A new professor is making her mark on arts and culture at Wittenberg and on Springfield as a whole: Kelley Booze, well-known local artist and now Visiting Assistant Professor of Art.
Booze is a recent graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, receiving her Masters of Fine Arts in Studio Art this past May. As a Springfield native, she was well aware of Wittenberg, and her colleagues at Hatch Artist Studio encouraged her to apply as she was still finishing up her degree, which led to her current position.
At Wittenberg, she teaches Studio Foundations: 2-D Design (ART-101), Basic Drawing (ART-121), and Painting I (ART-231). In the spring, she will again teach ART-101 and ART-121, as well as a 300-level drawing course and a 300-level painting course.
Even prior to receiving her MFA, Booze was already a lauded oil painter with a sizable library of works. From graduating with her Bachelors in 2009 until she went back to school in 2022, numerous pieces of hers were displayed in galleries, a notable example being the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.
In addition to traditional art, Booze also harbors a love for dance and was “borderline obsessed” for a time, and when she returned to graduate school, she ran headfirst into experimentation, including interdisciplinary approaches such as mixing her media with performing arts.
“I had always held, like, dance and my art practice separate,” she said, “but my experience of kind of overlapping these became increasingly interesting—and the idea of the art being in the doing of something, rather than the product of something.”
Booze’s newest exhibit at Wittenberg, “One Eye Open,” is a chronology of her transformation in grad school. It starts, from left to right, with representational oil paintings, and then transitions into drawings that lean more into conceptualism, which then shift into an abstract experimental style focused on pushing boundaries.
“I was more interested in movement and how movement and practice of the body impacts, like, my perception of my surroundings,” she explained. “I like that line between like, well, is it a painting or a sculpture? Or is it a drawing or a sculpture? So I like, kind of, flirting with that combination of the two.”
“One Eye Open” is currently on display at Ann Miller Gallery in Koch Hall until October 10th. On October 1st, Booze gave an artist’s talk in Kissel Auditorium, during which she discussed her journey through graduate school and the lessons she took away from her experimentation with art.
Beyond Wittenberg, Booze’s art is also heading international—in January 2026, an “experimental video projection piece” of hers will feature in a group exhibition entitled “Humanity” at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) in Gimpo, South Korea.
Booze’s biggest takeaway from her history with art as a whole is how the experience and the practice of art shapes our perception of the world around us: “Drawing trains us to look at things differently, to see things differently, to really be observers of our own world.”
