Events
This Saturday (October 18th), my colleague who teaches our ceramics coursework and I went to another raku ceramics workshop at Dakota Potters Supply! We were supposed to bring two alumnae, but they ended up ultimately unable to come. I’ll share the results after I photograph them, but here are a few photos from the day. I did a bit of obvara and the rest I ferric chloride dipped and then saggar fired. It was, as always, a fun event!
I had a painting, Incursion, juried into the competitive regional group show Local Perspectives at the Sioux City Art Center.
44 artists’ work was selected by curator Christopher Atkins from over 250 submissions by 100 artists.
Local Perspectives is up from October 2, 2025 - February 8, 2026. The opening reception is on Thursday, October 2nd from 5-7pm. The Sioux City Art Center is located at 225 Nebraska Street, Sioux City, Iowa 51101.
I’m excited to see everything that got in at the opening reception!
My exhibition and associated events with several elementary schools in Yamanashi City led to some press!
Japanese national Yomiuri SDGs Newspaper (special educational issue of The Yomiuri Shimbun) featured my Tekisen Elementary School collaboration (part of my Nezu Memorial Museum invitational solo show and visit) in an article in July 2025.
Kōhō Yamanashi (Yamanashi City Public Relations Brochure), a quarterly magazine, published “Shelby Prindaville Art Exhibition at Nezu Memorial Museum” in Issue: July 2025, Vol. 245 as part of Yamanashi City’s 20th Anniversary Commemorative Events.
Yamanashi City Cable TV broadcast segment on my Tekisen Elementary School visit and student exchange, May 2025.
To follow up on my previous post, the Morningside Art Sale opens today!
There is a wide variety of artwork on offer from faculty and students, including paintings, photos, prints, greeting cards, decorative and functional ceramics, sculptures, crochet, jewelry, and more! I noticed prices ranging from $1 to $160, so there's available art at a range of budgets.
Birthday, holiday, or just because gifts that are one-of-a-kind... don't miss out! Please bring cash or check. We can make limited change!
Sales hours will differ on some of the days due to student worker availability, so take a look below. It is open to the public, so feel free to spread the word!
Today (Thursday, August 28): 1-5pm
Tomorrow (Friday, August 29): 1:35-3pm
Tuesday, September 2: 1-5pm
Wednesday, September 3: 1-5pm
Thursday, September 4: 1-5pm
Friday, September 5 (FINAL SALES DAY): 1:35-3pm* (could be through 5pm if a student worker's paperwork is processed by then!)
Classes at Morningside University began earlier this week; I always enjoy meeting new students and look forward to catching up with returning ones!
This fall, I am teaching ART 103 Design, ART 210 Graphic Design I, ART 402 Advanced Studies in Art History, and ART 470 Graphic Design Internship.
As Morningside’s galleries director, I scheduled an art sale to open up our fall season in Eppley Art Gallery! I will be selling prints and ceramics, and I look forward to seeing what else other members of our community offer. It will open on Thursday, August 28th and run through Friday, September 5th on weekdays.
Sales times are a bit up in the air as it depends on when I can hire students for shifts, but should be some subset of 1-5pm. Please stop by if you’re interested, and note that we only take cash or check.
Once again interrupting my Japanese posts to remind you that the invitational You Want a Piece of Me? exhibition which I previously posted about here ends on August 17, 2025, so due to the gallery’s open hours you have two more dates left in which to stop by! I’ll get more into that below, but first, let’s do a deep dive into what I did.
This show asked artists to create art using a jigsaw puzzle, or puzzle pieces, as part of the art - and to leave at least some portion of original puzzle visible. You may recall that last year we did a similar challenge using board games, and here is what I did for that Advance to Gogh show in 2024!
