With varied life experiences and backgrounds, three new full-time faculty join the Department of Art.
The Department of Art is pleased to announce three new full-time members of faculty: Madeline Rupard (2D Studio), Sylvia Ramachandran Skeen (3D Studio), and Kaleb Ostraff (Art Education), all of whom will begin work as Assistant Professors in Fall 2024. Although they share a background of an undergraduate education at BYU, each of these new faculty members have since accumulated widely different experiences which have shaped them people, artists, and educators, and which they are eager to share with the Department of Art community.
Madeline Rupard
Madeline Rupard is a painter who has lived and worked primarily in New York City since 2015. She moved to New York to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and her experience there inspired her to stay for the next several years. “I fell in love with the city and made some new friends in my program, and decided I wanted to stick around,” Rupard recalls of that time. “It’s a city that isn’t always easy to live in, but there are rewards for sticking it out.”
While living in New York, Rupard found a number of ways to make a living as an artist. Her painting practice provided some income through commissioned works and direct sales with collectors. She spent some time working in a midtown art gallery, and most recently was a studio manager for renowned artist Jules de Balincourt, whose studio was located near her home in Brooklyn. Rupard spent her most recent years in Ridgewood, a small community on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. It holds a special place in her heart: “There are a lot of artists and studios in Ridgewood, and I found myself often going to friends’ spaces in that area, whether it was for work, or a studio visit, or making something myself – I believe it’s the Greenwich Village of our time.”
Rupard’s prior experience with BYU began in 2009 as a freshman pre-animation student. After changing her major to Illustration, she participated in a study abroad program in London led by Department of Art professor Peter Everett. She had encountered Everett before, and felt strongly that she should attend this study abroad. This program proved to be a major pivoting point; after serving a mission in Hungary, she graduated with her BFA in Art in 2015.
In 2020, she returned to BYU for a single year to serve as a Visiting Artist Adjunct for the Department of Art, teaching classes in painting and business practices for artists. In the five years separating Rupard’s graduation from BYU and her return visit she noted the progression she saw in the student body. “Every generation looks back on the generations that follow them and marvel at how smart they are and how far they’ve come,” she remarks. “As I’ve come back to BYU for the visiting artist position, I think students are really tuned in and responding to the present. It’s an exciting time to be a young artist, and I think it’s about finding your voice and figuring out how to communicate that clearly while holding your integrity – I believe BYU is uniquely equipped to provide an environment where that energy can thrive.”
In her personal painting practice, Rupard also habitually responds to the present moment. Drawing on the landscapes and spaces she encounters every day, usually captured offhandedly by cell phone recording, she works with paint to create unique reproductions of light, texture, and atmosphere. These luminous paintings depict scenes ranging from New York City to the American west, and everywhere in between.
“The way I’ve been thinking about my work lately is as this kind of futile effort to distill time, to slow down things,” she says of her process. “I think it’s also a practice of gratitude, trying to freeze time to take note of these ordinary things as miraculous in some way. It translates into the kind of pieces that I make frequently with western landscapes and gas stations, but it could also become something totally different – it’s a kind of discovery, a hunt for something that surprises you.”
This search is a project that began for Rupard during her time as a student at BYU, and is something she looks forward to exploring with a new generation of students: “I remember feeling this vast horizon of opportunities while I was at BYU, as I found out what it meant to be an artist. Moving to New York in my 20’s was an effort in chasing that feeling again, but I don’t think you need to live in New York to have access to that energy. You can get it anywhere with the right mindset, and I think BYU is a special place for that. I’m excited for those moments where we will discover things together, because I think that’s the real joy in teaching. ”
Sylvia Ramachandran Skeen
Sylvia Ramachandran Skeen is a ceramicist and sculptor whose journey to her medium of choice took her through several mediums. Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, she came to BYU in the 90's in pursuit of a number of interests, frequently changing majors from music, film, literature, sciences, and more. It wasn’t until her senior year that she finally took a summer-term ceramics course she had been putting off, and found a new form of harmony between her analytic self and creative impulse.
Skeen recollects how the course changed her mind and helped make her decision to pursue art: “When I would take aptitude tests, they would always tell me I had a scientific mind, I would always land on the science end of things. Clay [as a medium] was sort of a surprise to me, but the more I worked with it, the more I loved that marriage of the chemistry in glazing and the negotiating of gravity with the expressive elements that you can introduce with ceramics.”
Without any formal training and late in her undergraduate career, this final change of direction towards Art was initially daunting to Skeen. Despite its challenges, the experience taught her skills that have helped her throughout her career. “I think one of the biggest things that I learned was the value of discipline and hard work, especially in the form of making a lot of work,” she recalls. “That was a revelation for me, that art is not always about making great work, but making a great deal of work and then making selections.”
This process of making a great deal of work also entailed ideological shifts. Skeen was fascinated in the idea of objects holding significance for people within the scope of everyday life, and initially expressed that interest through painting still lifes. Gradually, this would evolve into a desire to move into three dimensions: “I think my early work with still life paintings helped me to become interested in object making and installation, because it’s a way to highlight the deeper and more important things behind these objects that we make and use.”
