Professor Wendy Weiss will be honored at a reception recognizing her retirement from the university, from 4-6 p.m. on Thursday, May 22 at the Sheldon Art Museum on UNL’s city campus. The Department of Textiles, Merchandising & Fashion Design and the College of Education and Human Sciences invite you join them in recognizing Professor Weiss’s career and accomplishments over the last twenty-eight years. RSVP to rsamuelson1@unl.edu by May 15.
Colleagues, family members, friends and associates are invited to contribute to a book of homage and reminiscence that will be presented to Wendy Weiss at the May 22 reception. Letters of appreciation and congratulations, photographs and greetings should be sent to the office of the Department of Textiles, Merchandising & Fashion Design, 234 HECO East Campus 68583-0802, to arrive no later than May 19, to be assured of inclusion. Please send to the attention of Rosanne Samuelson.
Weiss joined the faculty of what was then the Department of Textiles, Clothing and Design in August 1986 after completing her Master of Fine Arts degree in textile and fiber arts at the University of Kansas/Lawrence. Over the course of her academic career Weiss has exhibited her textiles widely in both solo and group exhibitions. International exhibition venues have included Marmara University in Istanbul, the La Rochelle (FR) Convention Center, the Daegu Culture and Arts Center (Korea), the Bildungszentrum Raiffeisenhof in Graz (Austria), the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (Japan), and the Henan Museum (China) and One Moon Gallery in Beijing.
In North America she has shown her work at the Museum of Nebraska Art, the Arts Incubator in Kansas City, The Design Gallery at the U of Wisconsin–Madison, the San Francisco Museum of Craft & Design, and the Rogers Gallery of the University of Missouri–Columbia, and many other exhibition spaces.
Weiss became director of the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery in 1996 and has managed all programming and coordination associated with gallery exhibitions since that time. The Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery, devoted solely to the exhibition of textiles and related art and design forms including apparel, is the only gallery serving this singular mission in the Plains region. “Wendy has devoted enormous time and energy to build the Hillestad Gallery into the valuable departmental, university and community resource that it is today,” said department Chair and Professor Michael James. “She has also worked tirelessly to support the efforts of the Friends of the Gallery, who over the years have provided important financial underwriting to support the gallery’s mission.”
Significant Hillestad Gallery exhibitions curated by Weiss include Lia Cook In Touch: Faces and Mazes (2009), Cynthia Schira: Drawing on Tradition (2004), Ana Lisa Hedstrom: Lexicon of Stripes (2004) and Jane Sauer: Impassioned Form (2001), all of which were accompanied by catalogue publications for which Weiss contributed analytical essays and editorial oversight.
In addition to her Hillestad Gallery efforts, Weiss curated several shows at other venues both local and regional, including Different Voices: New Art from Poland, a touring exhibition of contemporary Polish textile art by 20 living makers, which opened at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in fall of 1998, to launch a five-city US tour. With Associate Professor Diane Vigna, Weiss co-organized the Textile Society of America annual national conference here in Lincoln in October 2010. The conference included nearly a dozen exhibition venues throughout the city, including the Hillestad Gallery.
Weiss has been involved in numerous community-focused initiatives and projects, and regularly incorporated into her classes pro bono outreach activities in the community for her textile design students. These included the completion of an exterior mural for the Matt Talbot Kitchen in Lincoln in 2000. Weiss has also worked with native communities and collaborated with Dr. Gloria Gonzalez-Kruger on a Woods Charitable Trust-funded project entitled Creating a Personal Vision: Adornment and Dance, also in 2000.
Wendy Weiss is an affiliate faculty member in Women & Gender Studies, and has served the College of Education and Human Sciences and the University in numerous capacities, including as a member of the Academic Planning Committee (2003 to 2005), the Academic Senate (1993 – 1996) and the University Judicial Board (1991-1993).
Weiss received a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Scholar Fellowship to conduct research in Baroda, India, in 2009, and was recently awarded a second Fulbright that will allow her to return to India in Fall 2014 to continue project activity focused on disappearing ikat dyeing and weaving practices that she pursued there in 2009. Other honors have included Nebraska Arts Council Artist Fellowships in 2001 and in 1995.