Guest artist Dewey Blocksma will present a lecture on his extraordinary and highly imaginative artwork.

A guest of the UT Department of Art, Blocksma will also work with UT's art students through workshops using found and “repurposed” materials. The evolving works that they collaboratively create during his visit, using the CVA Gallery space as their working studio, will be on display through January 25th.

Dewey Blocksma is a Michigan artist who earned a B.S. degree in Chemistry from Wheaton College in Illinois, and who worked as an emergency room physician for ten years after graduating from Northwestern University Medical School. He is now an artist full-time. At a glance, Dewey's work is witty and enigmatic. His sculptures are an extension of his toy-making experiences developed in childhood while living on the border of India and Pakistan where conventional children’s toys were unavailable. Dewey's work can be read on various levels.  He challenges the notion of classical beauty by favoring surfaces that shy away from formality and perfection.
His paintings are moments out of his life, vignettes collected, nuances captured. “I use painting as a way to figure out what I’m trying to say, not as a way to explain what I’m thinking.”