Well here it is July, and once again the latest crop of UW MFA students have exhibited their works at the Henry Gallery, and once again the show is down and the new artists have been cast off to make their way in the world, as the fairy tales say. Traditionally, this would have meant a wait of five years or so, until the gallery owners decided whether or not the fledgling artists had wings that could sustain the heights to which they aspired. For the past five years, however, dealers have been found waiting to snatch the chicks from their academic nests before the wax dried on their wings or the ink on their diplomas.

This has been particularly true for the ceramics program, where the award-winning teaching team of Akio Takamori, Jamie Walker and Doug Jeck has been turning out instant art stars--think Drew Daly and Tim Roda (2004), Eric Eley (2005), Susie Jungune Lee (2006)--snapped up in a flash by the likes of Greg Kucera and Scott Lawrimore. (That these artists produce spectacular work in everything but ceramics is anything but an accident of the program; more about that later.)

Perhaps it is too soon to say what will happen to this year’s grads, given the new economy. The most obvious impact already took place in the size of the graduating class itself--twelve students (not counting design), down from twenty-six the year before--and in the reorganization of the MFA program itself.

Fibers snipped and knotted its final graduate thread this year, following the path of printmaking, which was downgraded to undergraduate status only in 2007. Although suffering from low submissions for years, ironically and for what it is worth, they had just been ranked fifth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report’s 2009 ranking of graduate fiber arts programs, tying with Rhode Island School of Design, where fibers is a popular choice. (The UW School of Art as a whole is currently ranked at thirty-seven.)

In recent years, the UW fibers program had pursued a multi-disciplinary track. Nola Avienne, the star pick of the 2007 program, was one of the students who benefited from this approach. Her MFA exhibit of kinetic “drawings” of metal-filings skipping and accumulating in concentric circles--propelled by magnets attached to turntables on the underside of the drawing surface--resembled an extension of Duchamp’s Rototypes, but referenced neurologic function and memory tracking in connection to her own recovery from traumatic brain imagery. Avienne, (who, with a single flower nestled in her dark hair, looks like she just stepped off a 1940s movie set) has become a feature of the Seattle gallery scene and may be part of the reason for this year’s elevated ranking of the program. She has exhibited at Catherine Person and Soil Galleries, continuing to build on her MFA work, combining magnets and iron filings with wood or bicycle tires into static or kinetic sculptural forms, sometimes with surrealistic effect--magnetic eyelashes for revolving eyeballs!

Last month Greg Kucera included Avienne in “Individual Demographics,” an exhibit exploring aspects of identity. Avienne’s piece, Blood, was a grid of small individual panels painted with donated blood from 72 artists. (Avienne acquired a phlebotomist’s license for the purpose.) While sales of the individual panels guaranteed that the collector would “own” a genuine piece of the artist whose blood was used, the identity of that artist was unknown until after purchase. Avienne’s work was exhibited alongside that of Tim Roda, Tim Hawkinson, Deborah Oropallo, Dario Robleto, Chad States, Kara Walker, Roger Shimomura, Louise Bourgeois, and other relevant established and hot new artists from the local, national, and international art world.

Metals disappeared entirely this year, graduating its last two students in 2008. Very fine students they were, too: Susan Lechler Osborn expanded the traditionally jewelry-based nature of the program in a tree-like “dress” of twisted wire blooming with paper inserts cut from German history books, in reference to the elided history of World War II in German pedagogy as well as in the artist’s family; most impressively, Molly Epstein created an extremely sophisticated series of quasi-medical devices involving sensors, steel, and silicon, which combined bodily responses--breath, heart rates, the imprint of touch--with the fragrance of medicinal plants in Manifestation, in memory of a friend who died of asthma, if I remember correctly. Her work is reminiscent of Nyland Blake, with all the technological and physiological creepiness, but considerably less irony. Epstein has been granted an exhibit at Gallery4Culture in the upcoming September ‘09 through March ‘10 cycle.

Sculpture was also missing this year, melded into the ceramics program to become something called 3D4M, encompassing ceramics, sculpture, glass and public art. In this year ‘s MFA catalogue, ceramics--the main money draw for the School of Art for the last five years--is not listed as a graduate program, yet produced three MFA grads. 3D4M is listed as a graduate program, but produced none. The nature of transition.

At any rate, the post-reorganization MFA program (outside of design) now consists of 3D4M (including a new Dale Chihuly Endowed Chair of Glass: think money here, although Mark Zirpel is a brilliant hire), Painting and Drawing, and Photography. Although the blending of the 3D programs reflects not only the current financial crunch in academia, but also the growing irrelevance of strictly defined categories in contemporary art, the majority of students are still enrolled in the Painting and Drawing program. An alternative for contemporary-minded art students lies in the DXARTS program for digital arts and experimental media, which borrows faculty from Arts and Humanities as well as from Science and Engineering, but lies outside of the school of art per se. With requirements in math, science, and computing, DXARTS offers a BA and a Ph.D. but no masters degree.

