100,000,000 and Off-Site Art Space are pleased to present Within You Without You, a multi-venue exhibition of work by 1st and 2nd year MFA students in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas. Each exhibition features new work by emerging artists exploring urgent ideas across a wide range of media, materials and contemporary practices. With intersecting themes, artists dive deep into inner worlds, untangling themselves to seek connection, and navigate the complexities of the human experience intertwined with our contemporary landscape. 

 

Off-Site Art Space / 924 Delaware Street in Lawrence, KS 

Opening Fri, March 7, 6 - 9pm, Closing March 28th

 

100,000,000 / entrance in alley between 222 and 332 W 75 St, Kansas City, MO 

Opening Sat, March 8, 6 - 9pm, Closing April 5th 

 

RSVP (stevegurysh@ku.edu) to join the Graduate Seminar for a critique of Within You Without You with guest critics Sean Nash, Sunyoung Park and KU Visual Art Faculty

Mon, March 10, 5:30 – 8pm at Off-Site Art Space

Wed, Mar 12, 5:30 – 8pm at 100,000,000

 

100,000,000 is an art space for exhibitions, collaborations, and interactions located off an alley in the Waldo neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Instagram:  @100000000space

Hours: Sunday, 1-5pm or by appointment 

Off-Site Art Space is an installation and gallery space dedicated to showcasing student work and is organized and supported by the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas, and is located at 924 Delaware Street in Lawrence, KS.

Hours: by appointment 

visualart@ku.edu

Instagram: @kuvisualart and @offsiteartspace

Please join us for Grace Tuthill's MFA Thesis Exhibition! The Opening Reception is on March 13th, 5:30-8pm, at the Edgar Heap of Bird Family Gallery. There will be some pizza and drinks!

The exhibition will be on display from March 10th to March 18th on M-F from 9-5.

Grace Tuthill grew up in Northern California and received their Bachelor of Art from California State University of Sacramento in 2020, with an emphasis in ceramics. They became an Artist in Residence at Cobb Mountain Art & Ecology Project before joining the MFA program at Kansas University in 2022. 

Grace explores the methodology and aesthetics of wood fired ceramics to create intentional and reparative relationships within the self and the community. By creating abstract sculptures, Grace is able to explore themes of vulnerability, resilience, and how our experiences leave a lasting mark.

See more of Grace's work on their website here!

Follow Grace on Instagram @gracetuthill

The artist, educator and KU alumnus examines life’s mysteries within cauldrons of clay and fire.

Marshall Maude, f’96, g’03, is an associate professor and chairperson of KU’s department of visual art. He is an internationally recognized ceramic artist who specializes in firing his work in 2,400-degree wood kilns, a chaotic, organic process completely different from predictable firings in electric or gas ovens. Compared with the dynamic environments of wood kilns, graduate student Meredith Smith explains, firing in electric kilns is akin to “programming what is basically a big toaster and walking away.”

Maude is a man on the move. Always. Reached on his phone during fall break—a time when students and faculty are supposed to rest and recuperate ahead of the mad dash toward semester’s end—Maude explains that he’s having “a little bit of a studio day,” and the thought occurs: Does an artist get time off? Can the creative process ever reach full stop? “That’s one of the positives and negatives about it,” he replies. “For sure you can’t take a day off, and you can never retire.”

Maude somewhat reluctantly accepted the administrative load of department chair following Tanya Hartman’s 2021 departure for Michigan State University. He honored what he saw as a service obligation to the department where he’d earned both of his degrees and had established his professional home, but also because he already had significant projects in mind.

“It’s a little easier to enact change from the top,” Maude says, “but I don’t really have any ambition to be in any kind of administrative leadership role. I mean, I literally have no ambition for that. Basically, nobody else wanted to do it, and I was sort of willing, and I think most people would agree there’s some element of service that needs to be taken on.”

Graduate director Sarah Gross, associate professor of ceramics, says that as a “small program in a large research university,” it was important that Maude embrace the department’s traditional strength as “a setting that isn’t cutthroat. … It’s a competitive program to get into, but we try to create an atmosphere that is comfortable and warm, and not about outdoing everybody or making other people look bad with your own successes. It’s more about lifting each other up.”

