Graduating Year: 2020
Education: BFA Painting
Gina recently brought her mural design for the Newport Flood Wall on Dave Cowens Drive to completion for the city's 225th Anniversary! This mural, entitled "Education Empowers", tells the story of the Southgate Street School; the original building stands today and is now the home of the Newport History Museum. It was the first and only school for Black children in Newport immediately following the Civil War. The 19-panel wall will eventually become a chronological timeline of Newport's rich history.
Graduating Year: 1999
Education: BFA Graphic Design
Hammonds travels the globe as a design advocate and onboarding leader within IBM’s enormous design and engineering teams. In 2015, as part of Cincinnati Design Week, he conducted an in-class design workshop and spoke at NKU about his work in radical collaboration, user-centered empathy, and the legacy of IBM’s innovation-based culture that he has been integral in evolving.
Oen was recently selected to be one of the jurors in Fast Company’s international 2020 Innovation by Design Awards.
Career: Design Principal, Employee Experience Design at IBM
Graduating Year: 1995
Education: BFA Graphic Design
David W. Mack is an American comic book artist and writer, known for his creator-owned series Kabuki and for co-creating with Joe Quesada the Marvel Comics superhero Echo. Early life Mack graduated from Ludlow High School in 1990, where he had written and acted in many of the school theatre productions. Mack earned scholarships to Northern Kentucky University for five years, a four-year scholarship based on his portfolio of art works, and in his fifth year the Dean's Scholarship for academics. He graduated in 1995 with a BFA in graphic design.
Graduating Year: 2019
Education: Spatial Arts
Career: Landscape artist at Laika Studios
Graduating Year: 1998
Education: BFA Drawing
Hollis Hammonds is a Kentucky born artist who has been living and working in Austin, Texas since 2007. Her work crosses media from drawing to sculptural installation and has been exhibited throughout the U.S. including solo exhibitions at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC; the Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, TX; the Reed Gallery at the University of Cincinnati in OH; the Museum of Art at Southern Mississippi University in Hattiesburg, MS; the Hiestand Galleries at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX; and at Women and Their Work gallery in Austin, TX.
Career: Associate Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Visual Studies at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.
Graduating Year: 2014
Education: BA Visual Communication Design
Tyler Reed (BA Visual Communication Design, 2014) was accepted into the Adobe Creative Residency Community Fund — a program extended to give relief to creatives during the pandemic. Reed will be spending the month of August creating while using a beta version of Adobe Illustrator for iPad. Adobe selects creators for the program who are, “passionate about creating personally fulfilling work, sharing their journeys, and activating fellow creatives to craft the careers they want by empowering them with knowledge.”
Tyler is the creative mind behind the Rude Pets Club — a series of humorously illustrated creature characters. Reed was also interviewed about his work by Cincinnati Refined in May, and appeared on CincyLifestyle in June. In addition to his RPC work, Reed is an illustrator for Brill Creative.
Graduating Year: 2000
Education: BFA Graphic Design
Landscape artist, sculpture, illustrator. Active in pursuing art grants and public projects such as large permanently installed sculpture at the Newport Scholar House, funded in part through a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
Aside from teaching amazing Art and Design students at University of Kentucky as Assistant Professor of Digital and Print Media, David also currently has work in an online exhibition, FACT/itious, at Morlan Gallery, Transylvania University. He'll also have work in the exhibition, This is America*, at UK Art Museum in October. David earned an MFA in Studio Art from Purdue University in 2012.
Why did you choose to study at NKU SOTA?
I grew up in small-town Western Kentucky, and was excited to study in an exciting Art program near a big city.