UMVA Showcase – Winter 2026: Stephen Burt, Jon Luoma, Liz Moberg, Amy Tingle, Heather Newton Brown

Stephen Burt

I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2016; as a result, I began to question my approach to making art, which has, for some time now, centered on calling attention to both the beauty of nature and the ravages of climate change. With the ticking of time, it becomes more apparent that while I may delay the advancement of this disease, it will in the end have its way, and I must use the time I have wisely. I began to think if I was going to try and call attention to the horrors headed our way, I should do so with clarity and directness. A recent work, Creative Altruism 2024, was inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: 

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?

These words alone should wake us up to the moment and galvanize us to action, yet in our fragmented society driven by inequity, greed, and selfishness, we seem far too comfortable in our habits of consumption to take substantive actions to curb the worst of what’s to come. Thus the strangeness and urgency of the subsequent imagery . . .

I am building a visual language of symbolic images that, together with words creates alarming yet beautiful visual experiences. I want the work to cut close to the bone. In recent works such as The Horror and After the Warnings, I utilize banners to display clearly written, stylized texts that directly address the viewer. These words are coupled with a phantasmagoria of images, perhaps most closely associated in my mind to Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797). In this, I am also inspired by the later cartoonish and disturbing works of Philip Guston. I have studied the Old Masters for many years now, and over the past five years or so, have been integrating the visual experiences created by chiaroscuro drawing with that of graffiti and calligraphy, creating layered, complex drawings. The words may be initially obscure, as with graffiti, and this is intended to require the viewer to look and ponder more deeply our current conditions of separation from nature, servitude towards technology, and willful ignorance of where any privilege we have comes from. 

This may sound dramatic, but I believe we are at an inflection point where each of us must work towards the common good. It is clear now that our writing and language have not prepared us for the challenges and crises of our current world. In fact, language has been used to cleverly obscure the very real and pressing issues of our time. I believe that art has the power to change lives. For me that art is not an illustration but a plea for reason in the face of insanity.We can rebuild our sense of community but first we must recognize the utter seriousness of our present moment where our destructive selfishness has indeed produced monsters—monsters we must collectively battle as if our lives depend on it, as they do.

 

Jon Luoma

Calligraphy-with-art combinations are an ancient practice: on stone monuments, medieval manuscripts, broadsides, posters, modern calligraphers’ work (not to mention Chinese and Japanese paintings). Sometimes there may be a “propaganda” intent; here, they hope to be inspirational “advertisements” for Henry David Thoreau’s poetic and forward-looking nature and wildness advocacy.*

I try to keep the calligraphy irregular, not too formal, not (even) too attractive, practiced, or cute (perhaps with mixed results). Ideally, the written words should be integrated with the painted image, the two aspects should work together.

 

Liz Moberg – Resistance by Mail

Some of the most striking graphic arts forged in resistance movements upend the convention of a boundary between the verbal and the visual by making them interdependent. That’s what I aspire to when I combine the verbal and the visual. I don’t do it often; it surfaces when I find resistance is necessary.

I’ve mailed over 350 block-printed postcards to U.S. government offices since the 2024 election. Like miniature resistance posters, these 4-by-6-inch postcards are expedient to make: quickly carved rubber stamps, easily printed with stamp pads, and tinted with colored pencil. Each has a theme that pairs a word with a picture. The verbal and visual form a new, distinct language, and where the message is a concern, each has more impact combined with the other. This work is also collaborative in a way. I keep going because I know there’s a vast collective of us resisting in the same way. 

 

Amy Tingle

Maybe it’s because I had an early career in book publishing. Maybe it’s because I am married to a poet. Maybe it’s because I co-founded a small literary press when we moved to Maine. Maybe it’s because we have a Little Free Library in our yard. Whatever the reason, my current work is centered around hand-stitched narrative embroidery. Nearly every piece contains words: snippets of poetry, song lyrics, quotes, or memoir-like snapshots from my own life. 

Sour Grapes is an ongoing project, a body of hand-stitched narrative embroidery that explores generational trauma and the additional burden of silence. By focusing the viewer’s attention on text, this work encourages transparent dialogue and radical honesty about the harms done to us and the harms we have done, as a modality toward healing and hope. 

The collection centers around a large quilt—my ongoing restoration of a vintage quilt passed down from my maternal grandmother. The rehabilitation began first with new batting and a large piece of fabric to reinforce the back of the quilt. I then began the painstaking, time-consuming work of appliquéing text stitched over some of the deteriorating sections to hold it all together. There are many sections that are nearly threadbare. 

As I wield my needle and thread, I am always asking what the materials remember and who gets remembered through them. What meaning do the holes and thinning areas hold? It is a loss of actual material, of course, but even more so, of family ties, history, and memories. My maternal grandmother was abandoned by her mother abruptly when she was ten or eleven years old. My paternal grandfather was a witness to the murder of a twenty-three-year-old black man by his brother, my great uncle, who was later acquitted by an all-white jury after less than thirty minutes of deliberation. These simple facts are mostly all I know.

How did those events shape the rest of their lives? My parents’ lives? And mine? What do reparations look like? Is there any way to begin to repair us all through artwork? Will my stitches become amends for the harm done? What additional reparations and labor need to be undertaken to ensure that the next generation doesn’t carry these burdens into the future? What does it mean to be an agent of transformation in your own family? 

All of the text and stitching in my work is a kind of sense-making, the way I map my feelings and attempt to heal myself, my family, and the world around me through my hands.

 

Heather Newton Brown – Items of Refuse: Nothing Changes When Nothing Changes

I have been collecting various magazines and other sorts of ephemera, as well as other discarded items for many years. I was recently given an extra large lot of magazines and decided to continue my series Items of Refuse. In sorting through them I was struck by the relevance and resonance of topics we are struggling with currently. Time magazine clippings from 1945 had haunting similarities to articles that could be read today, related to war, politics, relationships, household needs, and world affairs. I decided to be curious, and to let the process guide me. If I already knew the outcome, it wouldn’t be much of an experiment, so I found myself in a state of engaged learning throughout each painting. Pieces of history bring emotional resonance or discordance to the current experience, weaving past and present. A time machine, of sorts.

 

 

Image at top: Stephen Burt, Creative Altruism, brush painting and pen and ink on paper, 8 x 26 in., 2024 (photo: Jay York).