Maude last year realized a dream project by creating gallery space for students in East Lawrence, in what had been a popular houseplant store, and he’s currently enmeshed in plans to move KU’s photography program from its current home in the School of Architecture & Design into the visual art department within the School of the Arts, a transition set for fall 2025.

And, reclaiming what had been a facilities maintenance shed bordering Bob Billings Parkway, on West Campus, Maude created what he calls the Interdisciplinary Ceramics Research Center (ICRC), welcoming both international ceramic artists and KU faculty interested in exploring ceramics for their own research.

“He puts his money where his mouth is. He takes risks,” Gross says. “The ICRC is his brainchild. We’ve had all these wonderful, yearlong artists-in-residence come and teach and work and exhibit, based on this space, and we have studio spaces there where grad students and faculty can work. That was all something that that came out of his brain, but also his blood, sweat and tears. The same with the new downtown student art gallery.

“It’s such a great idea, and not only does he have the vision to think about it, but he has the sort of connections to the community to actually find a place to make it happen. And then he has the construction skills to completely renovate the old Jungle House and turn it into this cool gallery space that gives students a chance to put their work out in our community.”

Read Chris Lazzarino's full article at Kansas Alumni Magazine here!

Poppy DeltaDawn and her 2024 work “Oxeye,” made of handwoven cotton on industrial felt. Credit: Courtesy of the artist

As Poppy DeltaDawn, assistant professor in the University of Kansas Department of Visual Art, sees it, the 72-page “RATIO: Digital Weaving to Change the World” (For the Birds Trapped in Airports/LMRM, 2024) is her first take on a more cross-disciplinary approach to the possibilities and implications of the Thread-Controller 2 digital hand-loom.

“It’s a hand-loom outfitted with computerized Jacquard technology that was invented in the 1990s by an Oslo weaving professor, Vibeke Vestby,” DeltaDawn said. “It’s made by the Norwegian company Tronrud.”

The maker says it “enables the weaver to expedite the process of converting ideas into actual form or woven fabrics.”

DeltaDawn is building upon that framework.

“I relocated to KU from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to develop the Textile and Fiber area’s digital weaving program,” said DeltaDawn, who arrived on the Lawrence campus in fall 2023. “In the last decade, institutions across the world have been integrating handweaving and innovative design into their curriculum, yet there are still relatively few opportunities to learn the loom and consider its social and historical contexts.”

DeltaDawn spends much of “RATIO” explaining and illustrating her methods — practically and step by step — programming the TC2 loom using original designs created in the Adobe Photoshop computer program. But she also recounts the development of weaving technology in China and Europe, integrating a philosophy that, in the words of her publisher, “considers the broader implications of creating cloth and why it matters to our agency, autonomy and freedom.”

The book also contains a preface by the co-directors of Chicago’s LMRM (“Loom Room”), a community weaving center with one of the largest digital looms in the country. The book debuted during LMRM’s 2024 Weaving Workshop Weekend, a digital weaving conference in which DeltaDawn also presented a lecture and new work in a group exhibition with the event’s other presenters.

DeltaDawn said her hiring at KU is an encouraging sign of the times.

“There's an interest in traditional textile production that was experiencing a divestment in the past 20 years or so,” she said.

In “RATIO,” DeltaDawn writes of connecting the renewed interest in hand-making cloth and other traditional crafts to the so-called “tradwife” movement, suggesting that “traditional” and “conservative” values are conflated. But there are plenty of other factors at play, she said.

In her classes and research, DeltaDawn lectures on why weaving matters and why it is essential to continue innovating this human technology. Among other exemplars, she points to Mahatma Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement that espoused a self-reliant community rooted in traditional cultural and economic subsistence.

“Because the bulk of our manufacturing takes place overseas, the average American just doesn't know how textiles are made anymore,” DeltaDawn said. “Textiles used to be ... a recognizable characteristic of our humanity and of our aptitude to manipulate the world around us into objects of cultural value and use value. The textiles that we use could tell a story about our communities and the land that we occupy.”

