Fall 2019 through Spring 2020

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. Recently some faculty have been engaging in interdisciplinary research such as arts in medicine and arts in engineering. 

The work of William Cannings, Associate Professor of Sculpture, was featured in one of Glasstire's Top Five "Five-Minute Tours" for the week of April 11-17, 2020. The video tour features Cannings' solo exhibition Cross Section, A Decade of Work, currently on view at the McCormick Gallery in the Allison Fine Arts Building at Midland College, Midland, Texas during March-April 2020. The exhibition showcases a selection of Cannings' inflated steel sculptures in bright colors, some displaying the effect of high air pressure bursting the welded metal seams.

The work of Aaron Hegert, Assistant Professor in Photography, is being featured in the international exhibition Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie: The Lives and Loves of Images, on view February 29-April 26, 2020. The exhibition opened simultaneously at the main exhibition halls in three cities in Germany, and has since moved to an online format providing virtual tours. Hegert's work, displayed in When Images Collide at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, is from his series Shallow Learning (2018). Hegert fed images of earlier works that he had never previously exhibited or published into Google Image Search; the exhibition shows the results of Google's algorithm and questions how the images themselves might view the world.

Lesley Wolff, assistant professor of art history, received two prestigious research fellowships to support work on her current book manuscript, Hungry Eyes: Picturing Foodways and Indigeneity in Postrevolutionary Mexico. A Tyson Scholars of American Art Fellowship will enable Wolff to conduct research at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, during April-May 2020. She will use the museum's collections to supplement the visual material in her book and further bolster her research on the transnational (US-Mexico) relationships among foodways in 20th century North American art. Wolff has also received a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment. She will be a resident fellow at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin during June-July 2020. Here she will access the archive's special collections of primary texts, photographs, and artwork by key figures involved in 20th-century Mexican art, such as Anita Brenner, Miguel Covarrubias, Diego Rivera, and Nickolas Muray. Wolff is especially eager to draw out images and poetics related to foodways and to place these in the context of Mexican agriculture and consumption.

Cody Arnall's solo exhibition Who's Got a Price on Their Head was selected as one of Glasstire's Top Five "Five-Minute Tours" for the week of March 19-25, 2020. The exhibition is at the Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery at the University of Texas Permian Basin in Odessa through March 31.

Carol Flueckiger, Associate Professor of Art Foundations, exhibited her Solitude of Selfie project, an artist book in honor of the Centennial of Women's Suffrage, at the ARTexchange event at the 2020 CAA conference in Chicago. The exhibition ran from February 14-24 at Columbia College's Hokin Gallery, and entailed workshops that artistically responded to this 100-year anniversary of the 19th amendment (1920-2020). Flueckiger digitized the handwriting from Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 1892 "Solitude of Self" address and integrated it into the background of her compositions. As cyanotypes exposed by the light of the Lubbock sun, these Solar Powered Paintings literally illuminate history while also anchoring the viewer to contemporary culture. 

Additional cyanotypes by Flueckiger, in combination with the work of Robin Germany, Interim Director and Professor of Photography, were featured in the exhibition Notes from the Desert Aquarium at the Wright Gallery at Texas A&M University in College Station from January 21-March 10. The exhibition addressed climate change and the responsibility of individuals to react accordingly. Germany's large format photographs show areas of the Gulf of Mexico at, and just below, the waterline - a juncture of two worlds. In these photographs, Germany says she is "...seeking the stories in the water, unknowable stories of life and struggle, stories that are inextricably intertwined with ours and laden with implications for our future."

Associate Professors Jorgelina Orfila (Art History) and Francisco Ortega (Graphic Design) continued their work in animation with a series of free workshops at the Burkhart Center for Autism Education and Research, beginning in January 2020. Titled Animation-Making as Therapeutic Practice, the workshops introduced children and teenagers diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to stop-motion animation, including materials and equipment; timing, sequencing and movement; and sound-image synchronization. Participants created their own storyboards and produced a short, one-minute animation. Graduate researchers Melissa Kimball, M.A. student in Art History, and Jose Ardivilla Ph.D. student in the Fine Arts Doctoral Program, assisted with the series. The workshops were featured in Episode 1 of the State of the Arts video series produced by the J.T. and Margaret Talkington College of Visual and Performing Arts.