2022

Taekyeom Lee's research explores unconventional materials and digital methods to graphic design to create 3D type, graphics, and even designed objects. This research began with two questions: Where does typography belong in the post-digital age? How do we bridge digital and physical experiences? Post-digital typography is engaged with tangible experience assisted and/or created with various digital controls. For the post-digital typography, the cutting-edge digital techniques play a crucial role in turning intangible ideas into tangible design products with physical substance, also combined with augmented reality to build the strong connection between analog and digital realms. In response to this movement, his research actively adapts digital design and various fabrication methods, specifically 3D printing and CAD design. In a broad sense, his research is aiming to develop, test, and find the place of the emerging technologies in the design process and creative practices.

Taekyeom Lee is an educator, maker, and designer using the artist's material and artistic sensibility. He is currently an Assistant professor of Graphic Design at Illinois State University in Normal, IL. He received an MFA degree in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Marilyn Artus explores the female experience within her art making practice. Marilyn has also been a curator, commercial artist, burlesque promoter, event planner and female artist mentor. She has created shows that explore the suffragist era in the U.S., paid tribute to an assortment of women in American history and most recently been using the American flag as a vehicle for feminist exploration.

Marilyn grew up in Norman and Tulsa, Oklahoma. She spent two years of college at University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. She then returned to Oklahoma and finished her bachelor of fine arts in printmaking from the University of Oklahoma. She worked for 13 years in the gift industry designing products and packaging for United Design Corporation and Relevant Products for manufacturing worldwide. In 2008, Marilyn became a full-time visual artist.

Some of the highlights of Marilyn's art career so far have been solo and group museum and gallery shows in Oklahoma, New York, Tennessee and Washington. The first to receive the annual Brady Craft Alliance Award for Innovation in fiber arts in 2011 and in 2010 led an art making workshop at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in association with the retrospective exhibit 'Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968. She was selected to exhibit in the premier exhibit of “Elevate” on the guest room floor elevator lobbies at the 21c Museum Hotel in Oklahoma City.

Unmoored
March 10 - April 14

“I create sculptures and installations from materials reclaimed at the margins of the city. My practice involves collecting and transfiguring natural and manufactured debris to amplify their potential to serve as markers of conflict and resilience in the landscape. Informed by observation and research, my practice considers the implications of my selected materials and the factors that situate their recovery. I adapt traditional crafts to bind the past with the present and pit the transformable forces of nature against suggestions of human industry, agency, and complicity”.

Loren Schwerd is an artist and educator based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work uses handcraft to transform found and foraged materials to obscure distinctions between organic and synthetic matter and reflect the entwined forces of nature and culture.

Schwerd earned her MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University and her BFA from Tulane University. Her work has been exhibited at the Luckman Gallery at California State University, the Center for Craft Creativity and Design in North Carolina, The Columbus Museum of Art in Georgia, the La Triennale di Milano Design Museum in Milan, and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans.

Her works have been featured in FiberArt Magazine and Artistry in Fiber, Vol. 2: Sculpture, from Schiffer Publishing, She has been awarded residencies from Art Omi, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Center. Schwerd teaches sculpture and design at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Plot, Vein, Crescent, Eye

January 18 - February 25

Artist Amie Cunat brings a large-scale sculptural installation, to the Lightwell Gallery as the first exhibition of 2022 at the University of Oklahoma School of Visual Arts. The exhibition opens Friday, Jan. 18, and will run through Feb. 25.

A virtual artist talk is slated for 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 2, in room 205. This event is free and open to the public.

Cunat’s influences for this exhibition range from pop abstraction and surrealist bio morphism to horror and science fiction movies such as The Blob and The Thing.

“Plot, Vein, Crescent, Eye takes on the qualities of an autonomous organism through the painted paper’s leathery and crinkled skin-like surface,” Cunat said. “The sculpture’s thick border and specific range of color creates a stark boundary, akin to an extracted sod patch transplanted into a lawn. Embedded within the interior of the flat object are shallow vacancies that resemble cuts or emptied sockets.”

“I have made a site-specific sculptural installation for the Lightwell Gallery,” she added. “It is entirely hand cut, constructed and assembled from layers of paper and paint. The process is similar to all of my sculptural work, where I wrap cardboard objects with paper that produces a different kind of surface.”

Cunat further described her work as attempting “to create a connection between the landscape of where I grew up in Illinois, that shares similar landscape features to Oklahoma’s terrain. A significant feature to the work is its ability to nod to several different reference points, but not necessarily describe any. Is it a plot? Does it have a vein? Why crescent? What eye? Etcetera. The answers to these questions are all yes and present … but at the same time, wholly no and absent.”

OU Art and Design Students to Present Final Projects at 2022 Senior Capstone Exhibition

NORMAN, OKLA. - The annual University of Oklahoma School of Visual Arts’ senior capstone exhibition is back in person this year! Featuring the work of graduating seniors from all visual arts programs offered at OU, the exhibition will open on April 28 for Studio and Art, Technology, and Culture areas , and May 2 for Visual Communication. A complimentary closing reception is scheduled from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, May 6, on the second floor of the Fred Jones Jr. Art Center, in the Lightwell Gallery.

This exhibition is presented each spring in conjunction with a capstone course required for all graduating seniors receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree. Each student creates a body of work that represents their studies and the time they spent at the OU School of Visual Arts, a portion of which is displayed during the senior capstone exhibition.

The students work closely with faculty to organize and install their works. Students are responsible for every aspect of the show, which offers them valuable hands-on experience necessary for success post-graduation.

“We are extremely happy this year to hold an actual in-person opening for our annual School of Visual Arts Senior Capstone students,” said studio capstone faculty adviser Bob Dohrmann. “It has been two long years waiting since the last opening, and my studio art students are excited to showcase their works for a real audience. The exhibition will feature ceramics, printmaking, drawing, painting, painting on ceramics and a small installation.”

The School of Visual Arts, established in 1915, is the oldest and most comprehensive school of art in the state of Oklahoma. Through civic engagement, the school endeavors to meet the artistic needs of Oklahoma’s citizens and promote the growth of culture. The goal of the OU School of Visual Arts is to prepare each student for success nationally and internationally as artists, designers, scholars, teachers and influential patrons of all the arts.

The Lightwell Gallery is located on the second floor of the School of Visual Arts in the Fred Jones Jr. Art Center, 520 Parrington Oval, in the OU Arts District. Gallery hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The gallery is closed on weekends and OU holidays.

2022

Unmoored March 10 - April 14

Plot, Vein, Crescent, Eye

January 18 - February 25

OU Art and Design Students to Present Final Projects at 2022 Senior Capstone Exhibition

Unmoored
March 10 - April 14