AAH alumni

Graduate finds her way in the ‘uncontrollable motion of life’

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Graduate finds her way in the ‘uncontrollable motion of life’ Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/11/2024 - 00:00

Ava Altenbern, who double-majored in biochemistry and art history, reflects on charting her path through a pandemic

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Lassoing light and capturing the magic between horse and rider

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:49:00 +0000

Lassoing light and capturing the magic between horse and rider Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/19/2024 - 11:49

Alumnus and professional photographer Chris Sessions explains how one of his first photo assignments 30 years ago in a CU Boulder class evolved into a cultural art exhibit.

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Sculpture and Post-Studio Practice Alumni Conversation

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 21:26:09 +0000

Sculpture and Post-Studio Practice Alumni Conversation Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/23/2024 - 14:26

Alumna Amy Hoagland sits down with Professor Richard Saxton to talk about her recent projects after graduation

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Abby Bennett (MFA 2015) brings public artwork into focus

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 20:32:44 +0000

Abby Bennett (MFA 2015) brings public artwork into focus Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/26/2023 - 14:32

Master of Fine Arts alumna Abby Bennett has launched a successful career in the arts after graduation and now builds monumental public artworks around the world. Professor Yumi Janairo Roth sat down with Abby and talked with her about her time at CU Boulder and her career trajectory.

What was your experience in the MFA program?

"I went right into the sculpture and post-studio program. I have always just worked with my hands and with a wide variety of mediums. So, no matter what area I would have been in, I would have still been making sculptural things.

"It was nice to have the time and the freedom to learn creative problem-solving, I had lots of time to experiment. The time in the MFA program enabled me to explore new materials and learn valuable skills because I understood that it would be hard to do this later when I didn’t have a studio and an entire wood shop full of tools available.

"I felt a real bond and closeness with the other sculpture grads, we all hung out outside of school as much as we did at school. Even though everybody's at different places in their personal lives, you're bonded because you are in this collected shared experience. And you go through the ups and downs of that journey at the same time. I'm still good friends with all of them."

A Search for Comfort, 2015. Concrete

How did you shape your career in the arts at CU Boulder?

"The first week or two before I started classes at CU I was on campus and saw a sculpture being installed between the museum and the Art & Art History building. That was the first time I had interfaced with Demiurge, a large-scale fabrication studio based in Denver, who was doing the installation. I was asked to help with the installation, and it really made a big impression on me.

"Once I finished school, I was encouraged to apply to Demiurge. I sent in my resume, followed up, and finally got an interview over lunch. It went well and they called me as I was driving away from the restaurant, thinking I got the job, but they had locked their keys in the car and asked, “Can you give us a ride back to the shop?” I was like, yeah of course, but I had to move a ton of tools in the backseat to fit four people. I think that's probably why I got the job because I had an insane number of tools in my car.

"When I started at Demiurge, my desk was in a hallway, between the designer's office and the owner's office and so I was a part of every conversation from beginning to end. I listened and learned things out of the necessity to formalize and realize projects—from administration to installation."

Formations by artist, Mark Reigelman. San Diego International Airport

How has your work in the MFA program informed your career?

"It comes naturally for me to conquer complex logistical issues and working in the Art & Art History wood shop with Bill Rumley (the AAH Woodshop Supervisor) was one of the things I really enjoyed when I was at CU Boulder. I loved helping students figure out how to do their work and encouraging them to use what resources we had available to solve their problems. Having the curiosity, mindset, and tenacity to look for answers through hands-on problem-solving has always served me well."

"At Demiurge, we've done so many cool things, one was a pavilion dome structure made from 900 aluminum panels. Our team had never completely assembled it and it took four people, 14,000 rivets, and four days to install it. Your arts vocabulary and materials library gets bigger and bigger, especially working with so many diverse and creative people. It's incredible when brilliant minds from all sorts of different backgrounds, collaborate to solve the same problem.

