"It's a real testament to the excellent work of our faculty, staff, and students done across all of our disciplines that we've sustained this national ranking." says Yumi Janairo Roth, Chair of the Art & Art History Department, CU Boulder. The University of Colorado Boulder Graduate Fine Art program, has been ranked 23rd in the nation, according to U.S.News & World Report's rankings.
As a CU undergrad, Jessica Dee Sawyer (ArtHist鈥�03) studied the bold black lines of Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky鈥檚 striking use of color. When it came time to redesign the logo and packaging for Smarties, the beloved crunchy candy pellets that have remained unchanged since the 1950s, Jessica tapped into her background as an art history major.
When Megan O鈥橤rady looks at a painting, she doesn鈥檛 just examine its composition. She鈥檚 interested in the artist behind the brushstrokes and the social context in which the artist is working. This month she explored an extraordinary, yet little written about, history of Black abstraction in a piece for The New York Times: Once Overlooked, Black Abstract Painters Are Finally Given Their Due. CU Boulder Today spoke with O鈥橤rady, a critic and essayist who recently joined the university as assistant professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies in Art and Art History, about why it鈥檚 important to revisit art history, its movements and its artists.
Alejandra Abad and Rom谩n Anaya, University of Colorado Boulder fine arts graduate students, developed the 鈥淥ur Wishes/Nuestros Deseos鈥� project as a way to create community art during a pandemic. The concept is to reclaim flags, using them to embody inclusiveness instead of as divisive symbols.
Professor George Rivera created this public art piece鈥攈is first ever billboard work鈥攖o address hate as a response to the current political climate, Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 pandemic. It seeks to confront this issue in a simple and straightforward message without specifying any specific group.
The focus on process and abstraction harnessed at CU Boulder became an essential component of Takenaga鈥檚 artistic career. Today, Takenaga, a current Guggenheim memorial fellow and professor emerita of Williams College, is celebrated for her large-scale paintings and the way in which they teeter between abstraction and something slightly representational.
For art students, it can feel like the pathway into a career should fall into one of two strictly separate categories: art maker or art historian. Starting in the spring of 2021, however, this divide will be challenged with the arrival of the University of Colorado Boulder鈥檚 newest art and art history faculty member, Megan O鈥橤rady, who is also an art critic and essayist for The New York Times.
The works in the exhibition Citizenship: A Practice of Society exemplify how artists act as citizens. The exhibit features five new commissions approaching issues that have become more pressing this year: voter registration, native lands, access to information, legislation on citizenship and human connection. One of these, 鈥淧roperty Rights鈥� by Yumi Janairo Roth, is the artist鈥檚 exploration of how our image of public land and the American West is built, maintained, accessed, controlled and delineated.
Assistant Professor in Foundations, Anna Tsouhlarakis, is a 2021 recipient of a prestigious Creative Capital award. Her project, "Indigenous Absurdities" challenges and stretches the boundaries of aesthetic and conceptual expectations to reclaim Native identity through video, performance, photography, and installation.
The new year鈥檚 art project and its accompanying public art motorcade are the result of work by two CU Boulder graduate students and artists: Alejandra Abad and Rom谩n Anaya, collaboratively known as Abad鈼瓵naya. The two artists will use flags to artistically represent people鈥檚 hopes and dreams as a way to reclaim flags from being divisive symbols about the past and present, and allow them to embody a more inclusive future.
