[from the series “Homework: Photographs from Taos, New Mexico”]
The Pollock Gallery of the Division of Art at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts will present EMERITA: A retrospective of Debora Hunter and Mary Vernon, an exhibition featuring works by the two recently retired SMU art professors, from September 7 to October 20, 2018. This two-person retrospective honors their collective 90-year contribution to the Meadows School, exhibiting work from the 1970s to the present.
In May, Mary Vernon concludes her long career at SMU. She is retiring as an art professor, a master of painting, drawing and color theory education at Meadows School of the Arts. She’s been teaching here for 50 years.
On September 15, her new exhibit titled “Painting is Drawing” opened at the Grace Museum in Abilene, where it will be on view until January 6. The exhibit features her interpretations of landscapes and still lifes, often marked by soft lines and blended colors in media including oil and graphite. The museum will host a reception with the artist on October 7.
The museum also captured Vernon’s installation on video to mark the exhibit’s opening.
Every year, SMU Meadows encourages students to explore the arts outside of the traditional classroom environment.
During the New York Colloquium, students visit a range of museums, galleries, artists’ studios and other venues appropriate to the development of their critical and professional studies in art. Approximately 25 students participate each year, with at least half from the Division of Art, both graduate and undergraduate. The Colloquium forms the basis for contemporary art studies for our students, and provides exposure to the international art world as represented in New York.
In honor of the 2017 event, Photography Major Chris Coyne, a participant in the 2016 Colloquium, sends us a photo dispatch.
The New York Colloquium: Everything You Need to Know
Contact Us to Sign Up | Read the Synopsis | Download the Syllabus
Kyle Hobratschk (B.F.A. Art, ’11) loves older buildings with character.
As an under-graduate he began doing drawings and watercolors of homes for the Park Cities Historic & Preservation Society, leading to commissions from real estate agents, homeowners and commercial developers.
Hobratschk was featured in a can’t-miss interactive feature in the Dallas Morning News entitled Corsicana diaries.
Hobratschk on working in Corsicana, via our 2013 MPrint story: “It’s shown me the importance of building community,” he says. “Growing up, I thought of an artist as someone alone in a studio. You don’t imagine working WITH other people until you realize that a lot of things you want to do aren’t possible alone. I couldn’t do Corsicana on my own.”
Meadows Prize Winner New Cities, Future Ruins, a curatorial initiative inviting artists, designers and thinkers to reimagine the extreme urbanism of America’s Western Sun Belt, has just launched an expanded website. It features the first details of November’s events in Dallas, including a list of early confirmed participants and links to register.
The convening will run November 11-14, 2016. This hybrid conference and festival will be open to the public, feature artists’ projects, bus tours, and events throughout the city, as well as talks, roundtable discussions, screenings, and workshops. Confirmed participants include Noura Al-Sayeh, Roberto Bedoya, Mary Ellen Carroll, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Naima J. Keith, OtherOthers, Postcommodity, Andrew Ross, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer and Imre Szeman, with a larger list and full schedule to be announced later this summer.
You can find out more about each participant, a formative schedule for the convening, and a curatorial statement on the expanded site.
| Register for the Convening | Meet the Partners |
More About New Cities, Future Ruins
New Cities, Future Ruins will engage the cities of the Western Sun Belt as arenas for pioneering art and design. The region, stretching from Houston to Denver and from Phoenix to San Diego, is home to some of the fastest-growing cities in the country, symbols of opportunity and entrepreneurialism, historic cradles of free market capitalism. Their path, however, may be unsustainable: located in delicate ecosystems, the unprecedented growth of these cities is marked by sprawl and resource overuse, dramatic demographic shifts and struggles over immigration. Some of the most pressing questions of our moment – questions of whether current ways of life can or should persist environmentally, economically and socially – are in few places as clear or as compelling as in these Western Sun Belt cities. Suburban in texture, these new cities are twenty-first century spaces that resist creative traditions inherited from the industrial city. Bringing critical and innovative art and design practice from around the world to bear on this urban landscape, the initiative seeks to foster visionary thought and artistic experimentation at these urgent sites, places that both embody and illuminate global crises of rapid urbanization.
Follow NCFR and help spread the word: Instagram: @newcitiesfutureruins, Twitter: @newcitiesfuture, Facebook: New Cities Future Ruins