Alumni
Our graduates go on to be artists, receive prestigious awards and residencies, and receive tenure-track and visiting positions.
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds
Edgar Heap of Birds has studied at the University of Kansas, Lawrence (BFA, 1976), undertaken graduate studies at the Royal College of Art, London (1977) and attended the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (MFA, 1979). He was named USA Ford Fellow in 2012 and Distinguished Alumni, University of Kansas, in 2014. Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts and Letters degrees have been awarded by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston (2008), Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (2017), and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, (2018). In 2020, Heap of Birds was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a member of the Humanities & Arts class, with a specialty in Visual Arts.
Julie Green
Julie Green (b.Yokosuka, Japan) wanted to be a stewardess until age four, but became a painter instead. Green received a BFA and MFA from The University of Kansas with Roger Shimomura as major professor. Green, a professor of art at Oregon State University, lives in the Willamette Valley with husband and artist Clay Lohmann and their small cat, Mini.Since 2000, Green spends half of the studio year illustrating final meal requests of death row inmates in an ongoing project titled The Last Supper. 800 kiln-fired plates are on view at Bellevue Arts Museum through September 2021. Fashion Plate, 2017-, personal and women’s narratives, provide balance to The Last Supper. Another series, First Meal, a collaboration with exonerees and the Center on Wrongful Convictions, depicts the first meal eaten following release from a wrongful conviction. UPFOR gallery’s exhibition of First Meal and Fashion Plate received the Presents Booth Award at The Armory Show in 2020.
Green’s work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, a Whole Foods mini-documentary, National Public Radio, and Ceramics Monthly.
A recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors and the Hallie Ford Foundation Fellowship, Green has had forty-two solo exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad including The Block Museum, Hunter Museum of American Art, and University of Liverpool Art Museum. Collections include The Library of Congress, State of Oregon Library, Spencer Museum of Art, Fidelity Investments, Athena Art Finance, and private collections worldwide.
Juan José Castaño-Márquez
Juan José Castaño-Márquez is a Colombian-born artist based in the united states working in visual biomythography, photography, performance, video, and new media arts. through art, he explores contemporary issues on historiography and archivization, as well as personal identity. some of juan's projects directly engage with ideas of representation of "the other"–this other being both brown and queer; historical erasure; and situations of victimization in his country of birth. Juan is currently a tenure-track assistant professor of digital media at the School of Art, Nebraska Wesleyan University.
Fuko Ito
Fuko was born and raised in Kobe, Japan where she grew her love for storytelling through reading books and comics. Through printmaking, drawing, and books, she hopes to take her viewers onto a journey to an imagined, soft alternate universe inhabited by a community of naked, plush creatures called fumblys. Fuko is currently serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Foundations and Drawings in the College of Fine Arts and Visual Art Studies at the University of Kentucky.
Richard James
Richard utilizes the traditional doll format of ceramic head, hands, and feet with a cloth body to create large-scale ceramic sculptures that employ found objects within the narrative. The mending of clothes and the construction of dwellings are two crafts handed down to me through my parents’ and grandparents’ way of life. Richard is currently an assistant professor of sculpture and ceramics an Texas A&M – Corpus Christi.
Antonio Martinez
Antonio Martinez was born and raised in Hutchinson, Kansas. He received his BFA in ceramics at Wichita State University in 2014 and his MFA from the University of Kansas in 2018. He has taught at numerous universities and art centers while exhibiting his work nationally. His work has also been published on numerous occasions in Ceramics monthly. Currently, he is Assistant Professor at Middle Georgia State University (Tenure-Track).
Mark Hosford
Mark Hosford was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1974 and grew up in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas. He moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1993 to pursue a BFA in Studio Arts at the University of Kansas. He received his MFA in 2001 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. That same year, Hosford accepted a teaching position at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Art. Hosford has served as president of the Southern Graphics Education Outreach and Vice President of Outreach for the Southern Graphics Council, the largest international printmaking organization. Hosford has a national, international, and regional exhibition record, including exhibitions in Poland, Germany, South Korea, China, New York, Boston, and California. His work is included in numerous public and private collections. He is represented by Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee.Specializing in drawing, printmaking, and animation, Hosford’s work draws from a fascination with ghost stories, oddities, stream of consciousness, and personal narratives. His work often portrays an alternate reality where fertile and untethered imaginations are allowed to roam in wild abandonment.
