News Bureau | ILLINOIS

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The School of Art and Design Master of Fine Arts Exhibition presents the artistic work of graduate students in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that is the culmination of their graduate education.

The annual exhibition opened April 6 and runs through April 20 at Krannert Art Museum. It includes graduate students in the studio art and Design for Responsible Innovation programs.

As a graduate student in studio art, Kofi Bazzell-Smith has focused on how manga, the Japanese art form used in comics, can be a tool for global exchange and building bridges between U.S. and Japanese cultures and between Black and Japanese communities.

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Bazzell-Smith grew up watching anime, or Japanese animation that often features adaptations of manga, and drawing what he saw. He has traveled to Japan four times to learn the language and manga storytelling and to give lectures and presentations.

Bazzell-Smith said manga drawing has its own style, engages with the subjective experience of the reader and is very cinematic in showing scenes from different angles. It also has a specific storytelling structure that includes unexpected elements to hold a reader’s attention, he said.

“I really like the black-and-white aesthetic and the really strong contrast of manga. The storytelling structure is about audience impact. The plots are built around twists that draw people in,” he said.

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Bazzell-Smith’s work in the exhibition will feature his latest manga project “Radius.” It combines his interests in manga and boxing; he is a professional boxer.

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“Radius” tells the story of a world where robots are used for labor and entertainment for humans. The relationship between robots and humans is a metaphor for race and class. In Bazzell-Smith’s story, robots compete in arena fighting matches, and the boy robot/fighter at the center of the story has the unique ability to dream and the desire to achieve. The story follows Bazzell-Smith’s favorite genre of manga, shonen, which is adventure and coming-of-age stories for young boys.

He said it was a challenge to convert a medium usually viewed in the form of a comic book to gallery walls. His installation features several giant vinyl prints of his artwork, as well as 40 framed manga story pages.

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Manga is one of the most popular art forms in the world, particularly in the U.S., Bazzell-Smith said.

“I think popular media and popular culture are really useful entry points in understanding another culture. Through cultural mixing and sharing, and creating from a different vantage point or perspective, you can make things that normally wouldn’t be created,” he said.

Bazzell-Smith said he’ll begin in the fall at Rochester Institute of Technology as the first professor in the U.S. to teach manga drawing. He’ll return to Japan in May to begin building a study abroad course for the school and to give the commencement speech at Kansai Gaidai University.

Other exhibitors in the MFA show include:

Holly Strickland, a graduate student in Design for Responsible Innovation. Her work is a website called Care•Stories, which aims to demystify women’s health topics and provide support through the sharing of women’s health stories. The website focuses on reproductive health, with a story index feature for various topics including menstruation and pregnancy. Users also can filter stories according to race and ethnicity, religion, age and sexuality. Strickland said she wants to destigmatize conversations about reproductive health.

Travis Keller, a graduate student in studio art. In his work “Finding the Light,” painting is a practice of searching for hope in the rituals and memories of daily life. The process of painting is a way for Keller to maintain connections with his chosen family even when they are apart. His work includes references from videos, photographs, drawings and his memories.

Song Shangye, a graduate student in studio art. Shangye’s book project “A First Course in Figurative Painting” is a painting textbook written in the language of modern math, particularly in the nomenclature of point-set topology and differential geometry. The work in the exhibition interrogates the accessibility of the book and how physical bodies engage with abstract concepts.