Alumni

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 (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.
Since 2000, Green spent half of the studio year illustrating final meal requests of death row inmates in an ongoing project titled The Last Supper. 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.
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.

Fuko Ito hails from Kobe, Japan where she grew her love for storytelling through reading books and comics. She moved to the US to study printmaking and drawing and currently resides and works in Lexington, KY as an artist and educator. Through drawing and storytelling, Fuko hopes to take her viewers onto a plushy, heartfelt journey to an imagined, soft alternate universe inhabited by a community of naked and radically soft creatures known as fumblys. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at The University of Kentucky, College of Fine Arts in Lexington, KY.

Antonio Martinez (b. 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 an Assistant Professor of Art, Middle Georgia State University, Cochran, GA.

Mark Hosford (b. Kansas City, MO). He moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1993 to pursue a BFA in Studio Arts at the University of Kansas with a concentration in printmaking. 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 and Chair of the Department of Art. Hosford has a national and international 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. Specializing in drawing, printmaking, and animation, Hosford’s work draws from a fascination with counter-culture imagery, spiritualism, curiosities, obsolete technology, stream of consciousness, and personal narratives.

Jody Wood uses mediums of social practice, video, photography, and performance. Her recent work re-imagines routines in poverty support agencies, aiming to sculpt power dynamics, relationship networks, and resist stigmas surrounding poverty. Her site-specific work has been supported by prestigious institutions including A Blade of Grass, Esopus Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, an ArtPlace America Initiative at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and through residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows at institutions including Skövde Art Museum in Sweden; Norrtälje Konsthall in Sweden, Open Source Gallery in NYC, and featured in publications such as The Atlantic, MSNBC, The Art Newspaper, and The New York Times.

Rena Detrixhe is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Kansas. In her contemplative work she combines repetitive processes and collected or scavenged materials to produce large-scale objects and installations, ephemeral sculpture, performance and drawings. Drawn to materials which possess an inherent story or familiar source and often utilizing natural elements, a continuing objective in her practice is to investigate the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world with attention to histories of injustice.

(b. Kansas City, Missouri) Terry resided in Salina, Kansas, from 1968 to 1995 before moving to Chicago. Evans has worked extensively throughout Kansas and other parts of the Midwest, and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States. Evans’ work has been supported by a number of prestigious grants, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 1996. In 2016 the University of Kansas presented Evans with an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.

(b. Lima, Ohio) Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor.
From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hamilton has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University since 2001, where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art.

Wendell Castle (1932-2018) created unique pieces of handmade sculpture and furniture for over five decades. Since the outset of his career, Castle consistently challenged the traditional boundaries of functional design and established himself as the father of the American studio furniture movement. Castle was renowned for his superb craftsmanship, his whimsically organic forms and his development of original techniques for shaping solid, stack-laminated wood. His iconic masterpieces in wood and in technicolor gel-coated fiberglass from the late 1960s and 1970s are among the most important and coveted examples of 20th century design. In the 2000s, Castle continued to push the boundaries of art furniture, crossing over into the design world with handmade editions of multiples exhibited and sold by the renowned gallery Friedman Benda.

Catherine Reinhart is an interdisciplinary artist from Ames, IA. Reinhart creates fiber work and conducts social practice with abandoned textiles around themes of domestic labor, connection, and care. "I am an interdisciplinary artist who makes fiber art and sculpture and conducts socially engaged projects with abandoned textiles. These works center on themes of labor, connection, and care. My primary goal is to increase the visibility of women in contemporary art, emphasizing artist-mothers. Caregiving girds up our society and is based mainly on the undervalued labor of women. This vital tending work is built on consistent, repetitive actions that provide comfort, ease suffering, and connect us with our fellow man."

