ceramics
Participate in an evening of fun and food in the Ceramics Studio. Come in and Create Bowls for a good cause. You don’t need to know how to throw on the wheel to make bowls! Handbuild them! Be a part of the Empty Bowls event to Fight Hunger no what your skill level. Bowls produced during the open studio night will be donated to the Empty Bowls event in April 2012. Plan on trimming your bowls sometime in the days following the open studio night.

Where: The Art Warehouse, Ceramics Studio
When: Thursday, November 10th 6PM – 10PM

Download a flyer here

the proposal photo According to Daniel McQuade, who earned a BFA in photography at Marshall in 2006 and went on to become a professional photographer, this story has been in the making for about six years now. It all started when he walked into Baptist Campus Ministries(BCM) on Marshall’s Huntington campus one night.

“I was by my lonesome, and I saw this gorgeous girl,” McQuade said. “Naturally, I didn’t say anything because I was on the shy side. She was with a ‘posse,’ and I was just some random guy by himself.”

The girl, Lizzy Freeman, is a third-year medical student at Marshall’s School of Medicine.  And Saturday, March 5, she became McQuade’s fiancée.

A few days after the random sighting, McQuade showed up at the darkroom in Smith Hall, and the girl was there. “It caught me off guard for a second because it was one of the last things I expected, but this time I said something. We struck up a conversation. Long story short … I ended up spending a lot of time with her in the darkroom and we grew pretty close. I was there when her grandma passed away and she asked me if I would go to BCM with her that night. She was there helping me through endless frustrations when I was working on exhibitions and my senior show till ungodly hours of the night.”

Fast forward a few years and McQuade is ready to propose marriage to Freeman. He knew she wanted a unique proposal—no ring in the wine glass for this girl—and the idea came to McQuade to take her back to where they’d first met; the darkroom.

McQuade contacted Danny Kaufmann, assistant professor of photography at Marshall to gain permission to be in the darkroom a few nights. He hired videographer buddy Trevor Coffman, who came all the way from the Gorge, to capture the proposal on video. Then McQuade drove out to the “boonies” to shoot the proposal photograph, which was to be presented to Freeman at just the right time.

Coffman met up with McQuade around 11:30 and set up the video in the darkroom while McQuade went through with his proposal idea. Coffman also put a sign on the door that indicated that video equipment was in the darkroom to dissuade any questions from Freeman about it being there.

McQuade explained some of the preparation.

“I shot quite a few rolls to get the one that I wanted to use,” he said. “My plan was to develop a picture that I had written a proposal on and stash it until Lizzy was running a print of her own through the developer. When she was standing there with her print I would slip mine on top and she would see it and I would do the guy thing and drop to one knee. As simple as it sounds, it ended up being a production on my end. I picked up Lizzy and headed to the darkroom. All the while Trevor hid in his car waiting for my signal that all had gone well. We got there and had a little bit of a hard time finding the right equipment to use but we finally found two that worked for us. Time was ticking and we only had one hour of video to get the proposal. Finally the time came when Lizzy was ready to run a print through the developer. I led her to believe that I was running one of my own through from one of our previous shoots but I swapped it out for the proposal print when I walked up beside her at the sink. It was ‘go time’ and I hoped that the print would turn out the way I had intended. About 5 second later the words “Lizzy, will you marry me” became visible on a little card in the picture and I dropped to one knee and whipped out the ring. She was in shock and everything went just as I had wanted it to.”

For Freeman, it was perfect.

“The darkroom was really the perfect place,” she said. “I remember meeting him in college there—I remember exactly what he was wearing. Once I found out he had a key to the darkroom it was all over; we spent hours in that room. Then

Daniel and I began officially dating December 29, 2005. I shared my love of the snow and he shared his of the water. Daniel had a rough time learning how to snowboard, and rough is putting it mildly. I eventually overcame my initial fear of falling off the jet ski at the lake.  We’ve traveled to NY with the art department, Niagara Falls, numerous states, and plenty of beaches. When he asked me to go to the darkroom, I really wasn’t suspecting anything.  We had been out shooting with the Holgas and Daniel had been to the darkroom multiple times developing film so I didn’t think much of it.

Freeman explained that the couple initially had trouble finding equipment that would work for their project.

“Once we found one that worked, we began to make test prints,” Freeman said. “I remember getting mine right and Daniel wanted me to wait on him. I just figured he was excited since we hadn’t done this in a while. Then he said, “I’ll just wing this one, I have tons of paper.”  First of all, Daniel wings nothing.  He is a perfectionist photographer—to the point it drives me crazy sometimes.  Winging is not characteristic of him.  Also he could have all the paper in the world but would never waste a sheet on “winging it.”

