Installation by Siri Stensberg in gallery.

Department of Art

The Study and Practice of Art

An essential aspect of the WSU experience, students are encouraged to apply multiple perspectives and embrace risk and uncertainty on the path to discovery. Classes, studio opportunities, and research projects will challenge you to think and communicate in innovative and interdisciplinary ways.

Faculty members in the Department of Art are internationally recognized contemporary artists and scholars that consistently bring their professional experience into the classroom. Extensive studio, workshop, and machine resources are complemented by a robust Visiting Artist and Scholar Program and collaborations with the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at WSU.

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Grace Athena Flott

Artist Talk

WSU Fine Arts Center Auditorium

Thursday January 29th 4:30 PM

Grace Athena Flott is a Seattle-based painter fascinated by the myth of normalcy and social constructions of health, beauty, and gender. Raised in white suburban America, Flott spent her youth striving toward normalcy in all its forms until she experienced a major biographical disruption that placed her body firmly outside of mainstream representation. Remixing Italian Renaissance iconography and surrealistic narratives, Flott’s lifelike figurative paintings and portraiture speak to the dynamics of representation through a feminist disability justice lens.

Premised on the notion that our identities are formed with and against other bodies, Flott’s work invites the viewer into intimate light-filled spaces where her emotive subjects toy with a normative gaze.

Gameform: Art/Play/Deconstruct

Solo Exhibition by artist and game designer Diamond E. Beverly-Porter

Gallery 2, Fine Arts Center October 15- December 11

Artist talk, Thursday October 16th, 4:30 PM with an opening reception to follow.

 Gameform: Art/Play/Deconstruct is a solo exhibition by artist and game designer Diamond E. Beverly-Porter, exploring games as a formal artistic medium. Drawing on the historical and cultural legacies of Black people in the United States through embodied knowledge, Beverly-Porter fuses storytelling, game mechanics, environment design, and digital art as acts of epistemological resistance and Black feminist worldbuilding. 

Her work centers Black women and girls as complex protagonists navigating sociopolitical realities, positioning her games and art as living archives of Black cultural production and Afrofuturism. Using play as a critical tool, she challenges reductive narratives and reclaims space for Black peoples’ complexity and joy. 

Beverly-Porter’s character-driven, richly designed worlds invite audiences to engage with power, identity, and representation in digital spaces. As one of the few Black game developers in the industry, she creates the games she wished existed as a child—immersive spaces for cultural critique and storytelling. 

An Assistant Professor in the Digital Technology and Culture Department at Washington State University and community arts advocate, Beverly-Porter’s work embodies resistance, creativity, and collective dreaming. 

All That Matters

Washington State University’s Department of Art presents All That Matters, a group exhibition opening August 18 in Gallery 2, featuring artists Chelsea Margaret Jacobs, David Janssen Jr, and Krista Brand, whose painting, fiber, and installation works transform collected and repurposed materials into reflections on personal history and cultural memory. Through their innovative approaches, the artists explore how everyday objects carry stories, examining the role of materiality in shaping meaning, expression, and possibility in contemporary art. Highlighting the nostalgia and resonance of familiar textures and items, the exhibition demonstrates how materials function as both evidence of origins and catalysts for new creative directions. A public panel discussion with the artists will be held on September 4 at 4:30 PM in the Fine Arts Center Auditorium, followed by an opening reception in Gallery 2, reinforcing the university’s commitment to diverse perspectives in the visual arts.

New mural adjacent to MASC celebrates sisterhood of Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell

Painted by Art Department faculty Jiemei Lin

WSU Libraries

According to Lin, the Virginia and Vanessa mural celebrates the creative lives and lasting influence of two remarkable women in the history of art and literature.

Woolf’s writing has served as a manifesto and source of inspiration for generations of artists, writers, activists, and women around the world, Lin said. Bell, in her own right, told stories through her paintings, prints, and illustrations, and through her visual responses to Woolf’s words, she expanded and reimagined them.

“This mural is inspired by the Virginia Woolf library collection at the WSU Libraries, a space that holds not just books, but traces of the sisters’ labor, imagination, and deep connection,” she said. “It honors their collaboration, their individual practices, and the powerful relationship that went beyond sisterhood.” See more at the library or here: https://cas.wsu.edu/2025/08/05/new-mural-adjacent-to-masc-celebrates-sisterhood-of-virginia-woolf-vanessa-bell/

Department of Art in the News

Visiting Writers Series to feature Josiah Morgan and Courtney Ann LaFaive

Washington State University’s Visiting Writers Series will bring two acclaimed contemporary authors to campus this spring, offering students and community members the chance to hear from a New Zealand-based poet and performance artist and an award-winning essayist whose work explores memoir, culture, and astrology.