Professor Craig Wedderspoon is one of three inaugural recipients of the new McMahon-Pleiad Prize, given by the Board of Trustees of The University of Alabama System. The prize has been awarded to a collaborative public art project, the UA System Art Trail, conceived by Wedderspoon and his colleagues Stacey Holloway of UAB's department of art and art history and Chris Taylor of UAH's department of art, art history, and design. Established by the Board to honor Trustee Emeritus John J. McMahon, Jr., the McMahon-Pleiad Prize advances collaboration in the UA System, consistent with the vision and leadership of Trustee Emeritus McMahon. The Prize includes a $75,000 one-time award, underwritten by the McMahon family, which will be shared equally among the three UA System art departments to cover the cost of project materials and related expenses. At each of the three UA System campuses, each group will design and create a durable, well-crafted public sculpture that enhances the visual aesthetic of each campus. The three outdoor pieces will rotate every two years, then return to their originating campus for permanent installation. Each team plans to unveil the sculptures before June 2019. According to UA News Center, a primary goal of the public art trail is to create opportunities for faculty and students in all three System art departments to discuss, develop and install projects collaboratively. Students will be able to share their designs with new and expanded audiences. According to the proposal, which was chosen from more than a dozen entries, “The McMahon-Pleiad Public Art Trail has the potential to visually enhance the entire UA System with an innovative, world-class public art program.” Professor Wedderspoon described the project's progress on UA's campus so far: "I put it out to my sculpture students as a design competition and junior BFA sculpture major Ringo Lisko’s proposal has been chosen. She has just started working on the wax for a scale model. Next she will get to work on the full-scale piece." Board president pro tem Ronald Gray described the public art trail project: “It represents the essence of collaboration and creative excellence that defines our friend and colleague John McMahon and our System.” For more information about the UA Department of Art and Art History and our programs, go here: https://art.ua.edu/about/
UA Alumnus Creates Giant Working Kaleidoscope
Ever had a sudden urge to peer through a giant kaleidoscope? Now you can! The latest permanent public sculpture, titled simply Kaleidoscope, is designed and built by UA art alumnus and foundry specialist Eric Nubbe, and has been installed by UA Art Foundry at Snow Hinton Park in Tuscaloosa. Commissioned by Tuscaloosa PARA, the seven-foot-high aluminum sculpture is a working, interactive kaleidoscope, perched at the northwest corner of the park. Since kaleidoscopes are shaped like a simple tube, Nubbe decided to make the massive optical instrument more interesting, so he chose the shape of a sextant - another viewing instrument which sailors have used to navigate the seas for hundreds of years. The kaleidoscope looks northwest into the sky over Tuscaloosa and the mirrors inside the kaleidoscope reflect whatever the skies look like on that day. In many kaleidoscopes, loose pieces of colored glass inside the tube are mirrored into symmetrical and colorful patterns as you turn the scope. Nubbe decided to add something similar to his. Instead of just looking up into refracted reflections of the sky, viewers look through translucent blue Plexiglas gears that Nubbe cut [on?]. When visitors look into the viewer, they rotate a disk just to the right of the scope, and the disk turns the blue gears inside, creating beautiful blue patterns across the sky. Eric Nubbe's Kaleidoscope is part of a Public Art Project commissioned by the Tuscaloosa County Parks and Recreation Authority to put art in parks around Tuscaloosa County. Giant steel flowers created by student artists Ringo Lisko and Amber Daum were installed last year in Monnish Park as part of the same project.
Metal Artists Featured at UA Gallery in June
Metal artists John Stewart Jackson and Joe McCreary (UA MFA 2011) will showcase their work at The University of Alabama Gallery in the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center, June 1-29, 2018. Between them, the artists have almost four decades of experience in the art and craft of working in metal. During the last 20 years, Joe McCreary has exhibited his work in solo and group shows and been included in several permanent collections. McCreary was artist-in-residence at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark for 12 years. Visitors to UA campus know McCreary's work through Goldie 1971, part of the Woods Quad Sculpture Garden, in the collection of the UA College of Arts and Sciences. For the past 15 years, McCreary has introduced artists to the process of casting through his introductory sculpture classes at The University of Alabama and at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has been a visiting artist at Birmingham-Southern, Alfred University and UAB. McCreary holds an MFA in sculpture from The University of Alabama and a BA in art education from the University of Southern Mississippi. His work deals with issues of scale, history, food, and humor. After studying sculpture at Birmingham-Southern College, John Stewart Jackson spent six years as a resident artist at Sloss Furnaces National Landmark in the Metal Arts program, Sloss Metal Arts, specializing in cast iron sculpture. In 2006, Jackson moved to Singapore to serve as a curriculum specialist and sculpture teacher for School of the Arts (SOTA) for seven years. Returning to Birmingham in 2013, Jackson now works full-time on public art commissions, private commissions, and gallery exhibitions. Jackson's art website is https://johnstewartjackson.carbonmade.com/. Both artists’ works will also be featured at Stephen Smith Fine Art in Fairfield’s In the Belly of the Beast - Second Degree, a national metal casting exhibition that includes UA art alumna Claire Lewis Evans (MFA 2015), June 29-August 25, 2018. More information can be found here: http://www.firstfridaytuscaloosa.com/art-galleries/dinah-washington-cultural-arts-center-galleries and on the UA Gallery page: https://uagallery.as.ua.edu/. The Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center is located at 620 Greensboro Avenue, Tuscaloosa. It is open Monday-Friday, 9 am-5 pm and closed Saturday and Sunday. For more information about the UA Department of Art and Art History and its programs, visit this link: https://art.ua.edu/academics/ or contact the department at (205) 348-5967.
