Three Department of Art and Art History undergraduates took home Best of Area awards at the Nebraska National Juried Exhibition in September, while a recent graduate of Indiana University-Bloomington took home Best of Show honors.
Tom Colcord’s “Search for Delicious” (oil on canvas, 46” x 40”, 2013) won Best in Show. Colcord just graduated in May from Indiana University-Bloomington with his BFA in painting.
“It was really neat when they texted me to let me know that I won—best text ever!” Colcord said. “But it was also a little bittersweet because I was a little bummed that I couldn’t be there for the opening. I wish I could have seen the whole show, but I live eight hours away.”
Colcord’s piece involve his character, “Tom,” who is an evolutionary anomaly.
“I enjoy painting deep environments with lots of things in them. I like for there to always be new things to discover in a painting,” he said.
Rachel Hardin, a senior BFA student at UNL from Seward, Neb., received Best of Drawing for “Contact.”
“It was very gratifying to be recognized for the work that I am so passionate about,” Hardin said. “It has given me the confidence to continue to actively pursue a career in the field of art and to continue to push my drawings and concepts even further.”
Her drawings were inspired by the idea of bringing importance to the everyday, mundane tasks of life.
“What starts as a drawing of the figure eventually becomes layered and distorted to become a composition and tangle of body parts that becomes something less straightforward,” she said.
Elizabeth Katt, who is in the second year of her Bachelor of Fine Arts program at UNL, received Best of Sculpture honors for “Revealed.” The work is an audio installation in a hospital waiting room, where stories of human moments in her nursing career are told into the sterile space.
“I am very honored and thrilled to have my sculpture selected as a winner in the Nebraska National,” Katt said. “The installation is very personally meaningful and because it is not traditional sculpture, I was concerned how it would be received. To have it be understood and meaningful to others is rewarding in itself.”
Phoebe Little, a sophomore BFA student at UNL from Lincoln, received Best of Painting for her painting, “Patrick and Jay.”
“The award has motivated me to push myself even harder in the years ahead to excel in the art program and live up to this honor,” Little said. “This award also came at the perfect time. I left the morning after the opening of the exhibit for a four-month trip to Indian to work on a Fulbright project.”
Little is spending the semester in India working on a friend’s Fulbright project as part of her UCARE project.
Her painting is the first painting in a series of portraits of couples.
“I wanted to challenge the taboo that usually is connected with fetishes and sexual deviance,” Little said. “In this painting, I was trying to connect with the humanity in people that society would normally judge for the way they present themselves.”
The Nebraska National Exhibition is a juried exhibition, sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, that features the best undergraduate work from across the country. This year’s categories were painting, drawing and sculpture. This year’s jurors were JoAnne Carson of the University at Albany in painting and drawing, and Todd Slaughter of The Ohio State University in sculpture.