Two new shows are now available for students and faculty on campus. Postal Outliers is in the Student Union Building (SUB) Fine Arts Gallery and Character Development is on display in the Trueblood Pop Up Gallery.
Character Development: Portrait Studies by Michael Chambers
Character Development: Portrait Studies by Michael Chambers will be displayed through March 14 in the Trueblood Pop Up Gallery. Playing with the process by which a simple sketch evolves into a more refined work, Michael Chambers completed more than 100 digital artworks over the past 18 months.
“The process of creating, changing, adding lines and textures, experimenting, erasing, and re-working is endlessly fascinating,” Chambers said.
During this process, the artist continually asked himself when a work was complete or finished. Even with the ease of a tablet, a software that allowed infinite variations, and an imagination that proved ceaseless, Chambers found the answer to this question to be elusive and wildly different for each portrait; “finished” proved to be an inaccurate description.
This exhibition of curated works intends to shed light on Chambers’ creative process that begins with a few marks and ends as a series of portraits of individuals with their own characters, choices, and storylines.
Chambers is a program manager in the Office of Continuous Improvement at Boise State.
Postal Outliers
Your mailbox becomes a museum, where you never know what might arrive next, inspiring and constantly surprising you.
Debra Mulnick
In the summer of 2019, university art curator and collection manager Fonda Portales listened as Debra Mulnick, a local artist, spoke about her dynamic relationship with her growing collection of mail artists’ books, printmaking objects, postcards, stamp sheets, handmade papers, and upcycled found objects. When the two decided to organize an exhibition, the first of its kind in Idaho, they put out a call for mail art, not knowing the extent to which COVID-19 and United States elections would affect the submissions received.
Ultimately, they received over 250 objects from 24 countries and 19 states. These will be archived in the Special Collections and Archives and will be a valued repository for student scholars researching mail art, artists books, ephemeral and performance art.
In addition to the art received in the latest call, Postal Outliers features mail art from the university’s archives. The show will run through Feb. 21, in the SUB Fine Arts Gallery.
Art lovers who can’t visit the galleries in-person can see pieces from the exhibitions on the Boise State Fine Arts website.