UA Art Foundry Casts Sculpture Across Alabama
Towering steel flowers, a massive mathematical loop-de-loop, larger-than-life baseball players and renown university presidents are just a few of the projects, supervised by Professor of Art Craig Wedderspoon, that have been created in the giant work bays at UA's art foundry. From Tuscaloosa to Gadsden, sculptures from the foundry find homes around the state. It takes skill and determination, caution and daring to see complex design projects grow from drawings and models to finished public sculptures. Wedderspoon and his team – foundry specialists Eric Nubbe, Joe McCreary and Ringo Lisko, with senior arts technicians Patrick O'Sullivan and Mike Eddins – work with strict safety standards and an inventiveness that keep all the machinery running smoothly behind those gigantic sliding garage doors on Margaret Drive. Now, a monumental new sculpture, cast in the foundry, is ready to become part of the Woods Quad Sculpture Garden. Mobius and Borromean Rings is designed and created by marketing major and studio art minor Paget Kern. Kern, who has taken sculpture courses for her art minor and makes jewelry at home, designed the work in a collaborative project with students in the departments of Math and Art and Art History. She linked two complex mathematical ideas together in a massive sculptural example. Kern explained that the design is “a triple Möbius strip tied together in a Borromean knot.” We’ve all seen the three inter-linked rings of a Borromean ring or knot. A Möbius strip can be made by twisting a strip of paper and adhering the ends together to create a continuous circle that is “unorientable.” If you walked along a center line on the loop, you would go around the Möbius strip twice before coming back to its starting point. The long and the short of it is that you’ll have to go see the sculpture for yourself when the giant twisted loops of welded steel sculpture are installed in the Woods Quad Sculpture Garden this summer. Up north in Gadsden, alumnus and staff member Eric Nubbe's public sculpture, commissioned by Walnut Gallery on behalf of the Gadsden Public Library, has been installed in the green space in front of the library. Just in Time is 7 feet high, 5 feet wide, 7 feet long and made of steel. Nubbe is working on a second sculptural project for the City of Florence’s bicentennial celebration to be fabricated in the foundry: a 20-foot steel musician overlooking the Tennessee River. Past projects of the foundry include a statue of past UA president and UA System Chancellor Robert Witt in Presidential Plaza on UA campus; the nine-foot tall statue of Willie Mays in Regions Field; student-designed and -built bicycle racks in Alberta Park and downtown Tuscaloosa; Amaryllis and accompanying park benches by undergrads Lisko and Amber Daum in Monnish Park; and iron benches for Schoolyard Roots (Druid City Garden Project); among others. The most intensive upcoming projects are related to Tuscaloosa’s and Alabama’s Bicentennial celebrations in 2019. They were competitive commissions awarded to Tuscaloosa artist Caleb O’Connor, Wedderspoon and the foundry. For the state’s commemoration, O’Connor designed sixteen 3-foot by 2-foot high relief bronze panels depicting scenes from Alabama’s history to be cast at the foundry and paired with sixteen interpretive text panels. The entire work is scheduled for unveiling in Montgomery in December of 2019, so mark your calendars! For more information about the UA Department of Art and Art History and its programs, visit this link: https://art.ua.edu/academics/ or contact the department at (205) 348-5967.
