Our spring 2015 issue of The Loupe was so packed with alumni news that we didn’t have room for it all in our regular edition. This Loupe Extra begins with alumni news not published in the print version and then reprints alumni news from “spring 2015” below it.
MEREDITH RANDALL KNIGHT (MFA 2014) and brother GREG RANDALL (BFA 2014) installed 
LINDSAY JONES LINDSEY is in medical school at The University of South Alabama College of Medicine, planning to graduate in May, 2018. She writes, “I still have a couple of years to decide on specialties but my top three are plastic/reconstructive surgery, trauma surgery and emergency medicine with emergency medicine being the forerunner right now.” Lindsey is the sculptor of Fibonacci Spiral, part of our Woods Quad Sculpture Garden.
ANDY MEADOWS (MFA 1995, photography) recently accepted a position at the Alabama State Department of Education in the Instructional Services division as the Arts Education Specialist for the state, a resource support person for all teachers in the state who teach theater, music, dance or visual art. He has been appointed to the Board of Trustees for the Alabama School of Fine Arts and sits on the boards of the Alabama Alliance for Arts Education and the Arts Education Leadership Team (a partnership between the Alabama State Department of Education and the Alabama State Council on the Arts).
Meadows created the Art Photography Program at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School (BTW) while adjunct teaching at Huntingdon College. He was recruited 5 years ago by Mountain Brook High School to run their Art Photography program. He quadrupled the enrollment of their AP Photography class in 5 years. Meadows writes, “I am still creating and exhibiting my work when the opportunity arises but the most important part is after five years of commuting to Birmingham I am now home with family.”
MICHELLE MOSELEY-CHRISTIAN (MA 2000, BA 1997, art history) is Associate Professor of Art History in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies’ School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech, where she has taught since 2007. She is also Program Chair of Art History. Moseley-Christian is a specialist in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting. Her publications include the essays “Salvation and Community in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Mennonite Portraiture: Egbert van Heemskerck’s Portrait of Jacob Hercules and His Family, 1669;” “Confluence of Costume, Cartography, and Early Modern Chorography;” “Marketing Mary Magdalene in Early Modern Northern European Prints and Paintings;” and “Pronk Poppenhuisen: Seventeenth-Century Didactic Dutch Dollhouses for Women.”
In 2014, Moseley-Christian was the first recipient of the William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art by the Southeastern College Art Conference. The selection committee named Moseley-Christian the winner for her proposal “Women and Wildness in Early Modern Northern European Visual Culture: Picturing the ‘Wild Woman’ c. 1300-1650.”
ANDREA DORMINEY TAYLOR (MA 2004, ARH) works as Vice President of the Douglas-Coffee County Chamber of Commerce and Assistant Director of the Economic Development Authority in Douglas, Ga. Taylor worked for the Douglas Enterprise for three years before being hired as Entrepreneur and Small Business Director in 2011. She was promoted in 2013 to Vice President’s position. She has a son Grayson who just turned 7 and a daughter Whitley who is almost 2.
COREY DZENKO (MA 2007, ARH) spoke with Anita Allyn and Josh Brilliant at TCNJ’s Art Gallery in a panel discussion about photography and materiality in conjunction with the exhibition “Unfixed Image: The Photographic Across Media” at the College of New Jersey’s Art Gallery.
ROGER JONES (MFA 2012) works as a youth minister at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Homewood, Alabama. He writes, “My most recent drawings and paintings explore geometric abstraction as a response to the composition of sounds in music. A painting that I completed in 2014 is featured in Volume 27 of Studio Visit Magazine. I am affiliated with PaperWorkers Local, a Birmingham-based non-profit artist co-op.” About his experience in the MFA program at UA, he writes, “I learned how important it is to be open to change, ideas that conflict with one’s current mindset and that the creative process is a lifelong endeavor.” Jones will have a solo exhibition in Tuscaloosa in October at The Arts Council Gallery at the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center. Jones’ website is http://rogerjones.yolasite.com/.
BFAers Since 1945
Here are a few more of UA’s BFA graduates in art: WILLIAM O. PARDUE (1951),WILLIAM WALMSLEY (BFA 1951, MA 1953), BETHANY WINDHAM ENGLE (1955), FRANK GUNTER (1956), GLENN HOUSE, SR. (1957), SYDNEY HAUSER (1967), DANIEL MOORE (1967), EDITH FROHOCK (1968),WILLIAM HALL (1973), LARRY NEWBERRY (MFA 1977, BFA 1975), LEE ANN LUTZ (1979), DAVID BETAK (1990), PAT SNOW (1990), MICHELLE MCKNIGHT DAVIS (2003), MARTHA MARKLINE HOPKINS (2004), PAUL OUTLAW (2004), JENNY FINE (2006), LIZ WUESTEFELD (2009), JOE STALNAKER (2010), MOLLY BROOKE THREADGILL (2010), JACOB DAVIDSON (2011), JEREMY K. DAVIS (2011), AMBER JONES (2011), MICAH CRAFT (2012), ADAM HILL (2012),BROOKE HOWELL (2012) and ERIC NUBBE (2014). There are many more BFA alumni than we have listed here. Following are a few post-BFA stories. Please send us yours!