"When clients come to Demiurge everybody comes at a different stage. Some people show up with a fully fleshed-out design and stamped engineer drawings, others come with essentially a sketch on a napkin or just a wild idea. Our team listens and collaborates however they feel most comfortable and typically it’s in those beginning conversations you learn whose skill sets will be best used when and where. That’s the joy of making public work with a team as flexible as ours is, we can make any part or the entire project, or we can fully collaborate, whatever suits the client best.

"The challenges at Demiurge don't stop, I learn new things every day. Sometimes I'm grinding metal and sometimes I'm doing payroll. In the future, I want to continue working, designing, and building monumental artworks and work with artists I have admired forever. There's still a lot to look forward to at Demiurge, it's still exciting to fantasize about future projects."

Octopus. Aquarium at the Boardwalk, Branson, MO

How has your art practice grown for you personally?

"The thing that I'm doing for myself that I still consider art or just uses that same part of my brain is renovating a 100-year-old house. There's a lot to do, and it's super satisfying. It’s incredibly creative and I find I’m solving many of the same problems an artist does when building a public artwork. Additionally, I've always loved good design and nice things, especially domestic touches, so the house feels like a cool freaking art project."

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Angela Schwab (BFA, Ceramics '06) builds space for the arts to thrive

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 17:15:16 +0000

Angela Schwab (BFA, Ceramics '06) builds space for the arts to thrive Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/01/2022 - 10:15

Bachelor of Fine Arts alumna Angela Schwab launched a successful career in the arts after graduation and now is designing spaces that inspire community engagement through history, environmental resourcefulness, and creativity. We sat down with Angela and talked with her about her time at CU Boulder and her career trajectory.

Moving West

I’m from West Virginia and knew I wanted to go to college someplace mountainous. I just couldn't imagine living someplace with only a big sky, I needed a diverse topography. CU Boulder with its hilly campus, green spaces, large trees and charming stone buildings had the right feeling for me. I had taken some ceramic classes in high school and wanted to study art; when I started taking art classes at CU, I was truly inspired and I knew that I wanted to take every class and get to know all the instructors.

The Undergraduate Experience

I loved how the undergraduate and graduate students worked together. As an undergrad I had access to the grad students and as a 19-year-old, that was really exciting. Seeing the graduate students working, I knew that I could keep going with an art practice and their work inspired mine. One of the things I loved about the ceramics program was that as a student, you were encouraged to work in whatever material you wanted, for example, one of the ceramic grad students worked with fabric. Learning from my classmates and being inspired by the work around me was my CU Boulder experience; the studio culture of togetherness kept me invested in the program.

After my undergraduate BFA degree, I had a studio space in Denver and started a ceramics production shop making slip-cast tableware. While my work was well-received - it was published in Dwell magazine, shown in exhibits worldwide, and Umbra produced a plate I designed - it was a lonely practice. I missed the camaraderie of working in a creative studio, and especially the critique of my work that I had gotten in school. My BFA degree had prepared me to receive critical feedback, and I learned how to listen and accept criticism and grow from that insight. Having a solo studio practice helped me realize that I couldn’t work in a vacuum and that I thrive with a social studio culture.

Switching from a studio practice to an architecture practice was easier than I expected. They each have their own unique systems and you have to create a process for thriving within those existing systems. The process of creating - whether with clay or designing a building - is time-consuming and can be all-encompassing; it’s what fills our days and ultimately defines the rhythm of our lives.

Snap Cups are 3-ounce ceramic cups with metal clothing snaps embedded in outer cup walls. Extra snaps are included to install cups anywhere: under your cabinet, by your desk, or to your bike handlebars.

The Eternal Optimist

In both ceramics and architecture the work needs to be full of coherent ideas and that becomes the real artistic practice; taking ideas and making a work of art that is beautiful, concise, expressive, and functional. One design principle that we have at AB Studio is to make a building project fit to its physical place and also its place in time/history. We strive to understand the past and the context of the site and adjacent buildings while designing into the future, remaining conscious of construction practices and the use of green materials within a realistic budget. There are so many details and components in architecture, and the challenge is distilling everything down into just the essentials, while keeping it beautiful and expressive. That's where I'm an eternal optimist, there's so much creativity and opportunity to learn and adapt, within every project and also within a career in the arts.

