2023 SVAD Faculty Exhibition

January 19, 2023 - February 3, 2023

Location: UCF Art Gallery

The UCF Art Gallery is proud to present a dynamic exhibition of artworks by the faculty of the UCF School of Visual Arts and Design. These professional artists have received both national and international recognition for their engaging and thought-provoking works. The exhibition showcases a wide range of traditional and contemporary media and processes including animation, drawing, digital art, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture.

Exhibiting Artists: Chuck Abraham, Bobby Aiosa, Jason Burrell, Jim Casey, Larry Cooper, Matt Dombrowski, Demetrius Dukes, Kevin Haran, Nicholas Kalemba, Joo Kim, Amer Kobaslija, Keith Kovach, Shannon Rae Lindsey, Theresa Lucey, Anthony Mancuso, K-J Mathieson, Justin Nolan, Carla Poindexter, Robert Reedy, Robert Rivers, Steven Spencer, Debi Starr, Ashley Taylor and M. Laine Wyatt

Art Historians: Ilenia Colón Mendoza and Keri Watson

Virtual Gallery

 

Faculty Panels & Lectures:

  • Art History Lecture by Ilenia Colón Mendoza
    • Monday, Jan. 23 | Noon – 1 p.m. | Register Here
    • Lecture abstract: Considered the first Puerto Rican artist, José Campeche y Jordán was born December 23, 1751 and died November 7, 1809. His parents were Tomás Campeche (1701–1780) and María Jordán y Marqués. He was a mulato, his father was a freed slave born in Puerto Rico and his mother was a native of the Canary Islands. His biographies always note that between 1776 and 1778 he was in contact with Spanish court painter Luis Paret y Alcázar, who had been exiled to Puerto Rico. Other sources additionally mention that Campeche was a self-taught and versatile figure, pursuing music, architecture, topography, the design of coats of arms, and the making of musical instruments in addition to his work as a painter. Certain details of Campeche’s life remain a mystery because his belongings were destroyed after his death. He is widely recognized for his portraits of the colonial elite done in the Rococo style. While Puerto Rican identity was developing Campeche painted his Ladies on horseback and The Daughters of the Governor Don Ramón de Castro. His paintings use local folklore and symbolism to create a uniquely criollo product. Campeche captures the earliest visual constructions of Puerto Rican national identity. His painted studies of Puerto Rican identity furthermore reflect the complexities of his self-identity and the intersections of race and social class in the late 18th century.
  • Faculty Panel Discussion #1 with Chuck Abraham, Keith Kovach, Jason Burrell and Jim Casey
  • Art History Lecture by Keri Watson
    • Monday, Jan 30 | 1-2 p.m. | Register Here
    • Lecture Abstract: Eudora Welty (1909-2001) is best known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, but she also was a photographer who created an extensive photographic archive of her home state. Although just a third of Welty’s photographs were printed during her lifetime, these images, which offer important glimpses into the landscapes of the segregated South, have been exhibited locally and nationally in museums and galleries and published in numerous magazines and books. Well received by critics, Welty’s photographs garner significant scholarly and public attention but much of this consideration has centered around Welty’s portraits of people, especially African Americans. Welty’s portraits of the landscape, however, are equally revealing and offer opportunities to extend the study of southern racial politics to the built and natural environment. Of her architectural portraits, Welty’s views of Caldwell House are particularly noteworthy. She took eighteen photographs of the house—more than any other building she photographed—at different times of day, most likely over the course of weeks or months. Taking the photograph’s subject, an abandoned plantation house, as my point of departure, and responding to T. J. Demos’s invitation to see “ecology as a mode of intersectionality” that insists “on the inseparability between environmental matters of concern and sociopolitical and economic frameworks of injustice,” this presentation looks to the Plantationocene, a concept that traces the current ecological crisis to the Middle Passage and the establishment of the plantation economy, to argue that Welty’s photographs of Caldwell House and their various iterative performances over seventy-five years open space for new accountings of Mississippi’s social, cultural, and ecological histories and invite us to consider the relationship between the antebellum past, photography, and climate change.
  • Faculty Panel Discussion #2 with Anthony Mancuso Rob Reedy, Ashley Taylor and K-J Mathieson