Faculty News

Louise Siddons, Associate Professor of Art History

• 2017 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) $20,000 grant to support a traveling retrospective exhibition of Oklahoma modernist painter, sculptor, and printmaker J. Jay McVicker. The grant will also fund the first scholarly book to survey McVicker’s career.

Irene Backus, Assistant Professor of Art History

• Berenson Fellow, Villa I Tatti Harvard Research Center (International), 2016

Phil Choo, Professor of Graphic Design

• Excellence Award for OSU MFA brochure, 46th Annual University and College Designers Association Design Competition, 2016.

Pouya Jahanshahi, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design

• NY Designs Fellowship (Design Incubator), New York, NYC, 2016

Nov. 9, 2015 - March 12, 2016

Luxury. Accumulation. Alienation from nature. These topics, considered from a gendered perspective, are what artist and OSU Associate Professor Angela Piehl invites us to explore through paintings and drawings featured in this exhibition. Using a wide range of sources, Piehl employs images and photographs of both designed and natural beauty as a starting point for abstracting and re-combining elaborately decorative, even at times grotesque, elements. References to organic materials such as flesh, hair, tentacles, eggs, fat, bone, muscle, crystalline structures, and wood appear alongside her choices of color, pattern, and textural artifice to produce what Piehl calls "feral bouquets." At once engaging and seductive, while also repellent and abject, these biomorphic abstractions address multiple layers of the human condition through their allegorical and narrative allusions.

September 15 2014 - January 17, 2015

This exhibition features more than 30 works spanning two decades by artist and OSU professor Chris Ramsay. Collecting everyday souvenirs, Ramsay creates mixed-media sculptures that invite the viewer to look closely at traces of time and life: not rare and precious artifacts but simple, anonymous objects from marine fossils and arrowheads to postcards and Coke bottle shards. The intimate experience of looking into these works and reflecting on the objects that have touched one's own life elicits a subtle revelation all too often left untapped by art today. Ramsay's sculptures achieve their ends through unpretentious materials, intimate scale, natural harmonies, and quiet conduciveness to thought.

From nmhistorymuseum.org: The Virgin of el Pueblito, a miraculous 18th-century icon that found its iconographic source in a Peter Paul Rubens oil sketch (ca. 1632), was propagated by late colonial Franciscan friars and circulated throughout the viceroyalty in print and painted form. Originally noted for extirpating idolatry in colonial Querétaro, this talk considers her initial socio-religious and political importance before exploring her impact and significance in nineteenth-century northern New Spain.

Dr. Gonzalez's talk will be held at the New Mexico History Museum on Sunday, September 28th from 10:30–11:30 am. For more information about the event, click here.

Graphic Design Professor Carey Hissey will be retiring at the end of the Spring 2014 semester after 26 years of distinguished service and research at the Oklahoma State University Department of Art, Graphic Design and Art History. Carey Hissey was born and educated in Great Britain. She received her BFA in Graphic Design from the School of Visual Communication at the University of Central England in Birmingham in 1981.

Our OSU art professors Jo Lynch and Teresa Holder are taking part in a unique exhibition. The Ten Towering artists are a group of artists, each chosen because of their varied areas of expertise, showing together in one exhbition. The exhibition takes place at the University Club Tower in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What makes this exhibit so unique is that a percentage of the proceeds from their shows go to charity. A percentage of all sales from this exhibit will be donated to THERAPETICS, a 501(c)3 organization that breeds, trains and places service dogs to assist Oklahomans with physical disabilities.

OSU Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing and Studio Program Coordinator Liz Roth will exhibit paintings at the Hardesty Arts Center in Tulsa, OK from March 14, 2014 - May 4, 2014. The opening reception will last from 6:00 - 9:00 pm Friday, March 14th. Liz will come back to the Hardesty for an artist's gallery talk on Thursday, April 17th starting at 6:30 pm. In addition to the gallery talk happening at the Hardesty Art Center, Liz will be giving a talk about how her work interacts with geology at OSU's Boone Pickens School of Geology on March 28, 2014 at 12:30 PM.

Louise Siddons, Assistant Professor of Art History at OSU and Curator of Sharing a Journey, will lead a tour and discussion on Thursday, March 6th at 6:30 pm as part of the Late Thursdays events at the Postal Plaza. Another Curator's talk will start at 1:30 pm on Saturday, March 8th.

Space is somewhat limited in the gallery, so please remember that this event begins at 6:30 pm and could be a 'first come-first served' situation if attendance is high. This discussion is free and open to the public.

OSU Department of Art, Graphic Design and Art History teachers Jo Lynch and Teresa Holder's art works were chosen to exhibit in the Living Arts' "OH, TULSA! Biennial," This exhibit runs from August 2 to August 23rd 2013 at Living Arts in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The first image above is from artist and OSU watercolor instructor Jo Lynch. It is entitled "Gold in the Vault," an image of an art Deco Lamp in a vaulted ceiling which is upside down.

The second image above is from artist Teresa Holder and the work is called, “Selah: An Homage to Adah Robinson”

In this mixed media piece, Holder has used excerpts of a quote from Adah Robinson's personal letters, which are in Adah's own words, and in her own hand. These words are written to inspire others in the arts.