Using what I learned from the ceramics program, the practice of making multiples and iterating ideas, informed my work in the field of architecture. I was making kinetic work, snapping cups together and apart, there was a tactile, moving quality to the work, they were experiential. I took this concept into my architectural work, specifically, how we experience space, as something you move through and occupy with other people, and the materials and textures and light within a space, which is essential to the human experience.

Currently, we are helping a local art center expand their programming space. Working on this project I often think back to the experiences I had at CU, in the galleries, artist studios and classroom spaces and want to create similar opportunities for contemplation, creation, discovery and delight. I think that artistry is essential in design projects. Artists often have an intuitive understanding of proportion, form, material, experience, color, and light, and that knowledge should be applied to any building project or any project really. Designing with experience in mind requires a human touch, an artist’s touch.

Instruction Manual. Flipbook Instruction Manual demonstrates Snap Cups with Handles and Stem. 60 pages, double-sided, color printing, bound with zip-ties.

Fine Arts and Beyond

I think one of the biggest lessons I learned from ceramics is that there are so many ways it can go wrong! Despite my best efforts, there’s only so much I could control, which forced me to learn to pivot in order to keep moving forward. The fragility of ceramics definitely made me more resilient, and making art is a good way to practice resiliency. You have to be able to release, let go, and move on while continuing to make new work.

By studying fine art and ceramics I realized that it all applied to architecture. These art practices opened me up to accessing a wider range of tools, materials and building methods that impacted what I did in graduate school and even in my practice now. In school when I made my art projects I felt I needed to work with many different materials, but it meant that I needed to figure out how to do it and do it safely. My instructors connected me with other departments so I could access the metal milling studio and glass-cutting equipment; getting to work with other makers exposed me to new and inspiring methods and processes. I then used this knowledge to my advantage in architecture graduate school and beyond. In grad school I was using the laser cutter to cut felt and fabric. I made paper pop-ups of my building designs. I quilted drawings for my architecture projects - not exactly the given assignment - but doing it my way and I'm so thankful that my instructors were open to me working this way. When engineers and designers and crafters and artists trade techniques, it makes everyone’s work so much more interesting.

Quilted drawing

What’s on the horizon for AB Studio?

My business partner Ben Heppe and I have some really exciting adaptive reuse projects underway. We just wrapped up a remodel and new branding for a motel in Idaho Springs, and we’re in the early stages of helping friends open a neighborhood bike and coffee shop in a converted house. These are our favorite types of projects - working with clients who want to breathe new life into existing buildings. It’s such a fun puzzle to see how to take an existing space and adapt it to a completely new use - again with optimism!

We’re also working with Foothills Art Center in Golden to expand their gallery and artist studio spaces into a historic boarding house. The 150-year old stone building was historically an important gathering spot in Golden, and with the improvements, we’ve designed - accessible bathrooms, an elevator, code-compliant stairs - the building will be able to adapt to continue to serve as a gathering place for generations. It’s the project of a lifetime, and we’re so excited about creating a space that our entire community will get to use!

Foothills Art Center is expanding its galleries and arts programming into the historic Astor House in downtown Golden, Colorado. The historic portion of the building will be rehabilitated to stabilize the delicate structure and create flexible spaces for children and adult art classes, artist studios, and a teaching kitchen.

There are so many details and components in architecture, and the challenge is distilling everything down into just the essentials, while keeping it beautiful and expressive.

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Andrea Jenkins Wallace (MFA '98) Celebrates Art in the West

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 17:06:44 +0000

Andrea Jenkins Wallace (MFA '98) Celebrates Art in the West Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/05/2022 - 10:06

What was your time like in the MFA program at CU Boulder?

