UA News

For the first time, UA studio art graduate students will have their studio spaces in one facility – the 25,000 square-foot Visual Arts Graduate Research Laboratory.

The work spaces available to University of Arizona studio art students have been an old warehouse about three miles off campus or a storefront-style space.

But for the first time in the history of the UA's School of Art, studio art graduate students will no longer be dispersed at various Midtown locations. Their studio spaces, which are necessary for them to conduct their academic and professional work, are now located in one building: the 25,000 square-foot Visual Arts Graduate Research Laboratory.

To celebrate the newly opened space, the school is hosting a showcase and its first major fundraising event this week.

The building, which was recently vacated by the UA James E. Rogers College of Law when the Law Commons was completed, features 50 studio spaces for artists.

"Before, everything was about the commute," said Dennis L. Jones, director of the school, which was founded in 1893.

"But there is nothing on the national level like this," Jones said, pointing to the many features in the building, such as the art gallery, seminar room, wood and metal fabrication shops and outdoor sculpture garden. "This is really leading the pack."

Jones, who has spent about 20 years working to bring all of the students together under one roof, said it has been a priority to bring the students together for the sake of emphasizing research and encouraging collaborative work – something that can be difficult to do at a distance.

"Especially in the arts," Jones said, "with its interdisciplinary nature, it's good to have sculptors talking to painters and printmakers talking to photographers." Art education graduates and visiting scholars also will use the laboratory.

"This is also about being able to continue to recruit really good graduates as well," he said.

To showcase its new space and the work of its students and affiliates, the school is putting on a two-day event called "Continuum" on Feb. 20 and Feb. 21 at the new laboratory space located at 1231 N. Fremont Ave.

The event will also seek to "reinforce" the connections between the school, its alumni and the Tucson art community, said Jamie Martin, the UA School of Art's program coordinator.

"The event is rather unique," Martin said.

The event will feature an art sale and fundraiser to benefit the school's Visiting Artist and Scholars Endowment and its Director's Fund for Excellence.

The UA school's collaborators include galleries such as the Etherton, Conrad Wilde, Davis-Dominguez and the Museum of Contemporary Art – all of which will have select works on display, Martin said.

The art event will also feature the paintings, photography, prints, sculptures, video installations and performance art pieces of more than 100 UA graduates, undergraduates, faculty, staff and alumni, as well as former faculty members. The event will also feature workshops and lectures.

Leading up to the day of "Continuum," Nathan Abel was working in his studio space where he had relocated from the warehouse space the UA formerly rented for the studio art students.

Abel, a third-year master's student in the UA school, said a major problem with the former space was that because it was an older warehouse, he and others had a difficult time protecting their work.

"I can't tell you the number of times we would sweep and try and keep it clean," Abel said.

He also said that, with the move, it is much easier to schedule time with faculty and to get one-on-one critique time.

"The new space is much better – it's brilliant," he said. "It's definitely helped me out," Abel said. "I can now combine my whole studio practice, instead of having different things going on in the printshop on campus. It's all become integrated."