After earning her undergraduate degree, Skeen worked a range of jobs (including teaching K-12) before attending the University of Utah for graduate school. Her interest in everyday objects continued to grow as she began making sculptures for her MFA thesis. Through interpretations of simple technologies such as spoons and pitchers, she began to inspect the relationship between the mechanical functions of the world and the spiritual forces driving them. For Professor Skeen, sculpture represents that kind of balance; they exist in the world, made of material that is tangible and often familiar, while also serving as vessels for meaning.
Skeen completed her Master’s program in 2006 and continued to teach courses in ceramics and 3D foundations at the University of Utah. While living in Bountiful with her husband and daughter, life did not pause, and she found that maintaining her identity as an artist came with ebbs and flows in production. But for Skeen, allowing for struggle and change is an essential part of the creative process, just as important as creating material objects. “My work goes in a lot of different directions because my life has gone in a lot of different directions,” she says. “Much of the time, my practice is happening when I’m away from the studio, in my head or in my sketchbook, as I follow along with life. Things like relationships, moving, motherhood, children, these are all things that have an effect on your work as an artist.”
In Winter of 2022, Skeen taught at BYU for a semester as a Visiting Artist Adjunct. During that time,she created the exhibition Dream Machines, exploring the space between one’s subconscious thoughts and the hierarchical realities of the world’s demands. She thinks fondly of working in the studio alongside fellow sculptors in the B66 labs. That period of sharing space, thoughts, and ideas, she says, is what she looks forward to the most about her future at BYU: “For me, the biggest thing is being in the middle of all of these people who are making positive things happen in their life, who have hope for growth and exploration. Being around people who are making work and thinking about how to improve the world, and to understand each other – it really brings energy to me.”
Kaleb Ostraff
As an educator-artist, Kaleb Ostraff has been told he is hard to pin down. Migrating from medium to medium, he began his artistic journey studying sculpture at BYU for his undergraduate degree, although the definition of “sculptor” didn’t always stick when it came to the ideas he would have. “As artists, you can give us any material or process, and we could come up with a way of using that to engage with the world,” he says of his approach. “I think an artist is someone who pays attention to their lives, and reflects on their human experience.”
When he made his decision to move into the art education space, this malleability was an essential element of his methodology. Ostraff’s focus as an educator is centered around the synchronization of art making and teaching. “As artists, we tend to separate those concepts,” Ostraff observes. “But I think it’s important to recognize schooling can be a material unto itself in an art practice. I think of myself as an artist first, who then goes into a classroom and brings my experience as an artist to it.”
After teaching for several years in middle schools in Provo and Vernal, Ostraff decided to further grow as an educator by pursuing a PhD in Art Education. Ostraff’s dissertation work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign focused on the possibilities of engaging with spaces and experiences typically overlooked for their pedagogical potential, spaces ranging from museums to public gardens. In addition to his independent research, he would also serve in practical positions. For instance, Ostraff acted as a research assistant in public school classrooms, an experience he found initially frustrating:
“It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but it afforded a lot of unexpected opportunities,” he recalls. “At first it was frustrating, because I was often getting used as a grunt worker, cutting sheets of construction paper for teachers, that kind of thing. I had thought that as a PhD student, I would’ve been more hands-on in helping teachers integrate art into their lessons.”
This experience with tedious labor led Ostraff to consider what he was overlooking. While cutting construction paper for classrooms, he recognized that this labor itself was a pedagogical opportunity. Rearranging paper scraps that had been swept onto the floor, patterns began to emerge and caught Ostraff’s attention. The more he worked, the more he realized that these unwanted pieces of paper (as well as the act of sweeping them up) were just another medium for him to work with.
“I would take scraps from paper that I had cut into shapes for teachers and propose art projects to make with them,” he recounts. “Gradually, the teachers at the school got on board and got excited. That’s a big part of my own work that I think about; I am thinking about those materials within those unnoticed spaces that are overlooked in some way, those are the materials that I use as an artist for my practice.”
His approach to pedagogy follows philosophies of thinkers like Ted Aoki; for Ostraff, an educator’s curriculum is just as much lived out day by day with their students, as it is laid out as a regimen to be followed. Categories like ‘artist’ and ‘educator’, or ‘planned curriculum’ and ‘lived curriculum’ can necessarily produce tension or even a sense of opposition. But in Ostraff’s teaching experience, that tension isn’t something to be shied away from: “I used to think of tension as a bad thing. Ideas pulling on each other, structure and improvisation,” he explains. “But it’s almost like music, where the perfect tuning holds the tension between the dissonant notes. I think you can take that idea to almost anything.”
In looking forward to his career teaching here at BYU, Professor Ostraff looks for a balanced approach towards his relationships with students:“I believe in this idea that learning happens within an individual. You have to work with your students as an instructor with the knowledge that you have, and that helps bring out their potential – it’s a relationship without hierarchy, it’s a tree with lots of branches going in different directions.”