Studio Art

Therese Buchmiller

Assistant Professor of Studio Art California College of the Arts, MFA 2001 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA 1988 Contact Info: Office: 6 West Annex Phone: (320) 589-6229 E-mail: buchmilt@morris.umn.edu Courses Taught: ArtS 2401 & 2402 Beginning Sculpture  I & II ArtS 3400 & 3410 Advanced Sculpture I & II  ArtS 1500 CE Beginning Photography  ArtS 2500 Photography ArtS 3001 Media Studies –Collecting and Display in Art and Science ArtS 1070 First Year Drawing    ArtS 1101 & 1102 Basic Studio Drawing ArtS 1105 & 1106 Basic Studio Discussion Personal Website: www.morris.umn.edu/~buchmilt

Biography

Therese Buchmiller was born in Chicago, Illinois. She received a BFA degree with a concentration in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois and a MFA degree in sculpture from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2001. While residing in Minnesota between degrees, Therese worked as the Family Programs Manager at the Walker Art Center, and as the first artist-in-residence in the bookbinding studio at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (1991). While living in the Bay Area, Therese worked at the San Francisco Art Institute as their Community Programs Manager. She has been teaching classes in drawing, photography, and sculpture since 2002. Her installation and sculpture work often combines found or manipulated objects with drawn elements. She has exhibited her work both regionally and nationally. Her most recent exhibition, entitled Want of Wonder was at St. John’s University. Recently, Therese was one of only three faculty at UMM to be awarded the title of Service Learning Fellow. Other honors include a Community Leadership Award, Cadogan Fine Arts Fellowship in 2000 from the San Francisco Foundation. She has also received travel and research fellowships from the Jerome Foundation in Minneapolis.

Artist Statment

The activities of selecting, sorting, and arranging objects are exercises I employ to address issues of memory and to question my relationship to place, loss, and presence. I’m interested in the interplay between the artificial and the real, the physical relationship of objects or experience to the recollected, re-invented. New associations occur where order fails in the spaces between systems and categorizations.

My work is an inquiry about how language distances us from the very thing we try to define with words or meaning, and how various ways of knowing intersect. A personal taxonomy of shapes, textures, and ephemeral nuances coincides with scientific language to shift attention from the minute to a mass: a changing system that mutates, one that expands on itself, and unfolds.