Innovative Bike Rack Design Duo Strike Again
Two UA studio art alumni recently completed a set of innovative bicycle racks, the second of their kind, for the City of Tuscaloosa. The unique, sculptural bike racks, designed by Brandt Deeds (BA 2017) and built by Deeds and Alli Sloan (BA 2015) were installed at the new Alberta Park, next door to The Gateway, Alberta’s Technology and Innovation Center on University Boulevard, during the first week of September 2017. Alberta Park is part of a larger project of rebuilding and improvements in Tuscaloosa along the path of the April 27, 2011, tornado. Both bike racks are part of a plan, supported by the City of Tuscaloosa, The University of Alabama and other community organizations to encourage more biking in and around Tuscaloosa. From the beginning, Deeds and Sloan have been enthusiastic about the design-build project. Professor Craig Wedderspoon, who has been overseeing their work in the UA art foundry, said that they easily worked together because they were on the same page from the start. “Alli and Brandt are both avid bikers so they know what bikers want in bike racks, what adaptations are needed, like the way locks fit or how many bikes can actually fit in a public rack. They each came up with designs on their own and when we met, we realized their ideas were very similar.” Last summer, Alli Sloan designed the bike racks at 4th Street and 23rd Avenue downtown and then she and Deeds built those. This summer, Deeds’ design was built by Sloan and Deeds for Alberta Park. Like its predecessor in downtown Tuscaloosa, the Alberta Park set’s unusual design is innovative and practical. The designs are similar in size, but each is unique unto itself and quite different from standard bike racks. Sloan described her bike rack design as “an organic, wave-like composition.” The steel pipes in each design curve are undulating circles that echo the shapes of bicycle wheels, creating eye-catching patterns that stand out like sculpture. But those undulations have a practical value, too. Sloan said that the variety of sizes of loops in the rack’s design allows bikers with U-locks to more easily lock up their bicycles. Both bike racks can hold up to sixteen bikes each, as opposed to only seven bikes on the factory-made designs that would have been used. Each student brings a unique skill set to the project. Originally an engineering student, Brandt Deeds graduated in the summer of 2017 with a BA in studio art, focusing on sculpture, and a minor in mechanical engineering. Alli Sloan double-majored in advertising and studio art with a focus on graphic design in 2015. Both alumni also designed and built steel sculptures for the Nucor Children’s Charity Classic silent auction and took courses in sculpture with Professor Craig Wedderspoon. For more information about The University of Alabama’s programs in studio art and art history, go here: https://art.ua.edu/academics/graduate-programs/art-requirements/.
UA Sophomores Sculpt Steel Flowers for Monnish Park
Tuscaloosa -- The giant flowers that have arched above the UA art foundry behind the Bureau of Mines for several weeks will have a new home soon! The steel sculpture was designed and created this summer by two sophomore sculpture students at UA, Ringo Lisko and Amber Daum. It was commissioned by The Arts Council of Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County Park & Recreation Authority (PARA) and The University of Alabama Department of Art and Art History as part of the Tuscaloosa Public Art Project and will be installed at Annette M. Shelby Park on 15th Street in Tuscaloosa. UPDATE! The sculpture Amaryllis has been installed in Monnish Park, on the corner of 15th Street and Hackberry Lane. Above: Undergraduates Amber Daum’s and Ringo Lisko’s 12-foot tall aluminum and steel "Amaryllis," commissioned by Tuscaloosa County Park and Recreation Authority and the Arts & Humanities Council of Tuscaloosa, was installed in Monnish Park today! Thanks to Professor Craig Wedderspoon for the photo. Read more about their public sculpture project here.
UA Sculptures Break 3-Year Auction Record for Children’s of Alabama
Steel sculptures created by UA Department of Art and Art History members in 2016 were auctioned off for the largest total donation to Children's of Alabama the department has made since it began participating in the Nucor Children’s Charity Classic live auction three years ago. Children's of Alabama is the only medical center in the state dedicated solely to the care and treatment of children and serves as the primary site for University of Alabama at Birmingham pediatric care. UA Art and Art History undergrad art majors, a staff member (who is also an alumnus), and a professor raised $78,000 for Children’s of Alabama this year. Engineering-turned-studio art major Brandt Deeds and New College major and art student Nick Jackson together made their first sculpture for the charity auction, a collaborative project that brought in $12,000 to the pediatric care facility. BFA alumnus Eric Nubbe, who now works as Foundry Specialist for the department, has designed and created works for the last three charity auctions. Two of his steel sculptures brought high bids of $15,000 and $11,000 each. This year, Nubbe and Professor Craig Wedderspoon collaborated on a piece that brought $21,000. The high bid of $25,000 went to a steel version of “Simon the Lion,” Wedderspoon’s third year casting the Children's of Alabama mascot. The two previous “Simons” were cast in bronze and brought in $15,000 each. This year, Wedderspoon collaborated with UAB’s Metallurgical Engineering foundry to cast “Simon” in Nucor steel. Nucor donates all the materials for the sculptures. After the auction was over, Wedderspoon said one of Nucor’s CEOs commissioned him to do another steel "Simon the Lion" for an additional donation to the hospital of $20,000. Wedderspoon said, “We had an incredibly successful night…This brings our three-year total to $176,000, every penny of which goes directly to the hospital.” Wedderspoon attended the auction and banquet and listened to stories about some of the facility's patients. He said that participating in Nucor’s fund-raising for Children’s of Alabama makes him grateful for many things. “I am reminded of how truly incredible it is to be alive and to be afforded the privilege of working to teach young men and women how to use their skills, knowledge and passion, not only to be successful in life, but to share what they have learned and to contribute to their community.” Images above courtesy of Craig Wedderspoon. Images of the sculptures and their creators from 2015 and 2014 are below. Source: Professor Craig Wedderspoon, craig.wedderspoon@ua.edu or (205) 348-1898. Contact: Rachel Dobson, communications specialist: rachel.dobson@ua.edu or (205) 348-1893.
