Current Exhibitions

In celebration of UCM’s 150th Anniversary, UCM Gallery Director, Christian Cutler presents replicated photographs of the UCM campus and its students using vintage photographs ranging from the early 1900s through the year 2000. Cutler merges historical views with present-day scenes that have been photographed from the same viewpoint.

View exhibition images below or take a virtual 360 tour HERE.

Opening Aug. 18, 2021 the annual Art and Design Faculty Exhibition will feature a wealth of artistic media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and textiles, while showcasing the professional practices of UCM’s art faculty outside of their university duties. In addition to current faculty, several emeriti faculty also will have work on exhibit.

Scroll down for a preview of the exhibition.

Associate Professor of Illustration, John F. Malta, returns from sabbatical in New York, NY to exhibit selections from his new roadside attraction Haunted Francis Storybook Village as well as illustration projects for Facebook, Complex, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

This exhibition features a creative challenge designed to pair artist members of the Missouri Fiber Artists Association, in order to create joint collaborative works of art. A related previous collaborative project was completed in 2016, entitled “Pairings.” This pairings challenge, “Counterpoints 2020,” is designed to facilitate artistic growth and creativity, and to develop fun, collaborative shared interactions among members.

For this challenge, participating MoFA members were randomly paired. Each set of partners chose one of the 7 elements of art to focus on. The elements of art are line, color, shape, form, value, space, or texture. Each partner emphasized one aspect of their element in their work. For example, if the pair together selects the element of “shape,” then one artist might choose to emphasize geometric shapes in the joint project, while the other may choose to emphasize organic shapes, thereby creating a “counterpoint” dynamic.

Each artist began with a 10” x 10” artwork in her choice of media, keeping in mind her element and its characteristics. Each artist stopped about halfway through completion, leaving room for their partner to finish the piece begun, in her own way. The other partner did the same. The trade followed as each partner mailed each other their projects. Projects were finished in each artist’s chosen media and style, keeping at the forefront, the utilization of the chosen element.

When the scheduled time was complete, both artists mailed their completed projects to the Counterpoints 2020 coordinator, who arranged for the exhibition. The resulting joint or paired projects illustrate the concept of “Counterpoints” and become statements about cooperation, creativity, collaboration, and melding of diverse ideas.

Studio Art and Art Education students in the Department of Art and Design scheduled to receive degrees in December will present their work in the Main Gallery, Outer Gallery, and Gallery 115. Exhibits will feature the best work from their college careers, along with projects developed in collaboration with faculty advisors.

Illustration, Interior Design, and Graphic Design students in the Department of Art and Design scheduled to receive degrees in December 2020 will present their work in the Main Gallery. Exhibits will feature the best work from their college careers, along with projects developed in collaboration with faculty advisors.

Artists like Runcie Tatnall are  sheltering at home, and despite the disruptions to their lives and limited access to materials and space, they still feel an urge to create. Tatnall’s painterly realism lends its wry, sensitive eye to all kinds of subjects. Before the pandemic, his subjects varied from a world-weary bulldog, to a shadowy boxer, to urban erosion and the seductive call of the sea. Tatnall has spent the last six months in his Florida home, quarantined with food, cleaning supplies, and his domestic possessions.

His paintings pull the viewers into a world evoking such painters as Hopper, the Ash Can school, and John Singer Sargent. They invite; they don’t discourage. Powerful composition and deft rendering allow viewers to drift in and out of the emotions and landscapes of the paintings, inviting viewers to create narratives for themselves.

Tatnall, perhaps best known for his portraits and boxing paintings, trained in painting and illustration at the University of Delaware, the Art Students League in New York City, and received his MFA in painting from the University of Miami. He has been exhibiting professionally since 1995 across the United States including New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Miami and Houston.

Tatnall was an assistant professor of art at Stephen F. Austin State university from 2010-2016, and currently lives in Miami, Florida.

Elinor Carucci – Sheltering in Place: A Photographer’s Diary of Life in Isolation

Elinor Carucci’s work has always focused on the everyday — the raw, joyful, exposed, and exposing business of humans who love each other sharing a space. And Carucci’s own domesticity has never been so intense nor so constrained. Carucci is sheltering in place in her 950-square-foot Manhattan apartment with her husband, Eran, and their teenage twins, Eden and Emmanuelle. With work, exercise, mealtime, and virtual socializing, the family tries to maintain some semblance of normalcy, but results are mixed. “I feel like I’m getting a little used to it,” says Carucci, who is Israeli. “But at the beginning, I had a lot of flashbacks to the Gulf War.”

The UCM Gallery of Art & Design is proud to present 22 of Carucci’s quarantine photographs in our Main Gallery. In addition to the exhibition, the gallery will present a virtual lecture and Q & A about the project with Elinor Carucci at 4 p.m. CST, on October 8, 2020.  Details can be found under the EVENTS tab at the top of this webpage.

My studio is a room that leads to a seemingly infinite number of other rooms. I enter these other rooms by stepping into portals made of canvas and wood, never knowing what kind of room I’ll find myself in and seldom meeting the people who live there. I take the liberty anyway of rummaging through their belongings, drinking their beer, and staring out their windows. The people who occupy the rooms I visit typically appear to be loners whose solitude enables their strange obsessions. They collect things, build things, and futz around as if what they’re doing really matters–apparently for an audience of no one but themselves. It’s easy to linger in these rooms far too long without realizing it. I’ve stepped into the portals on beautiful spring days and stepped back out to find the trees outside my studio window completely bare–whole seasons of my life down the drain. I know the rooms I visit aren’t real. But sometimes they’re so real, my life feels like the thing I dreamt up.

Joey Borovicka is a painter living in Springfield, Missouri. His work has shown in solo and group shows throughout the Midwest and appeared in the publication New American Paintings in 2010 and 2013.