Visual and Performing Arts News

Sadashi Inuzuka’s transcendent ceramic art is celebrated for exploring the overlap between the natural world, science and society. Over the past 20 years, Inuzuka has exhibited his work to national and international audiences.

After having been deemed legally blind, Inuzuka was discouraged from pursuing a career in the arts, but he used his visual impairment as a motivation to reach out to other disabled individuals and to help develop their own artistic identities.

Inuzuka has been awarded a University of Michigan Thurnau Professorship, the highest award for undergraduate teaching. Inuzuka is considered a pioneer in the design and implementation of community engagement courses. He has created courses that enable students to see first-hand the role art can play in social change.

At Michigan Tech, he will help students move beyond their perceived creative limitations in an open, brown bag luncheon discussion. He will share images of his diverse artwork to help lead the discussion. The event is free, and all are welcome, Monday, March 17, from 12 to 1:30 p.m., Walker 202.

Inuzuka will also meet with Michigan Tech students in courses such as Creative Ceramics, Art Appreciation and Creative Drawing.

He will discuss his current artistic endeavors, especially “Whaletown” Project, at a lecture free and open to the public on Tuesday, March 18, from 7 to 8 p.m. on at the U. J. Noblet Forestry Building G002.

Support for the visit comes from the Department of Visual and Performing Arts and the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs.

Telling his story through clay

Chronicling his journey as an artist, renowned ceramist Sadashi Inuzuka took students and others at Michigan Technological University from the first time he touched clay as a student in Vancouver until now during an open discussion Monday.

“The first time I touched clay, something went through my body and I said, ‘this is it.'” Inuzuka said. “I didn’t know anything about art but I knew I wanted to make something.”

Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Meagan Stilp.

The Visual and Performing Arts Department at Michigan Technological University welcomes you to the 2014 Great Lakes Showcase, an annual juried exhibition of fine art and craft. A community mainstay for over 35 years, the Showcase celebrates the vibrant artists who work and visit the Upper Peninsula and surrounding region. Thank you for helping to celebrate creativity in our community and beyond.

To purchase artworks online, visit the site:

Great Lakes Showcase—A Fine Arts and Crafts Exhibition: Artworks for Sale

Thank you for supporting Great Lakes Showcase artists! Once you purchase an artwork, it must remain on view for the duration of the exhibition. In addition, it must be picked up on April 1 between 8am and 8pm. Staff will be on hand that day to help you retrieve the artwork and sign it out. If you have questions please contact Sarah Fayen Scarlett at sfscarle@mtu.edu or (906) 487-2067.

Finlandia University Gallery Exhibit
February 27 to March 19

Thursday, February 27, 2014

ARTIST TALK
1:00-2:30 p.m
Finlandia’s Jutila Center
3rd Floor Chapel

OPENING RECEPTION
7:00-8:30 p.m
Finlandia University Gallery
Finnish American Heritage Center

Tony Orrico will present work from his Penwald Drawings and CARBON Series.

Penwald Drawings are a series of bilateral drawings in which Orrico explores the use of his body as a tool of measurement to inscribe geometries through movement.  He uses a physical practice, symmetry practice (circa 2005), as point of entry into this work.  In his termed “state of readiness”, he is interested in the application of a present body to a surface, object, or course.  His gestures derive from the limitation of (or spontaneous navigation within) the sphere of his outstretched arms.  Line density becomes record of his mental and physical sustain as he commits his focus to a greater concept of balance throughout extended durations of drawing. Centralizing on themes of cyclic motion and the generation and regeneration of material, the work draws on the tension between what is fleeting and what is captured.  The master of each drawing is a conceptual score of which he only produces eight times on paper in his lifetime.

In the CARBON series, body, graphite, plane, time and space combine to become powerful reflections on life cycles, energetic flows and complementary opposites. His repetitious movements, often leading to exhaustion, become deep metaphors about life and death simultaneously.

Tony Orrico has performed/exhibited his work in the US, Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. His visual work is in collection at The National Academy of Sciences (Washington DC) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City) as well as prominent private collections. He has recently been presented at SCAD: deFINE ART, Cranbrook Art Museum, New Museum, and Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing.  In June he will perform Penwald: 2: 8 circles: 8 gestures at Center Pompidou-Metz.

As a former member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, Orrico has graced such stages as the Sydney Opera House, Teatro La Fenice, New York State Theater, and Théâtre du Palais-Royal. He was also one of a select group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at MoMA.

Orrico will be collaborating on research and an exhibition with Finlandia University Gallery and the International School of Art & Design, along with Michigan Technological University’s Visual and Performing Arts and Computer Science Departments.  Students and faculty from both campuses will be involved as Orrico works in The Mind Music Machine (tri-M) Lab, an interdisciplinary research group based in Cognitive and Learning Sciences and Computer Science at Michigan Tech.

From Finlandia Future Gallery Exhibits.