Ad Astra host Baker Purdon sits down with KU Visual Art Professors Tanya Hartman and Michael Krueger to discuss their open galleries and their lives as artist/teachers…
Tanya Hartman grew up in New York City, where she attended The Brearley School. She was educated at The Rhode Island School of Design, where she obtained a BFA in Painting in 1987. She received an MFA in Painting from Yale University in 1994 and then was a Fulbright Scholar in Stockholm, Sweden. She is now an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at KU teaching painting and drawing. Her current show, titled So That I Might Carry You With Me, at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, comprises eight portrait paintings of people living in the Kansas City area who have come to the Midwest from around the world as refugees from genocide, political upheaval, and societal breakdown. The sitters are painted in a realistic, but painterly manner, presented in front-facing, half-length poses, casually dressed, reminiscent of identity card photographs. You can see two of these portraits below.
Michael Kreuger is a father, artist, and teacher who spent most of his childhood years in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He earned a BFA from the University of South Dakota in 1990 and graduated with an MFA from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department teaching Intaglio, Relief, Drawing, and Digital Printmaking. His current exhibition, See Be, is featured at the Haw Contemporary gallery and is his first ever exhibition of paintings. The subject of the exhibition is rooted in landscape, and notions of wilderness and observation. The titel, in part, refers to the act of seeing as becoming; meditative observation as a means to learn, understand and become. There is also a nod to the notion of “live and let live,” to allow nature and wilderness to be, as the grateful observer.