Despite--or perhaps because of--the smaller program size, the work of this year’s MFA grads looked particularly good.

In photography, Laurel Schultz exhibited a series of gorgeous photographs of the Weyerhauser Company’s collections of bonsai trees. A coda to the series came in a photograph of a landslide, shot from a disorienting perspective, the very real roots of the devastated trees reading as threads in a miniature diorama. Schultz’s photographs are as crystalline and professional, as subtle and thematically complex, as any showing at the Gail Gibson Gallery, where I would not be surprised to see her work within the next two years.

Also graduating in photography, Erin Burns presented two videos and an audio soundtrack reflecting on the awkwardness involved in gaining competence, pairing children’s playthings (fat-tired bicycle, toy rowboat, antique toy piano) with a nostalgia for earlier time periods (think the sky-heavy grasslands of Wyeth’s Christina’s World). Marie-Claire Bozart abandoned photography altogether, exhibiting a series of fragile line drawings of wounded and dysfunctional furniture. These were quite lovely. Her full-sized cardboard sculptures were less convincing and perhaps exhibited too soon, looking rather like maquettes for early Louise Bourgeois.

Bo Choi, the final fibers grad, created a hilarious ensemble of costumes from recycled clothing: a multiple-armed dress shirt for multi-tasking; a self-mocking hooded suit for self-defense (curling up, limbless, like a grub); and a supremely sexy, little white “cocktail” dress with fur-lined pockets at breast and crotch, the latter descending into a long “tail” (the fetishistic “cock”), which also served as a furry brown boa. All are excellently modeled by a Butoh-trained dancer in Choi’s “fashion video.”

Painting looked strong this year, with work that showed a competence in color, a facility in the handling the spatial tension between surface and depth, and a freedom of brushwork and scale that I have not seen in a very long time.

Two years ago, Eric Elliott was the star pick out of the painting program. His MFA work, (studio still-lives developed in murky grays as if by an eyeless painter) greatly impressed a number of knowledgeable viewers--including gallery owners Catherine Person and James Harris, both of whom have since exhibited his work. His post-graduation work acquired a greater light and atmosphere, hints of color shining in clear compositions that belie the unifying primordial mud from which his objects creep. He currently teaches at the Gage Academy of Art, as well as at Highline Community College, and was awarded the Neddy Artist Fellowship by the Tacoma Art Museum. Elliott will be having a one-person show at the James Harris Gallery this September, where he has been added to the stable.

This year, Robert Gardner carried on in the monochromatic vein with a series of small elegant paintings of a single tin can striped gray and tan by reflected light. It took me four visits to the show to really see these little oils. Utterly unpretentious, they have the understated beauty of Anne Applebee’s work, while impressively maintaining their sensual matte surface without resorting to encaustic. One, Into Black, departed from canniness, depicting a trompe l’oeil image of masking tape “holding up” an image within the image, something vaguely seen but beyond discernment. The rigor of Gardner’s representational minimalism is reminiscent of Agnes Martin Vija Celmins: a spare Romanticism grounded by an insistence on the thingness of things.

Haley Farthing’s paintings also held to monochrome moderation, her delicately lush pastel-on-plywood drawings of driftwood suggesting the feathers and bones of decaying angels. Pegasus as detritus. The grain of the plywood adds depth to the transparency of the pastel, creating a counterpoint to her sensitively rendered natural forms.

Alice Case and Anne Petty both paint large scale paintings in full and luscious color. Case produces sumptuous abstracts of swooning chromatic harmonies that open to deeper space, bounded in the foreground and edges by a shallow proscenium. They are reminiscent of William Ivey’s abstracted studio paintings that frame the deeper space of a window while maintaining Modernist two-dimensionality. Petty’s figurative paintings also play the surface against atmospheric space with brush strokes almost facile in their apparent ease. Petty’s figures are paused mid-gesture in mundane tasks, flashing strokes of burning color. The monumental scale hints at deeper significance, but provides no clues: Eric Fischl sans Freud.

The star of the painting program, and perhaps of this year’s MFA program, however, was Hugo Shi. Shi graduated from the China National Academy of Fine Arts in 1984. He worked as an artist, illustrator, and editor in Beijing before immigrating to the United States ten years ago, and has taught and received numerous commissions since. Opting to return to the university for his MFA, Shi has now reached a level of painting that rivals any of his instructors.

