MIU Art Department

✨ Join us for *THREE STRAND CORD* ✨
MA / MFA Show at the Wege Gallery
JUNE 1 – JUNE 21, 2026

Come experience the creative work of emerging artists in this inspiring new student exhibition featuring:

🎨 **MA in Studio Art**
NAYIAH MCPHAUL / JULES LARSON

🎨 **MFA**
COLE FISHBACK

Celebrate the artists and their work at the Artists’ Reception.
🗓 Friday, JUNE 12
⏰ 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
📍 Wege Gallery

We’d love to see you there. Come be part of the conversation and experience *THREE STRAND CORD* 💫

Liber Floridus closes Fri, May 8

We had such a great time hosting Andy Ness and Amanda Curreri a few weeks ago for their gallery talks! Here is an image from the event and—some good news—the show will be on view through May 8! Don't miss this beautiful show and the sensitive dialogue happening between these two artists' works.

SUE HETTMANSPERGER / LILLY MCELROY / STO LEN

through a narrow window

OCTOBER 31 - DECEMBER 19, 2025

Today is the last day to view this amazing show! Through a Narrow Window features the work of Sue Hettmansperger, Lilly McElroy, and sTo Len. Spanning painting, photography, video, and printmaking, the exhibition reveals three artists’ approaches to working through topics surrounding the environmental crisis, and a pervasive sense of tension in the face of climate change.

Don't miss it. The show closes today at 4pm.
@ Wege Gallery

🌊✨ This Saturday! Step into the world of artist sTo Len, where water becomes a printing press and trash becomes a storyteller.

📅 Dec. 6 | 10–11:30 AM CST
📍 ZOOM / Wege Gallery
🔗 Event page to Register for ZOOM link

Join us for a powerful artist talk tied to Through a Narrow Window. sTo Len will explore how art, ecology, and community collide in his practice— exploring his striking technique that transforms debris from waterways into bold monoprints, exposing environmental injustice that most people turn a blind eye to.

Whether you join us online or in person, you’ll leave seeing the world—and human impact—in a whole new way.

Come for the art. Stay for the conversation. Bring your questions. 💬

SUE HETTMANSPERGER / STO LEN / LILLY MCELROY

THROUGH A NARROW WINDOW

OCTOBER 31 - DECEMBER 19, 2025

Through a Narrow Window features the work of Sue Hettmansperger, Lilly McElroy, and sTo Len. Spanning painting, photography, video, and printmaking, the exhibition reveals three artists’ approaches to working through topics surrounding the environmental crisis, and a pervasive sense of tension in the face of climate change. Each of the artists takes a deeply personal approach to this immense and widespread issue and use their studio practices to metabolize the blows that can be felt within the scale of individual experience.

The artists in the exhibition ultimately seek to ask questions and find agency as contemporary humans. What does it mean to respond, what is a suitable response, how might I use my knowledge, craft, and experiences to suitably address such expansive and insurmountable destruction? For the viewer, the work offers methodologies for fine-tuning one’s awareness, remaining engaged, coping, and resistance. Emerging from a small fissure in the systemic climate issues before us, the exhibition also extends a ray of hope, in which the entire universe can be found.

Next up at the Wege Gallery!

Phillip Chen: Noumena and Other Spectralities
April 25 - May 30, 2025

Artist’s Reception: Friday, May 9, 6:30-8:30pm
Artist Lecture: Saturday, May 10, 10:00-11:30am

The Wege Gallery is proud to present Noumena and Other Spectralities | Phillip Chen: Prints and Paintings. Featuring varied art mediums and source materials from the artist’s collection, the exhibition unveils Chen’s enigmatic approach to image-making and his ongoing dialogue with the objects that untangle personal and familial histories and other states of affairs. 

Phillip Chen received his B.F.A. degree from University of Illinois at Chicago and M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His prints have been exhibited in numerous locations nationally and internationally and are held in public collections that include Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts. He has traveled extensively as a visiting artist and served as an evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts, College Art Association, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. His creative activities have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Iowa Arts Council, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Louis B. Comfort Tiffany Foundation. In addition to his nomination for the Queen Sonja Print Award, the world’s leading award for graphic art, in 2018, Phillip Chen was named a fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

More info at wegegallery.org

MA student Annika Terpstra in her studio. 📸 by Ken West

We’re currently accepting applications for our Low-Residency MFA and our on-campus MA programs! At MIU, we pair a rigorous contemporary studio curriculum with a focus on development of consciousness through Transcendental Meditation. As David Lynch said: “meditate and create!”

