/USA, 2011, shipping crates. Image courtesy the artist and Grand Arts, Kansas City.

Photographs by Department of Art Instructor Amjad Faur will be on view at the next Pulse Miami show. Congratulations Amjad!

shown: Burning Bush, carbon pigment print, 40×60″

Paintings and drawings by artist Megan Williamson will be on view in the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center’s hallway cases, November 7 – December 14. Ms. Williamson studied painting at the New York Studio School, the Yale-Norfolk program, Queens College, and Knox College. Critic Cathy Lebowitz remarked that each of Williamson’s paintings “balances the laws of the physical world with the lawlessness of the imagination in a different way, sometimes accentuating the sensual aspects of paint, sometimes suggestive of mysterious worlds of color and shape.” Williamson exhibits regularly in Chicago and New York, and is a member of the Midwest Paint Group and Zeuxis (both are contemporary painters’ organizations that exhibit across the country). She resides in Chicago.

Ms. Williamson will deliver a lecture on her work on November 17, 2011, in room 213 of the Fine Arts Center. Lecture will begin at 5:30 pm, with reception to follow. View more of Ms. Williamson’s work at meganwilliamson.com.

Shown: Still life with rabbits, 2011, oil on canvas, 24×18”. Image courtesy the artist.

gwendolyn yoppolo is currently a studio artist in residency at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. She spent the previous years as a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation, a Studio Technician at Alfred University and as Assistant Professor at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. She received her MFA from Penn State University in 2006. While at Penn State she received two fellowship awards for her research using the scanning electron microscope, and continues to work with this instrument to photograph the tiny landscapes of beach rubble, sugar cereals, plant seeds, and insect parts.

She creates sensuous kitchen and tablewares that use the physical experience of hunger and satiation to allude to larger issues of human desire and consumption. Her visionary designs challenge us to rethink the ways we nourish ourselves and others within contemporary food culture.

Ms. yoppolo will deliver a lecture on November 3, 5:30 pm, in room 213 of the Fine Arts Center. View her work online at gwendolynyoppolo.com.

Image courtesy the artist.

The University of Arkansas’s Association of Ceramic Enthusiasts, in collaboration with the Little Bread Company, will sponsor a ceramics sale on October 20, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. For $15, visitors may purchase a student-made bowl and fill it with a Little Bread Company soup. Proceeds benefit the ACE (a Registered Student Organization), assisting in the funding of visiting artists, workshops, and students’ travel to the annual conference sponsored by the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts.

Little Bread Company is located at 116 North Block Ave, Fayetteville, AR 72701 / 479-527-0622. For more information, contact Ryan Sniegocki at rsniego@uark.edu

Recent drawings and paintings by Sarah Norsworthy are on view in the Fine Arts Center’s hallway cases through October 21.

In her work, Norsworthy responds to the often fleeting perceptual experiences in her everyday surroundings – light moving on the surface of a nearby creek, or the subtle, daily rearranging of ephemera on her studio windowsill. The drawings and paintings have a fleeting quality themselves. They are, paradoxically, gradual accruals of immediate moments, loose and emphatic gestures and collaged elements fixed on well-worn surfaces.

Sarah Norsworthy grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College in 2002. Her clothing designs are on display at Mayapple Salon (546 W. Center Street). Her paintings, drawings, and clothing designs can be viewed online at sarahnorsworthy.blogspot.com. Ms. Norsworthy currently resides in Fayetteville.

Exhibition opens October 8.

The University of Arkansas Department of Art’s Fine Arts Center Gallery is pleased to present Mark Dion: Process and Inquiry. The exhibition features selections from several bodies of the world-renowned artist’s work, as well as related preparatory drawings, and works made in proposal of a public art piece for the University of Arkansas campus.

Mark Dion’s oeuvre has explored social, historical, and contemporary representations of nature, through collaborative models, group participation, and experiments of co-evolution. His projects illuminate histories of aesthetics and science, examining continuities and ruptures between past and present practices of knowing, ordering, and classifying the material world. With an artistic research process that regularly synthesizes visual and textual information from journals, diaries, and other primary documents, Dion presents us with a keen sense of our contemporary moment. Not allowing us to accept any visual conclusions idly, however, Dion’s work challenges the depths and breadth of our own areas of interest and supposed expertise, including our own particular ethics of learning, teaching, and living.

Dion (b. 1961) is the recipient of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Lucelia Award (2008), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2005), and the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001). His work has been shown across the globe, including major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (2003); and Tate Gallery, London (1999). In 2007, Dion was featured on the PBS series Art 21. Dion is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and In Situ Gallery, Paris.

The exhibition, curated by the University of Arkansas’s Alissa Walls Mazow, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Art History, also features a library section, which serves as an introduction for those not as familiar with the artist’s work, as well as an opportunity for those desiring a deeper level of investigation to study further.

Throughout 2011, The University of Arkansas Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences has celebrated the 60th Anniversary of the Fine Arts Center, which houses the Departments of Art, Drama, and Music. Mark Dion: Process and Inquiry is both the culminating celebration of the Department of Art’s past, and a significant step into its future.

The exhibition opens October 8, and will continue through November 18.

Opening day hours: Saturday, October 8, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Regular gallery hours Monday – Friday, 9:00 – 5:30, Sunday 2:00 – 5:00

Shown above: Mobile Ranger Library – Komodo National Park
2008, mixed media, 96 x 84 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches