This page is news about some of our graduates in art history and studio art up to the Class of 1999. Alumni News items are added regularly, so drop us a line and tell us what you’re up to! Complete our Alumni Update Form to share your news and contact info. To see more recent alumni updates, go to this page for studio and this page for art history. Check out our Notable Alumni and Faculty page.
1998
Kara Morrow (MA 1998, art history) is associate professor and chair of the department of art and art history at the College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio. She received the PhD from Florida State University and the BA from Auburn University. Her teaching and research on medieval and African art history, as well as the art of the ancient world.
1994
Andy Meadows (MFA 1994, photography) founded the Booker T. Washington Magnet School Photography program in 1995 at the then Carver Creative and Performing Arts School in Montgomery. Meadows now works as Arts Education Specialist for the Alabama State Department of Education where he distributes grants to schools and works to improve arts education in Alabama. Read more about the BTW Photography program he founded here.
1990
Pat Snow (BFA 1990) works as an artist and serves as Inside Sales Representative at MIND Research Institute in Austin, Texas. His art website is here.
1987
Karen Graffeo (MFA 1987, photography) is an internationally known multi-media artist in photography, performance and installation, recognized for her work with the Romani people. She has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar and the recipient of numerous grants. She has had numerous national and international solo exhibitions and her work is included in public and private collections around the world and in Alabama. She is professor of art and director of photography at the University of Montevallo.
1983
Known as a master printmaker and “an inveterate promoter of graphic art in Alabama,” Scott Stephens (MFA 1983), now Professor of Art and Chair at University of Montevallo’s Department of Art, works in large-format printmaking and historic photographic processes. His work has been recognized with a fellowship from the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts and two individual artist fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 1992 and 2002. In 2006 Stephens was designated the Carnegie Foundation CASE Alabama Professor of the Year.
1979
Daniel Livingston (MFA 1979, BFA 1976, ceramics) is a master raku potter and exhibits his work throughout the Southeast. Livingston was a longtime studio artist at the Kentuck Art Center in Northport, Ala., and has been a demonstrating artist at the Kentuck Festival of the Arts since 1992. For two decades, he taught ceramics as a full-time instructor at UA and retired in 2013. More about Livingston here. And his art page is here.
1977
Sara Garden Armstrong (MFA 1977) is a noted visual and sound artist whose work is included in significant national and international collections, among them the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; MoMA, New York City; Women Artists Archives National Directory (WAAND); Ira Silverberg Papers; Sun and Moon Press Archive; Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry. She had a solo exhibition at the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center in Tuscaloosa in September 2020.
1975
Janice Hathaway (BFA 1973, MFA 1975, photography) had a solo exhibition of her work was presented in the Eugenio Granell Fundación in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to surrealism. At UA, she focused her graduate studies in printmaking and photography and in the early 1970s, Hathaway was an active member of the Dada-inspired Raudelunas group. Read more on Hathaway’s website.
1973
Frank D. Fleming‘s (MA 1969, MFA 1973) fanciful sculptures in ceramic and bronze are in numerous international and national solo and group exhibitions, private, corporate collections and the collections of museums and galleries across the country. Read more about Fleming in the Encyclopedia of Alabama.
William Hall (BFA 1973) is master printer and studio director of Pace Editions in New York where he has worked since 1988. For over a quarter-century at Pace Editions, Hall has collaborated with acclaimed painters and sculptors including Jim Dine and Chuck Close. Read more about him here.
Janet Hinton (MFA 1973, printmaking) maintains a printmaking studio in Fairhope. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Mobile University, Mobile Arts Council, Fairhope UCC, and Optera Creative in Mobile. About her time at UA, Hinton says, “I loved the teacher and student fellowship, having my own studio in Garland Hall while in the MFA program, and everything I learned from my teachers. Mr. Zoellner, my wonderful major professor, left me his etching press upon his death. Every time I travel to see art, I am grateful for Dr. Bolt’s art history classes.” Her art website is here.
