Art Faculty Stories

Titled “Implications of Rock Art Aesthetics in Olmec Sculpture” and published in the journal Latin American Antiquity, Dr. Jillian Mollenhauer’s article explores how Olmec elite helped legitimize their political power through art and how the Olmec civilization incorporated rock art aesthetics and rituals into their sculptures to legitimize their political power. In it, she highlights the deliberate choices made by Olmec sculptors and emphasizes the importance of rock art as a unique and influential art form in Mesoamerica.

Abstract: The development of freestanding stone sculpture by the Olmec people of Mesoamerica’s Gulf lowlands has long been considered one of the defining artistic achievements of the Formative period. However, by the Middle Formative period the production of freestanding sculpture was often eclipsed by the contemporaneous creation of rock art outside the Gulf lowlands. In this article I argue that Gulf Olmec sculptors and audiences occasionally co-opted the aesthetic and ritual treatments of rock art at topographic shrines to construct and reinforce the sacred geographies of primary site cores. In so doing, Olmec elites converted the ideological power of the wild and the animate earth into a form of political capital.

Read Jillian’s entire article.
Read a feature about Jillian’s article published by Phys.org.

As the academic year begins, a leadership change is taking place in the Department of Art at MSU Denver. Professor Matt Jenkins has accepted the position of Chair, and Dr. Deanne Pytlinski’s nine year term has come to a close.

Deanne is transitioning back to full-time faculty, focusing on the Art History, Theory, and Criticism program’s launch of new introductory courses, more general studies courses, and further globalizing MSU Denver Art’s modern and contemporary curriculum. Deanne states, “It has been such an honor to serve the students, faculty, and staff as Chair of this incredible department, and I am so proud of everything we have been able to create together. It has been an incredible 9 years as Chair, filled with more ups and downs than any of us could have ever predicted.”

On the first day in his new role, August 1st, 2024, Matt celebrated Deanne’s stewardship, writing— “A GIANT heartfelt thanks to Dr. Pytlinski for her nine years of leadership as Chair! We are in a very strong position thanks to your leadership and vision. We look forward to supporting you in your teaching and research going forward!” He added, “I am so excited and ready to get to work, have a lot to learn, and I want to thank you for the opportunity.”

Matt has been teaching in the Art Department at MSU Denver since 2008. Before that, he taught at the University of New Mexico, the University of Denver, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His research interests include performance art, socially engaged art, internet art, video art, and environmental art. His work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally and he is currently a member of the Arquetopia International Honors Alumni Residency program. He earned his BA in Art with a minor in Chicano/a Studies from Adams State University, an MA in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and an MFA in electronic media art and design from the University of Denver. He says,“I’m so excited and grateful for the opportunity to lead the MSU Denver Department of Art! I look forward to helping our wonderful students, faculty, and staff thrive while collaborating with other departments on campus, working towards the important goals of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, and bringing energy and creativity to the exceptional mission of MSU Denver.”

Deanne wishes students, faculty and staff the best, saying, “I can’t wait to see you in the classroom—make great work and be brilliant!”

We’re excited to share that Professor Nima Bahrehmand with collaborators Laurids Sonne and Eric Coombs Esmail from the University of Colorado Boulder have published a media artwork and accompanying text in the latest issue of the Journal of Media Art, Study, and Theory (MAST). This special issue focuses on media art and archaeology, and the piece is titled “Unearthed Objects: S3026 and Michael Marder’s object earth.”

The article is open-access and can be viewed online here.

May 24 – July 20, 2024

Opening May 24, 2024, Collective Nouns brings together diverse and distinguished artists working across a wide variety of media representing each artist’s unique experiences, influences, and interests. This exhibition offers a peek into the studio art and design practices of MSU Denver’s art faculty and staff, celebrating our vibrant visual art community.

