Texas Tech University

Former School of Art Director, Professor Todd DeVriese, has left TTU’S SoA to become Dean of the Department of Art at St. Cloud University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. As we began the search for a new director, CVPA Dean Carol Edwards announced last week that Professor Tina  Fuentes, (BFA and MFA, North Texas State University) the Associate Director and a Professor in Art  (Painting) will serve as the new interim SoA Director. She assumed her duties formally July 20.

Tina Fuentes

Although she was born in San Angelo, Fuentes grew up in Odessa.  She began teaching art in the Texas Public Schools; teaching next at Waco Art Center; followed by the University of Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico; and finally is a student favorite drawing and painting professor here since 1986 – 23 years.  She has participated extensively as an exhibition juror and served as a member of the Visual Arts Panels of New Mexico State Arts Division and the Texas Commission for the Arts.  She has also served as juror and board member of the Albuquerque Arts Board 1% for Art Program and more.

Fuentes lives in Lubbock with her husband, Paz Molinar. They have a daughter Erica and son-in-law, Greg Graves who have an eighteen-month-old son, Cash Kane. “He is the sweetest thing,” exclaims Fuentes.

In addition to being an educator, Fuentes  is a practicing artist with her own expansive studio. Many would call her a pioneering Latina woman who has gained much recognition for her art. Some examples of these accolades are an invitational one-woman show “Capas y Luz,” Ellen Noel Art Museum, Odessa, TX.; “53rd Grace Museum Competition,” Grace Museum, Abilene, TX. (1st place award ); “One Woman Show: Dibujos y Pinturas de la Desnuda,” Cabrillo College Gallery, Aptos, CA; and the invitational “One Woman Show,” San Antonio Art Institute. She was also the subject of a 1990 KTX-TV, Lubbock, Texas, production, entitled “El Arte de Tina Fuentes” which was accepted by the National Education Television Association and made available nationally to all PBS stations.    read more >>

Corey Escoto, BFA 2005 (MFA, University of Washington, St. Louis, MO), was recently featured on the  Art:21 Blog . He lives and works in his studio in St. Louis, Missouri. Escoto feels his work is influenced by the city and his living-work space, located on the second floor of an old red brick building downtown-where he feels most of his work is done in the kitchen.

According to contributing blog author-artist, Georgia Kotretsos, in her  post, Inside the Artist’s Studio: Corey J. Escoto, Escoto said, “I came to St. Louis in 2005 because of graduate school. I am from Amarillo, a medium-sized town in Texas, and St. Louis was an interesting change. St. Louis is a major American city with its share of problems, potential, and history. It has a good mix of the benefits and cultural opportunities of a big city, while retaining the small-town midwest charm. I was most drawn to St. Louis because of its great potential for an artist with limited means.”

Recently he was chosen one of three artists who were selected for the Great Rivers Biennial at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2008 and he received the  Gateway Foundation Grant. His work has traveled in the New American Talent 23 and the  Texas Biennial (2007). Internationally, he has been recognized in exhibitions such as Le Souvenir (Weimar, Germany); Seven Days Brunch (Basel, Switzerland); and Decollecting (Dunkerque, France).

A member of the Art-O-Matics in Cellophane (NY), Kotretsos is the editor-in-chief and a founding member of  Boots Contemporary Art Space founding artists (European correspondent) (St. Louis, USA). She currently lives in Athens, Greece.

National Geo 1 by Corey Escoto

Scott Dadich, BFA, Communications Design,1999,  is Creative Director of Wired Magazine. He credits SMAP (Saturday Morning Art Program), bagels, and a lack of enthusiasm for Mechanical Engineering at UT for bringing him to TTU’s SoA and helping to propel his career.

Dadich’s truly meteoric assent into the publishing world is full of recognition and dazzling successes. First, at Texas Monthly where the magazine accrued 14 National Magazine Awards including the award for General Excellence in 2003 under his creative eye.