But Freeman let him finish his print.

“Then we threw our prints in the developing solution.  He insisted his be on top of mine and I said, ok, whatever and I asked him to get the timer and I would shake the solution (which he claims to have never heard).  He didn’t move.  I was confused until I looked into the developing solution when his photo revealed itself. I looked back at him and he was on one knee with the ring, and said, “This is as good of a time as ever, right?”  I put my hand out to accept the ring, nervous I guess, and Daniel said, “No I have to put it on your finger!”  I was floored. Completely shocked.   And of course, I said yes!”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, Jan. 20, 2010
Contact: Jaye Ike, College of Fine Arts, 304-696-3296

Upcoming Gallery 842 exhibition focuses on the spiritual

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Ian Hagarty, who teaches painting in Marshall University’s College of Fine Arts, is the curator of Gallery 842’s upcoming exhibition, “On Spirituality: Emerging Visions of the Spiritual.”

The exhibition opens Jan. 21 with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and will remain on display through Feb. 18.

Hagarty is in his first year of teaching at Marshall. He has taken a behind-the-scenes role in this endeavor – choosing the artists and art for the exhibition, instead of presenting work.

“As part of my first contribution to the Department of Art and Design I wanted to organize an exhibition with students, and the community at large, in mind,” Hagarty said. “The exhibition brings together a diverse group of emerging artists who work in a variety of traditional and non-traditional materials and my hope is that students will have the opportunity to recognize that, in the contemporary art world, being an artist doesn’t always have to be medium-specific. I also hope that the exhibition presents creative options for addressing, what for some is a very important issue, ‘Spirituality.’

Hagarty invited nine artists from across the country, and one from Huntington. Natalie Larsen, who also teaches art at Marshall, will present work in this exhibition.

“Some of the artists in the exhibition have ties to one another via education/schools, region, etc.,” Hagarty said, “and I was fortunate to be able to bring together such a strong mix of creative individuals, due to their committed involvement with the theme of the show.”

Gallery 842 is located at 842 4^th Ave. in Huntington. It is open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 6 p.m.

Following is a list of artists who will be represented in the exhibition:

• Charles Westfall          MFA, University of Georgia, 2011 (candidate)
• Casey Smith                MFA, San Francisco Art Institute, 2005
• Natalie Larsen             MFA, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, 2006
• Jared Clark                  MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2007
• Stacy Isenbarger         MFA, University of Georgia, 2009
• Rusty Wallace             MFA, University of Georgia, 2000
• Jeff Guy
• Leonor Jurado             MFA, University of Missouri, 2009
• Matthew Ballou          MFA, Indiana University, 2005
• Craig Hawkins            MFA, University of Georgia, 2011 (candidate)

ShowGraphic This exhibition features commercial and experimental work by local and national designers and artists that use video and emerging animation technology. The opening reception at Birke Art Gallery will be on September 21st and will include a discussion at 7PM in Smith Hall 154 with Rainer Ziehm, designer and partner of leftchannel, a motion graphics design firm located in Columbus, Ohio. Other participants include Ozone Studios, Mills James Productions, Motion Masters, Alex Wilson, Joseph Mougel and Cynthia Brinich-Langlois.

Daniel Kaufmann, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Design, was chosen to show his artwork in reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, which will continue until Sept. 26 at the Musée de l’Elysée, a museum for photography in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Kaufmann’s work was selected from among 700 entries submitted by 120 of the world’s top photography schools. According to the Musée de l’Elysée’s website, the exhibition showcases 80 up-and-coming talents from 30 countries.

Kaufmann said his work in the exhibition is from his series House Home. The photographs in House Home are digitally constructed from photographs of his home, his friends’ homes and objects from many different home-furnishing stores. He said he does not photograph a room in its entirety, but rather in parts that he then uses to construct the images. When constructing the final images, he uses the same types of compositional and photographic techniques used in commercial photography, advertising and marketing. In the title of the work, House refers to physical construction of the rooms while Home refers to the human imprint on the room.

“The photographs in House Home are inspired by a fantasy of aspirational living in which ideas of home and a person’s lifestyle are constructed by purchasing slick, shiny and arguably unnecessary things,” Kaufmann said. “I see a person’s lifestyle as a … means of forging a sense of self and creating cultural symbols that resonate with personal identity.”

This semester at Marshall, Kaufmann is teaching “Introduction to Photography,” “Introduction to Design” and “Advanced Studio Sequence Photography – The Staged Photography Constructed Image.”

