School of Art News
March 4, 2022: Welcome students, teachers, parents and community members to the Annual Community Open House for the Texas Tech School of Art! We will be opening the doors of our Art Building and 3D Annex to show off the artistry of our faculty and students to the Lubbock and South Plains community. To RSVP and register visit our page here.
February 25, 2022: Deadline for current TTU students to submit entries to the Logo Design Competition for the new name of the Art Appreciation program. The course name is changing from ART 1309: Art Appreciation to ART 1309: Global Art and Visual Culture to reflect the changing art and academic environment. Winners receive a prize of $300, $200 or $100 plus swag with the new logo!
October 9, 2021: Graphic Design major Channing Wicks was crowned 2021 homecoming queen at the Texas Tech vs. TCU football game at Jones AT&T stadium, with global studies and general studies major Donovan Satchell as homecoming king. The winners were elected by student vote at the Rowdy Raider Rally on October 8, and featured in an article on Texas Tech Today. Channing said she was "incredibly fortunate to have received this title, and will use this tremendous opportunity to continue to pour my time and efforts into the university that has served its students so well." Congratulations Channing!
October 16-December 31, 2021: Cody Arnall and William Cannings, Assistant and Associate Professors of Sculpture, are collaborating in an installation
of their multi-media work at the Contemporary Art Museum in Plainview, Texas (CAMP). A free public reception will be held on October 16 from
6:00-9:00 PM. 
In this installation, Arnall uses construction materials from mega hardware stores
such as plywood, electrical components, primer, sheet foam insulation, and window
screen in an unusual manner, to signify human error leading to unintended ends. Cannings
is known for his inflated steel sculptures that look like blown-up plastic and give
the impression of lightness.
October 14-November 19, 2021: Associate Professor of Ceramics Von Venhuizen will have an exhibition, "Will there be balloons?" at the Fine Arts Gallery of South Plains College in Levelland, Texas. Von's work incorporates industrial and familiar shapes, the human form, vessels, dark imagery and firing in a wood kiln to show a wide spectrum of human experience. The opening reception is on October 14 from 5:00-7:00 PM.
October 9-November 13, 2021: Will Cannings, Associate Professor of Sculpture, will have a solo exhibition of new works at the Cris Worley Fine Arts Gallery in Dallas, Texas. The exhibition, Getting Back to Basics, marks Cannings' return to an instinctual exploration of material and form after 21 years of inflating hard materials. Several works draw their inspiration from the natural world of West Texas. The opening reception will be on October 9 from 4:00-8:00 PM.
FIRST FRIDAY ART TRAIL HITS 200! AND SCHOOL OF ART WILL BE THERE
Friday, May 7th marks the 200th First Friday Art Trail since its inception. School of Art (SOA) was present at the start, and School of Art will be there this Friday with the following exhibits:
Andrew Lawson: A Present Dystopia (MFA Thesis Exhibition) will be in the John F. Lott Gallery of the Louis Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts. Andrew's work titled Factory #2 was on the cover of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal on May 5th.)
Rick McCoy: Manufactured Scapes (MFA Thesis Exhibition) will be in the School of Art's Satellite Gallery at the Charles Adams Studio Project (CASP)
School of Art's Studio D at CASP will be open showcasing artwork by artist in residence, Tricia Earl, MFA, for the 200th anniversary of the First Friday Art Trail. Also on view will be “Animating Democracy, Part II,” a project created in conjunction with graduate students in the Advanced Painting course and the Seminar in Professional Topics course in the School of Art.
School of Art has been an active and vital participant of Lubbock's Art Trail from the beginning. Art Professor Tina Fuentes, and Joe Arredondo, Director of Landmark Arts, joined then Director of the Lubbock Regional Arts Center (now LHUCA), Jane Bell, of the TTU International Cultural Center and other community stakeholders in formulating the idea for a community “art walk.” Christened “art trail” realizing the vast distances between venues, they were initially held quarterly, every three months. But, it was clear that monthly gatherings for art made much more sense, so the First Friday Art Trail was born with trolleys conveying folks between venues. Pre-COVID audiences often exceeded 4,000 persons. Now that the pandemic is almost behind us, it will be good to get back to in-person celebrations of the arts.
Arrowmont Summer Program Awardees Announced
March 4, 2021: School of Art announces that CLAYTON W. SALLEY and SEAN MCINTIRE, both juniors in jewelry design & metalsmithing, have been selected to receive support to attend this summer's Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts Workshop Program.
Texas Tech School of Art has an exciting partnership with Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts to provide matching student support for two students to participate in summer workshops. Through this program, a scholarship underwritten through Arrowmont's Windgate University Fellows Scholarship Fund is matched by funds from TTU School of Art. Support for this summer program has an approximate value of $1,400 for each student that includes the one-week workshop fee, application fee, meals and housing, plus SOA covers travel to and from Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
CLAYTON SALLEY, whose current jewelry practice focuses on sound and movement, proposes to expand and develop his artwork practice through the Arrowmont workshop. Says Clayton, "The three-dimensional natural shapes you see repeated in my recent research are called "spicules. I find these hollow objects satisfying to touch, see and hear– especially in mass groupings."
SEAN MCINTIRE anticipates that the Arrowmont workshops he has selected will help him bring a broader range of color, texture, and material to his work and encourage him to stop relying so heavily on the base metals. McIntire comments, "I believe skills gained could also help me achieve more depth and begin to take a more sculptural approach to my work. A second line of work will explore the relationship humans have had with science, invention, and technology over time. I want to focus on how our view on ever-evolving technology has so drastically changed, for better and for worse."
