My colleague Paul Adamson and I brought a large group of Morningside community members to another raku ceramics workshop at Dakota Potters Supply on April 26, 2025!
Here are some photos from the day, which will be followed by posts about my pieces (once I get them photographed and edited).
I’m so excited to share that my solo show in Yamanashi City’s Nezu Memorial Museum opened today!
The exhibition poster I designed for Living Bridges: Art, Ecology, and Sister City Connections.
As you may already know from previous posts, Yamanashi City is the Japanese sister city of Sioux City; I met their visiting delegation in honor of our 20th year of this sister city relationship at Morningside University in November 2023 and then visited Yamanashi City with Morningside University board member Mia Sudo in July 2024 after my Arts Itoya residency in Takeo-onsen, Japan.
Between then and now, many folks have come together to help celebrate all of these connections and the 20th year of Yamanashi City’s incorporation by having me present a solo art show in Nezu Memorial Museum! This has been a monumental undertaking that could not have been accomplished without the support of many people including Morningside University board member Mia Sudo, the Morningside University administration, Yamanashi City mayor Takagi, Ms. Yokoyama from the Yamanashi City Local Resource Development Division, numerous Yamanashi City Hall staff and Morningside University colleagues.
Living Bridges: Art, Ecology, and Sister City Connections will be on exhibit from April 26 - May 24, 2025, and I will be on site during its final exhibition week!
I’ve had my gargoyle gecko Ashlar for six years now as my only pet, though I also keep hundreds of houseplants as well.
An opae ula shrimp swimming next to a Malaysian trumpet snail in my new tank.
Recently I decided to branch out into keeping what are colloquially called “Hawaiian volcano shrimp” or “opae ula,” Halocaridina rubra. These shrimp are special because they are extremely adaptable, long-lived (lifespan is over twenty years!), and have a very small biological footprint which requires minimal care (no filtration, no water changes beyond topping up to combat evaporation, no heaters, no airstones, rarely providing supplemental food beyond what naturally develops in the tank). The one curveball to their care is that they live in brackish waters, and can handle a variety of salinities but prefer about 1.010. Brackish water is a bit limitation in terms of what other species of fauna and flora you can keep alongside them; most aquatic plants are either freshwater or saltwater and will “melt” in brackish conditions. There are just a couple forms of macro algae that keepers have identified that are safe. In terms of other fauna, the most recommended tankmates are Malaysian trumpet snails, sometimes called MTS for short: Melanoides tuberculata. These snails are typically a freshwater species but they can adapt to brackish conditions and are considered good tankmates for the shrimp as they are also detritivores, but they do more to turn over the substrate and clean the glass compared to the shrimp.
I made this three gallon jar aquarium using aragonite sand, coral I gathered from a Japanese beach, and basalt and lava rocks I gathered from Iceland. I added a Venus comb murex shell I purchased online, as I wanted some fine lines in the tank but have read that the commonly used “sea fan” gorgonian skeletons will break down over time and pollute the tank so I chose a safer route.
I then stocked the tank with a tiny brackish marimo (a form of macro algae) as well as a brackish Chaetomorpha macro algae, eight Malasian trumpet snails, and approximately thirteen opae ula shrimp. I say approximately because they were impossible to count with complete confidence - they came with the Chaetomorpha algae ball I bought from the same seller and were darting in and around it.
Here are some photos from the first couple days! This is the cleanest it will likely ever look, as it will begin to grow the biofilm and algae that will serve as the primary diet for the shrimp and snails.
As you may recall from this post, I was invited to participate in the show Food for People at the University of South Dakota Art Galleries. I attended the closing reception on Friday, March 28th, and it was fun to see all the other artwork on display as well as chat with some of the participants and viewers! Here are a couple of photos I took of the show statement as well as of my own installed artwork. In making these tile paintings, I intentionally have not grouted them into a fixed viewing situation, and I found it interesting how this show’s preparator chose to orient and install them!
My artwork has been juried into the Orange City Arts 2025 Regional Art Show Stewards of Creation, which will be on display April 5 - May 3, 2025. I have one painting and two ceramic vessels in this exhibition; my colleague Shannon Sargent and my student Eli Boyd Harris also each have an artwork in the show as well!
