Alumni Spotlight
Katherine Crowley
BFA, 1999, Graphic Design
Katherine Crowley is an artist and graphic designer living and working in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. In the summer of 2007 Ms. Crowley was invited to participate in a portfolio review by the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C. The festival planners hoped to streamline the use of graphics for upcoming festivals and solicited portfolios from artists and designers in an international competition. Three artists were selected to go forward and create proposals for a design that would represent the 2008 festival of trees. Katherine Crowley was selected as one of the three finalists.
The criteria were broad and comprehensive. The chosen design needed to function in a variety of media ranging from billboard signage to web applications. The design was to encompass the myriad aspects of the festival including parades, cultural events and performances while grounding the graphics in the historic city. Drawing from the knowledge gained in Dr. Robert Wicks and Dr. Ann Wicks Asian Art History courses at Miami University, Ms. Crowley designed her proposed work to emulate the appearance of a Japanese woodblock print and fit the format of a Japanese screen. The design is modual and can be broken into squares and rectangles to fit different media. Each section of the design represents the history of the reltionship between the United States and Japan; the arts; sports; and festivities that take place during the festival. Each section of the design contains an image of one of Washington's famous monuments. An flowering cherry tree branch ties together the overall design.
Though Ms. Crowley's work was not selected as the final design she was honored to be chosen as a finalist. Katherine Crowley works as a graphic designer with a small architecture firm in the Short North Arts District of Columbus. As a fine artist she creates works of art in oil colors and bronze sculpture that focus on legacy, symbolism and personal memory. She has completed several commissions and has exhibited work throughout the country. In 2004 she married her college sweetheart, Matthew Anderle, a graduate of the Miami School of Architecture. The couple resides in Columbus.
To see more of Ms. Crowley's work, visit http://www.katherinecrowley.com/
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Lorene Anderson
BFA, 1988, Painting/Metalsmithing
Lorene Anderson lives and works in Oakland, California. Anderson received her B.F.A. from Miami University and her M.F.A. from UC Berkeley, where she received the Eisner Award for painting. She has been exhibiting her work internationally and throughout the Bay Area, including the Oakland Art Gallery, Tangent Contemporary Art Gallery, and Gen Art's Emerge exhibition in San Francisco. Her work was recently included in an exhibition in Japan, April 2006. The paintings explore the manipulation of two-dimensional space; math, cosmology, physics and their relationship to biology. Chance, gravity and physics control the shape, direction, and distribution of paint. Anderson is interested in self-automating systems and reinforces this exploration by mimicking that concept in the paint application. She lets paint travel across wet areas creating a webbed effect, or lets different mediums merge and separate/feather into one another or totally repel each other. http://www.LoreneAnderson.com
Azimuth, mica, polymer & acrylic on canvas, 90 x 71"
Altitude and azimuth describe the location of an object in the sky as viewed from a particular location at a particular time. I also play with the idea of supersymmetry—at first glance paintings in this series appear to be symmetrical when in fact, there are many differences.