Campus News
President Stewart assists Aidan Smith and Barbara Blackerby in cutting the ribbon of the new 3-D Art Building while Board of Trustees members and DeAnna and Chris Smith observe at Homecoming.
Scott Meyer and Barbara Blackerby celebrate the new H. Conrad and Barbara Martin Blackerby Ceramics Studio.
3-D ART GAINS NEW HOME BY CRAIG WILLIAMS
UM’s new 3-D Art Building tells a story of interconnectivity. The facility’s fruition fuses the future with the University’s nearly 120-year-old history, featuring determination, collaboration and philanthropy. The 10,000 square-foot complex is complete, but its narrative is not yet finished. It is becoming. The structure, located where the building known as “The Laundry” stood during the early 1900s, contains a ceramics studio, a metalwork/sculpture studio and 3-D classroom space, as well as a carved limestone windowsill from 1908. Architects and construction crews tailored the building to sketches by UM Art Department faculty members, who proudly tout their collaboration as artists. Windows connect the classrooms, symbolic of the unification of their respective fields. “The coolest things in art bring different disciplines together,” says Scott Meyer, professor of art. “That’s where new knowledge comes from, and that’s what’s going to make an artist.” Meyer believes the facility will allow
6 Montevallo Today | |
The McCarley/Smith family commemorates the Donald G. McCarley Metal Shop.
UM to continue its legacy of attracting gifted and passionate artists. Meyer says he met a student at a conference who is looking to transfer to UM from another school’s clay-building program. “They’re going to see it and want to come here,” senior art student Blake Dillard says. “This opens up all kinds of possibilities.” Dillard is using his metalworking skills in learning to create clay and ceramic structures, including kilns. Donors and alumni H. Conrad and Barbara Martin Blackerby (classes of 1966 and 1965, respectively) funded the H. Conrad and Barbara Martin Blackerby Ceramics Studio.
Photos by Amy Baldis ’10
Chris and DeAnna Smith ’99 funded The Donald G. McCarley Metal Shop in memory of DeAnna’s father, a talented welder who operated his own industrial design and manufacturing business. Chris is a current MBA student at UM. DeAnna serves as UM’s vice president for business affairs and treasurer. The excitement for the project is palpable among those involved. Scott Meyer, for one, says he is proud to be an element in a larger context. “I wouldn’t trade places with anyone in the country, not only for what we are, but what we are going to do,” Meyer says. “This isn’t going on in many other places. And it’s not over.”