Faculty Research & Accomplishments
Fall 2020 - Spring 2021
Faculty at the Texas Tech School of Art are engaged in a vast variety of research projects. Research helps faculty members stay abreast of their fields, keeps them at the forefront as leaders in their disciplines, and helps them to better prepare students with up-to-date techniques and concepts. Faculty research trajectories often include personal explorations on topics developed over many years. Additionally, faculty have been engaging in interdisciplinary research such as arts in medicine and arts in engineering. Some of those collaborative projects are reported on the Art Making Links webpage.
Rob Glover Works Selected into Art Now America National
Robly Glover, professor of jewelry design and metalsmithing, has two works, SevenGoblets for GaGa and Stop selected into Art Now America National Juried Exhibition (March 2-April 9, 2021, Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City). Juror Mike Calway-Fagen, curator and director of exhibitions at Stove Works, an innovative contemporary art center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, selected works by 37 artists out of 139 submissions from all over the country. Calway-Fagen will provide a virtual lecture on March 24th.
Nancy Slagle Has Works Selected into Art Now America National
Nancy Slagle is one of the 37 artists whose artwork has been chosen out of 139 submissions from all over the country for the Art Now America National Juried Exhibition (March 2-April 9, 2021, Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City). Juror Mike Calway-Fagen, curator and director of exhibitions at Stove Works, an innovative contemporary art center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will provide a virtual lecture on March 24th.
Ghi Fremaux's Collaborative Work Exhibited in International Exhibition
A collaborative work by Ghislaine Fremaux, associate professor of painting, and her partner Lando Valdez was selected for inclusion in UNC Asheville's 12th Drawing Discourse. Juried by internationally renowned painter, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, the exhibition call drew a pool of 1,925 submissions from 566 artists in 11 nations, from which Sunstrum chose 120 works. A full-color catalogue will be printed for the exhibition and available through the website of UNC Asheville Art and Art History. Extruded by Fremaux and Valdez is a large-scale work of pastel drawing and collage, produced in their ongoing inquiry into the medicalized subject, desire, and the corporeal experience of grief. The exhibition premiered on January 22, 2021 as a virtual exhibition without a specified closing date.
Rina Little Publishes about Art and Place
Dr. Rina Little, associate professor of art education, published "Alfombra Making: Collaboration, Art, Place." The refereed article, written with Christina Bain, is in the January 2021 issue of the National Art Education Journal Translations. Alfombra making is used by Catholic, Indigenous, and artistic communities to celebrate religious beliefs and traditions, to share cosmologies, and to intervene in public spaces and the authors used narrative inquiry to discuss their experience of participating in this tradition with a community of alfombristas and our students in Antigua, Guatemala.
Dr. Little collaborated with artist Portia Cobb on a chapter for the book Visual Participatory Arts-Based Research in the City: Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics. The chapter discusses how the Lynden Sculpture Garden's program (Milwaukee, WI) asks artists to co-create using a variety of strategies that alter and connect work and space to sites of struggle and to larger social, historical, and political processes. Place here is conceptualized as a location through which movements, interactions, materials, communications, and affects create knowing. By learning in and through art as material matter, place is produced specifically to challenge traditional ways of knowing, to render places and histories tangible, and to provide spaces where cultures can meet and exchange multiple and contested stories. The program offers a way of being political through the affective where artists working across disciplines are committed to the radical Black imagination. Here, Black radical thought seeks to claim and reimagine the city by creating alternative social and spatial transformations through progressive action. This is a space of wonder, of cultivation, of healing, of collective freedom, where the imagination is understood as something that can transform the world and produce conditions that support it.
Janis Elliott Receives Humanities Center Work Group Grant
Dr. Janis Elliott, associated professor of art history and co-director of the Medieval & Renaissance Studies Center (MRSC) with Angela Mariani Smith of the School of Music, received, last fall, a TTU Humanities Center Working Group Grant for the years 2021-2023. The grant supports a three-part series of events comprised of a 1-day symposium (Spring 2021), a MRSC professional development day (Spring 2022), and a 2-3 day conference (Spring 2023), all under the rubric Arts, Histories, & Literatures of the World 500-1500 CE.
The first event takes place later this spring on April 24th. The one-day event will feature presentations by MRSC affiliated faculty and students from TTU, with one keynote speaker (at 1:00pm), followed by a round table. Keynote Speaker Professor Geraldine Heng (University of Texas at Austin), author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018) will present a lecture is entitled: "Teaching the Literatures and Cultures of the Global Middle Ages". Other members of the MRSC Working Group include: Jacob Baum (History); Julie Couch (English); Janis Elliott; Angela Mariani; Lane Sobehrad (History/LISD).
