Design for Civil Society: Fostering Dialogue for Completely Human Agents
January 18 - March 26, 2023

Public Lecture: Monday, February 13, 10:30am

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 16, 5-7pm

Location: Ruth Davis Design Gallery, Nancy Nicholas Hall, 1300 Linden Drive, Madison, WI

Design for Civil Society: Fostering Dialogue for Completely Human Agents is an ongoing series of interactive projects examining and visualizing the effects of globalization on local communities. Through projected animations and digital interactive tools, Design for Civil Society: Fostering Dialogue for Completely Human Agents displays community engagement strategies and fosters participatory coalition-building among community members, academics, and designers to address specific problems in the community.

Congratulations to Professor Taekyeom Lee!

Lee's typographic work has won a judges choice award and honorable mention from this year's competition hosted by the Society of Typographic Arts (STA). The STA honors the 100 best typographic arts produced each year with the typographic work as one of the top four best designs among outstanding artwork submitted worldwide. Lee's other three entries have been selected. The STA was established in 1927, and the competition has recognized typographic excellence for the past 44 years.

Through A Glass, Darkly
September 9 - December 31

Including: Professor Helen Lee, MFA Candidate Carolyn Spears, Heather Sutherland [MFA '17], and Matt Jacob [BFA '18]

Location: The Delaware Contemporary, 200 South Madison Street, Wilmington, DE

Spanning across six galleries, selected works engage the historical promise and power of the material to reveal and to bring clarity, while challenging viewers to acknowledge an inherent interconnectedness between enhancement and distortion.

Professor Emeritus T.L. Solien: Along the Way
November 4 - January 13, 2023

Location: Tandem Press, 1743 Commercial Avenue, Madison, WI

Tandem Press is excited to host an exhibition of prints and paintings by Madison-based artist T.L. Solien this fall. T.L. Solien has worked in the Tandem Press studio in two occurrences, creating four editions of prints during those times. His most recent print created at Tandem Press, The Spanish Chair, belongs to a larger series of work Solien has been developing over the past few years. We will show a selection of works on paper and one large painting from this series alongside his new print.

Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography
October 30 - January 22, 2023

Including: Professor Tom Jones

Location: The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth, TX

Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography highlights the dynamic ways that Indigenous artists have leveraged their lenses over the past three decades to reclaim representation and affirm their existence, perspectives, and trauma. The exhibition, organized by the Carter, is one of the first major museum survey to explore this important transition, featuring works by more than 30 Indigenous artists through approximately 70 photographs, videos, 3-dimensional works, and digital art.

BELONGING TO THE LAND
February 25 - February 17, 2023

Location: Madison Municipal Building, 215 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Madison, WI

BELONGING TO THE LAND is a collection of Professor John Hitchcock’s resent works on paper and neon sculpture. Hitchcock uses the print medium with its long history of commenting on social and political issues to explore his relationships to community, land, and culture. His artworks are based on his childhood memories and stories of growing up in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma on Comanche Tribal lands next to the US field artillery military base Ft Sill. Many of the images are interpretations of stories told by his Kiowa/Comanche grandparents and abstract representations influenced by beadwork, land, air, and water.

Imprinted in Madison: Artists Making Their Mark
February 25 - February 17, 2023

Artists: Eric Ballies, Chuck Bauer [MA '70], Tyanna Buie [MFA '10], Barry Carlsen [MFA '83], Rachel Durfee [MFA '94], Anwar Floyd Pruitt [MFA '20], Professor John Hitchcock, Barbara Justice [MFA '22], Amos Paul Kennedy, Sara Meredith, Henry Obeng, Merikay Payne [BS-Art '09], Yvette Pino [BFA '11], Benjamin Pollock, and Roberto Torres Mata [MFA '21]

Location: Madison Municipal Building, 215 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Madison, WI

Imprinted in Madison: Artists Making Their Mark features prints by contemporary artists whose paths brought them to or through Madison. UW-Madison has the top printmaking MFA program in the country and the UW's Tandem Press produces fine art editions of prints by internationally renowned artists. As a result of these two outstanding institutions, many emerging and prodigious printmakers come to Madison to study, teach, or produce prints. In that way, Madison subtly affects the artist and in turn the artist impacts our city, creating an influential cultural nexus.

To celebrate the importance of printmaking within our local arts ecology and honor some of the printmakers who have made or are making their mark on Madison, the 2022 Municipal Building Exhibition showcases a wide variety of prints and printmaking processes from internationally exhibited artists and locally celebrated printmakers alike.

Blu³eprint
February 22 - April 2, 2023

Location: Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, 227 State St, Madison, WI

Carved from limestone and measuring almost seven feet in height, Blu³eprint depicts artist Professor Faisal Abdu’Allah seated in a Belmont barber’s chair, a nod to the significance of the barbershop both within his artistic practice and his personal history. For Abdu’Allah, a trained barber, the barbershop reflects the Black experience as a place of physical renewal and social solidarity for generations of men.

Abdu’Allah selected the title to express the communal power associated with the Black salon. The artist made the “u” in “Blu³eprint” to the power of three, to reflect the three “u’s” in the Zulu word “Ubuntu.” Ubuntu is an African concept referring to the interconnected nature of humanity. It communicates the idea that we are human only through the humanity of others, or, “I am because we are.”

Abdu’Allah’s pose may be familiar to some. It mirrors a sculpture that has been an enduring feature of Madison’s public art landscape—Abraham Lincoln (1909), a bronze monument by Adolph Weinman situated atop the University of Wisconsin’s Bascom Hill. In recent years, the monument has generated controversy among some UW students who argue that President Lincoln’s anti-immigrant policies and his belief, despite his opposition to slavery, in white racial superiority means that the monument should be removed.

Abdu’Allah conceived of Blu³eprint as a counter-monument to the Lincoln sculpture—a contemporary work erected as a counterpoint to an existing monument. “My philosophy is that artists have always been the shapers of social consciousness, and for me this piece illustrates that,” Abdu’Allah said.

Water Memories
June 23 - April 2, 2023

Including: Professor Tom Jones

Location: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

This exhibition explores water’s significance to Indigenous peoples and Nations in the United States through historical, modern, and contemporary artworks. In four thematic sections—Ancestral Connections, Water and Sky, Forests and Streams, and Oceanic Imaginations—diverse aquatic expressions feature both representational and abstract approaches.