Teaching
The Morningside University News just got in on all the excitement - “Associate professor of art Shelby Prindaville uses skills towards historical process” was published on August 26th! The image on the right is a screenshot of the introduction, but check out the whole article in the link above or take a look at this PDF.
Though we began having faculty meetings and events last week, classes start this Wednesday here at Morningside University. I will be teaching ART 103 Design, ART 210 Graphic Design I, ART 405 Advanced Studies in Graphic Design, and ART 470 Graphic Design Internship this semester!
Morningside’s 2022 graduation was on May 14th, and it was a really nice ceremony filled with a lot of students-becoming-alumni I have taught over the past three years! I posed for several photos, but I haven’t received copies yet - however, here’s one from our ODK honors ceremony in April. This is of Steinkamp, our 2022 Marion Shapiro award winner!
I’m posing with Rachel in front of her entry into the Morningside Reynders’ Retirement Art Contest!
Speaking of wrapping up for the year, here are some of our graduating art department majors’ websites (a capstone course assignment), if you’d like to check any or all of them out:
https://www.calissahanson.com/
https://elizabethobermeier.com/
https://gracie-eli-design.squarespace.com/
https://lexwurth.wixsite.com/lex-wurth
https://8shayjohnson.wixsite.com/my-site
https://mk0025.wixsite.com/madeline-keating
This was a fun and full academic year, and it should be a bustling summer as well!
Here are some day-of photos from the April 2022 raku workshop I attended at Dakota Potters Supply in Sioux Falls along with Morningside ceramics instructor Paul Adamson and students Lauren Hedlund and Debora Allard. The photo of finished works are some of the student pieces - I’ll post separately about my own!
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal civil rights law which reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
All three of the higher education institutions I have taught at have complied with this law. Up until recently I had believed - mistakenly, it turns out - that any educational institution had to make a choice between adhering to Title IX and receiving federal funding, or opting out of both.
I have now learned that institutions can request religious exemptions to Title IX, receive those exemptions, and then are explicitly allowed to discriminate against their students and employees and still receive federal funding. Furthermore, the Office for Civil Rights has approved every religious exemption Title IX request filed. This includes hundreds of institutions; in late 2016 that number was at 245 and it continues to grow each year. Depending on their religious tenets, institutions can legally discriminate “on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, pregnancy or receipt of abortion while still receiving federal funds.”
Last March, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP) filed a class action lawsuit seeking to remedy this glaring civil rights loophole. As stated in the legal complaint, the institutional and legally sanctioned discrimination faced by these diverse populations includes “conversion therapy, expulsion, denial of housing and healthcare, sexual and physical abuse and harassment, as well as the less visible, but no less damaging, consequences of institutionalized shame, fear, anxiety and loneliness” on our taxpayer dime.
If you too find this religious exemption to Title IX to be deeply troubling, please consider donating to the REAP team (through their parent organization Soulforce, which received an 89/100 on Charity Navigator).
I was invited to take part in the ART 246 Intaglio and Collograph Printmaking course’s finals etching trade. The end of the semester is always a busy time, but I said yes; I haven’t done an etching in ten years and it’s always good to refresh and grow, plus it’s a nice interaction for all involved. Our talented instructor Stephanie VonderAhe provided me with an already beveled 3x4” copper plate with hard ground applied. The assignment was themed “the view from here.” As I was mulling over the theme and how it might fit into my artistic practice, I decided to do a portrait of Ashlar - I see her every day.
I drew the piece at home, and I just accepted any mistakes I made as I didn’t really have time to re-ground any spots. When I thought it was done, I put the plate into the acid bath for a 40min etch, took it out, and printed it. That first print was pretty good, but the drawing seemed a little flat and there were a number of areas where I wanted to add or deepen shadows and develop a sense of volume. Stephanie added a new layer of hard ground for me, and I went back into the plate a second time. We then put it in the ferric chloride again for 40 more minutes.