Maia Toteva Receives 2021 Scholarship Catalyst Program Award
Dr. Maia Toteva, assistant professor and coordinator of art appreciation, has received a 2021 Scholarship Catalyst Program Award through the TTU Office of Research & Innovation. The grant will support Dr. Toteva's work on her book Ilya Kabakov and the Russian Underground of the 1960s: The Beginning of the Moscow Conceptual Movement which investigates an artistic development of a vital significance and far-reaching multicultural implications. That is the Moscow conceptual movement—an unofficial artistic alliance which emerged in the Russian capital in the 1960s as part of the underground resistance against the Russian Art Academy, political censorship, and the Soviet system. A vital nexus between the Soviet East and the capitalist West, Moscow conceptualism engendered a prominent international figure—the founder of the movement and the leading Russian immigrant artist exhibiting in the West today—Ilya Kabakov. Focusing on the work of Kabakov as conceptualism's principal player, the book connects the Russian phenomenon with the dynamic intersections of Soviet art, science, and theory and the growing importance of transnational artistic trends and networks.
Heather Warren-Crow Screens Information at Various Film Festivals
Heather Warren-Crow, associate professor of interdisciplinary arts, screened her video Information (2020) at the Film Maudit Film Festival in Los Angeles, California in January of 2021. Information also screened at Myymälä2 Gallery in Helsinki, Finland in November of 2020 and during the Arizona Underground Film Festival in September.
Warren-Crow's video We Should Have Died in 2012 When We Had the Chance (2020) was screened at the Barcelona International Short Film and Video Festival in October 2020. Her video Audio Evidence of Indefinite Universal Supplication Breakfast (2020) was screened at the International Multimedia Art Festival held at F2F at Suluv Gallery in Novi Sad, Serbia: September 21-26 and online: September 4-9, 2020.
Carol Flueckiger Has Solo Exhibit at LHUCA
Carol Flueckiger, associate professor of art and art foundations coordinator, presented Solitary Voyager, an exhibition at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) in Lubbock, TX from December 1, 2020 through Jan. 31, 2021. These works share one title, Solitary Voyager, which is a phrase taken from "Solitude of Self," Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 19th century address arguing for suffrage. This title blends the solitude that Stanton talks about in her address, bicycle imagery, and the stark west Texas landscape to create artwork that reflects on environment and sustainability. The exhibition was reviewed for Glasstire by Michelle Kraft. A 5-minute virtual artist's talk, that includes details about Flueckiger's process, can be viewed here.
Maia Toteva Organizes International Symposium
Dr. Maia Toteva, assistant professor and coordinator of art appreciation, co-organized the international symposium Walking with the Enemy: Affirmation as Subversion in the (Post)Socialist, Postmodern, and Post-Truth Eras and delivered the keynote address "Subversive Affirmation: Historical and Critical Perspectives" at the ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture in Athens, Greece. Dealing with a complex multicultural phenomenon known as "overidentification," "subversive affirmation," and "exacerbated mimesis," the symposium addressed global art practices that have embraced mimicry rather than opposition as a subversive political strategy. The speakers included internationally known artists, scholars, and critics publishing on the topic, and the papers compared modes of political and artistic engagement in Eastern and Western Europe, Russia, South Africa, and North America. The symposium was generously sponsored by the Onassis Foundation, Greece, and virtually hosted by the ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture in Athens, Greece on November 20, 2020. The event attracted a diverse international audience as more than hundred and twenty people registered to attend. Together with her fellow co-organizers, Toteva is working on publishing an edited volume and a series of podcasts on "subversive affirmation" and its ramifications in the Post-Truth era.
Earlier in November Toteva chaired the virtual conference session "The Art of Subversive Action: Irony, Rebellion, and Anxiety in Socialist and Post-Socialist Russia and Eastern Europe" and presented the paper "The Poetics of Anxiety and Rebellion in Soviet and PostSoviet Art" at the 52nd Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).
In February 2020 Toteva chaired the conference session "Silence, Exile, and Cunning: The Art of Survival, The Survival of Art" and presented the paper "The Art of Silence and Noncompliance in Soviet Russia in the 1960s-1970s" at the 101 Annual Conference of the College Art Association in Chicago, IL.
Toteva also published an article titled "Voices from the Void: Survival and Noncompliance in Soviet Russia" in the 2020 edition of Trends: The Journal of the Texas Art Education Association.
Carol Flueckiger - Animating Democracy
Working with CASP Studio D artist-in-residence Tricia Earl, Carol Flueckiger, associate professor of art and art foundations coordinator, invited students in the ART 1100 class to create and post an attribute from Animating Democracy. Also known as Americans for the Arts, this program inspires, promotes, and connects arts and culture. The program uses eleven attributes, such as coherence, risk taking and sensory experience, to guide art toward contributing to civic and social change. The project was presented to the community on November 6, 2020. Also, in November in a special Election Day episode of the Humanities Now podcast of the Humanities Center of TTU, Flueckiger talked about her new work. Catch the podcast here.
