Find your program at the UW-Madison Art Department

Expand your perspective and connect with your classmates, your community, and the world around you!
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMGRADUATE PROGRAM

Find your program at the UW-Madison Art Department

Expand your perspective and connect with your classmates, your community, and the world around you!
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMGRADUATE PROGRAM

The University of Wisconsin-Madison occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, called Teejop (day-JOPE) since time immemorial. In an 1832 treaty, the Ho-Chunk were forced to cede this territory. Decades of ethnic cleansing followed when both the federal and state government repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought to forcibly remove the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin.

This history of colonization informs our shared future of collaboration and innovation. We respect the inherent sovereignty of the Ho-Chunk Nation, along with the eleven other First Nations of Wisconsin.

UW Art in the News

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Announcing the 2024 Arts + Literature Laboratory Prize winners Kate Davidson and Claire Tomkiw

For Immediate Release – March 18, 2024

The Arts + Literature Laboratory and UW–Madison Art Department are pleased to announce the 2024 Arts + Literature Laboratory Prize winners University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate Students Kate Davidson and Claire Tomkiw!

The annual ALL Prize exhibition is awarded to one or two graduating MFA candidates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, selected by curators on the ALL Visual Arts Team. The prizewinner’s MFA thesis exhibition is shown at ALL, and receive a $1,000 stipend to assist with exhibition expenses and installation provided by the Art Department.

A local Madison community-driven contemporary non-profit arts organization, the ALL provides the visual, literary, music and performing arts that presents over 200 events per year, mostly free or low-cost, and year-round arts education for all ages, working to make the arts more accessible and sustainable in our community.

My research at explores our relationship with place and our feelings of belonging, driftlessness, and dislocation. What does it really mean to know a place? Drawing on the construction of delicate architectural materials like wood, textiles, paper, and wire to create interactive and site-specific installation, I look at the ways we are affected by our built environment, how we create the idea of home, and what it means to be rooted. Through the construction and installation of floating wood and paper kites, lightweight, delicate, and capable of joyful flight, my ideas of place, architecture, and atmosphere rely on internal balance, tension, pressure, and constant re-adjustment while also being deeply dependent on their environments. Like us, they are in continual motion, kept both afloat and anchored by tenuous lines. Throughout the day as light drifts in through the windows, the shadows are activated and move through the space. Framing the pieces outside the window, the view out into the street of nearby buildings, construction, and sky acknowledge of the central role of architecture and environment in my work.

—Kate Davidson [MFA ’24]

Originally from New England, Kate moved first to the west coast and then the Midwest, graduating from the University of Chicago where she studied the impact of religion on political movements and immigration. Looking to move back to the east coast after several years working in Illinois, she found a job as a caretaker on a public land trust off the coast of Maine and unexpectedly fell in love with building things. She began working in historical restoration carpentry, eventually shifting to fine furniture, technical woodworking, and sculpture. She is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Stone Fruit is an exploration of the performative femininity intrinsic to my experience with chronic illness and it’s impact on my relationship with myself and others. Large-scale alternative process photographic prints of my own MRIs and self-portraiture are displayed alongside contact prints of vintage garments, lingerie, and flower petals; blood vessels, reproductive organs, and tissue become akin to the folds of fabric, pencil-lines of plant matter, and the boning of a corset.

Thematic elements of each image are staged in a papier-mâché tableau, referencing classic vanitas still life paintings. From the picked-clean pelvic bone, to a floral arrangement teeming with bugs, each paper sculpture is an uncanny facsimile of a real-life object. This is a false and flat, but appealing, reflection of the reality of inhabiting an inherently unreliable body. From afar, the illusion of normalcy is present.

Take a closer look, however, and there is something lurking under the surface, a poisonous pit hidden in the flesh.

—Claire Tomkiw [MFA ’24]

Claire Tomkiw is an interdisciplinary designer with a focus on combining analog photography processes, sculpture, and writing. Her work explores the limitations of the body, particularly through the lens of chronic illness, and pressures of womanhood through playful exploration of myriad mediums. She has exhibited in shows throughout the Midwest and East Coast and received a Shorty Award in 2021 for her design work. Claire obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Studio Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Davidson and Tomkiw’s 2024 MFA thesis exhibitions will be shown at ALL from March 19 to April 19, 2024, with a closing reception on Friday, April 11th from 6:30 to 8:30pm.

Spring 2024 Visiting Artist Colloquium

Come visit the University of Wisconsin-Madison Art Department!

Tours are now available by appointment, view our upcoming Art Department events for prospective students at Visit Bucky: apps.admissions.wisc.edu/visitbucky/

Carefully read the event information and COVID-19 Safety Protocols and Campus Visitor Agreement before your visit.

Arts at UW

Did you know?

The UW-Madison Art Department is:

  • #1 in Printmaking
  • Ranked among the top 15 Fine Arts MFA programs
  • Founded the 1st collegiate Glass program in the U.S.
  • 1 of only 5 universities in the nation with a Neon program

Ranking Source: U.S. News & World Report


The University of Wisconsin-Madison ART DEPARTMENT is committed to teaching art in the context of a major research university and a vibrant intellectual community. Offering the following degrees: B.S., B.F.A., M.A., & M.F.A. in Studio Art, B.S. in Art Education, Certificate in Art Studio, and Certificate in Graphic Design.

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