Shaun McGinnis, a 1992 graduate of the VCUarts Department of Interior Design, has helped design two homes featured on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC. McGinnis works for Duane Foster of D Foster Architects in Scottsdale, AZ and the two architects partnered with homebuilder Atreus Homes & Communities on both projects.

The first home was designed for the Yazzie Family and the episode aired on October 28, 2007. The Yazzie’s home on the Navajo reservation in Pinon, Arizona was designed in the Navajo “hogan” style, which is usually round and cone shaped, with the door facing the east to welcome the rising sun for good wealth and fortune. This was the first “green” home that the show has built, complete with solar panels, a windmill and a cistern for collecting rainwater.

The second home, for the Martinez Family, was completed in January and the episode is tentatively scheduled to air April 27, 2008. This home in Albuquerque, New Mexico was designed in a Santa Fe/Pueblo Territorial style with influences from the mission settlements of the early 1800’s.

On both projects, McGinnis was responsible for the elevations while his colleague Foster developed the floor plans. The architects took the design from concept to completion in only two and a half weeks per the show’s tight schedule.

For more information on the Yazzie Family project, please click HERE.

For more information on the Martinez Family project, please click HERE.  
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"We are thrilled to announce Donwan Harrell's selection as this year's recipient of the VCUarts Alumni Star Award," said Karen Videtic, chair of VCUarts Fashion Design and Merchandising Department. "I've known Donwan for many years and it is a great honor to recognize his talent, professional achievements, and dedication to the school. We have been able to count on Donwan to share his insights and experience in a highly competitive business with students. He is a long-standing member of our advisory board and we are very pleased to acknowledge not only his professional success, but his dedication and support as an alumnus of VCUarts." Harrell, who received his BFA in Fashion Design in 1992, is the president and creative director of his own multi-million dollar fashion conglomerate, Kemistre 8, LLC that houses the successful brands Akademiks, Akademiks Ladies, Stash House and PRPS. He will be honored at a reception on May 17, 2008.

At an early age, Harrell learned to sew, stitch and cut patterns proficiently by hand and with machinery. As a sophomore at VCUarts, Harrell won the prestigious International Air France Student Fashion Designer Competition and spent the next two years studying at the Chambre Syndicale in France.

Harrell worked in design for Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and Nike. With Nike, he was relocated to Hong Kong to study the Asian market and design active-wear reflecting Asian themes. Traveling and living throughout Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and Singapore to absorb and research the culture for his designs, Harrell became a cultural design anthropologist of sorts. After nearly five years with Nike, Harrell and his brother Emmett Harrell decided it was time to create a fashion movement, and Akademiks was born. Akademiks originated out of an understanding that “urban/minority kids didn’t really dress differently than anybody else, they just wanted to wear their clothes bigger. The mentality was to simply change the spec. It was an evolutionary process and still is,” recalls Harrell. “The name Akademiks represented a movement that would raise our next generation, hence the term “Jeanius Level Products.”

During the past eight years, the Akademiks brand has expanded beyond men’s denim and apparel to encompass Ladies, Boys, Girls, Outerwear, Footwear and Accessories. Superstars Brad Pitt, Tom Brady and David Beckham are have been spotted wearing the PRPS high-end jeans.

Click HERE for more information on the product line and Donwan Harrell.

VCUarts Department of Painting & Printmaking and the Center for Digital Print Media will host commandprint, the 2008 Southern Graphics Council Conference from March 26 through March 29.

The conference will encourage critical discourse on such issues as digital media and expanded notions of print media, print theory, the plight of material and process-specific disciplines, marginalization, and understanding printmaking’s shift to a place of leadership in the postmodern terrain. The conference will include demonstrations, artist talks, panel discussions, a vendor fair and more. Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett will give the keynote address on March 27. They are the co-directors of Triple Candie, a not-for-profit contemporary art venue founded in Harlem in 2001, and co-publishers of Art on Paper magazine, which they have owned since 2004.

The Southern Graphics Council is a nonprofit membership organization that advances the professional standing of artists who make original prints, drawings, books, and hand-made paper.