For You Want a Piece of Me?, I needed to recycle puzzles - but I don’t own any, so I stopped by a thrift store and perused their offerings. I ended up buying three puzzles, mostly based on the differing scale of the pieces. I hadn’t decided what to do yet, but I figured owning these puzzles was a good first step. They were, in order of scale: L.O.L.Surprise! Floor Puzzle [large pieces], Milton Bradley lambs puzzle [medium pieces, 1 original piece held in an octopus tentacle], Milton Bradley Big Ben waterfall puzzle [small pieces, 1 original piece held in an octopus tentacle].
I pondered what I wanted to do with them for some time, as I wanted to make something that was still my own but that also satisfied the challenge parameters. I eventually decided I’d make a sort of topography out of the puzzles. This required actually building them, which for the 1000 piece puzzle took far longer than I wanted it to; I ended up building the other two easily but only assembling a few sections of the Milton Bradley Big Ben waterfall puzzle until I had enough connected material to satisfy my needs.
Then I built up a patchwork foundation, purposefully rejecting any edge pieces as I wanted the sculpture to communicate growth potential along its full border. After I glued it together and somewhat leveled its base, I then sculpted an octopus atop it. I formed the octopus out of QCC, clutching a mid-sized puzzle piece in one of its tentacles and a small piece in another. I also added some sand ridges. After curing, I painted the whole sculpture! Here are some progress pictures:
And here’s the finished piece! This is Construct, acrylic, QuickCure Clay, glue, and puzzle pieces, 16x25.67x3.25", 2025.
If you want to see Construct and the other Gallery 103 You Want a Piece of Me? entries in person, you can stop by either tomorrow (Saturday, August 9th) or next Saturday, August 16th between 10am and 1pm. Gallery 103 is located on the ground floor of the Ho-Chunk Centre located at 600 4th St, Sioux City, IA 51101.
My June 2025 show card design for Ikigai, Continuing.
The Arts Itoya residency show and reception was scheduled earlier in June 2025 than it was in June 2024 and I arrived five days late due to my show at Kansai Gaidai, so I only had three works finished for my Arts Itoya show (as well as a work in progress!). I titled my show Ikigai, Continuing 「生き甲斐・再び」, to connect it to my June 2024 Arts Itoya show Ikigai 「生き甲斐」. To the right you can see the show card face which I designed!
The reception was a great time; it was four hours long and quite a few people stopped in to check it out. I had invited a very well-known artist from Takeo, Takeru Niizato, to stop by (and also asked if I could set up a visit to his atelier after our show came down); he was very kind and took the time to attend our reception and scheduled our visit for later that week.
Below are some photos from my show reception!
I’m also excited to share that I’ll have a solo show Terra Traces at Coyote Gallery in Vermillion, South Dakota, from July 17 - August 31, 2025. The reception will be on Saturday, July 19th from 3-5pm. I hope there’s good turnout!
The Vermillion Cultural Association operates the First Dakota Coyote Gallery (colloquially called Coyote Gallery) which is located at 12 E. Main Street, Vermillion, SD 57069. Below is the show poster designed by Vermillion Cultural Association Executive Director Shannon Cole!
I’m interrupting my Japanese posts (which will continue!) to share that the Summer 2025 ArtWalk is on Thursday, July 10, 2025, starting at 5:30pm at the Sioux City Art Center in Sioux City, IA. Visitors can walk from there to Gallery 103, 3Rivers Art Gallery, ArtSUX, and Vangarde Arts. At each venue, visitors will see artworks that follow the theme: You Want a Piece of Me? Over 30 local artists (including me!) have created art using a jigsaw puzzle, or puzzle pieces, as part of the art.
The Sioux City Journal published a cover article titled "Putting It Together" about the event and exhibition on Monday, June 30th with some flattering descriptions and a sneak peek detail of my submission which will be at Gallery 103. To respect the SCJ paywall, I'll just include an image of the part of the article that's about me! (You can click on it to expand the image if you’d like.)
Every location will offer a chance to see our art community's creativity, and snacks and beverages, too. If you want, you will also be able to use your phone and a posted QR code to vote for your favorite artwork! The First Place winner of the People's Choice Award will receive a fine-art wood-crafted jigsaw puzzle from Liberty Puzzles in Boulder Colorado. The Second Place winner will receive a $100 gift certificate to a class at the SCAC.
