Following an illustrious career, Professor Emerita Laurie Beth Clark is putting on a massive exhibition to showcase the work and lives of her former graduate students.
Forty-one years of a professor’s teaching career. Three galleries. More than 100 life stories of her former students told through their art.
“How We Got It Together,” a massive show of alumni artworks, will run from October 12-18 on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. The works have arrived from 17 states and seven countries; they range from paintings and ceramics to glass and textiles. And they all have one thing in common: They illustrate the impact of an art education at UW–Madison.
“This has been a joyful process,” says Laurie Beth Clark, the exhibition’s curator, who worked with all of the artists during their graduate studies at UW–Madison, in some cases decades ago. More recently, she contacted each of them out of the blue with an invitation to be part of “How We Got It Together.”
In response, “So many of them have said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for doing this,’” she says.
Clark, who joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1986, retired from her professorship in May and was granted emerita status last month. Clark’s career has been dedicated to both teaching and building community through art, including through decades of interdisciplinary collaboration on campus. She’s also known internationally for Spatula&Barcode, the collaborative social practice art duo she created with UW art professor Michael Peterson, who also retired this spring.
Yet getting this latest exhibition off the ground required some detective work. To track down all her former MFA students and other graduate students on whose committees she had served — and who had earned degrees from 1986 to 2026 — Clark scoured the internet for email addresses, websites and other clues. She then sent out more than 200 letters and received almost as many responses.
What she got back from many was not only a desire to participate, but a flood of memories of their formative days at UW–Madison.
“As a young and naive artist, my time at UW was foundational in growing my artistic vocabulary,” wrote Andrew Roberts-Gray, who now lives in Colorado and has a 6’ x 8’ painting in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum. “Mostly I studied printmaking, which is still part of my practice today. Additionally, I worked part-time at the Elvehjem Museum, now the Chazen Museum of Art, beginning my museum career.”