Shi exhibited two pieces. One, a ten-foot high diptych of two pieces of dried fish, recalls Rembrandt’s flayed ox; its drizzled surface of stain and glaze is masterful, the crisp depiction of the cherry-red plastic ties that anchor the fish perfect Barthian puncta to rivet attention and provide focus to the layered surface. The other painting, an equally monumental four-panel oil of pickled fish innards and sea cucumbers in lidded glass jars, plays off the double perspective of Chinese propaganda painting, deploying a low, close-up, reverential viewpoint in conjunction with the straight view of distant mountains appropriate to a poster of Mao. The contents of the giant jars reference male and female genitalia, while the alternating warms and cools reflect the seasons. The  trompe l’oeil base on which the jars “stand” abets the quasi-religious tone: they read as reliquaries, or perhaps portraits of martyred saints.

Shi’s combination of Asian and European traditions, brings a tension, a kind of resistance, to his painting. As in the best of contemporary painting, he makes the medium relevant, putting a lie to claims of the obsolescence of traditional Western art practice.

A similar resistance and relevance is found in George Rodriquez’s large-scale ceramic mariachi band: nine seven-foot tall musicians, each with matching, elaborately “tooled leather” belts and boots, intricate buttons and hats. Rodriquez modeled his figures after Mexican folk art/ kitsch: low-fired clay figures turned out by entire families for the tourist industry. There’s a bit of Jeff Koons here in the literal elevation of “low art,” but rather than offering an ironic comment on an exhausted civilization, Rodriquez’s musicians radiate joy, waiting for the singer-viewer to take his or her place in the empty circle before the band. Rodriquez’s technical touches and details--the catalogue of glazing techniques, the adhesive tile patterning of the “floor” that echoes the tradition of Mexican cut-paper banners--make the installation itself sing.

Arun Sharma’s Seed is a life-cast of a nude male figure, linked by the penis to the umbilical cord of the new-born baby at his feet. Standing on a base of broken clay, the desiccated figure contrasts with the fresh clay of the infant. The piece owes much to Kiki Smith in its depiction of the abjectly mortal body. Its significance was augmented by Sharma’s second piece, a glowing Plexiglas coffin doubling as an ant farm. A non-observant Hindu, Sharma meditates on the obsolescence of individual life following procreation (from the viewpoint of nature); the interdependence of life and death; the meaning of labor in the face of mortality. The import of the tunneling of the ants in the double-glassed sides of the coffin--the maintenance of the society, the transportation of their dead--becomes more potent with the knowledge that there is no queen present, and no future for the colony.

Ben Waterman, the final ceramics grad this year, took an unusual course to graduate ceramics, coming from a BA in political theory with time off working on a farm and riding the rails. Waterman deals in accumulation as a way of marking and remembering history, and as a way of maintaining awareness. Reckoning of a Mile, his 2008 exhibition at Drop City Gallery, comprised 16,180 railroad spikes of hand-formed clay, referencing the (primarily Chinese) labor involved in laying the railroad, and garnered reviews in Ceramics Monthly and Ceramics Art and Perception.

Waterman’s MFA piece, A Thousand Readings, was the visual accounting of a personal meditation on the human potential for cruelty and ruthlessness, especially as reflected in the choice to devote one’s life to art.

Waterman began with three texts: a letter from a Japanese master ceramist, with whom he had studied, recounting the story of a poet who chose not to rescue an abandoned infant while traveling into the mountains to achieve higher consciousness; a poem in which a young boy continues to read War and Peace while witnessing an elderly man take a fatal fall; an excerpt from a short story in which an American soldier in Vietnam systematically dismantles a baby water buffalo after seeing his buddy blown apart while his companions, (and the writer) watch. The texts were read 1,000 times, first by the light of bits of wood burned in rough, square braziers of clay (scooped out by hand and fired in the course of the readings), and then by single lit matches. Waterman read only as long as he remained present to his own intentions.

The results of this exercise was turned into a display in which the match bundles (each from single round of readings) were wrapped in clay and stacked like tiny corpses between layers of cement, on thin pieces of plywood supported by cinderblocks and bricks. The clay braziers surrounded this makeshift altar, supported by bound stacks of history books. Small groups of burned matches also lay on open sections of the board, partially surrounding the tiny catacomb. Excerpts of the three texts were mounted on the wall.

Waterman’s piece is at once impressive and incomplete: while the project is sincere and intensely ambitious, it falters as a finished artwork. One wonders, for instance, about the formal choices made: why this board, why these books, why these dimensions for this shelf. If the primary ethical dilemma consists of the realization that the choice to be an artist is anything but value-free--that it involves sacrificing other more ethical, politically meaningful, or socially-useful life choices; that it involves abandoning the crying baby in the forest--then the next step must be to make the art produced worthy of that choice.

