School of Art Faculty and Students Receive Artists 360 Artist Awards

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Clockwise from top left: Rana Young, Sky Maggiore, Trent Bozeman, Chung Park, David Andree, Brody Parrish Craig and Maximiliano Oliver Calabotta

Mid-America Arts Alliance announced the 2022 Artists 360 Awards and the School of Art in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences celebrates the art faculty and students and local artists awarded project and student grants.

School of Art recipients include David Andree, assistant professor of art in painting and drawing and Rana Young, teaching assistant professor in studio art photography. In addition, graduate students Trent Bozeman, Sky Maggiore and Chung Park and undergraduate B.F.A. art education student Maximiliano Oliver Calabotta in collaboration with Brody Parrish Craig.

"Congratulations to all artists selected for the 2022 Artists 360 grants," said Marty Maxwell Lane, director of the School of Art. "We are especially proud to see faculty and graduate and undergraduate students from the School of Art selected this year. Through their creative research these artists are opening up important conversations around themes such as trans joy, memory, labor, indigenous lands, preservation of Black history, familial trauma, and more. We are honored to have these artists in our community and are excited to see their research and practice advanced through this support."

David Andree, assistant professor of art in painting, drawing and foundations, is a Minnesota native and maintains tribal affiliation with the Red Lake Nation of Ojibwe.

Andree plans to travel to indigenous sites of significance and will create new site-specific artwork exploring land through painting, sculpture and sound, culminating in publication and exhibition.

Projects include paintings which responsively shape themselves to land, creating temporarily frozen fabric sculptures generated by forms in the landscape, and a musical instrument played by the movement of water in streams.

Rana Young is a teaching assistant professor in photography and foundations and is currently working on a project Lie and Smile, an exploration of her relationship with her late mother.

Lie and Smile is a photographic series responding to Young's mother's archive and absence where she constructs prosthetic memories to reinterpret her life and embalm her mother's death. Since 2017, Young has been investigating the lived experiences that lead to parental abandonment, incarceration and her mother's persistence to conceal years of endured trauma.

Young describes familial narratives as aid in rendering visual elegy and versions of her mother for her to confront or forgive.

Trent Bozeman is a M.F.A. graduate student with a background in journalism and is interested in how Black history is reshaped, documented and preserved.

His current project is based in the Arkansas Delta in Elaine, Arkansas where Bozeman describes the racial divide as strong as ever. He is focusing on collaboration while also making images that hold a more vocal stance on the inner politics, societal issues and culture of Elaine.

Last summer Bozeman hosted a photography camp at The Elaine Legacy Center and plans to continue the camp in 2023.

"Giving these kids the tools and agency to represent themselves is empowering and can, hopefully, alter how this place exists to them," said Bozeman.

The town is currently constructing the Elaine Civil Rights Museum and Bozeman intends for their full body of work to be part of the museum and archive.

Sky Maggiore is a M.F.A graduate student, artist and educator from rural New York whose practice utilizes photographic mechanics and language to speculate ideas of perception.

Maggiore considers how visual media and immersive installation can intervene to question the ways in which photography and queerness intersect. Their inquiry into perception and embodiment are driven by their lived experience as an artist from Appalachia.

Through multiple mediums, the work contemplates grief, transformation, survival, endurance and illegibility within a non-heteronormative existence. They use remnants of their own transition to speak to its ephemeral and non-linear nature. These remnants are used to confront fixed understandings of trans experience and become a site of research for Maggiore's work.

Chung Park is a Korean-born American artist and M.F.A. graduate student currently investigating ideas of labor, memory and community by drawing from his personal and family history.

Park's background is in painting but is taking an interdisciplinary approach working in between several media. Recent explorations in writing, ceramics, installation and performance have pushed him toward building immersive spaces that activate tensions between comfort and displacement.

He has embarked on project and research-based art making which includes work referencing his Korean heritage, food culture and the immigrant experience.

Maximiliano Oliver Calabotta, an art education undergraduate student, and a graduate of the M.F.A. creative writing and translation program Brody Parrish Craig are working together to increase access for the trans community to shared stories of joy.

Building on previous work with TWANG's anthology and creative workshop series, they will work within Arkansas' TGNC community to create a zine publication responding to the prompt "Trans Joy IS". Through generative events, publication and artist showcases, they are striving to further Twang's mission to collaborate and create a TGNC+ arts collective.