Yumi Janairo Roth, assistant professor of studio art, is in her third year as what art department shorthand calls "the 3-D professor" -- that is, she is a sculptor and metalsmith, an artist and teacher whose work has height, breadth, and depth.
In April 2000, the Kwality Art Show, her first solo exhibition in the Wriston Art Center Galleries, explored issues of quality, taste, scale, choice in materials, presentation, and audience interaction in a variety of sculptural formats. If some of her subjects are, as she says, drawn from "the more mundane and banal aspects of life," the work itself is distinctive, challenging, and more than a little ironic and was the subject of a recent article in the Journal of Mundane Behavior.
In addition to the Wriston Galleries, Roth's sculptures were included in Metalsmith magazine's 1999 "Exhibition in Print" and have been shown in the James Howe Gallery at Kean University; the Commonwealth and Wendy Cooper Galleries in Madison; and the 16 Beaver Street Group and the Scott Pfaffman Gallery in New York City, as well as in Boston and Chicago.
A graduate of Tufts University with an additional bachelor's degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Master of Fine Arts degree from the State University of New York, New Paltz, Roth was named a College Art Association Professional Development Fellow in 1997 and was a visiting artist at the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago from 1994 to 1997.
