A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Amy Vogel

Associate Professor

Contact

Bio

Amy Vogel (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices (CP). She joined what was then called the First Year Program in 2008. Amy played a key role evolving the First Year Program into the Department of Contemporary Practices, and was Co-Chair of the Department between 2008–2012. Amy served as Interim Director from 2015–2017 and 2018–2019, and Director from 2019–2020. She received her MFA from California College of Arts, Oakland, CA in 1995, and her BFA and Art Education Certification from The University of Colorado, Boulder, 1990.

As an artist, Vogel has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Prats Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid, Spain; Larissa Goldston (NY), Paul Kotula (Detroit), Edward Mitterrand (Geneva), and Air de Paris (Paris). In 2014 she had a survey of 15 years' work, entitled Amy Vogel: A Paraperspective, at the Cleve Carney Gallery at the College of DuPage. She has participated in group shows at Western Exhibitions (Chicago), White Columns (NY), The Suburban (Oak Park), FRAC Haute-Normandie (Sotteville-lès-Roue), Francesca Pia (Zürich), and other venues. Vogel has collaborated with artist and Professor Joseph Grigely on many projects, including shows at the Orange County Museum of Art; the MCA, Chicago; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; the Berlin Biennial; the Yokohama Triennial; Mathildenhöfe, Darmstadt; the French Academy in Rome, and other international venues. She has had reviews in national and international periodicals, including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and Artforum.

Personal Statement

Working across drawing, painting, and sculpture, Vogel investigates our fragile and shifting relationship with the physical world. Her pencil drawings depict natural and constructed landscapes inhabited by figures who seem absorbed in their own worlds, occupying their surroundings yet rarely engaging with them. Whether waiting, escaping, or simply resting, these figures evoke a quiet ambiguity. Her drawings are at once detailed and dissolving, as erasure and mark-making interrupt and reshape the image. Her sculptures combine everyday objects with taxidermized animals, particularly seagulls, which sit on items such as fabricated rocks, toys, planters or an overturned chair, with brightly colored paint decorating or destroying both. With the sculptures it is our bodies that inhabit a world that is both mundane and askew.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1227

Credits

3

Description

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1249

Credits

3

Description

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1243

Credits

3

Description

Developmental psychologists who study child behavior have a term that refers to the companions who inhabit the play world of children, they are called ¿Imaginary Companions.¿ These companions, or friends, are entirely real to a child. Sometimes, as children get older these imaginary friends develop into entire imaginary worlds, what psychiatrists call ¿paracosms¿. The Brontë sisters had a paracosm complete with its own language.

Many artists create their own worlds as a way of reimagining or coping with this one. Henry Darger and Adolf Wölfli; both struggled with mental illness and participating in the real world and spent their lives creating their own imagined worlds, complete with invented histories, nations, flags, and, in the case of Wölfli, his own language and musical scores. Contemporary artists like Trenton Doyle Hancock have also created fully developed paracosms as a way of exploring identity, storytelling, and alternative realities.

Along with developing your own Imaginary World we will question what role imagined worlds have played in the past and can play in our current world where reality is constantly blurred with AI, social media, reality tv and deep fakes. Imaginary Worlds are often developed as ways to process, communicate and provide hope in a times of crises and oppression. What roles can imaginary worlds play in our world today?

This class is open to all but recommended for students who already have, or begun (even if only in their mind!) an existing Imaginary World.

Class Number

1203

Credits

3

Description

Siena is a hill town in Tuscany that was first settled by the Etruscans in 900 ¿ 400 BC. It reached its peak as a political, economic and artistic center in the Medieval period from 1150 ¿ 1350 AD. During those years it prospered, enjoying a ¿golden¿ era as an independent republic with a representative government, where enlightened trade and economic philosophies fostered modern banking practices and distinctive styles of painting, sculpture, and architecture developed in the service of aesthetic pleasure and civic pride. Today, Siena's historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the city's art, medieval architecture, museums, archives, university and cuisine are internationally renowned.
Living the Past in the Present will use the archival and cultural resources there to give young artists greater insight into how historical interests and study can serve as a catalyst for their own growth and work as contemporary artists and thinkers. We will be interacting with artists, historians, archivists, art and architecture conservators, scientists and ordinary Sienese to understand how the experience of growing up, living, working and creating in a place with hundreds of years of vibrant historical and cultural traditions affects contemporary identity and expression.
Our time on the study trip will primarily be used for visiting and learning about sites, collections, and the people who study and live amongst them. We will also be gathering reference information to document what we are looking at and learning about: sketches, drawings, lists, diagrams, photographs, research notes, and reflective writing. There will be two assignments (one studio, one academic) that we will work on in Siena.

Class Number

1030

Credits

0

Description

Class Number

1034

Credits

3 - 6