Promotion to Full Professor in 2025!

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I learned yesterday that I will become a senior faculty member at Morningside University beginning next fall, as I will be promoted to full professor!

In academia, there is a ranking system which is typically: instructor → assistant professor → associate professor → [full] professor.

I served as an instructor while teaching at Louisiana State University in graduate school in 2011-2013, became an assistant professor when I was hired full-time at the University of Saint Mary in 2013, was promoted to an associate professor in 2019 after earning tenure at USM but then moving to Morningside University, and have held the rank of associate professor since then while earning tenure at Mside in 2022.

It is an honor, and one that few academics reach before their mid-40’s, so I’m pleased to have earned it at the relatively youthful age of 38!

Generative AI Stealing From and Misunderstanding My Content

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In preparation for my Morningside University Humanities Speaker Series lecture Clay and Fire: Exploring Raku Ceramics, I was googling raku terminology to take screenshots that demonstrate that some of my artwork and research published within my blog posts are in the top internet search results for a number of raku finishing techniques. (Note: all below Google screenshots have a black background because I browse it using “dark mode” which is a bit easier on my eyes.)

In particular, my honey raku ceramics are the very first three image results and my website is also typically the first or second overall search result!

Screenshot of Google search image results for "honey raku", with my images as the first three results

As I was gathering screenshots of that, Google’s experimental generative AI decided to interrupt with its description of what honey raku is, and I was genuinely surprised when I first glanced at it - it was just a garbled reproduction of my own blog posts. Note that my blog is the first result under its “Learn more” right side panel.

The first Google generative AI stolen, erroneous description of “honey raku”

In comparison, below is a screenshot of the beginning of my blog post it’s pulling from:

A screenshot of a portion of my own honey raku blog post

You may have noticed these errors in the above generative AI description:

  • the image it stole (used uncredited) to illustrate the description is not of honey raku, it’s of ferric chloride and horsehair saggar-fired rakuware which is a different technique

  • the honey isn’t hot, the pottery is hot as it’s coming out from the 1000°C kiln

  • it works best on convex forms because the melting honey rolls off the convex forms but it settles in concavities and then you get large black pooling marks which aren’t as aesthetically pleasing

I downvoted this first generative AI description due to its errors, and then redid the search just to see what would happen. The generative AI “learned” from my downvoting, so it removed some of the misinformation, stole an image of mine to embed, and added new misinformation instead.

The second Google generative AI stolen, erroneous description, this time with stolen imagery as well

In this new description, it’s fixed the image reference and the convex vs. concave misunderstanding, but introduced new errors including:

  • for honey raku, you do not put the hot-out-of-the-kiln ceramic into a pit of combustible materials and then create a reduction atmosphere; that is, however, the process for some other raku techniques

  • it now doesn’t seem to know when/how the honey gets added, but it’s somewhere in the pit and that’s apparently enough

I shouldn’t be surprised; I’ve seen ChatGPT arguing that “strawberry” has only two R’s and generative AI advice to stare into the sun for 10-15min per day because it’s sincerely quoting from satirical newspapers. It’s a first for me, though, to see it explicitly quoting and erroneously paraphrasing me to spread misinformation.

Upcoming: Morningside University Humanities Speaker Series Lecture

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Coming up on Tuesday, February 18th at 7pm in Morningside University’s Weikert Auditorium (on the 2nd floor of the Buhler Rohlfs building), I will be presenting in the Morningside University Humanities Speaker Series with my Clay and Fire: Exploring Raku Ceramics lecture. This event is free and open to the public, so please stop by!

Shelby Prindaville's Morningside University Humanities Speaker Series raku ceramics lecture ad for February 2025

Behind the Scenes of Paper Snow (紙吹雪)

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Here are progress photos of Paper Snow (紙吹雪)! You can click on any of the thumbnails to see them larger in a sidescroll viewer. (Note that for in-process documentation, I rarely ensure a uniform lighting situation nor accurately color adjust the resulting photos like I do for the artwork photo.)

This painting was unusual for me in that I almost always start painting backgrounds before moving on to foregrounds and then going back and forth between the two until I think the piece is finished. With this painting however, I knew I didn’t want to obscure too much of the beautiful Uzurado dyed washi paper, so I started with the subject and then tested out just a cast shadow composition before adding a little ground and horizon.