With more artists, designers and researchers interested in the creative possibilities of the digital loom, DeltaDawn said, a field manual that acknowledges the realities of our current material culture is needed.

“After being a part of digital weaving and textiles programs around the country,” the KU researcher said, “I realized that there was no playbook, no rules, no pedagogy for thinking through the ramifications of this novel technology. I realized that we have an opportunity to effect change and to consider what it means to make art today with ancient cultural practices.

“That is this book. This is the first step — asking, ‘What is the future of the field; the future of weaving?’ ‘RATIO: Digital Weaving to Change the World’ reveals and reminds its readers that weaving is a human-powered activity that was systematically taken from weavers.”

“This is only an edition of 200. This is chapter one. This spring I will be an artist-in-residence at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and during those three months I will work with researchers at the Unstable Design Lab to develop the next segment of my digital weaving guide.”

-Written by Rick Hellman of KU News.

Rose B. Simpson Artist Talk

Hear from visionary artist Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo), whose work Maria is included in the Spencer Museum’s exhibition “Bold Women.” Simpson credits a long line of female Tewa artists as influences on her work, which integrates ancestral Pueblo pottery traditions with metalwork, automotive design, performance, installation, music, and creative writing. This event will also be livestreamed on the Museum’s YouTube channel and will be recorded and available to view afterwards: https://www.youtube.com/live/7DTG54Pi90Q

Join us for a talk by International Artist-in-Residence Mary Sibande, whose work is included in our exhibition “Bold Women.” Sibande is visiting from Johannesburg, South Africa to create a site-specific installation for the exhibition in collaboration with KU students and faculty. Q&A will follow the talk. This event will also be livestreamed on the Museum’s YouTube channel and it will be recorded and available to watch later.                                                                                     https://www.youtube.com/live/Pjs9-s--RbQ?si=jsX0-19jssP7bj6v

March 12th 3-4pm in the Kansas Union, Alderson Auditorium, 1301 Jayhawk Blvd

KU DESIGN SYMPOSIUM LECTURE: Photographer Kelli Connell

March 27th 6:00pm, free and open to the public in Budig Hall, 130

Kelli Connell’s work investigates sexuality, gender, identity and photographer-sitter relationships. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. Publications include Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (Aperture and Center for Creative Photography, March 2024), PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice (Aperture), Photo Art: The New World of Photography (Aperture), and the monograph Kelli Connell: Double Life (DECODE Books). Connell has received fellowships and residencies from The Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work and The Center for Creative Photography. Connell is a professor at Columbia College Chicago.

The Great Blue Heron

By Carolyn Kizer

As I wandered on the beach

I saw the heron standing   

Sunk in the tattered wings

He wore as a hunchback’s coat.   

Shadow without a shadow,   

Hung on invisible wires   

From the top of a canvas day,   

What scissors cut him out?   

Superimposed on a poster   

Of summer by the strand   

Of a long-decayed resort,   

Poised in the dusty light   

Some fifteen summers ago;   

I wondered, an empty child,   

“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

 

I stood on the beach alone,

In the sudden chill of the burned.

My thought raced up the path.   

Pursuing it, I ran

To my mother in the house

And led her to the scene.

The spectral bird was gone.

But her quick eye saw him drifting   

Over the highest pines

On vast, unmoving wings.

Could they be those ashen things,   

So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,   

A pair of broken arms

That were not made for flight?   

In the middle of my loss

I realized she knew:

My mother knew what he was.

 

O great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned   

So many rockets ago,

So many smokes and fires

And beach-lights and water-glow   

Reflecting pinwheel and flare:   

The old logs hauled away,   

The pines and driftwood cleared   

From that bare strip of shore   

Where dozens of children play;   

Now there is only you

Heavy upon my eye.

Why have you followed me here,   

Heavy and far away?

You have stood there patiently   

For fifteen summers and snows,   

Denser than my repose,

Bleaker than any dream,

Waiting upon the day

When, like grey smoke, a vapor   

Floating into the sky,

A handful of paper ashes,

My mother would drift away.