After the reception is over, I’ll share my piece in its entirety for those of you who can’t make it to the ArtWalk!
Mia and I set out for Kansai Gaidai quite early, and arrived around 10am. We immediately greeted the Center for International Education’s staff and headed over to the International Communication Center to install the show. We strategized about the movable wall placement and then began to place and hang all of the artwork. Here are some images of the results, as well as the advertisements and KGU show panel:
While at Kansai Gaidai, I stayed in guest housing. I led a toast at the Asian Studies Program Completion Ceremony for the graduating class of students, and also attended a staff dinner. My hosts were very kind and welcoming! I had some free time on my hands as well, so I went into Kyoto to see Iwatayama Monkey Park in Arashiyama, checked out the Kyoto Handicraft Center and the Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design, visited Zohiko Lacquer Shop, and attended the non-verbal play Gear. I also did a pretty far-away day trip to the town of Shigaraki, which is famous as one of the six ancient kilns of Japan and also the birthplace of the infamous tanuki statues you can find everywhere in Japan.
Once the exhibition ended, KGU staff once again kindly helped me and together we repackaged it into the shipping crate! After I said farewell, I headed down to Takeo-onsen for my second artist residency at Arts Itoya!
Morningside University board member Mia Sudo came to pick me up at my hotel in Tokyo on the morning of May 19th, and we traveled together to Yamanashi City where we met with Mayor Takagi and a number of other officials. I gifted the city with an 14x11” print of Paper Snow (紙吹雪) in a 16x20” mat, and also gave Mayor Takagi and other attendees a variety of gifts including my handmade small dishes and chopstick rests.
The mayor and city gifted me with a 20th anniversary of incorporation celebratory chopstick rest, postcards, a tenegui which has a capybara cartoon on it amongst other illustrations, and a beautiful tapestry made out of a portion of a kimono decorated with flying plovers (an iconographically significant bird in Japan).
They also took me along with some other honored guests who spoke English well and could serve as additional company for me out to lunch, and then in the afternoon I got to visit a second-grade classroom’s art lesson and a fifth-grade’s English lesson.
The next day, Toizumi-san, our driver, and honored guest Mizuochi-san picked me up and took me on a wonderful tour observing Mt. Fuji and Oshino Hakkai, stopping for a wonderful soba lunch - it was my favorite soba I’ve eaten in Japan, and I’ve eaten it a fair amount! We even drove up to the fifth station, where hikers commence their climb of Mt. Fuji! However, the path is closed until July, as it is too cold at the top of the volcano until late summer.
We also stopped by Fuefukigawa Fruit Park, visited the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, and also popped into an ice cream shop and visited an art supply and framing store.
The sheer amount of time that a number of Yamanashi City staff including Toshimi Toizumi-san, Chiemi Yokoyama-san, volunteer Maki Mizuochi-san, and many others put into showing me their home and surrounding areas was incredible. I even visited an onsen with Toizumi-san one evening!
On Saturday, May 24th, the closing reception, artist talk, and ceremony was held at Nezu Memorial Museum. Many people showed up, and one lovely woman told me about how she read quite a bit of my blog and was inspired by my research into Japanese culture, arts, and ikigai. She said she even read a short book on ikigai, thanks to me!
I am so thankful and honored by the generous hospitality that Yamanashi City showed me, and we all chose to say “see you again” rather than “goodbye” when the show closed!
Last year in advance of my residency, I attended washi paper-making and kintsugi workshops in Tokyo before heading down to Yakushima, an island known for its natural wonders. There are always more things one could do than time to do them in, so I prioritized immersion in nature to gather reference imagery and experiences, but one of the opportunities I was sad to miss out on in Yakushima was the chance to make my own set of wooden chopsticks.
