This issue’s cover brings together art by a graphic design professor and an emeritus professor of painting through a layered, hands-on process
Three times a year, Clemson World has the privilege of selecting a cover image that will sit on coffee tables to be seen and shared by the Clemson Family for the next four months, until the next issue mails. This cover-selection process, like many creative pursuits, is both collaborative and a work in progress.
So, when we considered covers for the Summer 2026 Creativity and Culture Issue, our already inventive process felt full of possibility.
The challenge: how to select a single piece of artwork that represents all the media, mediums and makers represented in this issue.
Our solution? Create something. Enter graphic design professor Drew Sisk (“Outside the Lines,”). Sisk partnered with Clemson World’s creatives to become our cover artist
Sisk describes his work style and his teaching method with the same simple phrase: “creative flexibility,” combining traditional artistic methods and emerging technologies to reimagine what’s possible artistically.
His cover exploration thus began with thoughts about shadows and sunlight and the act of seeking out public art, a nod to our Clemson University alumni-focused feature story about Tiger public artists (“Art for Everyone”).
Sisk’s original “Clemson Creatives” typographic illustration conveys a sense of navigating the iterative, multilayered creative processes that happen across campus. Sisk has been using laser-etched acrylic in his own creative research and decided to explore it with the Clemson World cover as well. Using clear acrylic is also a subtle nod to the typographic experiments with physical materials at the Bauhaus, the influential German school of art, design and architecture (c. 1919–1933) known for its emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach to art, craft and technology.
With the assistance of Clemson’s student-run Makerspace, located in the first-floor lab of the Watt Family Innovation Center, Sisk then brought his design to life. In a laser engraving machine, the vector file emerges from negative space, slowly revealing the typographic illustration.
“I always like showing students how typography can be a carrier of layered meaning and how it can have the same expressiveness and exuberance as photos and illustrations,” Sisk said. “The type on this cover and the tools used to execute the concept convey both creativity and technology, which seems appropriate for the content of the issue.”
The acrylic itself also became an art exploration — both as a frame and as a lens for viewing public art. The acrylic cover was always meant to be photographed in front of an artwork.
The question, then, was: which artwork?
Creative explorations
While exploring main campus, Clemson World art director Jen Jefferson stumbled upon “Kia Kuas” by Emeritus Professor Tom Dimond. Created in the 1970s, the vibrant acrylic painting is rooted in geometric abstraction, drawing on influences such as Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt to explore symmetry, precision and color.
“My artwork has always evolved around geometric shapes and circles,” said Dimond.
Dimond taught painting at Clemson from 1979 to 2006 and served as director of Lee Gallery from 1973 to 1988. When he retired in 2006, he donated a series of paintings to the University, including “Kia Kuas,” now displayed outside Lee Gallery. When Jefferson spotted the painting, she immediately sensed that it would be a strong fit for Sisk’s acrylic etching. And as it turned out, Jefferson’s creative exploration led to a painting with quite the Clemson and state history.
In the 1970s, Dimond received a grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission to create a series of paintings, and “Kia Kuas,” pictured behind Sisk’s acrylic design, is one of five paintings from that series. The artworks reflect a meticulous process of sketching, taping, layering, and hand-painting and framing the linen.
“They’re all geometric, and they’re all symmetrical,” said Dimond. “They’re hard-edge paintings, and to get that hard edge, you have to tape the canvas and cut the image out. It’s almost like a stencil.” After cutting and taping, Dimond painted the canvases, finalizing the design by outlining it in black. Each painting features different colors displaying the geometric pattern in visually distinct ways, and each painting, said Dimond, took about 80 to 100 hours.
“They’re a part of the building,” Dimond said as he referenced the process of creating the paintings in Lee Hall. “They were framed right in that building.” After completion, the paintings toured across South Carolina and North Carolina, landing at the Asheville Art Museum and the Mint Museum in Charlotte. Upon his retirement, the paintings were distributed, and several remain on the University’s main campus.
Two become one
After deciding “Kia Kuas” was an excellent fit for Sisk’s acrylic cover, Jefferson hoisted it in front of the painting and photographed the two artworks together, paying careful attention to the alignment of light, material and scale.
Her creative process reflected a process that aligns with Sisk’s own artistic practice and pedagogy. In addition to exploring typographic illustration, Sisk said the acrylic cover considered what is possible when the digital interacts with physical materials and exploratory processes.
“I always challenge my students to think beyond the screen in their creative processes,” he said. “Yes, our tools are primarily digital, but what happens when you bring your process out into physical space and play with variables outside your control? Simple materials and processes can yield surprising results, and I like to think of material exploration as a valid, important area of research for our students to engage.”
After exploring various Clemson places, media, technologies and processes to create a single image, the final cover image led to a pairing of two artworks that not only complement one another visually but conceptually.
When describing the process of creating “Kia Kuas,” Dimond said it led to a completely flat, precise image that looks like a print — almost as if it were machine-made. Meanwhile, the process of laser etching Sisk’s graphic design onto acrylic created visible imperfections. Both artworks also reflect modular processes: While Dimond’s stencils were used to create five distinct artworks, Sisk’s graphic design and acrylic cover can be used with various backgrounds and colors.
Surprising results
When we set out to create this issue’s cover design, the goal was to reflect the various artistic practices, processes, disciplines, generations and mediums embodied within the magazine’s pages. We weren’t, however, anticipating the various ways “Kia Kuas” would thematically complement Sisk’s artwork. The surprise result image reflects the idea behind many of the stories in the summer issue: Artistic processes and journeys can lead to unexpected places, careers, lessons and insights. The result is not only an image holding multifaceted and interdisciplinary processes, but one that pairs a newly created artwork with a piece of University history.
