Kyla Strid has a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Alaska Anchorage and an MFA from Ohio University. She has been awarded residencies at the Clay Studio of Missoula, Red Lodge Clay Center, Guldagergaard (Denmark), the Lawrence Arts Center, Haystack, and Penland School of Crafts. Kyla has extensive professional experience working as a studio technician, studio manager, gallery manager, and curator at various institutions across the country. Currently, Kyla is the Director of Residencies and Adult Education at the Lawrence Arts Center and has a studio at Seed Co.

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Yewen Dong is a recent Chicago Art Institute MFA who is now an artist in residence at Anderson Ranch. Prior to arriving at Anderson Ranch in Colorado, Yewen spent 4 months interning at the Dieu Donné paper making studio in Brooklyn, NY. For the past two years, her work has been selected for the NCECA biennial, one of the conferences most selective exhibitions.

Marilyn da Silva’s work is based on telling stories through imagery and representational elements. Her trademark surface treatment of gesso and colored pencil creates a rich palette for her sculpture and wearable pieces. Her work has been displayed nationally and internationally, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Gallery of Australia in Camberra. She is represented in public and private collections. Also, she has been featured in numerous books, magazines and catalogues. She was selected as “Master Metalsmith 1999” by the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee and made a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 2007. In 2017 she received the award of “Master of the Medium: Jewelry/Metals” by the James Renwick Alliance.

Marilyn da Silva is Professor and Co-Chair of the Jewelry/Metal Arts Department at California College of the Arts in Oakland where she has been since 1987. Before moving to California, she taught from 1978-87 at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She earned her MFA in Jewelry Design and Metalsmithing at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana and her BS in Art Education at Bowling Green State University.

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Shelley Thorstensen was born in 1953 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. As a child she lived in Salzburg, Austria and Stuttgart, Germany before moving to Cherry Hill, New Jersey. She currently lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania where she is the Director of Printmakers Open Forum.

Thorstensen's work has been described by Edward Sozanski of the Philadelphia Inquirer as “romantic abstraction” and that her prints are “for the most part palpably emotional effusions”. Artist Michelle Wilson writes “Each piece by Thorstensen is not a single experience; instead it is a concentration of ideas, encounters, and emotions. Her conceptual roots are in nature and its experience, but go deeper than everyday reality. Viewing her work, one winds through a labyrinthine configuration, where process, pattern, and lines become conduits and psychopomps in her visual idiom. Thorstensen presents in each piece a simultaneity of linked consequences, twists and turns of the journey of the soul.”

Thorstensen has an undergraduate degree in Experimental Studies from Syracuse University, School of Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse, New York and a graduate degree in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art of Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

As the owner and president of Gardner Design, Bill Gardner has produced effective and award-winning results for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to one-man shops. He understands the nuances of brand practicalities better than anyone in the business and leads his team to first consider the business that the design is supporting.

As the founder of LogoLounge.com – the international, searchable compendium of logos – Bill authored the affiliated bestselling LogoLounge book series, volumes 1-10, and is the author of the annual LogoLounge Logo Trend Report. 2013 marked the release of the highly anticipated Logo Creed, a foundation textbook for students, educators and professionals alike.

In 2014, Bill became an AIGA Fellow Award recipient for his contributions to the local, national and international creative community. Bill also judges design competitions and speaks nationally and internationally on identity trends and logo development. In his spare time, he serves on several community boards and has completed a six-year term as the Territorial Vice President of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

This event is presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Born in Rochester, NY, Peter Pincus is a ceramic artist and instructor. Peter received his BFA (2005) and MFA (2011) in ceramics from Alfred University, and in between was a resident artist at the Mendocino Art Center in Mendocino, California. In Fall 2014, Peter joined the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology as Visiting Assistant Professor in Ceramics and is currently Assistant Professor of Art. His work has been exhibited in venues such as the Lewis Wexler Gallery, Duane Reed Gallery, Sherry Leedy Contemporary, Independent Art Projects at Mass MOCA, Chamber, Greenwich House Pottery, NCECA, Salon Art + Design, SOFA Chicago, Collective Design, and New York Ceramics and Glass Fair.

This two-day demonstrational workshop will provide an in depth look into complex slip-casting mold systems and colored porcelain slip casting techniques. I will demonstrate casting plaster on and off of the potter’s wheel, hand-forming wet plaster, cutting and reassembling molds, approaches for simple and complex forms and systems for efficient casting through the production a plaster mold. In addition, I will demonstrate layering colored porcelain slip onto the surfaces of plaster molds to produce porcelain veneered surfaces.

Artist website: www.peterpincus.com

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Michael Braley, Creative Director of Braley Design, has over 25 years of experience in identity, brand, print, visual systems, book and packaging design. His work has been recognized internationally and is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, The Denver Art Museum and the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany. His work has appeared in publications and exhibitions including: British Design and Art Direction, Cannes Design Lions, The Clio Awards, Moscow Global Biennale of Graphic Design, I.D., Graphis, Type Directors Club, Communication Arts, London International Awards, The Art Directors Club of New York, The One Show, The AR100 Show, AIGA, HOW and Print.

Braley’s poster work has been awarded worldwide and has been shown in the Golden Bee Biennale (Russia), Shenzhen International Poster Festival (China), Ecuador Poster Bienal, Anfachen Awards 2017 (Germany). Clients have included Aéropostale, Alliance for American Manufacturing, AIGA, Civic Engagement Fund, Effen Vodka, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Future Partners, Genentech, Pando Populus, The People's Music School, and Skadden.