I printed an edition of 16, but several of those had print errors (are you supposed to count those? - I’m now thinking you’re not, but I did!). As intended, I gave away 7 to the class. I framed up one for myself, and gifted another to my parents and a third to my sister. I have just a few good prints left, but of course I do still have my plate…
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out! Of course, I see some areas I could improve upon were I to do another plate or had time to fix mistakes prior to etching, but overall it’s a nice representation of Ash.
Well, last week we wrapped up the Fall 2021 semester, and next up is Spring 2022! I will be teaching Graphic Design I, Painting I, Painting II, Graphic Design Internship, Advanced Studies in Drawing, Graphic Design, and Sculpture, and Senior Art Seminar.
As we were critiquing all the student animations turned in for my ART 210 Graphic Design I final, one piece prominently displayed the Photoshop twirl filter.
I commented to the class that when I see that filter, I recall how it was used by an infamous pedophile to hide his identity online, but international police managed to reverse it enough to allow for identification which then led to his capture.
My students were like, “huh,” and then we moved on with the critique.
The twirl filter applied to my most recent “baked potato” raku-fired bowl. Scroll down to see it unaltered.
I am extremely happy and honored to announce that I have earned tenure at Morningside University. I came in on a shortened tenure clock due to having already earned tenure and promotion at my previous institution, so this news comes in my third year here at Morningside University as Art Department Chair and Associate Professor of Art!
In that time - even in a pandemic - I have experienced the professionalism, academic excellence, support, and warmth of the Morningside community in an abundance of ways. I look forward to continuing my work and service as I join the ranks of the tenured Morningside faculty!
Morningside’s 15th annual Into the Streets event took place today; we had over 800 Morningside students, faculty, and staff volunteer with non-profit organizations across the region! I volunteered with Art Club students, and we brainstormed display changes and restored the Lila Mae's House Break the Silence exhibit, which raises awareness about sex trafficking.
I’ve always wanted to do raku firing ever since I first saw a piece of raku pottery and learned of the technique as a child - but it’s never been an opportunity I could take advantage of until now! A few months ago I attended a Saturday raku workshop at Dakota Potters Supply in Sioux Falls, SD, joined by my ceramics faculty member Paul Adamson and graduating senior Anna Uehling. Raku, first practiced in Japan, is a low-firing technique that makes use of wide temperature swings, reduction, and carbon trapping to create some really ornate artwork. Due to the low-fire nature of the process, the pieces are mostly decorative; they are neither watertight nor food-safe.
Here is a slideshow of the day’s adventures. This post will be followed by a series of posts exploring each of the three different glazing techniques I tried! There were five different techniques available, and I was most interested this first go-round in three of them.
Crackle glazes (either clear or white), with the goal that carbon gets trapped in the crackles
The “baked potato” technique, wherein you coat the bisqueware in ferric chloride, sprinkle it with sugar, salt, and/or horsehair, and then bundle it up in aluminum foil like a baked potato before firing it
Copper glazes
Ferric chloride spray
Horsehair and/or feather application
I’m going to preface and close this post with my strong support of getting vaccinated, both in general and specifically with the COVID-19 vaccine. I have received both doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine; the sooner we achieve local and global herd immunity, the sooner we can regain a more normal world.
The United States is beginning to approach a new stage in the COVID-19 vaccination process: we are running out of people excited to queue, and are now attempting to convince those who are passively or actively opposing getting a COVID-19 vaccine to join the vaccinated so that we can reach herd immunity.
I have several students who have told me that they have rejected the chance to get vaccinated against COVID-19. While I haven’t grilled them on their own individual rationales, I know that there may be more than just political beliefs at play. The medical community is not infallible, and those patients who are privileged and/or lucky enough to have always received stellar health care are very fortunate - but others unfortunately do not have the same experiences.