New Artwork: Paper Snow (紙吹雪)

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During my first visit to Yamanashi City, I shared with several folks from city hall that I kept being stymied in my quest to see species-standard tanuki; as a consolation, they took me to Yamanashi City’s Manriki Park in the hopes of sharing their capybara with me. I was told it was up to fate as to whether I’d glimpse him or not, as sometimes he prefers to stay indoors (out of view). Fortunately for me, he was outdoors when we arrived and I was able to take some photos of him!

I painted this Manriki Park capybara atop Uzurado dyed washi paper from Ozu Washi. Uzura means quail in Japanese, and is a reference to the “paper snow” or confetti scraps and speckles decorating the paper like quail plumage.

This is Paper Snow (紙吹雪), acrylic on Uzurado dyed washi paper, 21.5x17”, 2025. Note my katakana stamp signature on the lower left below the capybara’s feet - that stamp was an extremely thoughtful gift from Yamanashi City to me!

An acrylic painting of Yamanashi City's capybara on Uzurado dyed washi paper by Shelby Prindaville

An acrylic painting of Yamanashi City's capybara on Uzurado dyed washi paper by Shelby Prindaville

A Second Residency with Arts Itoya!

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Due to my return to Japan in May 2025 for two solo shows in Yamanashi City’s Nezu Memorial Museum and Hirakata’s Kansai Gaidai University, I am happy to share that I will be completing a second artist residency in June 2025 with Arts Itoya in Takeo-onsen, Japan. I still have a lot of reference material and washi paper to make use of, and also plan to visit all three of the nearby well-known ceramic towns of Arita, Imari, and Karatsu. On my June 2024 residency I only carved out time to visit Arita once, and it was overwhelming; my artist travel friend Emily and I spent a full day there, walked until our feet were about ready to fall off, and we saw fewer than half of the studios and shops. I look forward to checking it out again and visiting Imari and Karatsu for the first time!

Spring 2025 Courses

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In Spring 2025 here at Morningside University, I will be teaching Graphic Design I, Painting I and II, Senior Art Seminar, Graphic Design Internship, Internship in Arts Administration, and Senior Project in Arts Administration. Enrollment in Senior Art Seminar has been steadily climbing, so keep your calendars open for all the exciting senior show receptions that will be happening in April and May!

Returning to Japan for Two Solo Shows in May 2025!

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As you may recall, I attended a month-long residency at Arts Itoya in Takeo-onsen, Japan in June 2024. Bookending my residency, I traveled to other locations in Japan including Sioux City’s sister city, Yamanashi City. I am now very excited to share that thanks to the support of the Yamanashi City Hall and the encouragement and backing of Morningside University board member Mia Sudo, I have been invited to return and have a solo show in Yamanashi City in May 2025 in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Yamanashi City incorporation at the Nezu Memorial Museum Exhibition Building. After that exhibition’s conclusion, the show and I will continue on to Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata (part of the Kyoto metro). Yamanashi City, Kansai Gaidai University, and Morningside University are all assisting to make these amazing opportunities possible.

I am extremely honored and grateful for the chance to exhibit with both of these institutions! 楽しみです！ベストを尽くす！

Upcoming: Food for People Invitational Group Exhibition at the USD Art Galleries

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I’ve been invited to exhibit an artwork in the upcoming group show Food for People at the University of South Dakota Art Galleries, which “seeks to build community through thoughtful discussion of food.”

The show will run March 4 - April 1, 2025 with a closing reception on Friday, March 28th from 5 - 7pm. The address is: University Art Galleries, 414 East Clark Street, Vermillion, SD 57069.

The End of the Fall 2024 Semester!

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Final grades have been submitted, I was applauded for my 5-year work anniversary milestone at Morningside University’s annual holiday banquet, and supply orders for the next semester have been placed! Over winter break, I will be working on a number of studio projects in ceramics and painting. I will share more about those as they unfold.

I look forward to 2025!

My Curated USD Student Art Show Debuts Tomorrow!

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Today I selected artwork for USD's Fall 2024 Student Art Exhibition and helped install the show, which will have its opening reception tomorrow (Thursday, December 12th) from 7-9pm at Cee Cee's Gallery in Vermillion, South Dakota. If you are planning on coming based on my previous post about this, note the updated time.