IMAGES, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: NATASCHA SEIDENECK, UNCANNY TERRITORY: THE TOPOGRAPHY OF RUIN, DECAY AND REGENERATION (DETAIL), 2024; HEATHER LINK-BERGMAN, VALANCE, 2023: TSEHAI JOHNSON, BREACH, 2023

Deanne Pytlinski, Chair of the Year &
Teague McDaniel, Excellence in Teaching: Adjunct Faculty

Two outstanding faculty from the Department of Art earned College of Letters, Arts and Sciences (CLAS) Deans Awards for the 2023-24 academic year. The CLAS Deans Awards recognize faculty and staff who have demonstrated excellence in their roles and contributions to MSU Denver. Winners are recognized during the CLAS Faculty and Staff Appreciation and Awards Ceremony, receive an award certificate and a monetary award incentive. The award winners represent those who have received the highest honor and distinction for CLAS.

Excellence in Teaching: Affiliate Faculty, awarded to Teague McDaniel, recognizes affiliate faculty who have demonstrated excellence in teaching and educating MSU Denver students. They have shown excellence in the classroom and consistent dedication to students by creating welcoming and inclusive classrooms that support the growth, learning and education of MSU Denver students.

Chair/Director of the Year, awarded to Deanne Pytlinski, recognizes one CLAS Chair/Director for the highest honor and distinction in CLAS. The Chair of the year goes beyond the role and scope of their department and displays outstanding leadership qualities. The Chair of the year fosters a positive departmental environment by mentoring and supporting the development of their faculty and staff. They have also shown dedication to diverse hiring and recruiting. They contribute significantly to the strategic planning and vision of the University, demonstrate innovation, and encourage
collaboration and cross-disciplinarity. They are a resource for problem-solving often lending expertise, addressing challenging issues, while creating a culture that values civic leadership and driving change. They promote the University’s core set of values: Excellence, Community, Access, Diversity and Respect.

More about CLAS Awards and Achievements

Anne Yoncha is Painting Area Coordinator at Metropolitan State University Denver. Her work combines digital sensing technology, such as bio-data sonification, and analog, traditional processes including painting with ink she makes from locally-sourced plant matter. Her ongoing research with the HAB (High Altitude Bioprospecting) working group began in Fall 2019 at Field Notes, a residency of Finland’s Bio Art Society at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in subarctic Lapland, where she worked with artists, biologists, and programmers to detect high-altitude microbes using a heli-kite. Join a painting class where we will spend some time exploring ideas like this! Anne is also part of a team developing a Bio-art course where students can collaborate with microbes to make artworks.

Nima Bahrehmand is an Iranian-American interdisciplinary artist and educator. His artistic research explores bodies, archives, and places that became suppressed and desertified due to being subjugated by political, economic, and technological progress. Via a digital voyage, he builds worlds that allow relocating the desertified from their initial setting into a new environment or platform, thus allowing the creation of new stories about them. Nima received his BFA from the University of Kerman, Iran; MA from the School of Art, Ghent, Belgium; MFA in studio art (Transmedia) from the University of Texas at Austin, and Ph.D. in Emergent Technology and Media Art Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Bahrehmand is developing new courses in Digital and Emerging Art Practices to launch in Fall, 2024 and will also be teaching Performance Art coming up the Spring. He is looking forward to incorporating virtual reality, video installation, and other time-based processes into the Art curriculum.

June 17 – August 13, 2022

Opening June 17, 2022, Collective Nouns brings together diverse and distinguished artists working across a wide variety of media representing each artist’s unique experiences, influences, and interests. This exhibition offers a peek into the studio art and design practices of MSU Denver’s art faculty and staff, celebrating our vibrant visual art community.

Featured artists include:

In its first international venue outside of the United States, the Design for the Common Good Network, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and Budapest Metropolitan University Faculty of Art and Creative Industries are pleased to present the Design for the Common Good International Exhibition, curated by Professor Lisa M. Abendroth, as a collection of over thirty network-nominated, peer-reviewed, and/or curator-invited public interest design projects from six continents and twenty-three countries. Exhibition projects exemplify the way communities, organizations, teams of designers are creating positive change together from the ground up. These typically localized scale-appropriate efforts are transformative in the places where they matter most—settings where there is a distinct call to action, a needed response to critical issues affecting people and their ability to live life at its fullest.