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NEWS FROM MARSHALL UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
ONE JOHN MARSHALL DRIVE, HUNTINGTON, WV 25755
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010
Contact: Jaye Ike, College of Fine Arts, 304-696-3296
jaye.ike@marshall.edu

John Farley, Daniel Kaufmann, Andra Levy and Tommy Warf have been chosen to participate in the Nelson Gallery’s 11th Annual Juried Show, which opens Aug. 6 and runs through Aug. 28.

Warf is a graduate ceramics and education student at Marshall.

“My work, ‘Vase Head Samantha,’ shows Samantha ready to be filled with the joy, love, grief, or unhappiness of others and carry that weight on her shoulders,” Warf said.

Sculpture student Andra Levy’s piece, “The Blue Deeley,” is made of blue mist alabaster stone. Levy describes it as “mother nature vs. woman. It goes with my other art pieces of what a woman goes through from young to old and everything in between.”

Fran Fevrier, coordinator of this show, calls the Nelson Gallery “an artist’s cooperative in sweet little Lexington, Virginia. We put a lot of effort in to supporting other artists, and to inviting the community in to enjoying the visual art that goes on in our gallery.”

The show was open to residents of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia, with a theme of “OUTSIDE/INSIDE,” which could be interpreted in any way the artist wished. It was juried by David Mickenberg, executive director of the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, Va.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Contact: Jaye Ike, College of Fine Arts, 304-696-3296

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – A Marshall University student in the College of Fine Arts is using his design skills for good causes after landing a summer internship with a newspaper focusing on the homeless in Washington, D.C.

Eric Falquero, a 21-year-old graphic design senior from Charleston W.Va., said he loves helping people and is happy he found a way to contribute to causes by doing what he loves – graphic design.

“Any good cause needs good design to make it stand out from everything else because we see all kinds of media every minute of every day,” Falquero said.

The biweekly paper at which he is interning, Street Sense, is based out of Washington, D.C., and its mission is to raise public awareness on the issues of homelessness and poverty in the city and to create economic opportunities, according to the website. The paper is sold by vendors who are homeless or close to being homeless.

“Most of the content is written by the vendors that sell it and they write about issues that they face,” Falquero said. “The vendors buy copies of the paper once it is printed for 35 cents a copy and they sell it for a minimum of $1. It provides them a creative outlet and a job where they are pretty much their own bosses because they choose when and where they want to go out.”

He stumbled across the opportunity while searching on the Internet for internships in the D.C. area and it was the first one that caught his attention, Falquero said.

“The internship actually had just been posted two days before I found it,” he said. “So I replied to it and I heard back from them the next day. The more I looked into it, the more interested I was, so I was very excited when they picked me.”

Currently the executive director of Street Sense has been focusing on marketing the paper and increasing the audience, Falquero said. A large part of that is establishing the brand and getting professional looking materials out, as well as a paper that is visually interesting so people want to read it.

“My long-term project for the summer is to redesign the paper, which is what I am the most excited about,” he said. “It will be time intensive and the biggest challenge but I like a challenge. It will be the longest lasting impression that I can leave with the organization, as well.”

Falquero also will be working closely with one of the vendors who puts together the layout for the creative section of the paper where vendors submit poems and photographs, he said

“Right now there is not much design to the creative section and the director feels that there should be more to go along with the rest of the paper and to really highlight a treasure of the paper,” Falquero said. “They want me to get to know the guy and help him with his design skills so that he can do it rather than just handing it off to me.”

Street Sense has about 100 active vendors who sell about 16,000 papers every other week, with the average vendor earning $45 a day, according to the website.

This is not the first cause for which Falquero has contributed his design skill. He also was behind all the creative work for the Empty Bowls campaign this spring. The purpose of this yearly campaign is to raise money for the Huntington Area Food Bank to feed the hungry by selling lunch and bowls made by the ceramic students in the College of Fine Arts.

“The Empty Bowls project was probably the most fulfilling project I worked on as far as anything affiliated with college,” Falquero said. “At first I designed a letterhead and made it on a word document so anyone who needed to use it for stuff affiliated with the campaign. Then from there I found out they wanted a website and I just kind of fell into working on the whole campaign.”

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Contact: Jaye Ike, College of Fine Arts, 304-696-3296

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Marshall University College of Fine Arts students are getting “crafty” this summer in a jewelry-making class that currently is being offered in the Summer II session.

“This is an introduction to the technical skills necessary for the craft of jewelry making,” said Daniel Cook, an adjunct instructor for the College of Fine Arts, “as well as an introduction to the aesthetic concerns of working in a small format and a discussion of the importance of body adornment to our society and individuality.”

The class meets five days a week for two hours in Smith Hall on Marshall’s Huntington campus and will eventually use the sculpture laboratory as the class moves forward, Cook said. There are 12 students enrolled in the class.