The Council also strives to increase public appreciation of these arts. Through an annual conference that draws participants from across the nation and increasingly attracts international participation, significant dialogue and exchange of technical and critical information occurs.

Click HERE for more information on the conference.

Mark Ramont, associate producer of Ford's Theatre, joins Theatre VCU as a visiting artist to direct this spring’s production of Cabaret.

Ramont is in his fourth season as the associate producer-artistic for Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Other professional positions have included associate artistic director for New York’s Circle Repertory Company, artistic director for Capitol City Playhouse (Austin, TX) and artistic director for the Hangar Theatre (Ithaca, NY). As a director, he has directed the world premieres of Walking the Dead, Dalton’s Back, The Colorado Catechism and Mad River Rising, among others. He has won awards for his productions of Jeffrey, Amadeus, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet), Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Mass Appeal and Agnes of God. He has directed for numerous theatre companies, including the Alley Theatre and Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, MD, Dorset Theatre Festival for 18 seasons, and Cortland Repertory Theatre.

As a theatre educator, he was the director of theatre at Rice University and was an adjunct professor at Sam Houston State University. Some of his students have gone on to receive graduate degrees from Yale School of Drama, New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California at San Diego. He has guest directed at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, Sam Houston State University, and North Carolina School of the Arts. He is the recipient of the Prince Grace Foundation’s Statuette Award for Sustained Excellence and holds a BA in Theatre - Directing from California State University, Fullerton, an MFA in Directing from the University of Texas at Austin, and completed an internship with the Asolo State Theatre in Sarasota, Florida. He is a member of SSDC, a site reporter for the National Endowment for the Arts, and a judge for the Helen Hayes Awards in Washington, DC.

Cabaret, a dazzling Broadway musical hit, is set in the decadent, provocative world of 1929 Berlin in a time when political unrest racks Germany, its economy is destroyed, and millions of unemployed people roam the streets. Enter into this chaos an American cabaret dancer, working at the downtown "Kit-Kat Klub" where anything goes on the stage. Cabaret is alive with memorable songs, political commentary and breathtaking dancing. “Wilkommen” to the Cabaret!

The show runs April 10-12, 17-19 & 24-26 at 7:30 pm, April 13, 20 & 27 at 3:00 pm.

For ticket information, please contact the Theatre VCU box office at 804-828-6026, Theatretix@vcu.edu or click HERE.

Jessica Langley, an MFA candidate in the VCUarts Department of Painting & Printmaking, has received the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation Scholarship in the amount of $25,000.

Langley will use the unrestricted award money to support her travel and research in Iceland for a period of 9 to 12 months. She plans to spend most of her time in the northern, less cosmopolitan areas, but will also spend some time in Reykjavik. Langley wants “to experience the contemporary landscape and find out how people think of it,” she stated. “I will make art and collect a lot of "sketches" (this will take on various forms from photographs, color studies, to whatever I put in a journal). Hopefully, as I'm there my work will develop into what I could call a body of work. There is nothing set in stone about my plan for my return, but it will hopefully involve an exhibition.”

While Langley does not have a formal connection with Iceland, she has always been curious about the Northern Lights and particularly the mythology behind them. She is also interested in the depiction of landscape and the natural, and how that is a constructed idea. After discussions with VCUarts professors Bruce Pearson and Gregory Volk, Langley kept seeing interesting intersections between what she thought about in her work and similar scenarios in Iceland. Pearson has lived and worked in Iceland and Volk has written extensively about Icelandic artists and curated Surface Charge at VCU’s Anderson Gallery in 2005, which featured installations by several Icelandic artists among other international figures.

As she considered the idea of Iceland as a research destination, Langley continued to research it and became increasingly intrigued with the incredible landscapes. Langley explains, “When we see a beautiful vista, we think about the image of landscape first. It is associated with the sublime, especially through Romanticism and the Hudson River School, and so I am thinking about the contemporary situation and what role the sublime takes within the landscape...So, [in Iceland] there is eco-tourism, industrialization, plus all of the mythology that goes way back and is so tied into the landscape, that it seems like a confusing situation of trying to figure out what the landscape means...for me anyway. I want to go there and learn about their ideas involving these issues there.”

