Art and Art History

The talented and imaginative Chalara Sutton, ’21, would be the first to tell you that being an artist is about much more than, well, being talented and creative. With the support of an Albion College FURSCA grant, Sutton spent this past summer focused on her art series, “Distinctively Black,” and discovered that a lot of the work didn’t involve paints or a brush.

“Unless we can provide a context for indigenous objects, we might as well not have them,” says professor of art and art history Bille Wickre, referring to a collection of pre-Columbian art recently given to Albion College. Researching that context—which Wickre calls “a gift to the world”—was an ideal summer project for Rebecca Wagener, ’21 (left).

“I wanted to talk about women and the attention on their bodies. I started with a satirical take—in one of my first pieces, I used my body as the figure and I held balloons in front of myself to represent breast augmentation,” says Payge Rumler, ’20, of her summer FURSCA project. “This connected on a personal level of having always felt sexualized and yet never sexy enough, but it also worked on a statistical level.”

Soe Yu Nwe, a Myanmar-born ceramic artist who received her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design after receiving her bachelor’s from Albion College, is featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 – Art & Style 2019. Since graduating from Albion just five years ago, her works already have been displayed in several U.S. cities as well as in China, the Philippines, Taiwan and Australia.

It has been a long, sometimes frustrating, but always enlightening journey for the Zuni Pueblo of New Mexico and Albion College, but an important cultural artifact, and a symbol of the Zuni tradition, is back home where it belongs.

A handful of students from Albion College, as well as from Alma College and Calvin College, are on the cutting edge of education through a new pilot program that partners with tech giant Google, furniture maker Steelcase and the Michigan Colleges Alliance.

Students learn a lot of interesting things while doing research, and Athena Balcoff, ’18, is no exception. “I found out you can order dead bees online,” she says. “I’m not really sure what other people use them for, but I wanted to use them for my art.”

Michael Dixon, associate professor and chair of art and art history, has drawn from personal experience to create the kind of art he wants, and needs, to create. His recent residency at the prestigious Yaddo retreat in upstate New York allowed him to explore his work in an even deeper way.