It has been a long time since Marshall has offered a jewelry-making class, Cook said.

“I am sure that I’m the first to teach jewelry at Marshall in the 21st century,” he said. “So far the class is only available in the summer, but if students continue to be interested in the subject I will be thrilled to teach it more often.”

Because the class is an introduction to jewelry, it is very technically based, he said. The students in the class are all making the same objects but with individual design concepts.

“The assignments are laid out to teach the student how to do something specific,” he said. “The first assignment is to create a key fob, or key chain, and all the students are given the same amount of material … while all the key fobs are the same size and material, the outcomes are radically different.”

The jewelry being made in the class is in no way limited as to material, however. For this class students will be using traditional materials such as cooper for the key fobs and silver to create two rings and a pendant, Cook said. Students have the option to set whatever they would like in the silver rings and pendant. Some students are using stones, gems, river glass or bark, and one is using the rubber shock absorber from his tennis racket.

To create the jewelry, students have to learn how to use basic small hand tools such as the jeweler’s saw, files, hammers, torches for soldering, polishing lathes and pliers, Cook said

Steven Romano, a senior sculpture major from Bluefield, W.Va., said he signed up for the class because he has never worked in such a small medium and likes to dabble in new areas.

“I am used to working with large scale in sculpture,” Romano said. “Taking it down to a small scale, you have to be a lot more meticulous.”

He said he would recommend this class to other students.

Cook said his favorite part about teaching this class is seeing what the students come up with and watching them as they figure out how to plan and achieve a design.

“Jewelry takes planning; it also requires an understanding of the order of operations,” he said. “You can’t always go back and fix something. You need to plan what is going to happen and in what order. It is thrilling to watch students learn how to organize their process to achieve their goals.”

This is the first time Cook has taught jewelry making at Marshall, but he taught similar classes at the University of Massachusetts and Dartmouth University, as well as in workshops at Snowfarm, a craft school in western Massachusetts, he said.

“Jewelry is a great way to learn to work with your hands,” he said. “As our society advances technologically, sometimes we forget how to make things with our hands and the satisfaction this brings to us. Jewelry is great because we can make something, wear it, and eventually somebody will tell us that our jewelry is great and ask where we bought it. Telling them that you made it is very satisfying.”

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NEWS FROM MARSHALL UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
ONE JOHN MARSHALL DRIVE, HUNTINGTON, WV 25755

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Contact: Jaye Ike, College of Fine Arts, 304-696-3296
jaye.ike@marshall.edu

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Sarah “Sassa” Nibert, a Marshall University senior majoring in art and design, has won the Huntington Steel and Supply Inc. competition for students participating in a public sculpture class.

Nibert has been awarded materials, funds for fabrication and a stipend to complete her work, and Huntington Steel and its employees are assisting her in fabricating her sculpture in their shop. The finished design will then be moved to a site selected by the City of Huntington in Harris Riverfront Park.

“This competition offers our students invaluable experience,” said Jonathan Cox, professor of sculpture at Marshall. “Each student developed a design, a scale model and artist’s statement to support his or her choices. They were then required to present their ideas and justify them to a panel of individuals from the university, the city, and the Huntington Museum of Art. Just that process is an essential experience for a student hoping to make his or her living as an artist.”

As the winner of the competition, Nibert will take that learning further. “The winning designer must manage his or her own project from budget to construction to installation,” Cox noted. “Sassa is getting real-world experience in bringing a project to life.”

Nibert’s design is a simplistic, abstracted form, representing a child and an adult figure in a scene of playful interaction. It is bright, inviting, and gender-neutral so that viewers could potentially see themselves or loved ones when they see the sculpture.

“I want a mother to see herself and her child, but also want fathers, grandparents, babysitters or children to see themselves and their families in the art,” Nibert said. “Public art absolutely has the power to inspire and influence people, and an issue that I feel is prominent in our area currently is overall health and activity level, especially for children. As the parent of a six year old, I am aware of the increasingly sedentary lifestyles that our children are adopting, and can see days of fresh air and imaginative outdoor play disappearing. Busy daily lives of parents can add to the problem, making healthy, interactive, health- and relationship-strengthening play time scarce.”

“We are gratified by this competition and the responses of the students,” said Huntington Steel President Mike Emerson. “Our entire company is invested in this project with Sassa. Our employees take pride in knowing that Huntington Steel is involved in a project that means so much to students – but also a project that will mean so much to Huntington. When the sculpture is installed, it means that Huntington Steel and its crew have dedicated themselves to our product, our craft and to our community. We are very pleased to be able to make this possible.”

The finished sculpture is scheduled to be installed and dedicated at Harris Riverfront Park on Sept. 11.

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