“My MFA thesis work was conceptually centered around storytelling and narrative. I used photography and video to explore the complexity of people’s lives in the ranching community in Kremmling, Colorado. Initially, when I started in the MFA program, I made a series of black and white portraits of Kremmling ranchers; people trying to make a living off the land, at the end of the 20th century. Many of those ranchers were third, fourth, fifth generation people living on that land and battling over water rights lost back in the 1940s—forcibly having to sell to the Denver Water Board and then leased back for 25-30 years. When I was doing this project, a lot of the families were really struggling because they were paying exorbitant amounts of money for water, but they still chose this way of life for their children and grandchildren. Making photographs of these individuals and families within the Western landscape only presented a single perspective. I then took a video class with Luis Valdovino. He helped me realize that I needed to broaden the story and let people tell their own stories in their own words. This advice helped me understand how to construct a narrative. That video ended up being my thesis.”

"My undergraduate degree is in Media and Communications and not art, so it was a bit of an adjustment in graduate school because I didn't have the art background that my peers did. Alex Sweetman and Albert Chong were very helpful, specifically in sorting out how to make documentary work within the context of contemporary art. CU Boulder was a good place for me due in large part to the faculty.”

“The Art & Art History Department gave me support with a GPTI teaching position and I also ran the photography lab, which helped me financially. It also gave me teaching experience so when I went on the job market, I got a tenure track right out of the MFA program. Looking back, securing a tenure track position had a lot to do with not only my photographic work but also having video and electronic media as part of my practice.”

Gingers, 2020. 40x30" Archival InkJet Print

After School Experiences

“I taught at Lake Forest College, near Chicago, but then I decided I wanted to be in the West, because I was still working on my Kremmling project. I accepted a tenure track position at Willamette University in Oregon. While there, I started new work in Alaska making a film about women who live along the Alaska pipeline. The women I focused on were not native to Alaska and that landscape, but had transplanted themselves there from the lower 48 and were defining a new existence —a contemporary western expansion story.”

“Teaching in the West took me from Oregon back to the University of Colorado as a sabbatical replacement for Luis Valdovino, then to the University of Denver, then a position became available as the Director of Photography at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. I always thought I'd go back into academia but the Ranch became an amazing place to raise my son as a single mother and continue my artistic practice. Today, I am the Vice President of Artistic Affairs at Anderson Ranch and I've been working on a sixteen year project exploring gender, identity and the construction of masculinity through portraiture and narrative with my son and his best friend.”

Anderson Ranch. Snowmass Village, Colorado

“I love Anderson Ranch, Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley. Not only because of my job but because I love the outdoors. There are very few places in the country where you can have this lifestyle AND live in a place known for its amazing cultural programs. Anderson Ranch also allows me to interact with artists of all levels, run robust art workshops and host a visiting artist program that features a series of critical dialogues about contemporary art. Anderson Ranch is a creatively rich place to be.”

Launching a career in the arts

“There are so many ways that artists can engage beyond their studio. For example, I still teach, often a couple of workshops a year at the ranch. I'll also co-teach with renowned artists like photographer Catherine Opie and David Hilliard. I enjoy our partnership program with over 70 colleges and universities that brings undergraduate and graduate students to the Ranch each summer, including students from CU Boulder.”

“One piece of advice for students today is to be true to yourself and your practice. Art allows us to reflect on what's happening in our culture, and by talking about it, hopefully, it opens up a larger dialogue about the world. But, I also think there is a level where artists need to be true to who they are and what they're interested in.”

“At Anderson Ranch, we talk to students and residents about the value of focusing on the process over the final product; it's about your journey. When someone takes a class here, I would rather see them leave the class with a sketchbook full of new ideas that they can take back to their practice in their home studio, than a finished object or a body of work they created in a week or two weeks. The experience is about taking risks and pushing boundaries, and even failing as there is so much to be learned from that process.

“Everybody wants to be able to go to art school and come out making a living with their art and it’s not always reasonable to think that everyone can do that—for a myriad of reasons. There are other opportunities in the arts.”