(b. Christchurch, New Zealand) Raymer says his current work is informed by the confusion of navigating one's sense of place. “Depending on where you are in the world, obtaining and holding onto a home can be difficult for many reasons, and if lost or never gained, it can invoke a sense of displacement, a loss of sure footing. I relate to the desire for home in the literal and figurative sense. I struggle with a sense of self and country being a New Zealander raised abroad in Texas, there is a disconnect I didn't fully recognize until I moved back here. There is a constant pull to mend the disconnect between a sense of self and place while also considering Aotearoa's history. Until then, the house floats, unfilled, waiting for a solid foundation."

Matthew Willie Garcia is a printmaker whose work moves far beyond the traditional print media, which includes screen printing, mokuhanga, projection-mapping, animation, and large-scale installation. Driven by a passion for both science and science fiction, Garcia explores their queer identity and the mysteries that lie within the vast universe. Garcia employs their knowledge of printmaking to explore these themes through color abstraction, the graphic image, and nonrepresentational forms.

Amber Hansen is a muralist and visual artist who creates socially engaged and community-based artwork throughout the middle of the U.S. with Mural On the Wall (OTW). OTW’s core mission is to work with community members to create murals that capture the collective imagination of the place in which the mural will be located and encourages community participation, collaboration and mentorship. Hansen’s studio work is a dialogue between her formal education and her rural upbringing. She promotes creative engagement for all ages while raising questions about the ethics of animal welfare and human’s relationship with animals and food.
Hansen is the co-director & co-editor of the feature documentary Called to Walls. She is an Associate Professor at the University of South Dakota where she teaches painting, and serves on the board of the Community Built Association.

Nicole Rene Woodard is an artist living in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Nicole was awarded the Foundation Residency at Belger Crane Yard Studios in Kansas City in 2021 and 2022. She has taught foundation and ceramic courses at Benedictine College and the University of Kansas. Nicole is exhibiting nationally and has completed short-term residencies at the Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences and Penland School of Crafts. Nicole is the Pottery Technician at John Michael Kohler Art Center, supporting resident artists in the Pottery at Kohler Company.

Aimee’s artwork focuses on complex issues relating to advancements in Western medicine. Particularly, the dilemmas produced by the marvels of medical technology juxtaposed with the often intrusive procedures used to sustain and prolong life. Her pieces raise challenging questions about hope, science, and cures. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Aimee is an Associate Professor of Art & Design and Area Head of the Metals and Jewelry concentration at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Emily Hanako Momohara was born in Seattle, Washington where she grew up in a mixed race family. Her work centers around issues of heritage multiculturalism, immigration and social justice.
Momohara has exhibited nationally, most notably at the Japanese American National Museum in a two-person show titled Sugar|Islands. She has been a visiting artist at several residency programs including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Headlands Center for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center and Red Gate Gallery Beijing. In 2015, her work was included in the Chongqing Photography and Video Biennial. Momohara has created socially driven billboards for For Freedoms and United Photo Industries. She lives and works in Cincinnati where she serves as the Interim Studio Arts Chair, Professor, and heads the photography major at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Erika Nelson is an independent artist and educator, exploring contemporary art forms in the public realm. She investigates the nooks and crannies of the United States seeking out the odd and unusual, gathering stories of people who build immersive elaborate art environments, as well as roadside vernacular architecture known as World’s Largest Things. Her art practice focus includes a multi-decade project producing the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things. She currently serves as the Cultural Resource Director for a NRHP site S.P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden, works on preservation crews traveling to sites across the country, writes for art, travel, and industry publications, and consults for regional and national arts organizations as a specialist in self-built worlds and rural art advocacy. Her work has been published in Public Art Review, Society for Commercial Archeology Journal, and Raw Vision, while her art practice has been reviewed in Frieze, Art Forum, and the Wall Street Journal. She regularly appears in pop and alternative culture interviews discussing the intersections of roadside culture, rural, and formal art worlds, most recently in a Smithsonian Magazine feature. She has been a guest of the 99% Invisible podcast focused on Balls of Twine, Atlas Obscura’s Show and Tell series, and has been the subject of a Zippy the Pinhead strip.