Bluntly:  If one bears the full ethical consciousness of choice, then the result of that choice has a duty not be half-baked. Not the academic fence-sitting of an ambivalent artistic Hamlet, not the wavering on the twenty-first floor ledge, but an existential commitment to what it is you have chosen to do, or what has chosen you. Not just to wash your bowl, as the Zen koan would have it, but to make it.

Interestingly, this is precisely the main focus of the graduate ceramics program, and is what has made it so enormously successful (earning a Brotman award for teaching and with a U.S. News & World Report ranking that hovers between third and fifth in the nation), and what has made its students so ready for flight upon graduation.

The strong focus of the program has been on studio practice, on the formal choices of material and display, with intense feedback on the result. Students are treated as peers. Competence in ceramics as a medium is taken for granted as a function of undergraduate education. The honing of the individual grad’s ideas and their expression in the most appropriate medium is primary.

Sometimes the encouragement to explore and question intent leads--as with Alicia Basinger (2008), who had already had a museum exhibit before entering grad school--in the end, to work in keeping with the student’s previous practice, albeit with more consciousness and assurance. At other times there is a change of scale and focus.

Kinu Watenabe is a fine example of this last. Coming from Japan with a small-scale design orientation, by the end of her first year she produced a full-sized pressed-earth boat for her final critique that knocked my socks off. (This was exhibited last year at the University House, though not to advantage.) She is now continuing with a series of room-like environments, begun for the 2008 MFA show, reflecting buried memory and family history. Watenabe has an upcoming exhibit at Gallery4Culture, as do Basinger and Evan Blackwell (whose 2008 MFA exhibit involved a complex construction from plastic drinking straws).

The ceramics grads this year were unusual in all producing work that actually involved clay. Oftentimes, the focus on producing solid, individual work has resulted in abandoning the medium altogether: Michael and Matthew Van Horn, both of whom graduated in 2007, went for other material for their sculpture, Simi into robotics (an interactive and semi-sapient mound of stew in the MFA show) and Van Horn into semi-surrealistic environments constructed crudely from lath (a giant monkey figure) or other found material (his grotty pink bunny suit and chicken-wire bathtub). While I have not heard from van Horn, Simi has been active in the Seattle gallery scene, whether as half of Fire Retard Ants (with Fred Muram, photography 2007, represented by Howard House and Lamontagne Gallery in Boston), or on his own. Simi has exhibited at Gallery4Culture, Helm Gallery in Tacoma, and at Lawrimore Project. He will be showing at Blackfish Gallery in Portland in August. Another instant launch.

In the past few years, reviews of the MFA show have sometimes questioned the value of a graduate degree in art. The question seemed to stem from the myth of the unteachability of art, of the artist-born-not-made, or at least from a distrust of the academy, of an intellectualized art that is thought not felt, or the over-influence of a teacher. Yet the value of a graduate program done right--of a focused encounter with master artists who provide mentorship and peer-critiques--can be invaluable.

The UW graduate ceramics program, now become something strange and new, has been remarkably successful in providing just this kind of experience, the importance of which can only increase, given the interdisciplinary direction of contemporary art. The BFA gives competence in an artistic medium; the kind of complex thinking and exploration of multiple media evidenced in the best of recent art requires more.

In their decision to transform ceramics into 3D4M, Walker, Takamori, and Jeck addressed the current interest of both students and faculty in interdisciplinary work, as well as the hard new economic realities: the paucity of funding available for College of Arts and Science programs with few faculty (especially for programs within the Division of Art), and the availability of funding for glass from local sources--as well as the aging of the current faculty.

While the new hires (the first in years for the School of Art) of Mark Zirpel (who moved from printmaking to an exciting conceptual approach to glass that moves between science and art), and Amie McNeel (a 1990 UC Berkeley grad, coming most recently from Cleveland Institute of Art, where she was chair of the sculpture program), seem like excellent answers to many of these problems, the danger lies in the melding of the highly effective ceramics program with the sculpture program.

The success of the UW ceramics program was grounded (in part) on a half-century tradition of freedom of thought and independence from the School of Art under Robert Sperry, Howard Kottler, and Patti Warashina. What hangs in the balance is whether or not 3D4M is able to maintain the independence and remarkable congeniality which has been the hallmark of the program, or if it will succumb to the internecine battles that too often afflict the School of Art as a whole. Perhaps the five-year watch is now on the UW School of Art MFA program itself.t;

Come the spring, I’ll be watching for the flight.