“When I got my MFA, I wanted to teach, but now I feel it may not have been the best reason to get an MFA because there are not enough teaching jobs. I think students who are going to get an MFA degree should be thinking from a perspective of what they want from their community. Things like critical feedback, time to explore and create new work, and even finding opportunities to change their practice through those explorations but not with the end goal of getting a tenure track job. Working in art adjacent professions and places can be very interesting and fulfilling. Not only a great opportunity for artists but it also enables organizations to start thinking more creatively too.”

Left: Nordic, 2018. 40x30" Archival InkJet Print
Right: The River, 2017. 40x30" Archival InkJet Print

"Working in art adjacent professions and places can be very interesting and fulfilling. Not only a great opportunity for artists but it also enables organizations to start thinking more creatively too.”

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David Ellsworth (MFA’73) Received the Smithsonian Institute’s 2021 Visionary Award

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:00:00 +0000

David Ellsworth (MFA’73) Received the Smithsonian Institute’s 2021 Visionary Award Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/05/2021 - 00:00

“Recognitions can come in many forms, from a simple smile to a museum acquisition,” said Ellsworth. “It is an acknowledgment that the intrinsic value of an art object is not the price, but the process. Recognitions acknowledge a maker’s motivations. While the object supports the ego, the process supports the soul.”

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BFA Alumni Adam Milner Inserts Sculptures Into the Everyday of NYC

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 06:00:00 +0000

BFA Alumni Adam Milner Inserts Sculptures Into the Everyday of NYC Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/19/2021 - 00:00

In lieu of a gallery, Adam Milner’s sculptures can be seen all around New York City — from a bodega to a dog’s collar.

Paintings belong on the wall, and sculptures belong on pedestals, right? Maybe not, according to Adam Milner, whose current exhibition Public Sculptures is premised on spontaneous encounters with art — not in a museum or gallery, but in the spaces we least expect: those we frequent as part of our daily lives.

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MFA Alumna Sama Alshaibi Wins Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 19:58:28 +0000

MFA Alumna Sama Alshaibi Wins Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/23/2021 - 13:58

Sama Alshaibi talks about her experience in the MFA program at the University of Colorado Boulder and being a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Landing in Colorado just months before 9-11 Sama Alshaibi, an Iraqi immigrant, found her world forever changed. Looking for opportunities to make work about the complex history of the US Middle East relationship, CU Boulder’s Department of Art & Art History became a home for her creativity to thrive.

“The United States government was talking about going to war with Iraq and being Iraqi, really hit me.” Sama reflects. “As my work as a freelance photographer dried up, as did most creative industries during the economic crash in the United States, I decided to go back to school and pursue my MFA.”

Silsila video installation at Marta Herford Museum, Germany, 2017

MFA Education as Opportunity:

“Through the visiting artist program I got to meet curators and artists who were straddling hybrid identities, being from different places, some dealing with the topics of occupation and war or the aftermath of war, some dealing with post-colonialism. The visiting artist program was excellent and reflected the complexities held within the art world.”

“The program brings in artists for a whole week and I had the opportunity to meet and get to know all those artists. I was put in charge of handling them when they were on campus and in turn they all helped me; they introduced me to the Middle East and North Africa contemporary art scene”

“My second year I received an Arts & Humanities Fellowship, it's mostly faculty, but they accepted four graduate students—that year the topic was ‘war’. I was paid to have discussions with scholars in the field, and it opened up huge opportunities for me to investigate different disciplines within that subject. We read books together, crafted papers, did presentations and my contribution was putting together an exhibition, that experience was powerful.”

“Boulder also had an incredible art program called Artnauts, Dr. George Rivera, Garrison Roots and Luis Valdovino ran it together, but really Dr. Rivera was instrumental in getting exhibitions both nationally and internationally on different kinds of topics, but mostly social, political and justice topics.”

“The Artnauts group was invited to go to Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine, in the summer before the fall of my third year. I had just become an American citizen that year and got my first passport in over a decade. Since that first trip to Palestine as a student, I've been there 30 times, had exhibitions and built relationships with a community of artists, many whom I met in Palestine from that initial trip as a graduate student.”

