For the 2024 University of Wisconsin-Madison Homecoming week we’re celebrating selected alumni with special features on our Instagram account. Read about all the art alumni features collected here.

Installation view of Instant Trance exhibition by Julie Insun Youn, MFA 2011.Julie Insun Youn — MFA 2011
This summer from July 31st to August 11th, alumna Julie Insun Youn hosted a solo exhibition Instant Trance at the Platform-L Contemporary Art Center in Seoul, Korea, with the support of the Arts Council Korea. Instant Trance invites us on a spiritual and humanistic journey in its most digital form. As loops and playback that appropriate and remix retro and new cultures, the synesthetic audiovisual experience fills the exhibition space, providing a meditative experience where the boundaries between self and the world disappear and become one. It is that moment when the senses of everyday life and self are suddenly interrupted, presenting a threshold to a state of selflessness (無我). Geometric and abstract digital graphics overlapped and scattered, forming a unique shuffle motion, while ambient and random noise intersect to create a circular situation where beginnings and endings merge. This psychedelic world of images and sounds that repeat, rearrange, and overwrite becomes a queue waiting for the sudden, flash-like moment of trance.

A traditional painter for over a decade, since 2015 Youn has shifted to “post-painting” and multidisciplinary digital experiments. In an era where everything is reduced to and consumed by digital imagery, Youn paradoxically seeks to reveal a distinct “beauty.” Concealing a nostalgia for the analog, her work aims to visualize the “light of consciousness” that dwells in the “here and now.”

Her artwork is currently on display in the exhibition BOTH at the PS Center in Seoul, Korea, through November 1st and she recently engaged in an in-depth dialogue article of questions regarding her work with Fakewhale.

Iskigamizigan (Sugarbush), 2023, mold blown glass, maple syrup, dirt, metal antique tap, communion cups by Abby Sunde, BFA 2024Abby Sunde — BFA 2024
Congratulations to recent alumna Abby Sunde, recipient of the Center for Craft 2024 Windgate-Lamar Fellowship. Each year a panel of craft experts identifies ten graduating students for their exceptional artistic talent and potential to leave a lasting impact in the craft world.

Growing up in the deep woods of Wisconsin on 1837 Ojibwe-ceded territory, the woods were always a source of solace, imagination, and curiosity to Sunde. As an adult, her attunement to nature has grown and she employs glassworking and drawing to find where natural processes and phenomena can merge within a craft practice. Using kiln-casting and hot shop processes to explore her ideas, she’s often drawn to mold-making and the mimicry that molds permit. The materiality of glass—its liveness, and its ability to embed meaning in ways that preserve narrative—inspires and animates her practice. Similarly, Sunde’s interest in drawing is rooted in the connection and character of natural materials and the ways they can be invited into a collaborative space. With these materials in mind, she investigates the ideas of community and individual sovereignty through the lens of plant/land/food systems and their current state within a post-colonial society.

A direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and also of Scandinavian/European-American descent, Sunde is a Midwest-based multi-disciplinary artist who primarily works in 2D media and sculptural glass. Sunde has been selected for group exhibitions including Wisconsin, Minnesota, Florida, and Massachusetts. Her work has also been a part of Northern Lights.mn’s Northern Spark art festival in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the First International Festival of Manuports at Kohta in Helsinki, Finland.

Collaboration with a Bird V, #10, Sterling silver, wood altered by a bird, 7" x3" x 1' (pendant), 2017 by Teresa Faris, MFA 1998Teresa Faris — MFA 1998
Alumna Teresa Faris’s artwork is currently being shown at the Museum of Arts and Design as part of the OUT of the Jewelry Box exhibition. Featuring work acquired by The Porter Price Collection dating from the 1950s to the present, the OUT exhibition celebrates the importance of queer perspectives in the world of studio and contemporary art jewelry. Faris’s pendant, Collaboration with a Bird V, #10, was made through a creative partnership between herself and her rescued Umbrella Cockatoo, Charmin, which speaks to the anxiety of displacement while demonstrating the soothing effects of meditative practices like artmaking and wood carving. Faris first crossed paths with Charmin in 1993 while she was an undergrad and for nearly two decades now the duo has collaborated to create over 100 jewelry pieces. Charmin carves wood with her beak and, upon finishing, offers the pieces to Faris, which is then incorporated into her jewelry designs.

Faris’s work is also on display at the Patina Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as part of the Wearing RED: Ignite the Fire exhibition curated by @charonkransen. This traveling exhibition highlights the 225 unparalleled works of art from over 50 international artists all in the rich and dramatic color red.

This year Faris received the 2024 Outstanding Research Award at UW-Whitewater, given annually in recognition of a single faculty member making significant advances to knowledge, technique, or creative expression in their professional discipline, where she is Professor of Art and Design.

Cultivar, Acrylic on jute mounted on canvas, 42 x 38-in, 2024 by Guzzo Pinc, MFA 2020Guzzo Pinc — MFA 2020
This past September to October, alum Guzzo Pinc hosted his first solo exhibition in New York City, titled Skins, at PLANT 486. Mixing bold colors with graphic elements and representational figures, Pinc creates dynamic abstract compositions that toe the line between abstraction and figuration. By manipulating the surface through sanding painted areas to create translucent effects that invite further study, large swaths of flat, colorful shapes provide an exciting movement and tension, resulting in a visually striking body of work.

Pinc’s current series of paintings is a meditation on the themes of permeability and individuation of the skin that forms the threshold that separates our insides from our outsides. As permeable objects, our boundaries are unclear—we breathe in wind, absorb sun, digest other animals and plants, and it becomes part of us… just as we lose water, shed skin, and leave waste. What ‘we’ are is in constant flux. Through a focus on the human body, Pinc explores how one thing becomes another, how identity fluctuates in time. In Wisconsin, life is dominated by the expansive forests that connect everything and the water that saturates our landscape. Our consciousness is filled with lush growth, overpowering gardens, alien weeds, muddy fingernails, titanic humidity, midnight paddles, devouring mosquitoes. We live within the blue and green mysteries of the earth. As such, we understand the mysteries of the skin.

Pinc grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs and currently lives in a small town in Southeast Wisconsin with his beautiful wife Cynthia, a big garden, and a river which runs back behind their house.

Big Pimpin' necklace, 2014 by Tanya Crane, MFA 2015Tanya Crane — MFA 2015
A huge congratulations to alumna Tanya Crane and the recipient of the 2024 United States Artists Fellowship. USA Fellowships are annual unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career. Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of arts professionals. Applications are reviewed by discipline-specific panels who select the finalists, which are then approved by the Board of Trustees.

Crane is a Southern California native who, after years of geographic exploration, has found a home and community in Providence, Rhode Island where she currently practices her research and creative disciplines. In addition to her rigorous studio practice, Crane is a Professor of the Practice in Metals at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University where her interdisciplinary focus in jewelry, craft, sculpture, and performance is utilized to influence the next generation of artists, craftspeople, and thinkers. Crane’s jewelry and sculpture are framed within a dual existence of prejudice and privilege, having adapted to life amongst family in both the white suburbs of rural Los Angeles and the predominantly black suburbs of South Central, Los Angeles. Craft has manifested as a conduit between these two worlds that have provided her with the cultural infrastructure that is centering her current work. Crane’s jewelry amplifies and elucidates the strata of human existence; these include history, race, class, and culture. Coming from the perspective of an African-American woman, Crane uses community and inclusiveness as a magnetic beacon to diversify and expand ideas, understandings, and codifications.

Find out what our more of our alumni have been up to in the Fall 2024 Learning Connections Class Notes. So many notable achievements, we love to see it!