Langley’s research also led her to the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation. The Foundation, established in 2001 and governed by a board of trustees appointed by the Central Bank of Iceland, the Icelandic Government, and the University of Virginia, was founded for the purpose of providing recognition and financial assistance to further scholarly study and research through student exchanges between Iceland and the United States. The mission of the Foundation is exclusively for charitable, literary, educational, and scientific purposes and for providing recognition and financial assistance to further scholarly study and research. The benefactors are scholars from the United States and the Republic of Iceland.

For more information on Jessica Langley and her work, please click HERE.
For more information on The Leifur Eiriksson Foundation, please click HERE.

The VCUarts Department of Dance and Choreography will present VCU Dance NOW, a concert of VCU Dance faculty and guest artist choreography on March 27, 28 and 29 at 8:00 p.m. at the Grace Street Theatre, 934 West Grace Street.

VCU Dance NOW marks the culmination of a thrilling season of guest artist and faculty creativity, and includes an unprecedented range of new work. Four nationally and internationally known dance artists, during residencies ranging from one to seven weeks, set work on VCU Dance majors in intensive rehearsal processes. Through these works, choreographers Heidi Weiss (Berlin), Tania Isaac (Philadelphia), Daniel Gwirtzman (New York), and Meisha Bosma (Washington, DC) delve into concepts such as isolation, discovery, history, and relationship, and carve out new interpretations through the medium of dancing bodies. Balancing out the program, VCU Dance faculty members Judith Steel, Scott Putman, James Frazier, and Martha Curtis pursue independent investigations into the shaping of space and time in four new works.

VCU Dance NOW is the sixth event of the VCU Dance NEXUS 2007-2008 Season, which with a stunning array of performances, film screenings, guest artist residencies and master classes, delivers all the energy and explosive creativity of a national festival. The VCU Dance NEXUS 2007-2008 Season is made possible in part by funding graciously provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation; the Virginia Commission for the Arts; the Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation, the Elmwood Fund, and VCUarts.

Tickets are $15 for the general public and $5 for VCU students with a valid I.D. Rambucks accepted. Tickets can be reserved beginning Monday, March 17 by calling the Grace Street Theatre box office at (804) 828-2020.

Click HERE for more information on this and other VCU Dance performances.

student exhibitions at the Anderson Gallery
907 1/2 West Franklin Street:

juried student design exhibition
March 21 through March 30, 2008
Opening Reception, March 21 from 5 - 7 p.m.
The student design exhibition features work from the Interior Design, Fashion Design, Illustration, and Communication Arts and Design departments.

juried Kinetic Imaging student exhibition
March 21 through March 30, 2008
Opening Reception, March 21 from 5 - 7 p.m.
The exhibition showcases student animation, video, and sound work juried by a notable expert in the field of Kinetic Imaging.

juried student fine arts exhibition
April 11 through April 20, 2008
Opening Reception, April 11 from 5 - 7 p.m.
The exhibition showcases student paintings, prints, sculptures, site-specific installations, drawings, crafts, photography and video. Undergraduate students currently enrolled in studio classes in VCUarts are eligible to enter up to three pieces of work. Each year, VCUarts Anderson Gallery brings a distinguished expert to judge student entries. The result is a stimulating exhibition, chosen from the most interesting and challenging student work to be found anywhere in the country.

Masters of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibitions (round 1)
April 25 through May 4, 2008
Opening Reception, April 25 from 5 - 7 p.m.

Masters of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibitions (round 2)
May 9 through May 18, 2008
Opening Reception, May 9 from 5 - 7 p.m.
This exhibition is the final requirements for students earning a master’s degree in the fine arts departments from VCU. The exhibition provides a forum for emerging artists to display their work and give viewers a “preview” of new directions in the visual arts. Each of the participating artists will exhibit work that represents the culmination of their 2 year masters program in one of the following areas: painting, printmaking, sculpture, crafts, and photography and film.

Please click HERE for more information on the Anderson Gallery and its exhibitions.

For news and information on VCUarts, please visit ester, an interactive website featuring awards, shows, guests and other VCUarts news.