“It's amazing how many times you can say this to graduate students, that in a way grad school could be the beginning of your network for life.”

Sama Alshaibi, “The Cessation” (2019), neon, aluminum, acrylic, palm fronds, water, copper, terracotta, and sound (commissioned by Artpace San Antonio, photo courtesy Seale Photography Studios)

Life as a student in the Art & Art History Department:

“CU Boulder is one of those places where the graduate experience is professionalized and provides opportunities to get to work with a wonderful diverse faculty."

"Albert Chong was my thesis chair and gets a lot of credit for the kind of artist I am today. He pushed me to dig deeper [creatively] then I had ever done before. He saw something in me and helped me find it. I found my creative voice because of him."

“I worked closely with Yumi Roth in the sculpture department. I never thought I'd ever do sculptural work when I entered, but I felt a strong mentoring relationship with her. She taught me how to produce my memorial-based sculptural project, which I performed with, in my photographs. She had a very strong influence on me and my work.”

“Luis Valdovino, my video professor, who is probably one of the best video professors in the country, gave me an international and transnational perspective. This was at a time where a lot of schools were only teaching from the Western canon, I was so lucky in grad school, my professors, especially Luis, had a very international perspective and empowered me with real art world experiences.”

“The MFA graduate program gives agency to their students and gave me a direction, doing politically motivated work and understanding that your community is a place where you can affect change.

“The graduate student cohort I was a part of were very active. We did exhibitions together. We collaborated; some of my best collaborations happened in grad school. We studied together and looked for grants we could apply for, we helped each other. We learned not to be competitive and realized that if we bonded together we were stronger.”

The Guggenheim Fellowship Project:

“The last couple of projects [including my Guggenheim Fellowship work] I have made are about gender violence in Iraq and how legal instruments such as the new constitution and the Iraqi Family Law are used to enshrine the subjugation of women since the United States invaded Iraq, post-911. I'm really thinking about how the urban spaces and public life has completely changed for Iraqi women.”

“I'm dealing with sculptural elements and the construction of imagery that does not come necessarily from a camera, but presents and captures something that seems invisible or obscure. I'm interested in taking something as cold as documents or police logs or blueprints of a city, and constructing new ways of making narratives based on the lives of women and girls in Iraq. I think it's really important that the world recognize the central role the United States has in making the conditions or contributing to the conditions that exist in Iraq, but also how that has defined all of the Middle East and North Africa. That it’s an American story.”

Staging the Imagined solo exhibition at Ayyam Gallery, Dubai, 2019

What is the role of the arts and artists in contemporary society?

“Art is always dealing with the most salient issues of our time. They can be other things too, of course, but it offers a space where we can imagine, or question these issues and ideas of our time in a way that we can't do with anything else.”

“I think art has the potential to resist oppression. It's got to present potential, to give voice to the ordinary and the voiceless. So, I really don't know what a society is without the arts. And that's all the arts, from literature to music to dance, but especially the visual arts, because it is a space that can be both ambiguous and very specific and is nimble enough to move and change and adjust, throughout time.”

“To me, art is everything, art saved my life. As a refugee, having the kind of experiences that I had in the world, art gave me a platform to speak from, and it gave me a way to plug in the things that really challenged me to tell a story, and then find out all these people experienced those same issues. They may not come from Iraq or Palestine or have the very specific life experiences that I had, but we can share time and space to learn and grow from each other.”

Sama Alshaibi talks about her experience in the MFA program at the University of Colorado Boulder and her upcoming 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Landing in Colorado just months before 9-11 Sama Alshaibi, an Iraqi immigrant, found her world forever changed. Looking for opportunities to make work about the complex history of the US Middle East relationship, CU Boulder’s Department of Art & Art History became a home for her creativity to thrive.

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Guggenheim-winning alum reflects on her career and time at CU Boulder

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 20:34:05 +0000

Guggenheim-winning alum reflects on her career and time at CU Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/02/2021 - 13:34

The focus on process and abstraction harnessed at CU Boulder became an essential component of Takenaga’s 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.

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