CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Graduating students in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will show their work in an exhibition at Krannert Art Museum.
The School of Art and Design Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition will present the work of students in art history, art education, graphic design, industrial design and studio art, which includes fashion, new media, painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture. The exhibition opens May 4, with an opening reception at 4 p.m., and runs through May 11.
Sydney Brown, a graphic design student, created the catalog and the branding for the exhibition, along with Grace Althaus, a junior in graphic design. The catalog features hand-drawn portraits of their classmates in a cartoonish style to emphasize playfulness, Brown said.
“I felt it really resonated with my classmates and their bright spirit and enthusiasm for what they do,” she said.
Some of the illustrations will be added to the windows of the Link Gallery between KAM and the Art and Design building. The catalog design has a grid structure in bold colors that will be replicated on the gallery walls.
Brown’s project in the exhibition is “Memory Lane,” a brand she created for custom books and stuffed animals for children. Her concept calls for taking a child’s drawing of an animal and turning it into a story titled “The Curious Mind of … ,” with the child’s imagined character’s name inserted, as well as making a stuffed animal based on the drawing.
Brown’s 5-year-old son drew a bear, and she created a story about the bear that will be displayed in a digital flipbook at the exhibition on a video screen resembling a TV hung above a child’s chair and table.
“I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the past and reminiscing on my childhood and my academic career coming to an end. I’ve been reading a lot of books with my son, and I wanted to do something with the same sense of nostalgia I had as a child, and representative of the feelings I’m having right now,” Brown said.
Emma Haugh-Ewald is a student in studio arts whose work combines installation and painting. She considers themes related to the body as well as domestic and personal space. She said she’s interested in “autotopography,” a term coined to describe how we use objects to map ourselves or tell a personal history.
Her work in the B.F.A. show is a hanging installation of four panels of a sheer fabric called scrim cloth. Haugh-Ewald painted a figure pictured in her bedroom on each of the panels. She drew the images on the cloth with alcohol markers, then painted them with a watered-down gouache paint.
“If a viewer walks behind it, it puts their body in context with the piece,” she said.
The first panel in the series, titled “Don’t Hit Your Head on the Ceiling Fan,” won first place in the 2024 Image of Research competition organized by Teaching, Learning and Academic Support in the University Library and the Office of Undergraduate Research.
Haugh-Ewald said she is attached to her bedrooms and spaces that she’s made her own, and she’s a collector of souvenirs. When packing up to move from place to place during college, she realized how the items that decorated her walls acted like a timeline of her life.
“The way you create messes or collect a bunch of stuff in your purse or pockets or the cup holders of your car tells very specific stories, more everyday stories. They tell you where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing,” she said.
Nathan Holder is a student in studio art with a concentration in photography. His work involves themes of relationships and how the various locations he’s lived in impact his relationships and his concept of home, as well as pop culture.
While Holder makes fine arts photos, his work for the B.F.A. exhibition is fashion photography and portraiture.
“I make grand, conceptual photographic project installations. They do well, but I see friends taking fashion photos and portraits, and people just connect to those images much more quickly,” Holder said. “As much as I’m interested in pursuing conceptual art and visually interesting and complex photographs, I also want people enjoying my artwork and not just in a fine arts space.”
His project, titled “Step on Me,” comprises six large standard prints; two additional solar prints that he created by coating a carpet with a light-sensitive liquid and placing a transparent image on top of it; and an audio component.
A large print in the KAM gallery is a self-portrait in which Holder wears a tennis dress, headband and wristband. The rest of the installation will be on view in Room 003 in the Art and Design building. Two of the photos are send-ups of popular advertisements — the Maxwell cassette tape “blown away” ad of the 1980s, in which the sound coming from the tape blows back a man’s hair and tie, a lampshade and his drink; and American Eagle underwear ads that feature a very specific type of male body.
Another photograph was inspired by the aesthetics of the “Hellraiser” movies with a character with spikes on his face. Holder photographed a model with spikes on the bottom of her boot, stepping toward the camera lens.