A lot of people including myself bring up the Tuskegee Syphilis Study when discussing this topic. It wasn’t that long ago; it lasted for 40 years and only ended in the 1970s (after a number of earlier attempts to shut it down were unsuccessful). That’s still within the lifespan of people around today. But here’s another example from right now in 2021: nonconsensual pelvic exams unrelated to medical need have been and are still regularly being performed in the United States on women under general anesthesia - with one of the explicit rationales being that if women were asked for their consent beforehand, they might not give it. The state I’m currently living in - Iowa - banned this practice in 2017. That’s only four years ago. Furthermore, most of my life has been spent living in states that allowed or still currently allow this practice. Some doctors and medical institutions continue to lobby for nonconsensual exams under general anesthesia to continue. These can also extend to involuntary rectal exams on both sexes as well as penile and prostate exams. This is, sadly, just another of many examples of systemic medical transgressions and disparities.
As mentioned in the opening of this post, I have recently been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, and I am grateful for that! I hope we can convince more folks to join us in this fight to attain herd immunity. But in order to do so, we need to acknowledge that some have legitimate concerns backed by personal or community experiences - and we also need to do better at tackling medical inequalities and oversteps. You can take action, too - through contacting your representatives and advocating for change, donating to organizations that are fighting these battles on the policy and legal fronts, and so on!
It was a good graduation! Here are a couple photos from the Morningside Flickr account of me processing and congratulating students.
Well, that was a strange and hard academic year we just finished, due to the pandemic, but I’m proud of our community for getting through it as best we could and being able to celebrate a range of accomplishments along the way.
Today is the graduation for our class of 2021! We had a wonderful string of senior thesis shows over the past month - the disciplines of graphic design, photography, animation, ceramics, drawing, and painting were all variously on display in the exhibitions of Courtney Klocke, Anna Uehling, Abby Koch, Kazune Oguro, and Carissa Powell. In fact, Kaz and Carissa’s two-person show will stay up through May 17th if you haven’t yet seen it and want to stop in!
I’ve always enjoyed attending annual state poet laureate presentations and have several books of poetry in my own collection. So when Morningside’s creative writing instructor Brendan Todt reached out to me to ask if I’d be willing to record a video of myself reading a poem aloud in support of National Poetry Month for a virtual 2021 Morningside Friday is Writing Day event shared online, I said sure!
Brendan suggested it might be nice if I chose an art-themed poem, which was an interesting challenge. I ended up selecting Three for the Mona Lisa by John Stone!
It’s pretty neat to see former students continue achieving in art! A former student of mine, Paul Stouffer, who took one-on-one lessons from me while I was in graduate school at LSU is a finalist in the 2020 Pabst Blue Ribbon Art Can Contest.
Well, we submitted final grades last week and we’re officially moving on to preparations for next semester! I will be teaching Painting I/II, Graphic Design I, Graphic Design Internship, and Senior Art Seminar for Spring 2021.
Recently, I was invited by my mentor and former professor Kelli Kelley to guest lecture via Zoom in Louisiana State University’s ART 4889 Advanced Drawing Workshop! It was fun to get a chance to catch up with Kelli and to virtually meet LSU art upperclassmen and graduate students.
I give propagations of plants out to students as gifts, and sometimes as prizes for answering art questions correctly (if more than one student is interested in adopting the plant). So far, students this semester have received Cyanotis kewensis, Zamioculcas zamiifolia, Tripogandra serrulata, Kalanchoe daigremontiana, and Kalanchoe beauverdii. Then this showed up in my inbox a few weeks ago:
If you’re wondering, I said yes.
I am teaching ART 103 Design and ART 210 Graphic Design I in addition to overseeing ART 401 Advanced Studies: Design this semester, and today is the first day of classes here at Morningside College! Given the pandemic, I’ve been working hard all summer at adapting Design and Graphic Design I to accommodate a hybrid and/or remote learning model if necessary. I have really enjoyed using the software VidGrid to record video lectures for asynchronous content delivery!
