MSUM Art Exhibit Opens Sunday
An MSUM art exhibit titled “The Graphic Design Alum Salon,” featuring 40 Years of MSUM’s graphic design program, runs Oct. 4-21 in the Roland Dille Center for the Arts gallery.
An artists’ reception will be held Saturday, Oct. 17 from 3-5 p.m. in the gallery foyer. An open house for graphic design’s newly remodeled studios will be held from 1-5 p.m. All events are free and open to the public.
Gallery hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday; and 2-4 p.m. Sunday.
Professor Emeritus Richard Szeitz, who chaired the art department in the late 1960s, said former President Roland Dille supported his proposal to initiate a graphic design program at Moorhead State College. In 1967, Arnold Favela was appointed as the first graphic design faculty member, and he led the program for one year, followed by Phillip Mousseau, who served for the next 20 years.
Mousseau designed the program loosely from one established by Alvin Lustig at Yale in 1950, and through the efforts of one of his former students, Rob Roy Kelly, who engineered similar graphic design programs at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and later at the Kansas City Art Institute. The first graduating class of graphic design majors was in 1970 and numbered six students. Mousseau retired in 1998 after 30 years at the helm.
For the last 20 years, Allen Sheets has been head of the graphic design department. Currently he works alongside Tom Anstadt and Katie Ellenberger, both MSUM graphic design alums. This semester there are 128 students enrolled as graphic design majors.
Alumni work has been submitted from across the United States, London and New Zealand.
For more information, contact Gallery Director Jane Gudmundson, 218-477-2284 or gudmunja@mnstate.edu.
(To the left is submitted artwork from 2009 graduate Danielle DeKruif, who is working at Noridian Mutual Insurance Co., in Fargo. “Get Reform Informed” was a time-sensitive internal campaign to educate Noridian employees on the topical issue of health care reform. The campaign needed an identify for the company Web site and a poster to direct people to a specific Intranet article.)