Department of Art and Art History

The Austin Visual Arts Association (AVAA)—which seeks to expand, promote, and document Austin as a leading arts destination—will gather with arts community supporters for an evening of celebration to recognize the very best artistic talent and accomplishment in Austin. Following an industry-wide effort to select the nominees, organizers aim to lift up and bring together the city’s artists by launching the Inaugural Austin Visual Arts Awards cocktail fete at the downtown location of the Austin Museum of Art on December 4 at 7 p.m.

The 2009 Award Finalists are:

Artist of the Year 2-Dimensional Art: Jennifer Balkan, Shawn Camp, Erin Curtis, Ray Donley, Laurie Frick, Roi James, John Mulvany, and Jana Swec

Artist of the Year 3-Dimensional Art: Beili Liu, Hank Waddell, Catherine Lee, Sunyong Chung, Phillipe Klinefelter, and David Everett

Artist of the Year Photography: Roberto (Bear) Guerra, Barry Stone, Lesley Nowlin, Anna Krachey, and Sandy Carson

Artist of the Year New Media: Sean Gaulager, The Totally Wreck Institute, Michael Smith

Artist of the Year Early Career: Debra Broz, Alonso Rey Sanchez, Heather Tolleson, Sterling Allen, Nathan Green, Jules Buck Jones, and Carlos Rosales-Silva

Collectors Circle Award: Helmutt Barnett, Damian Priour, Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, Sydney Yeager, and Jack White

Service to the Arts: TBA

President’s Award: TBA

Patron to the Arts: TBA

Lifetime Achievement: William Kelly Fearing

Lifetime Achievement In Memoriam: Robert Dale Anderson

Lifetime Achievement In Memoriam: Michael Frary

Congratulations to all of this year’s finalists.

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The third annual Rising Eyes of Texas show highlights student talent from all over the state. All media is accepted for entry, and cash prizes are awarded. Graduate, Undergraduate, and Continuing Education students are eligible.

This year’s juror is Kelly Klaasmeyer, Editor of Glasstire.

Deadline
January 15, 2010

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Jillian Conrad, How the Hidden World Works, 2007

Alumnus Kurt Mueller (MFA in Studio Art, 2008) has curated the exhibition Diamond Life, featuring new work by Jillian Conrad (Houston, TX) and Moo Kwon Han (New York, NY), on view now at Unit B Gallery in San Antonio.

Regarding the content of the exhibition, Mueller writes, “Jillian Conrad and Moo Kwon Han create idealized spaces, fictive structures of time and place through which we are invited to renegotiate our relationship to the real. The effect of their reflective constructions, however, is equally refraction. Poetic dreams are realized as hopeful Chroma-key videos and imagined landscapes manifest as dazzling sculptural installations. The artifice of these mediated views is purposely apparent; lofty reaches are made tangible by humor and humble means. Conrad and Moo Kwon’s works pull from natural science—geology, physics, biology—but repurpose its phenomena lyrically, as narratives of discovery and forms of accretion, as metaphors for the creative process. Drawings are sculpted, calligraphic poems are performed, and the world is revealed as a multi-faceted prospect: still-forming.”

Exhibition Dates
November 20, 2009 - January 2, 2010

Opening Reception
Friday, November 20, 6:30-10:00 PM

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Undergraduate Design student Angela Wen has won the Poster Design Competition that was part of the 6th Annual Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW). Held at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, the competition finals featured over 300 cyber-security experts, information security officers, academics and students. The group met in Brooklyn November 13, 2009 for cyber games in which students claimed scholarships, prizes and credentials. The games were organized by the graduate students of Polytechnic Institute of New York University’s leading cyber-security program and attracted 724 top computer students from the U.S. and Europe.

On view at the Houston-based artists-run space Box 13 is the exhibition Hasta La Basura Se Separa [artcrush] which includes work by several department alums.

Hasta La Basura Se Separa [artcrush] is an exhibition curated by the Austin-based group Los Outsiders: Salvador Castillo, Michael Anthony García and Hector Hernandez. Originally presented at the Galleria del Espacio Cultural de la Antigua Aduana in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, Hasta La Basura Se Separa [artcrush] features the work of 13 contemporary artists from Texas, New York & Utah.

The artists in this exhibition, Robert Boland (MFA in Studio Art, 2007), Jaime Castillo, Hunter Cross, Michael Anthony García, Katy Heinlein, Hector Hernandez, William Hundley, Kathy Kelley, Michelle Mayer, Eduardo Munoz (MFA in Studio, 2005), Teruko Nimura (MFA in Studio Art, 2009), Jared Steffensen (MFA in Studio Art, 2006) and Jade Walker (MFA in Studio Art, 2005), show work that consists mostly of sculptural and installation practices. With a special emphasis on found objects and the use of recycled materials these artists relate the identity of objects, whether in their present states, altered or how they are represented in images, to their individual connotations as well as their shared meanings.

Exhibition Dates
November 14 - December 17

Opening Reception
November 14, 7-9:30

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