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Faculty Art Show Gets a Facelift

University Art Gallery curator Jason Tannen, with the help of a study conducted by students in his gallery production class last year, determined that the biennial faculty art show would be more potent if it had a theme that changed with each exhibition. He also sought an alternative to the past practice of presenting one work by each member of the Department of Art's faculty. Tannen invited a smaller group of faculty artists to exhibit a larger number of works. Two faculty who had been on sabbatical and four new tenure-track faculty have submitted works for this year's exhibition.

The resulting show is New/Re-new: New Tenured and Returning Sabbatical Department of Art Faculty, which will open February 24, and run through March 16, at the University Art Gallery. An end-of-exhibit reception will take place from 5 p.m. until 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 15.

The two artists returning from sabbatical are Jean Gallagher and James Kuiper. Gallagher, whose emphasis is painting, has been at Chico since 1990 and received her doctorate of arts from NYU in 1993. Most recently, her multimedia piece Moondial was acquired by the Redding Museum, and she has been working on Stations, a series of paintings about rare and endangered pre-Polynesian plants, for Gallery Iolani in Hawaii.

Kuiper, whose abstract landscapes have been shown in hundreds of venues over the past twenty years, received his M.F.A. from Michigan State in 1976 and has also been here since 1990. He has recently been working and exhibiting in Alaska and Spain.

The four new tenure-track artists are Robert Herhusky, Wei Hsueh, Masami Toku, and Nanette Wylde. Herhusky, a sculptor, has been at Chico since 1986 and received his M.F.A. from California College of Arts and Crafts in 1985. He works in cast glass and wood, and his art of late reflects his interest in the "shameless destruction of the temperate rain forest of the North American continent."

Hsueh received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1999 and works with multiple media. Her sculpture/photography installations are concerned with social categories, sexuality, and eroticism. She draws parallels between "the act of calligraphic writing and social/political construction," both of which "signify and mean nothing."

Toku received her Ed.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1998. With a background in watercolor and art education, she is interested in the inescapable aspects of human nature, called Goh in Japanese.

Wylde has been at Chico State since 1998 and received her M.F.A. from Ohio State. Her work is informed as much by conceptual art as by electronic media.

New/Re-new promises to be a varied, energetic, and first-rate exhibit. -- Thomasin Saxe, Humanities and Fine Arts