faculty.augie.edu/~parsons/

Scott Parsons

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Teaching art and exhibiting art are both conversations I love to engage in: celebrating our questions, examining our perceptions, and suggesting beauty as a means to make life better. Time and again I am amazed at how much real self-discovery goes on in the studio classroom environment. There is a shared sense of aim, of finding one’s voice and helping each other along the way. Art is truly grace when this happens.

As an artist, I am deeply motivated to make art that touches people in the midst of the everyday—often I create work in the realm of public art, defining a space with a sensitivity that can transform, celebrate, and engage the redemptive qualities of metaphor for the profoundly personal and communal in people’s lives. As an undergraduate, I was a Regents Scholar at Augustana College and I received my M.F.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I currently teach all levels of undergraduate Drawing and Printmaking at Augustana. My experience in public art includes percent-for-art and private commissions for museums, research facilities, university buildings and transportation centers. I work in precast concrete, stone, light (solstice markers), glass, ceramic mosaic, terrazzo and stone in walls, floors, sidewalks and plazas. My design experience includes 3D pre-visualization, fabrication, design-team collaboration and early-integration public art planning.

My work is reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture, Architectural Record, and Public Art Review. You can read about an art installation I did here at Augustana for the Nobel Peace Prize Forum in The Lure of the Local by Lucy Lippard. My work has been exhibited at the South Dakota Art Museum, the Dahl Arts Center, the Nicolaysen Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have previously taught at Gustavus Adolphus College, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Denver School of the Arts, and Platt College. My drawing strengths are substantial in the areas of fundamentals, figure, and anatomy. In printmaking, I work and teach in litho, intaglio, screenprinting and woodcut.

Thoughts on Art

  • “You have to start with an unreasonable dream.” - Ed Keinholz
  • “Successful works are successful because of spirit, not because of perfection. In fact, some of the greatest works, in any art form, have their imperfect strokes. It’s part of the journey of discovery. All paths, if they are real paths, will drop you to your knees in humility from time to time. Without this, there is no growth.” - Karl Gnass
  • “Art is the finite trying to connect to the infinite.” - Jackie Winsor
  • “One of art’s functions is to recall that which is absent—whether it is history, or the unconscious, or form, or social justice.” - Lucy Lippard
  • “Basically, I think art is just a way to think...you know, it’s like standing in the wind and letting it pull you where whatever direction it wants you to go, and things start saying, ‘Pay attention to this,’ and ‘make this.’” - Kiki Smith
  • “Art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. It produces deepened perceptions of experience. More must happen than simply logically understandable things. Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no need of art. It could then just be logical sentences in a form of a text for instance. Where objects are concerned it’s more the sense of an indication or suggestion.” - Joseph Beuys
  • “To search for the good and make it matter—this is the real challenge for the artist. Not simply to transform ideas or revelations into matter, but to make those revelations actually matter.” - Estella Conwill Májozo

Contact Me

Feel free to email me at scott.parsons@augie.edu. My studio and office phone is 605-274-5025. I welcome current, former, and prospective students and their families to stop by or make an appointment to visit with me in our new Visual Arts Center, Room 185C.

You can visit my online portfolio at scottkparsons.com.

Credits

Thanks to Angie Oliver, Rachel McCallister, and Maryline Peacock for kindly providing me their photographs you see on this site.