MFA Alumna Walker Receives 2023 Alumni Promise Award
Printmaking alumna Ericka Walker (MFA ’10) received the College of Arts and Sciences 2023 Alumni of Promise Award on September 29, 2023. Walker, who attended UT after completing her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she is an associate professor at NSCAD University. The Alumni Promise Award recognizes alumni who have demonstrated distinctive achievement in a career, civic involvement, or both. This award is presented to acknowledge alumni who are making a mark early on in their career.
Walker’s work was included as part of the recent exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art “Landfall Press: Five Decades of Printmaking,” December 16, 2022–April 30, 2023. Some members of our campus community may also be familiar with her exhibition “The Great Experiment.” A series of large prints was exhibited in the Printmaking Showcase Gallery at UT last Spring. Additionally, her work was selected by Sarah Suzuki, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, for our alumni exhibition in the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture as part of the SGC International Conference, held at UT Knoxville in 2015.
Walker is one of the most important young artists working with print media today. Last year, she was voted by the membership of SGC International to receive their Mid-Career Artist Award. Based on her close examination of American and Canadian colonialism, Walker’s art draws on the vernacular histories of the early and mid-20th century posters to interrogate mythologies that have resulted in the systematic oppression of marginalized and underrepresented people. Raised in rural Wisconsin, her art is also concerned with agriculture and our relationship with the land.
In addition to her work as a printmaker, Walker extends her commitment to a publicly engaged practice through the painting of large-scale murals, which is a natural extension of her work as a printmaker.