As long as the weather isn’t frightful, I plan to be in attendance at the reception as well - so I may see you there!

I'm Not Yet a Geoselenic Artist After All

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As you may or may not recall (it’s been several years now!), I took advantage of an opportunity in January 2021 to include a digital image of my painting Velocity on a shielded microSD card loaded onto the Peregrine lunar lander. I’m a space enthusiast who got a kick out of the idea that I’d have a digital artwork archive on the Moon as well as Earth, and other blog readers thought it was really cool as well; someone shared the news with the Sioux City Journal such that there ended up being local press coverage about it!

The Peregrine was initially supposed to go up in late 2021, but it was delayed for a variety of reasons including pandemic supply chain troubles. For a couple of years, the launch date just kept getting pushed back. Finally, at the beginning of this year, it was ready. On January 8th, 2024, the Peregrine was launched… but by January 18th, it had reentered Earth’s atmosphere, burned, and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. After months of investigation concluded, it turns out that a faulty valve was to blame.

As the “first contracted mission of NASA's commercial lunar payload program,” this was a rather sad conclusion which means that I am at present still just a terrestrial artist.

Copper Mesh Saggar Raku Pottery

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I was most excited about trying this technique out at this recent raku workshop, as I’d only learned of it recently and I couldn’t find many photos online of it! I purchased two different brands of copper mesh scouring pads and then unraveled the pads and wrapped the copper mesh “socks” around ferric-chloride-dipped ceramics. I then bundled it all up in aluminum foil and saggar fired them (also known as the “baked potato” method).

Some tips:

  • If the ferric chloride is still wet, it will melt the copper mesh, so ideally apply it after the ferric chloride has dried. However, that means you can’t also use sugar for additional carbonization as it gets knocked off. If you’re feeling risky, you can daub some more ferric chloride atop the piece and sprinkle with sugar but it’ll then eat away all the copper in those areas.

  • The tighter the mesh atop the ceramic, the clearer the results. Really hug the vessel tightly for the most overall effect.

  • The resulting finish when taken right out of the foil looks like a hot mess due to all the ash produced - but after you rinse the ceramics off, their true appearance is revealed!

I’ve since learned that you can just buy rolls of copper mesh (so you don’t have to go the cutting-and-unraveling-scouring-pads approach unless you already have some on hand); I may play around with that moving forward! I really like the results I got from this process. In different areas, the copper mesh carbonization marks look like fish scales (or maybe dragon scales!), chainmail, webbing, fishnet stockings, or unraveling yarn. When the mesh only is in discrete spots, its marks also contribute to a layered, graffiti-like aesthetic.

Here’s the most mesh-marked piece of the batch, a small oblong vase:

Next, a small orb:

A weird little vessel I’m calling an oddgon:

And finally a larger, sideways orb:

Honey Rakuware

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I first tried honey raku in October 2023; I didn’t really like my own results at the time, but I learned two main takeaways in the process:

  • you very much want thin strands of honey rather than thick, so that it pulls into beads rather than leaving thick streaks

  • the honey works best on convex rather than concave forms, due to its propensity to run off vs. pool inside

With those in mind, I decided to give the honey raku finish another try atop two orbs, and I brought some honey drizzler sticks and a glass along for better stream control rather than using my earlier, clumsier technique of dispensing the honey via the squeeze bottle. Rotating these while they were insanely hot was asking a lot, so I really appreciated that Wanda was up for the challenge as she did that for me while I applied the honey.

Here’s the smaller sphere:

And the larger sphere:

The resulting pieces’ exteriors were smokier than the interiors since barely any honey made it inside, and the white shining out from the insides was distracting. I carefully stained the interior of the larger orb with India ink, and then watered it down a bit before staining the interior of the smaller orb as well. I love how they turned out; the bead trails of the honey almost look like planetary maps, comet/asteroid tracking paths, or constellations… a little bit like audio visualizations.