Now at Wired, he continues with his winning ways. In 2007, the magazine won the prestigious National Magazine Award for General Excellence and followed in 2008, by winning the National Magazine Award for Design, the magazine industry’s highest design honor. Also, in 2008, he was awarded SPD (Society of Publication Designers) Magazine of the Year and elected President of SPD. Of these awards, Dadich modestly said, “It has been a good couple of years.”

A Lubbock native, Dadich attended All Saints Episcopal School and graduated from Lubbock High School. “Terry Morrow was a great mentor and I started out in his SMAP program and was there every Saturday all through high school to learn.”

“Later, when I went to Tech, Professor Morrow would look in on me to check how my classes were going. In his classes, I learned so much about drawing.”

Dadich mentions John Raspberry as a great instructor along with the Professors Frank and Jane Cheatham, both now deceased. “The first year I was in her (Jane Cheatham’s) typeography class, all lettering had to be done by hand because there was no computer lab until the next year. That next year, we began learning Illustrator and Photo Shop.”

“I draw everyday,” admits Scott Dadich, “I lean on my drawing skills and knowledge of typeography constantly in my work.”    read more >>

Dale Battle assisting Dean Carol Edwards with glass blowing.

We started our trek from Lubbock to Junction, Texas, Jon Harp, Assistant to the Director for Branding and Marketing Communications (also our main photographer), and I to join the artists and alumni at Alumni Weekend at Junction last weekend. About five hours later, we arrived. Future Akins-Tillett, Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Coordinator of the School of Art program at Junction,  was on hand to do the the welcoming and showed off the campus to all first timers like us. This heat sort of hits you in the face as you leave the air-conditioned car. It made me really appreciate the cool breezes that followed that evening.

We were assigned our rooms in one of the several buildings on campus. Our area contained a large communal room with a conference table and a classroom. Our bedrooms were off the conference room complete with bunk-beds, two separate sinks in each room and a shared shower in common with the next door room. We parked our suitcases in the rooms and began exploring the offerings outside.

There was glass blowing— day and night — during the cooler hours. It was truly spectacular to watch at night, which we did after visiting the inviting swimming pool (recently renovated). Walking was the preferred mode of transportation, but I noticed a few bicycles, too.   The evening brought a hot dog feast and many new faces to meet. Glass blowers, Vickie Bunting, MA interdisciplinary, English teacher at Lubbock High; Carol Delasandro from San Antonio; alumni Dale Battle, Walter Holland, both retired art teachers; Jerry Martin, TTU alumnus and nurse at Arrington Cancer Hospital, and Angela Heath, MFA, Art History Professor at South Plains College, worked on into the night.    read more >>

Frances Colpitt , TCU Art History Professor, reviewing the Austin Texas Biennial Multiple Venues in the publication Art  in America describes Canning’s work as follows. ”To provide more in depth exposure, one artist was chosen to have a solo exhibition, each at a different venue. The most engaging for this viewer was William Cannings at Okay Mountain. He exhibited steel sculptures of life-size inflatable objects, like inner tubes,beach balls, and rafts, which he makes by heating the metal sheets and shaping them with forced air. Painted in shiny enamel, the works convincingly capture the puckered seams and the puffed out shapes of the artist’s motifs. Unlike Jeff Koon’s works, Cannings are actual size, thick and glossy rather than thin and glassy. The weighty material is rendered buoyant and airy, like the show as a whole”

Ken Little BFA 1969, was mentioned in the AiA article, also.  Little was specifically chosen to stage art at one of the temporary outdoor location curated by Risa Puleo at Lady Bird Lake. Colpitt describes Little’s work as “white picket fence outlining the shape of the continental United States”  

Guest-curator, Michael Duncan, a Los Angeles art critic and curator, chose art work from an open call for the third Texas Biennial Exhibition in Austin, Texas which showed from . Six alums and/or SoA faculty were chosen out of the 650 entries for this exhibit.  They were Susan Budge, Susan Cheal, Tom Matthews, Christie Blizard,  Little, and Cannings.