Jim Neel (MFA 1973) is professor of art at Birmingham-Southern College and a sculptor. He was awarded a prestigious 2016 John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry Residency, his second residency there, in order to create a large-scale installation piece titled Archeological Fragments. As a freelance photojournalist he covered the wars in Central America and the serpent-handling holiness people of Appalachia. His work has appeared nationally and internationally in over thirty newspapers, magazines and hardcover publications including the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Oxford American, Esquire and in the award-winning Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington. Visit Neel’s website.
1972
Deborah Hughes (BFA 1972) is a prolific painter, especially of outdoor scenes. She and her family and friends make regular trips to California and other venues after which she returns with new paintings. Hughes retired from UA after many years as a graphic designer in what was then known as “Audio-Visual” and later “Classroom Resources.” Since 2013, Hughes has curated the Wellness Walls for Art changing exhibitions at the University Medical Center, which fill the long halls of the medical building with visual delights for patients and guests alike. The UMC is located 850 5th Ave E, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35401, and open Monday through Friday, 8 am to 5 pm.
1971
Leah Tripp Alford (BA, 1971, English major, art history minor) is an artist, photographer and writer. Alford has published a memoir about life in the woods with her husband and a long line of companion cats, Catwoods, Stories and Studies of Our Feline Companions. Read more about Alford’s memories of the art department and Woods Quad here.
Edith Frohock (BFA 1968, MFA 1971) was the first woman to receive the MFA in art at UA. She specialized in painting, printmaking and artist’s books and was the first instructor to teach book arts in the South. More at Edith Frohock’s page on Wikipedia.
Victoria Lowe (MA 1971, studio art; BS 1969, education) has had a long career as an artist and educator. In November 2022, she was part of a group exhibition, INTERSTELLAR – Between Stars, at Lichtundfire in New York City. In 2016, a 40-year retrospective of Lowe’s art traveled to the Morris Museum in Augusta, Georgia, and the Hardin Cultural Arts Center in Gadsden. Lowe taught art at Florida Southern College and Florida Polytechnic University. She has had solo, juried and invited exhibitions at Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science and the Arts, Scranton, Pennsylvania; Quincy Art Center, Quincy, Illinois; Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, Georgia; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Platform Art Forum, Lakeland, Florida; Hardin Center for Cultural Arts, Gadsden, Alabama; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; Florida Southern College, Lakeland; The White House, Cramer Gallery, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland; Mobile Museum of Art and the Birmingham Museum of Art, both in Alabama. As a graduate student at UA, Lowe studied painting with Howard Goodson and Melville Price, and credits them in part for her successful art career. She also became interested in sculpture through courses with Art Oakes. Read more about her experiences studying art at UA. Her website is here.
1969
Dr. Elizabeth C. “Betty” Mitchell Walter (MA 1969) died January 1, 2019. Walter was known as an artist, art educator, academic, administrator and author and served as professor and department chair for more than two decades at the University of North Alabama. Read about her work with the Freedom Quilting Bee and other civil rights work.
1968
Barbara Gillette Price (BFA 1966, MA 1968) came to Tuscaloosa with her husband, new art faculty Melville Price, in 1958. After her husband’s death, Price moved to Washington, D.C., and began a career of art education, advocacy and administration. In 1978, she was appointed Dean at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1982, she accepted the position of Vice-President of Academic Affairs at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and in 1994 she was appointed President of Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Read more about Barbara Gillette Price on her website.
1967
Sydney Rhodes Hauser (BFA 1967) was the illustrator of the popular bestselling Proverbial Cat Calendar. She owned and managed a studio and retail shop, “The Tabby Cat,” in Sarasota for many years.
Ron Yrabedra (BFA 1976, MA 1969?, painting, ceramics) who earned two degrees in art from UA and worked as a popular artist and a professor of art at Florida A&M University for three decades, died February 18, 2022. Read more about his life and career.
1966
Dr. Robert Mellown (BA 1966) is Associate Professor Emeritus of Art History. Mellown has written extensively on art and architecture for numerous publications including Alabama Heritage and The Alabama Review. He is the author of the richly illustrated The University of Alabama – A Guide to the Campus and Its Architecture, published by the University of Alabama Press. He is a contributor to the Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia online encyclopedia and a consultant for Discovering Alabama’s Bicentennial special: State Capitals.