Oluchi Uchime Draws Picture of Patrick Mahomes
February 5, 2021: In advance of the Super Bowl, TTU's Office of Communications and Marketing enlisted Transmedia senior Oluchi Uchime of Arlington to draw a portrait picture of Patrick Mahomes while being filmed. Surrounded by time-lapse video and photo equipment, Oluchi worked on a drawing of Mahomes for about five hours.
Uchime is this year's recipient of the prestigious Real & Muff Musgrave - Medici Circle Endowed Drawing Scholarship. We were confident she would do a great job, and she did.
The Office of Communications edited down the hours of footage into a Twitter-sized nugget that TTU posted on Friday, February 5th (see screen-grab below; click here for the Twitter posting). Congratulations Olu!
School of Art Receives Terry Allen Sculpture
Terry Allen's sculpture, Liquid Assets (1996) has arrived at School of Art, though the cold weather is keeping the water feature
inactive for the time being. The bronze fountain consists of a round well-like base
in which a corporate executive stands. The figure is dressed in his business suit
and holds his briefcase. Yet he is placed in the middle of a fountain, dripping wet.
The water leaks from behind his neck and down his sleeves, as well as from his pockets.
He is hunched over, his expression blank. This is not the strong, diligent businessman
but a man consumed by stress, stuck where he is unable to move. This sculpture is
one from a series of works that Terry Allen made associated with corporate America.
The sculpture was donated to Texas Tech University and accepted through the TTU System University Public Art Collection.
November 6, 2020, 6:00-8:00 PM: Animating Democracy: The work of students in Professor Carol Flueckiger's ART 1100 class, Introduction
to Art, will be featured in an Art Installation Viewing at CASP Studio D, 408 Avenue J in Lubbock.
ART 1100 students Nate Knight, Calista Renfro, and Anabelle Jorge Galban
Flueckiger and CASP Studio D Artist Tricia Earl invited all students in the 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 ART 1100 student exhibition ties in to the School of Art's Race and Social Justice in the Arts Speaker Series, and can be viewed from outside the building.
STACY ELKO - In Memoriam
The School of Art mourns the passing of Stacy Elko, Associate Professor of Printmaking,
on August 26, 2020. Stacy joined the faculty of the School of Art in 2005. In addition
to teaching and mentoring students in printmaking, drawing, and video/transmedia,
she also served as MFA Coordinator and engaged in research with collaborators from
across the nation. A multi-dimensional artist, her work stretched beyond printmaking
to embrace time-based media, music, and performance art, as well as interactive environments
that were epitomized in her sculptural airships, "Flying Machines."
Always filled with surprises and mischief, Stacy challenged, questioned, provoked, and amused, frequently all at the same time. Professor of Photography Robin Germany recalls that "Stacy embodied all the things I love about the School of Art, the unexpectedness and unpredictability. She showed up at the last School of Art Zoom Happy Hour this spring and performed a Julia Child-style demonstration of creating an Aperol spritz."
Stacy took special pride in her work with an interdisciplinary research team to create a tablet-based application that would enable persons with aphasia—a language and cognition disorder that frequently appears after a stroke—to communicate with healthcare providers and other clinicians. This application, known as the Visual Interactive Narrative Intervention, or VINI, united Stacy's three great passions—her love of the digital interface and its gaming aspects, her extensive artistic background and talent, and her belief that the arts as a whole have meaningful and useful contributions to make through interdisciplinary collaborations that improve lives and quality of life. Her pathbreaking work on this project was a critical component in the college's award of its first major federal grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab.
Read the whole story at this link...
The School of Art has a new director!
Dane Webster comes to us from the University of Colorado Denver, where he was the Director of the Digital Animation Center (DAC) program and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the College of Arts and Media. Previously he was at Virginia Tech for 12 years, where he started their 3D computer animation program within the School of Visual Arts. While there, he also created and served as Director of the MFA in Creative Technologies and was a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology which promotes research and education at the boundaries between art, design, engineering, and science.
Dane has extensive experience in administration, fundraising, technology and both international and interdisciplinary collaboration. His artwork and short films have been shown in juried art exhibitions and highly competitive short film venues. His visualizations helped raise funds for $100 million in building projects at Virginia Tech, have been viewed over 110,000 times, primarily by students learning about a Native American settlement in Virginia, and have been shown as part of an interactive app at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. He is a photographer, animator, visualizer, and creative coder.
"I focus on the notion that, by their very design, universities hold a transdisciplinary conference on their campuses every single day. In addition to working with other artists, I have collaborated with researchers in computer science, music, math, mechanical engineering, disaster science, history, weather, social science, and education. This is my intellectual community and scholarly context."
"I have thought often of my last night in Lubbock during my campus visit, sitting in a restaurant around a large dinner table, talking with many of the School of Art faculty about the past, present, and a possible future. That night put the hook in me, leaving me feeling humbled at the thought of being welcomed by such an impressive group of artists, designers, scholars, and professionals; and also very excited about what new steps we all might take together."
At Texas Tech University, Dane will coordinate and guide all aspects of the School of Art in collaboration with the faculty and the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts. During this very exciting time for both the School of Art and the College, Dane's experience and vision will complement our strategic initiatives and help us all to raise the profile of the School and College nationally and internationally. He will help us create partnerships with other institutions, broaden our recruiting of high quality students and faculty, as well as lift the visibility of the School of Art's faculty and alumni. Please join us in welcoming Dane Webster to his new position at Texas Tech!
School of Art
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Address
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Email
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