Brosseau Creativity Awards
Deadline: March 9th

Applications for our annual Brosseau Creativity Awards are now open! KU undergraduate students in any field of study are invited to submit creative work in the categories of writing and diverse media. Learn more and apply online by March 9th!

Seattle Prize Masters Fellowship, launched by the Conru Art Foundation, is an incredible new program designed to support early-career artists working in the classical, representational tradition.

The program offers:

✔ $50,000 annual stipend so artists can focus on creating.

✔ A year-long studio residency in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square.

✔ Mentorship from world-class artists and faculty at the newly relocated Masters Academy of Art in Seattle.

✔ A comprehensive support system, including an onsite gallery, professional promotion, and access to patrons.

Conru Art Foundation Fellowship information and application at:

https://seattleprize.org/

Call for Entries: 19th Annual International MFA/MA exhibit of Emerging Masters MASTER PIECES. Open to current graduate students and MFA/MA (or PhD) degree recipients since January 2024. Entry Fee*: $25 for one entry or $40 for up to four entries. $5 per each additional entry.

www.manifestgallery.org

Undergraduate Research Awards (UGRAs) are $1,000 scholarships provided to undergraduate students pursuing original research or creative projects under the general guidance of a research mentor. 

Complete information, including the application link, is on the UGRA website. In addition to the research/creative project proposal, a recommendation form submitted by the student’s research mentor is required by April 1st.

UGRA Proposal Writing Drop-in Time: March 13th, 4:00 - 5:00 in Summerfield 201 (RSVP)

***Students who would like to have their proposal reviewed outside of the March 13th drop-in option should email curf@ku.edu.

KU Libraries is currently accepting entries for the 2025-26 LibArt Show which displays student art in exhibition spaces within KU Libraries (Watson, Anschutz, Art & Architecture, Spencer Research, and Music & Dance). These highly trafficked locations offer an exciting chance for students to gain exposure for their work, reach potential buyers, and inspire others to enjoy and create. The exhibition also features an annual recognition ceremony, where we highlight the outstanding works and the fantastic KU artists who created them. Artists are invited along with family and friends to this event.

Entry into the show is semi-competitive with all works being selected by a committee.  KU students of any discipline are highly encouraged to apply!

KU Libraries is awarding up to $5400 in cash awards this year. Awards will be given for Best in Show ($1000), Best in Category ($300), and Honorable Mentions ($100). We are also excited to announce the addition of two new awards this year:

Michael and Kathryn Hughes Award ($200)

Named in honor of Michael and Kathryn Hughes, whose generosity helps fund the continuation of the LibArt program. Works that celebrate KU and the student experience will be eligible for this award.

Dean’s Choice Award ($200)

With the goal of encouraging students to explore and engage with KU libraries, works submitted by first-time LibArt participants will be eligible for this award.

I kindly ask for your help to spread the word about this opportunity to students and encourage them to submit up to 5 pieces for consideration. All media are welcome!

The entry form and more information can be found at: https://lib.ku.edu/libart

KU's Undergraduate Research Symposium is held each spring to provide a venue for students to share the results of their research and creative projects with the campus community. This year’s event has online and in-person presentation options. Undergraduates from any KU campus are welcome!

April 21 – 25, 2025

online event (all week)

in-person oral and creative talk presentations (April 24th, 5:15-6:15: Kansas Union—presentation slots are full)

in-person poster presentations (April 25th, 2:00 – 4:15: Gray-Little Hall—150 total slots)

ACE Talks (April 25th, 4:30 – 5:30: Gray-Little Hall—three presenters will be selected)

Full details, including the registration form, are on the Symposium website. In-person poster presentation slots are limited, so students wanting to present in person should register early!

Foundation for Contemporary Arts
Emergency Grants

These monthly grants range from $500–$3,000, with the average amount being $1,700. Visual and performing artists whose work is of a contemporary, experimental nature and who have a US Tax ID number can apply.
Deadline: Rolling | foundationforcontemporaryarts.org