Design for the Common Good is a coalition of purpose-driven networks committed to design practice, education and research that improves social, economic and environmental outcomes.

MSU Denver Art Communication Design Associate Professor and Program Coordinator Shawn Meek and Professor Lisa Abendroth collaborated on a mobile app project that has garnered regional and national praise. Abendroth curated and authored all project-based content and Meek designed and developed the mobile app for the international exhibit Design for the Common Good. Their mobile app earned:

• 2022 Denver One Club Awards, Merit
• 2022 GDUSA Design Showcase Awards

The GDUSA Design Showcase reflects the increasingly expansive ways in which graphic design serves and shapes commerce and culture. The Meek/Abendroth design was chosen from 14,000 entries submitted.

When MSU Denver Professor Carlos Frésquez began painting murals in Denver’s Chicano neighborhoods in the 1970s, he was looked down upon by the larger city community.

Today, murals are everywhere – and treasured throughout the city – as testimony to “what’s going on right now,” he said.

“I call murals ‘walls with tongues’ because that’s what they’ve been all along,” he said. “It’s a way to instantly communicate and document a time. And voice your opinion.”

This summer as Frésquez, a Metropolitan State University of Denver alumnus and professor, embarked on teaching his popular Community Painting: The Mural course, he was forced to adapt the collaborative process to the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here, Frésquez and his MSU Denver students show how they came together to paint a new mural while staying physically apart.

“It’s another way to learn and teach this process,” Frésquez said, “and it’s been a positive challenge. It forced me to rethink how to teach.”

PHOTOS: DENVER MURALS BY CARLOS FRÉSQUEZ AND HIS STUDENTS

Story by Amanda Schwengel, MSU Denver RED

Associate Professor Shawn Meek has been recognized with an award for his 2020 work Rose Code, by The One Club for Creativity. Rose Code earned a Silver Award in the category of “Out-of-Home / Experiential & Installations,” and is being exhibited at The One Show, a prestigious exposition in advertising, design and digital marketing. For 40 years, The One Club has had a rich legacy of honoring some of the most groundbreaking ideas, created by some of the most remarkable minds in creativity.

Specializing in UX/UI design and front-end web development, Meek is a designer who also codes; building from concept to completion. Having always been drawn to rose windows “for reasons unexplored,” Meek was fascinated by the structural mastery and craftsmanship of these detailed objects. He found himself tracing the pattern in these physical objects and asking himself, “How can that be coded?”

Rose Code’s purpose centers upon the idea of creating highly detailed and visualized forms utilizing code as a solo medium. As a digital installation, users are drawn into a curated space driven by code (HTML5 & CSS3) that is visually generated onto two opposing walls with the creation of the rose window displayed in the center. Conceptual unity is realized by intersections of auditorial cues referencing repetitive religious systemic underpinnings, patterns of code in continual progress and rose window form creation.

“I am a tourist of my personal faith, a weekend window shopper for salvation,” Meek ruminates. “Religion, after all, is just an organized system, isn’t it?”

Associate Professor and Communication Design Program Coordinator Peter Miles Bergman is a conceptual artist, printer, publisher, and the founder and Special Agent in Charge of the Institute of Sociometry, an international art and communications cooperative. Bergman formed the group in 1995 after selecting the term “sociometry” — which is “the quantitative analysis of individuals and their relationship to groups” — from the dictionary. Or, in Bergman’s parlance “guerilla sociometry”, which does not conform to the rigors of math or science! In collaboration with his partner in art and life, Heather Link-Bergman, former Communications Manager at the MSU Denver Center for Visual Art, their “Institute of Sociometry” is spotlighted in the current Museum of Contemporary Art Denver exhibit Citizenship: A Practice of Society. As a survey of politically engaged art, in response to political events and the current climate, as well as recent art world trends, the exhibition posits art making as a critical civic act, and runs from October 2, 2020 – February 14, 2021.

