UK Art Studio, Art Ed Alumni Lend Talents to Art and Visual Studies Building Celebration

Video by Jenny Wells/UK Public Relations & Marketing. 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Sept. 8, 2015) — More than 80 University of Kentucky art studio and art education alumni are helping celebrate the School of Art and Visual Studies' new facility in an alumni exhibition on display during the facility's open house from 5 to 9 p.m. today (Tuesday), Sept. 8, at the Art and Visual Studies Building, located at 236 Bolivar Street. The exhibition and open house are free and open to the public.

The Alumni Show is the first exhibition to be staged in the gallery of the new Art and Visual Studies Building at UK. This summer, the school put out a call to alumni of the program who were still creating work and received a tremendous response. More than 80 recent pieces of art (executed in the last three years) were selected from working art studio and art education alumni from undergraduate and graduate school classes as early as the 1960s to UK's most recent class of May graduates.

"It's an eclectic mix of work. We are just so excited that so many people wanted to be part of this grand opening and were willing to loan us their art so that we could show them off," said Ruth Adams, associate director of UK School of Art and Visual Studies and associate professor of photography.

The work is diverse including painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, video, printmaking, fiber art, collage and more.

UK's newest academic facility, the Art and Visual Studies Building, replaces Reynolds Building Number 1, where UK art studio students and faculty worked for more than 40 years in what was originally meant to be temporary space. The art studio program joins the art education and art history and visual studies programs in a new integrated studio/classroom environment designed to encourage collaborative innovation in the visual arts.

The 21st-century facility, housed in a historic tobacco processing plant, features traditional artist studios and instructional spaces, as well as five digital media labs and a 3D fabrication lab. The building also features a state-of-the-art gallery for student and faculty shows and for special exhibitions such as the Alumni Show.

The new gallery is a space tailored to the many needs of the UK School of Art and Visual Studies and its artists.

"We designed the space so it was incredibly versatile," Adams said. "We have obviously normal walls where we can put up 2D work. We have a new feature, which is what we call our black box theater, which is where we can show video, and we have it set up so there are doors on either side of it that allow us to close it off and make it completely dark."

Unlike Barnhart Gallery in Reynolds, the new facility's gallery is temperature- and humidity-controlled, which opens up the space to outside artists as well. "It will allow us to bring in artists where the work could actually be affected by the environment and allow us to actually show things that we couldn't have shown in the old space."

In addition to the exhibition, several other festivities will be going on at the open house. Visitors will also be able to take tours of the new building, see art class demonstrations, and participate in a silent auction to raise money for the Ross Zirkle Memorial Scholarship fund. Light refreshments will be available and WRFL will provide the music for the celebration.

The UK School of Art and Visual Studies Alumni Show will be on display through Lexington's next Gallery Hop Friday, Sept. 18. Regular viewing hours for the gallery in the Art and Visual Studies Building are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. 

The UK School of Art and Visual Studies in the UK College of Fine Arts is an accredited member of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in the fields of art studio, art history and visual studies and art education.

MEDIA CONTACT: Whitney Hale, 859-257-8716; whitney.hale@uky.edu