Faculty Collaborate to Present Workshops for Texas Teachers
Dr. Rina Little, associate professor of art education, Rob Glover, professor of jewelry
design and metalsmithing, and Dr. Andrés Peralta, associate professor of art education,
organized and presented three workshops under the series title, Art-A-Thon: Imaginary Worlds, for teachers who attended from all over Texas during the months of October, November
and December. The workshops included Stories, Machines, and the Natural Environment;
Photo, Place and Narrtive; and Futurisms: Examine, Critique, and Reimagine. Supported
by the Helen Jones Foundation, the workshops featured on site and virtual art making
with graduate students Mona Bozorgi, Diana McCutcheon, Madeline Castillo, Nathan Carroll,
Cody Beetler, Michelle Weintraub, and Corina Carmona.
William & Shannon Cannings in 2-Person Exhibition
William Cannings, associate professor in sculpture, and Shannon Cannings, assistant professor of practice, presented a two-person exhibition at the Meadows Gallery, University of Texas at Tyler from October 12 - November 6, 2020. Titled 20 : 20 : 20, the exhibition presented 20 works of art representing 20 years of marriage. Shannon's work included oil painting, drawings and silkscreens. William's work consisted of inflated steel sculptures with automotive paints.
Jiawei Gong Receives 2020 President's Excellence in Engaged Scholarship Award
Jiawei Gong, associate professor in transmedia arts, received a 2020 President's excellence
in Engaged Scholarship Award, as a team project leader of the Texas Liberator Project.
The TTU team created an educational tool by which students across Texas would be familiarized
with the liberation of the concentration camps in the European Theater of War during
the Second World War. Using testimonials, the team at Texas Tech University developed
a digital app to help share the stories of the Texas Liberators with high school students
across the state. Texas Tech created a narrative by which students could come to understand
the extremes of savagery and fanaticism, humility, and humanity of the Second World
War from the perspective of the American soldier. More information about this project,
including a complete list of the TTU team go to this TTU Outreach & Engagement page.
Lesley Wolff Receives 2020 Excellence in Field Award from TASA
Dr. Lesley Wolff, assistant professor of art history, received a 2020 Excellence in Field Award from the Texas Association of Schools of Art for her presentation at the 2020 TASA Virtual Forum on October 23rd. Titled Envisioning Black Freedom and the Global Caribbean in The Kingdom of This World, the lecture responds to the current moment of anti-racist protests in support of Black lives by historicizing the role of uprising, revolution, and Black futures in the Américas through a discussion of her recent curatorial project, The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined, which debuted in 2019 at the Little Haiti Cultural Center at Art Basel Miami Beach. Her presentation can be heard at this Youtube link.
Heather Warren-Crow Video Screened in Italy
Dr. Heather Warren-Crow, associate professor of interdisciplinary arts, had her video titled "reCAPTCHA" presented at the Cervignano del Friuli's Contemporary Art Festival in Italy, October 17-25, 2020.
Cody Arnall Exhibits In Various National Exhibitions
Cody Arnall, assistant professor of sculpture, had one work selected into the 2020 Third Coast National Biennial presented at K Space Contemporary in Corpus Christi, Texas. Exhibition dates were September 4 - October 7, 2020.
Arnall had two artworks selected into Constructed Visions III, a national juried exhibition of artisans/artists creating 3D or 2D contemporary fine craft or sculpture that highlights process-driven methods. The exhibit took place at the St. Louis Artists' Guild from August 14 - September 2, 2020.
Arnall's video/performance work titled Walking in an Exaggerated Manner with Bruce Nauman was selected into the Axis 15th National Juried Exhibition: Con Cariño, exhibition dates were August 8-29, 2020 at the Axis Gallery, Sacramento, California.
Ghi Fremaux in Collaboration with Lando Valdez Exhibits in REPOSE
Two works by Ghislaine Fremaux, associate professor of painting, produced in collaboration with her partner Lando Valdez, were curated into the exhibition titled REPOSE curated for ArtistsforArtists by Leslie Moody Castro and presented virtually in fall 2020. According to Castro, "REPOSE is about the radically subversive act of simply being, of sharing space, of touching, of wearing each other with comfort and pride. To share space, to be connected by touch, by skin."
Maia Toteva Presents Pedagogical Research
Dr. Maia Toteva, assistant professor and coordinator of art appreciation, was selected to present a paper at the 15th International Conference on the Arts in Society at the National University of Ireland Galway, Galway in June 2020. The conference was moved to June 2021 due to COVID-19. She delivered a paper titled "Teaching Art Across Modalities and Spaces" at the 14th International Conference on the Arts in Society, held at the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon in Lisbon, Portugal in June 2019. More than than 345 delegates from 41 different countries attended this peer-reviewed international event. Toteva's paper discussed the pedagogical goals and considerations of TTU's Art Appreciation program as she focused on the methods of promoting active learning techniques and student engagement in large-enrollment classes.
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