WILLIAM “Bill” HALL (BFA 1973) has already made an impression on the SMGA’s Permanent Collection (Loupe Spring 2011). As Master Printer at Pace Prints in New York for almost 30 years, he has had unparalleled access to renowned artists making exquisite work. Over the years, he built a collection that he and his wife have now donated to the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art’s Permanent Collection, already a formidable gathering of the work of internationally acclaimed artists. Selections from the William and Sara Hall Collection of Contemporary Prints will be on exhibit through June 10 in the UA Gallery downtown in the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center.
JENNY FINE (BFA 2006) has come back home to Alabama with her latest installation performance project, Flat Granny and Me: A Procession in My Mind. Its latest incarnation was a lecture and performance in January at the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan. Fine uses performance, photography, installation to create and tell stories about her family and her childhood experiences. Flat Granny and Me has been more than a yearlong project with Flat Granny, a life-sized photographic costume of her grandmother.
Fine writes, “A Procession in My Mind is a collision of the agricultural history of my hometown of Enterprise (“City of Progress” and home to the Boll Weevil Monument) with my family’s present day relationship to the landscape of our south Alabama farm. This live theatrical performance and room-sized diorama began as a re-imagining of the year my grandmother was named Enterprise, Alabama’s ‘Woman of the Year.’”
After receiving the MFA from The Ohio State University, Fine served as studio assistant for Ann Hamilton, artist-in-residence in Dresden, Germany, and at the The Wellington School in Columbus, Ohio. She has also taught in China and worked at an orphanage and women’s shelter in Nigeria. She lives near Enterprise, where she keeps a studio.
JEFFREY BYRD (BFA 1987) is professor and chair of the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa.
A video and performance artist, he exhibits and performs around the world, from Lincoln Center to Beijing. This year he performed in Berlin, Salt Lake City and a little town in Poland. He writes, “My recent work is inspired by my job as an administrator. This piece [pictured this page] attempts to elevate the mundane tools of office work (Post It Notes) to the level of visual poetry. In the performance, I write beautiful words from many languages on the notes and hang them on a glass surface (in this case it was a glass elevator at the SLC Public Library). Viewers are invited to share their beautiful words as well. I’ve done this piece in Toronto, Boston and Helsinki, so I’ve collected a great list of words!”
The prolific MARTHA MARKLINE HOPKINS’ (BFA 2004) painting Corinthian White (right) was chosen for the online gallery exhibition Dark sponsored by Arc Gallery, San Francisco. Her Pink Moire was chosen for the exhibition Voices: An Artist’s Perspective, Women’s Caucus for Art, NYC. She lives in Fairhope.
In the Spring/Summer 2012 issue, we published a photo by LARRY NEWBERRY (BFA 1975, MFA 1977) of a group of art students in Woods Quad. Only one person remained unidentified – until now! JAN HOLLAND KIMBROUGH (BFA 1974), then known as Jan Hurston Holland, was that person and she sent us an update. Holland came to UA in 1970, like Barbara Pennington, on a 4-year scholarship from Scholastic. “It was kind of a big deal because there were no fellowships, foundations or endowments for art students like there are today. Art was not a mainstream field of study and art students were understood even less! I have had an exciting art career working for Occidental Petroleum Corporation in Tulsa
, as assistant art director for Horizon Magazine (a national fine arts magazine published in Tuscaloosa) and a free-lance business, Holland Studios. In 1990, I began work for a degree in medical social work and earned an MSW from the university in 1992 and had a 10-year career as a hospice social worker with Montclair Hospice and a case manager at Lakeshore Rehabilitation Hospital, both in Birmingham.” Holland emphasizes the value of an education in art: “It taught me to think ‘outside the box’ and to creatively problem solve even in a totally different work setting.”
In late breaking news, BFA graduating senior ALEXANDRA (ALI) HVAL was awarded one of only ten nationwide Windgate Fellowships this year. Her sculpture, Genesis, is pictured to the left. Other UA alumni awardees are Adam Hill in 2012 and Jenny Fine in 2006, both BFA graduates. More about Ali Hval’s award and her future plans here.