I also decided to experiment with a blue copper glaze in combination with the honey raku on a small bowl, even though the concave interior would be a challenge. What you can’t see in the below images is twofold: first, the blue lip is complemented by a blue base line, only visible when you lift the bowl up or get really down low. Second, this piece unfortunately lost the thermal shock lottery and has a number of minute cracks which make it less structurally sound. However, since it’s a decorative, low-fired piece anyway (as opposed to being food-safe or water-tight), the cracks are a permanent asterisk - but they won’t stop me from displaying or using it!

Upcoming: Artist Talk at the University of South Dakota

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I’ve been invited to give an artist talk at the University of South Dakota (USD) in Vermillion, South Dakota on Monday, November 18th at 2pm in the Warren M. Lee Center for Fine Arts! This event is open to the public - if you’re interested in attending, here is the Facebook event page for it.

Both beforehand and afterwards, I will hold studio visits with individual students, and later in the semester will guest curate USD's Fall 2024 Student Art Exhibition, which will have its reception on Thursday, December 12th from 6-8pm at Cee Cee's Gallery in Vermillion, South Dakota.

I’m very excited to connect with the USD art students, faculty, and community in each of these ways! Many thanks to USD’s Associate Professor of Art Amber Hansen for these invitations.

Slip Resist Naked Raku - Take Two!

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I also tried a two-stage slip resist naked raku again; I dipped burnished bisqueware with waxed bottoms into slip, let it dry until it began to crack, and then dipped it in clear glaze before firing. I first tried one- and two-step slip resist naked raku out in April 2024, with mostly very low-contrast results. This time, I had higher contrast results, but also let some the slip dry too long before doing the clear glaze dip, as some of it actually touched the clay surface in a number of areas on the larger oval bowl and a couple on the smaller bowl (both below). Though it wasn’t intended, if it’s widespread like it is on the oval bowl, I actually am visually into the result (much like I am into crazing/crawling, which are also considered glaze defects).

Here’s the little dish, which has the highest contrast I’ve produced in slip resist naked raku:

And here’s the larger oval bowl:

Copper Glaze Rakuware

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Here are the pieces of pottery I made with copper glazes (mostly) at the October 2024 raku ceramic workshop!

First, we have a textured orb:

Next, a hexagonal textured tray:

A rectangular tray:

And finally, an experimental landscape vessel which uses the new-to-me “yellow crackle” glaze in combination with two other copper glazes:

Another Raku Workshop!

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My ceramics colleague Paul and I attended another Dakota Potters Supply raku ceramics workshop this past weekend! I was fortunate enough to receive partial funding from the Morningside Fall 2024 Faculty Conference Travel Fund, which allowed me to really experiment with new techniques.

We were hoping to bring three students along as well, but trimming disasters and a rescheduled athletic event took two out in advance and illness struck the third on the morning of the workshop. Fortunately, there were a bunch of other artists in attendance and Paul and I had brought quite a few pieces to finish, so we still had a lot of opportunities to learn and grow. I tried a new-to-me technique out, significantly improved in my honey raku technique, and picked up supplies to test out a method in our upcoming workshop in April that I saw another artist successfully using! I also demonstrated some techniques other artists in attendance hadn’t yet been exposed to, so there was a productive exchange of information all around.

Here are a few photos from the day itself, and once I’ve had time to photograph the pieces I made, I’ll do a series of posts on the artwork.

Arts Itoya Painting Progress Pics!

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I often get asked about my studio practice and processes, so I like to share some photos of how my artwork develops! Here are progress images from my Arts Itoya residency in Japan. Note that I do not take the time to precisely color adjust progress photos, and they are often taken in poor lighting conditions (late at night) and sometimes at angles. I also can forget to pause to take pictures when I’m in a rush!

First, here’s Duality:

Next, Pursuit (Ichi-go Ichi-e):

Then we have Lifelong Renter:

Shingling:

Messenger:

And finally, Fleeting:

Upcoming: Cultural Corner Art Guild & Gallery Exhibition

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I have ten ceramic pieces in the upcoming Cultural Corner Art Guild & Gallery’s Pottery, Glass & Jewels Exhibition in Chillicothe, Missouri! My good friend Susan Nelson will also have work on display, so you should really check this show out if you have the opportunity.

The show will run from October 5 - November 15, 2024 with a closing reception on Friday, November 15th from 5-7pm. Here is their website, and their address is 424 Locust St, Chillicothe, MO 64601.