Since I was lucky enough to get to come back to Japan this summer, I looked into whether there were any chopstick workshops in or around Tokyo. The most frequent recommendation was to visit a town called Kawagoe, which by a combination of train, bus, and walking was about an hour and a half away from where I was staying. There, Wood Works Kawagoe (Karaki Woodworking) offers a workshop in making chopsticks.
When you arrive at the shop, you either can begin right away if there are available seats or you get a digital ticket reservation. When I showed up, all the seats were full but I was the first in line. One of the workers told me it would likely be around 45min wait, so I walked around the touristic “old town” streets of Kawagoe for a little bit, but 15 minutes later my seat was already open!
You first choose from a suite of wood blanks, selecting for either appearance, hardness, or both. I was instantly most attracted to the high contrast bocote of the selection options, which also happened to be one of the harder woods (and one of the most expensive). The shop presented the hardness of the wood as a potential upside and downside simultaneously, in that hardwood is good long-term for durability but is more difficult to shape, as it requires more strength to plane and sand. Bocote is a decorative wood not native to Japan (imported from Central America), but there are a lot of traditional woods for chopsticks that are imported including ebony, rosewood, and purpleheart.
I particularly liked one of the bocote wood blanks that had eyes in it, so I asked if they had any more pieces than what were on display so I could find a matching pair, and the staff kindly opened a deep drawer full of more blanks. I found two pieces that had a lot of contrast and some eyes.
A photo of me shaving down the first of my wood blanks.
Then I began the process of making my chopsticks. The blanks are printed with numbers on them, and you place one into a former in a specific sequence and shave down the wood with a plane until it becomes flush with the mold. You then rotate and put into the correct space in the sequence and do it again and again until you’ve done all four sides. Then you repeat the process with the second chopstick. I have to say that the hardness of the bocote was no problem at all at any stage, so I wouldn’t let the shop’s talk of needing sufficient strength impact your wood selection choice.
Sanding the chopsticks with coarse sandpaper.
Once you have finished planing, you refine the shape with a coarse sandpaper. Once you are happy with the shape of your chopsticks, you then polish them with a fine sandpaper. On this step, I polished until I thought they were likely good, and then asked a staff member to check. They said they could use more polishing, so I went back at it. I then asked again and received the same answer (which I was happy about - I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be aiming for or what was possible to achieve with the provided sandpaper, so I appreciated the feedback!). After polishing a third time, I got the OK to move onto the final step: oiling. I dipped each chopstick into linseed oil and rubbed it into the wood. This helps seal the surface while also highlighting the woodgrain.
When completed, you package the chopsticks and you’re done! I liked mine so much I thought maybe I should buy some sets of bocote chopsticks as souvenirs for others (the workshop also sells their own finished chopsticks), but when I went to look at their three bocote sets available for purchase, they were not nearly as beautiful as mine (and they were more expensive than mine as well, to cover the labor!). I ended up leaving with just my set. The workshop in total, including the type of wood blanks I selected, cost me about $35.
My finished, handmade set of bocote chopsticks!
I flew into Tokyo a few days earlier than my exhibition-related trip down to Yamanashi City, as I really feel jet lag so I wanted some time to try to burn a bit of it off first. I arrived on May 14th in the early evening. The next day, I stopped by my favorite paper store Ozu Washi to pick up a few items that I might want for my main event that afternoon: a traditional indigo-dyeing workshop at Hanten’s Mizuno Dye Factory at OKUROJI.
The workshop is of course intended for dyeing clothing, so I brought a few white cotton pieces along; however, I also wanted to dye some washi paper! Some of the washi I brought ended up not being suitable, but two pieces in particular were viable. I ended up dyeing those two along with a lightweight long-sleeved shirt and a blazer. The cost in total of the workshop was up there, but I thought it was worthwhile. I paid approximately $275 (and separately bought the items to dye as well) and spent over two hours preparing and dyeing my pieces.
I learned a bunch of tie-dye techniques in the process!
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).
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!
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.
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
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！
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’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.