UA Art Sculptures Bring $52,000 to Charity Auction
Four steel sculptures created by students and faculty at UA’s Department of Art and Art History raised $52,000 for the 9th annual Nucor Children’s Charity Classic silent auction this year, the second year the department has contributed art to the charity. Senior Alli Sloan, recent BFA grads Ali Jackson and Eric Nubbe, along with Associate Professor Craig Wedderspoon, all donated art work to the 9th annual Nucor Children’s Charity Classic auction which was held October 18, 2015. Sloan, who is a double major in graphic design and advertising, was inspired by the motion of a golf swing in creating her sculpture, which brought $10,000 at auction. She designed and made a spiraling shape in steel with undulating metal waves to add movement. She sprayed on a silver metallic powder coating over the whole work, similar to chrome. Recent BFA grad Ali Jackson's sculpture brought $12,000 to the charity auction. Jackson created a large circular steel form incorporating many different colored beads and the Children’s of Alabama logo. This was the second year for BFA graduate Eric Nubbe to create and donate a sculpture. He now works as a sculptor’s assistant in the department’s foundry. Nubbe's sculpture brought in $15,000 this year. In the 2014 Charity Classic, the winning bid for Nubbe’s steel model of Children’s Hospital was $11,000. Craig Wedderspoon made a new version of his “Simon the Lion” bronze sculpture, which brought in $15,000. Simon is the official mascot of Children’s of Alabama. Last year’s Simon by Wedderspoon also brought $15,000 at auction. Text is used on each sculpture. Words like “Nucor,” “Children’s” and “Classic” are cut as raised or engraved letters or, as in Sloan’s work, cut into thin steel rectangles and floated a few centimeters above a steel base. The text on all of the sculptures was milled by Mechanician Joe Howell at the Arts and Sciences machine shop in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, along with David Key and Michael Perrigin, all of whom contributed essential detail work to the sculptures this year and last, noted Craig Wedderspoon. “It’s a great example of our work together in the College’s Bureau of Mines Arts and Engineering Complex.” Last year, 3 sculptures by UA art students and faculty raised more than $40,000 for the annual charity auction sponsored by Nucor Steel. Since its inception in 2007, the Nucor Children’s Charity Golf Classic has raised more than $1.9 million for Children’s of Alabama.
Arts Technicians to Attend Inaugural Conference at Duke University
UA Department of Art and Art History Arts Technician Senior Patrick O'Sullivan and Assistant Arts Technician Mike Eddins will be attending the first annual Student Shop Managers Conference hosted by the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University in Durham, N. C., in July. The goal of the conference is to provide a professional forum that will bring together managers and directors from colleges and universities across the US to discuss and learn about topics such as safety, training, procedures, instrumentation and design software, including Simulating Virtual Machining software. The keynote address will be "Integrating the Student Shop Experience into the Classroom," by W. Neal Simmons, Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke. A panel discussion on "Models of Different Student Shop Operations," with panelists from Harvard, Clemson, University of Texas, Georgia Tech and University of Minnesota will also allow questions and comments from the attendees. This is the first conference of its kind anywhere in the country. Commenting on the conference's focus on safety training and procedures, O'Sullivan noted, "We're always trying to standardize our [in-class] demos so it's nice to know that other places are interested in this, too." The conference will also help the arts technicians stay abreast of the latest technology. "A lot of student shops are heading in that direction by adding the machining software as well as 3-D printers and cutting lasers. We want to get familiar with these so down the line we will be able to use them," said Eddins. [LpF15]