Our newest full-time faculty member, Assistant Professor Yunjin La-mei Woo is a socially-engaged artist and a cultural-studies researcher. Born as the granddaughter of a Korean shaman, her artistic practice is informed by her research on various notions of humanness and how such notions intersect with issues of power, gender, class, and ethnicity. Her creative work ranges widely from installation to video, performance, sculpture, writing, and participatory projects. Woo has exhibited, published, and presented her creative work and research in various venues both internationally and nationally. She earned her BFA and MFA from Seoul National University, South Korea, and is currently working on her PhD dissertation in Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. You can find more about the material structures that Yunjin has built here.

Jessica Weiss, Ph.D., Assistant Professor – Art History, Theory, and Criticism, presented a paper, titled “Castilian Legacy and Juan de Flandes’ Miraflores Copy,” at the International Colloquium “Flandes by Substitution: Copies of Flemish Masters in the Hispanic World (1500-1700)” sponsored by the Royal Institute of Cultural Heritage (kik-irpa) in Brussels, Belgium.

Matt Jenkins, Associate Professor – Integrated Media, showed his work The World’s Largest PDF in an international juried exhibition on Conceptual Art at the CICA Museum in South Korea and presented the same work at the American University in Paris for the Arts in Society conference.

Rachael Delaney, Professor – Art Education Coordinator, was honored at the 2017 Colorado Art Education Association fall conference as the Art Educator of the Year. Colleague Dale Zalmstra reflects, “I have known and at times worked with Rachel over a number of years. As an elementary art teacher, I have been the cooperating teacher for her student teachers. I know from the students what the priorities and focus are in their art education classes. I know the efforts Rachel has made to mentor and facilitate the growth of her students. I know she has a very high standards and high expectations for her students. She calls for their best in ways that both inspires and motivates them as they grow in understanding and confidence.”

Jillian Mollenhauer, Ph.D., Associate Professor – Art History, Theory, and Criticism, presented papers at the Association for Latin American Art Triennial Conference: Art at Large: Public and Monumental Arts of the Americas, at the deYoung Museum, San Francisco; at Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in Orlando, Florida; and at the 2nd Annual Research Colloquium for the Rocky Mountain Pre-Columbian Association, Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

In 2017 Dr. Mollenhauer presented “Identifying the Quintessence of Olmec Centers in Formative Olman,” in the session, “Quintessential Places: Analyzing the Character of Pre-Columbian Sites” at the 2017 Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology, in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Shawn Meek, Associate Professor – Communication Design, presented a paper entitled ‘Fonts of My Family: The Fleeting Craft of Cursive Writing’ at the 2017 Hawaii University International Conferences on Science, Technology & Engineering, Arts, Mathematics and Education (STEM/STEAM) in Honolulu, along with publishing in the conference proceedings. Meek was honored by Graphic Design USA (GDUSA) American Web Design Awards 2017. His work, Boyan Slat: UX/UI Design, was published in this annual showcase of the best websites, microsites and apps nationwide. This same work was also awarded a Silver by the One Club for Creativity Denver’s 2017 Annual Show.

Summer Trentin Ph.D., Assistant Professor – Art History, Theory, and Criticism, presented a paper titled “Reconstructing Antiquity: Alternative Research Projects in Classical Art and Archaeology” at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (http://camws.org/meeting/index.php) at the University of Waterloo in Kitchener, Ontario. She also authored two articles, one with illustrations by an MSU Denver student, related to her research on domestic decoration in Roman Pompeii.

Tsehai Johnson, Associate Professor – Ceramics, installed Zest, a permanent commission at the new CU Boulder Village Center Dining and Community Commons building.

This work is a collaboration between Johnson and the chef in consultation with KSQ Architects. The piece explores the explosive flavors and textures of fresh foods and spices. The design originates in the upper left corner of the niche where a plate gradually morphs into to fiery spices, lush flora and bursts of pleasure. In a sense, the plate becomes an explosion of colors, flavors, and textures.

Photo: Zest; 2016; Porcelain; 5.5’x 8.5’x 6”

Photo credit: Wes Magyar