Friday, March 14, 2014

Art & Design Students Win Awards

Four Parkland Students won merit awards at this year's Illinois Community College Juried Exhibition at Governors State University's Fine Art Gallery. To view some of the works in the show, including the four Parkland award winners visit http://www.govst.edu/uploadedFiles/Academics/Colleges_and_Programs/CAS/Center_for_Law_Enforcement_Technology_Collaboration%281%29/CLETC_Inside_Pages/2014ICCJE_AWARDSforweb.pdf

We are very proud of our talented students and want to congratulate all six who were chosen to exhibit in this year's show.

Chan Bao - Merit Award
Julio Gaytan - Merit Award
Leila Ghasempoor - Merit Award
Eunsook Park - Merit Award
Erin Rogers
Al Tindle

Art & Design student lectures airing on PCTV

Last semester two of our talented Art & Design students gave presentations on experiences they recently had away from our campus and now you can view those lectures on PCTV. The lectures will air this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 11am and 9pm.

In 2011, Eric was awarded the Don Lake Art Scholarship and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts Scholarship. That summer Eric traveled to Arrowmont in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains to attend a week-long workshop in resin casting. Asking himself, “Why not?” He encased a raw slab of bacon in resin. This piece won a Merit Award in the 2012 Governor’s State Community College Juried Art Exhibition. Always the curious learner, Eric traveled to Guinea, West Africa to learn traditional lost-wax bronze casting through Antioch University. For six months Eric apprenticed with master caster, Sekou Berete. 

After graduating from Parkland in May 2013 with an AFA, Ruta Rauber continued her exploration of metal smithing and ceramics. She received the Metals Award in 2012 and is the 2013 recipient of the Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts Scholarship. “Beyond the Bezel” gave her the opportunity to explore the use of cold connections (rivets, tubing, prongs, etc.) in combination with found objects. Her supply kit not only included sheets of copper and brass, copper wire and solder but also foreign coins, bottle caps, postage stamps, game pieces, metal scraps and other ephemera. “The use of cold connections allows me the freedom to assemble components that would not normally go together. I am drawn to collage and mixed media and am challenged in combining old with new, traditional with non-traditional, permanent with ephemeral. Objects that would otherwise be cast off or forgotten in a junk drawer are given a new life as pieces of wearable art.”-R. Rauber 

Art Faculty Featured

Parkland College art faculty talent will be featured on the national stage next week during a ceramic arts educators conference in Milwaukee.

Art and Design faculty Chris Berti and Laura O'Donnell will play a role at the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts' 48th annual conference, March 19–22. O'Donnell, an art history instructor at Parkland, will be the discussion leader for conference topic "The Figure In, On, or Of Clay" while Berti, a sculptor and Parkland professor of ceramics, will serve as curator for a featured exhibit, "The Figure in Clay," to be held in conjunction with the conference.

O'Donnell's session will explore why the human form has remained such a fascinating subject and concept for thousands of years in ceramic art. "The figure in, on, or of clay is an expression of both its subject matter and its physical medium," O'Donnell said in a statement about the session. "The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of ceramic artists using the figure. What do they say about contemporary society?"

O’Donnell has an MA in Art History and an MFA in Ceramics both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her writing has been published in Ceramics Art and Perception, Ceramics Technical, and Critical Ceramics, as well as in several exhibition catalogues. Her artwork appears in 10 of Lark’s 500 Series books featuring ceramic art, and she exhibits regularly at Cinema Gallery in Urbana.

As part of the conference, “The Figure in Clay” exhibition, curated by Berti, will be held at the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee March 19–April 19. This showing examines the work of an international group of contemporary artists who use clay as a medium to interpret the figure as both subject and content.

Berti is an active NCECA exhibitor with works in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and the Frederick Meijer Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids.

-Article by Ruthie Counter