With both on-campus and low-residency options, we help students build the foundation for a sustainable long-term creative practice. Find out more about our MA and MFA programs at ART.MIU.EDU

MIU’s Low-Residency MFA in Visual Art is now accepting applications for Summer 2025 entry! Come join a wonderful and supportive community of artists from around the country!

Our Low-Residency MFA gives you the opportunity to pursue an in-depth graduate experience in art that is flexible and tailored to your individual needs, cultivating a community of support around your practice while developing friendships and connections to sustain your life in art. On campus studio-intensive residencies in the Summer and Winter ground you in a community that is sustained during remote semesters by weekly online seminar meetings, as well as regular remote and in-person studio visits with nationally-recognized faculty and mentors. The unique system of Consciousness-Based Education offered at MIU integrates your creative practice with the practice of Transcendental Meditation, establishing a balanced and sustainable foundation for nurturing a lifetime of studio practice.
For more info check out art.miu.edu or click on the link in our bio!

MIU Associate Professor Gyan Shrosbree will give a public talk on her work and studio practice this Friday 3/28 at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Details below!

GYAN SHROSBREE Visiting Artist in Painting & Drawing
Artist Lecture 4 PM March 28, 2025 E125 Visual Arts Building
Gyan Shrosbree received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has had recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Ola Studio, Pound Ridge, NY: nx.ix Gallery, Detroit, Ml; Haus Collective, San Antonio, TX; Grapefruits, Portland, OR; Grand View University. Des Moines. IA: Yellow Door Gallery, Des Moines, IA: Ripon College, Ripon, WI: Lovey Town Space, Madison. WI: and The Iowa Arts Council and State Historical Museum, Des Moines, IA. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; Cleve Camey Art Gallery, Glen Ellyn, IL; Ground Floor Gallery, Nashville, TN; The Woskob Family Gallery, State College, PA; NYSRP, Brooklyn, NY; and Artstart, Rhinelander, WI. Gyan has been an artist-in-residence at Mac0owell, Yaddo, The Vermont Studio Center, Two Coats of Paint. and The Maple Terrace. Recent publications featuring her work Include Egomania Magazine, The Coastal Post. Inertia Studio Visits, Precog Magazine, and Maake Magazine. Gyan is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Maharishi International University. She lives and works in Fairfield, Iowa.

Congratulations
Elee Torres!

Elee is an MFA alum, class of 2024 💪🏽💪🏽♥️

Repost from
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**NEW EXHIBITION**

Elee Torres, 𝘌𝘚𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘈𝘕𝘋𝘖 𝘘𝘜𝘌 𝘏𝘈𝘎𝘈 𝘉𝘜𝘌𝘕 𝘛𝘐𝘌𝘔𝘗𝘖... (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳...)

𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐞 𝐓𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐬 is an artist from México currently living in Fairfield, Iowa. Elee received an MFA from Maharishi International University (M.I.U.) in Fairfield in 2024 and received a BFA in Painting from M.I.U. in 2013.

In 2001 through 2003, after immigrating to the U.S., Elee received a yearly scholarship from the ArtReach Program at the Indianapolis Art Center in Indianapolis, Indiana.

In addition to his studio work Elee has collaborated with artists on dance and stage performances Including, Passion Dance Studio, Judy Bales: Words Collide 2012, Fairfield Art of Dance, FEIST Club Burlesque, Bubble Boys Burlesque.

“I move through my days making. I make clothes, food, furniture, jewelry, and I grow flowers to prepare for the changing of the seasons and for personally significant dates and holidays. Cycles of time are intimately woven through my labor.

Growing up in a large-small-town in rural México, this was how most things happened, they had to be made. In everything from day-to-day basic needs to the yearly and once in a lifetime events there was certain degree of labor: preparing, nurturing, maintaining, repairing, improving, and the act of performing the rituals. Now, making has become a weird luxury of time and resources, and not a practical living approach at all. [...]

I like to think about the human impulse to transform our living spaces even though it may very well detract from functionality. Subverting the ‘normal’ roles of objects and materials speaks to my playful nature and allows me to express my own identity. [...] Having immigrated to the USA in my early teens, and at current living in the American Midwest, thoughts of home, belonging and identity are ever present in my life.”