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Mikael Owunna, a Pittsburgh native with Nigerian-Swedish heritage, creates work that focuses on the intersections of identity and nationality. His skills are also intersectional: he is an artist, a photographer, a Fulbright Scholar, and an engineer. Owunna graduated from Duke University in 2012, with dual degrees in Biomedical Engineering and History. Wasting no time out of college, he spent his Fulbright scholarship in Taiwan from 2012-13, teaching photography to aboriginal Taiwanese youth. In 2014, the students’ works won an exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum. From 2013 to 2017, he embarked on a major project called Limit(less), photographing and telling...

Last summer, I was lucky enough to be invited to English artist Antony Gormley’s studio in London. Gormley is a sculptor most well-known for his work creating pieces that represent the human body. His studio is a sprawling space in central London, just north of Kings Cross tube station, with indoor and outdoor spaces. The rooms are filled with sketches, photographs of sketches, and sculptures. When I was there, various assistants also filled the studio, helping Gormley create and plan one of the most important exhibitions in London. Visiting Gormley’s studio at any time would be a delight, but it...

After introducing you to our first two resident artists, Jagath Weerasinghe and Yong Soon Min, it is time to finish our artist spotlight series with the final member of the Baik Artist Residency, Tintin Wulia. Once again, the Baik Artist Residency is occuring in the Van Every/Smith Gallery through the month of October, with the exhibition on view from October 29th and December 11th. Please go into the studio space and see what each resident artist is creating for the project! Tintin Wulia was born in Bali, Indonesia, and is now based in Brisbane, Australia and Gothenburg, Sweden. After studying...

Jaume Plensa’s Waves III radiates outward in all directions in the form of brick paths. I find myself walking past it almost every day as the main campus sidewalks lead to, and diverge from, the sculpture. As a work of art, it is engaging and timelessly relevant. Letters from all different languages interconnect to form a single person. Waves III is an intricately complex yet holistically simple allusion to both diversity and unity. In this instance, letters do not compose meaning by creating words. Instead, they create a form, an exploration of humanity. Open-ended both figuratively and literally, the piece...