Thornton Willis (MA 1966, painting) has had a five decades-long career as an artist. Willis, considered a second generation abstract expressionist, and his wife, art historian Vered Lieb, gave 27 paintings and two sketchbooks to UA in September of 2018.
1965
Robert J. Tucker III (BFA 1964, MA 1965) is a working artist and Professor Emeritus of Art at Birmingham-Southern College, where he taught for more than three decades. View his art on this page.
1964
William Edward McGowin (MA 1964) known for his Name Change project, has had more than sixty solo exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the National Museum of American Art, and other private and public collections. Visit his website here.
John Tilley (BFA 1961, MA 1964) has taught watercolor classes for more than forty years, through The University of Alabama’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Shelton State Community College and most recently through Tuscaloosa County Park and Recreation Authority and the City of Columbus (Miss.) Recreation and Parks Department. He has also taught mixed media workshops and particularly enjoys demonstrating painting techniques to elementary school students. Read more about John Tilley here.
1963
Robert L. Shelton (MA 1963) is Professor Emeritus of Art at Birmingham-Southern College, where he taught art and film courses for more than three decades. His prints are in numerous private and public collections.
1959
William Christenberry (BA 1958, MA 1959, painting) is reknown for his photographs influenced by James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Read more about Christenberry here.
1957
Glenn House, Sr. (BFA 1957) taught for almost 20 years in UA’s School of Library and Information Studies’ Book Arts program, which he helped establish and develop. Among his innovations: he discovered Alabama Kozo Asian-style paper and promoted printmaking and book arts throughout the South.
Barbara Pennington (BFA 1955, MA 1957) dedicated her life to painting and art education until her death in 2013. From teaching art therapy to Bryce Hospital patients to her provocative paintings of the Civil Rights Movement to her later intensely colored abstract works, Pennington always expressed compassion for humanity through her art. Read more about Pennington and the rediscovery of an exceptional painting she made.
1956
Dale Wilson Kennington (BA 1956) was a painter known for her interior scenes with figures in realist style. Her work has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions and hangs in numerous museum collections. Grandeur of the Everyday -The Paintings of Dale Kennington was published by University of Alabama Press in 2017. In 2011, Kennington received the Governor’s Arts Award from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Kennington died in 2017. More about her at the Encyclopedia of Alabama.
1953
After serving in the U. S. Army in Europe during World War II, William A. Walmsley (BFA 1951, MA 1953) took advantage of the G. I. Bill to earn a BFA and an MA degree at The University of Alabama. He studied painting with John Opper and John Galloway and painting and lithography with Richard Zoellner. A world-renowned printmaker and the inventor of fluorescent lithography, Walmsley became known for his use of “blatant irony, raucous humor and shameless punning” in his psychedelic and ribald art. He taught for more than three decades at Florida State University and has had numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery, London; Alberta (Canada) Institute of Technology; Art Institute of Chicago; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Mint Museum (Charlotte, N.C.) and the Brooklyn Museum, among many others. In 1989, he was awarded the UA College of Arts and Sciences Society of Fine Arts Career Alumni Award.
1948
After further graduate work at Columbia, Howard Goodson (BA 1942, MA 1948, painting) returned to The University of Alabama to teach until his untimely death in 1975 at the age of 55. He exhibited his paintings throughout the South including solo exhibitions at the Birmingham Museum of Art and throughout the region. His work is in the permanent collections at the BMA, the Atlanta High Museum of Art, other museums and private collections.
1927
Mary Eula Stephenson Mills (1905-1974) majored in art at The University of Alabama and graduated in 1927. One of her early post-graduation jobs was as a finisher in a portrait studio in her hometown of Selma. In 1930, Mary Stephenson married Olan Mills and together co-founded “one of America’s most significant twentieth-century portrait photography businesses,” in Tuscaloosa in 1932. Mary Mills lent creative and technical expertise to the business she and her husband built into one of the most innovative portrait photography businesses in the US. Read more about Stephenson.