In 2016, Braley received the Iowa State University, College of Design, Design Achievement Award recognizing outstanding creative and professional achievements of alumni. Prior to moving to Lexington, Braley worked in San Francisco and New York. Braley lectures and leads design workshops at universities and professional organizations around the nation.

Artist website: www.BraleyDesign.com

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Flor Widmar is the current K-State Ceramics Area Artist in Residence for the academic year 2018/2019. She was born in Oceanside, California and was raised in Chihuahua, Mexico. Flor earned an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Sierra Nevada College. She has attended residencies domestically and internationally; exhibiting in Denmark, Japan and in numerous venues across North America.

This body of work stems from the elaborate memorials made to honor and mourn those lost; the beautiful yet tragic structures built on our highways and country roads in the U.S. and many other nations. In recent years controversy has arisen around these unsanctioned cenotaphs with authorities arguing distraction and danger to drivers while citizens claim first amendment rights. In many places local and regional governments have stepped in to regulate, restructure and remove them. The future of these road side remembrances is uncertain. The forms, texture and objects in this exhibition are comprised of her research, documentation, personal relation and interpretation surrounding this ancient tradition and its contemporary plight.

Artist website: https://florwidmar.weebly.com/

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Sungyeoul Lee's work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the US, Finland, Korea, and Japan. His work has earned several awards, winning grand prize at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale 2003, NICHE Awards, and the Saul Bell Design Award 2011 and 2016. His work is included in permanent collections in the Cheong-ju Craft Museum in Korea and the Sparta Teapot Museum in North Carolina. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Metalwork and Jewelry at Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea.

His current body of work is inspired by his fraternal twins because they are the most significant presence in his life. Two identical but dissimilar forms, which repeatedly appear throughout the work, remind him of fraternal twins who have different characters. The process of building identical forms, one fabricated by a silversmithing technique and the other formed by welded wire, requires more time, labor, and endurance; however, through his work, Lee's experience of the mystery of fraternal twins is conveyed to the audience.

This event is presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Bri Murphy is currently a graduate student at Ohio University where her interdisciplinary research focuses on 3D printing and its future democratization through open-source file sharing. She aims to question the current and future implications of such technologies as they transition from cutting-edge to mainstream. Murphy is the former Gallery Director at the LUX Center for the Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her work has been exhibited nationally and she has degrees in Ceramics and Art Education from SUNY New Paltz. During her workshop Murphy will demonstrate 3D printing with K-State's own DIY delta clay paste printer covering material preparation, printing calibratoin, 3D modeling tips and resources. Her artist lecture will highlight the use of 3D printing within her own broader interdisciplinary practice.

Artist website: www.brimurphy.com

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Melanie Johnson received her MFA in Painting from Indiana University. She is Associate Professor of Art & Design and co-coordinator of the Foundations Program at the University of Central Missouri. She lives in Kansas City.

Statement: I make large scale figurative drawings and paintings using imagery derived from observation and composite sources. Narrative is employed loosely in my work and I draw primarily on the familiar as a catalyst for making. The imagery gives form to a dissonant accrual of lived experience, family histories and anecdotes, appropriated iconography and the acting out of roles both obligatory and imagined. Surface, palimpsest and indexical histories of making are meaningful in my process. I want the physical work to encapsulate imagery representative of a lived moment as well as the history of its own manifestation. The work should conjure a habitat that has one foot in reality and the other in a state that evokes the slipperiness of memory, longing or a disquieting curiosity.

Artist website: melanielynnjohnson.com

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

Time-space compression is an inescapable fact of contemporary life. In our era of instantaneous imaging and accelerated electronic transmissions, distant locations and time periods are brought closer together. We live our lives immersed in multiple time-flows simultaneously and are capable of being present both physically and virtually. Kevin Townsend’s expanded drawing practice builds upon these ideas fusing concepts of mark-making, duration, and temporality to engage time as both material and site for artistic production. Employing processes that are equal parts obsessive and meditative, Townsend produces large-scale ephemeral works that leverage the power and possibility of drawing to give form to our evolving relationship to time-space. In this artist talk, Townsend will discuss the ideas and process that animate his practice.

Kevin Townsend is an internationally recognized drawing artist and professor currently living and working in Kansas City. He has taught at Maine College of Art, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and Kansas City Art Institute. Townsend earned his BFA from Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University and his MFA from The School of Visual Arts.

Artist website: www.kevin-townsend.com

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.

wading in without is a large scale sculptural installation, utilizing cast concrete platforms as ground for a range of fabricated and found objects. Materials and forms are withdrawn directly from an autobiographical narrative, utilizing the artist’s childhood home as site and source as a means to address broader notions around dislocation and longing, and the enduring persistence of the human spirit.

Brian Caponi received his BFA in Sculpture from Grand Valley State University in 2007, and earned his MFA in Ceramics from The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2013.

He has attended various residencies including, WaterShed Center for Ceramic Art, Uttarayan International Ceramics Symposium, Baroda, India, Suroyo Ceramic Residency – Goseong, South Korea, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, City Design School, Beijing, China.

His work has been shown throughout the states and internationally, most recently at the National Museum of Slovenia, Simone DeSousa Gallery, Grottaglie Convento Italy, San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, American Museum of Ceramic Art, Janice Charach Gallery, and The Archie Bray Foundation. He is Chair of the Ceramics Department at the Royal Oak Campus of Oakland Community College, and has studios in Pontiac, Michigan and Jingdezhen, China.

Artist website: www.brian-caponi.com

These events are presented and funded by KSU SGA Fine Arts Fee.