The exhibition is located in the NWC DeWitt Theatre Arts building at 721 Albany Ave SE, Orange City, IA 51041. Viewing hours are Mondays-Saturdays, 9am to 10pm. Cash prizes will be awarded to ‘Best in Show’ and ‘Honorable Mention’ at the closing reception on May 3, 2025!
It was recently Morningside’s spring break, and some friends and I visited Kansas City together! I previously lived in the KC metro for six years while working at USM, but I’d somehow never knew about the Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge, which is about 90min north of KC (in between Sioux City and KC). In planning this visit, I spotted it on the map. After looking into it, I decided it was my one firm desire for the trip (though my friends were extremely accommodating and we accomplished all of my desires!).
The Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge has a large wetlands area as well as the bluffs which host a number of short, moderate difficulty hiking trails. We first hiked the Munkres Homestead Trail and its overlook where we gazed out at the wetlands, and I particularly loved the latter part of that hike after it joins the Loess Bluff Trail and descending the steps - that end portion of meandering forest habitat trail was really enjoyable. We then did the auto tour, and we saw numerous trumpeter swans, a bald eagle, tens of thousands of snow geese, and a very large eagle of some sort as well as a swimming muskrat.
I really loved it, and highly recommend it to anyone in the vicinity. Now that I know about it, I plan to visit each time I’m en route to KC; it’s only a 9min detour away!
For the third year in a row, I’ve donated ceramic artwork to Women Aware’s annual banquet’s silent and live auction. This year is their 40th Annual Women of Excellence Awards Banquet, and it’s happening on Friday, March 28, 2025 at the Marriott Riverfront in South Sioux City, NE.
In addition to the chopstick rests, I’ve made a number of little ceramic sauce bowls to gift to folks in Japan as well! To complement my leaf chopstick rest designs, I went with flowers for these small dishes. I photographed a range of six, and then provided you with a single shot of one of my favorites:
And as I did with my chopstick rests, I’ve made a few small ceramic Sioux City dishes as well. I’ve included as a size comparison one of my Sioux City chopstick rests next to these little dishes:
Though my own vision is to use all of the above pieces of pottery as sauce bowls (for wasabi, yuzu koshō, etc.), they could serve as little trinket/ring dishes, too.
I’ve been producing a number of chopstick rests to give out as gifts this summer in Japan! The people are so nice and there’s such a gift-giving culture that I want to make sure I am able to reciprocate. I’ve mostly been making a variety of leaf chopstick rests:
However, I also am in the process of making a few Sioux City chopstick rests for those who are more connected to the sister city relationship between Yamanashi City and Sioux City or have strong bonds to Morningside University.
These are much more finicky to glaze, as keeping the text legible and the heart from “bleeding” into the white satin glaze requires a multi-step glazing process:
I glaze the heart with two to three coats of glossy red with a small brush
I apply wax resist to the heart and each of the letters with a very small brush
I brush on two to three coats of the white satin glaze
I painstakingly coax the glaze off the wax resist areas using a very small, wet brush
It’s tedious, but the results look great:
Shelby Prindaville's custom ceramic Sioux City, Iowa chopstick rest
Any of my chopstick rests can easily be converted into a magnet instead, if the recipients prefer to use them that way!
Concordia High School in Concordia, KS, one of my alma maters, has repeatedly invited me to connect with its students and share my love of art, nature, conservation, and higher education with them.
Radio host Loren Swenson reached out to me recently to once again highlight my journey and reflect on my time at CHS in another KNCK “Alumni Moment” segment which air during halftime at sports events; this one was played during a basketball game on Friday, February 7, 2025.
Below is a screenshot link to the recording on ncktoday.com on its general Talk Show page, but there’s no individual link so as more shows get added, it’ll be harder to find this specific show recording. I’ve therefore downloaded the audio file and then uploaded it at the bottom of this blog post so that this post will continue to make this recording easily accessible! As an FYI, the beginning of the recording suffers a little from compression/feedback issues, but it smooths out pretty quickly.
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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!
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！
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.
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!
