Twisting your stomach into knots, etc.

A coach hollers at boys: “Go hit somebody.” A boy tries to rev up his teammates: “Act like they killed your mother.” Slogans like “We turn hatred into motivation” are splashed across T-shirts and embroidered on hats. Coaches shove and punch their players. Players smash into each other in practice. They chant and clap and dance, then call a truce after the game when opponents politely slap hands.

“Frightening, which is to say compelling” is what Bennett Simpson, Associate Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, says in a review of Erik Levine’s “More Man,” a film which explores one of the chief rights of male initiation in American society today - football.

Levine is typical of the arts faculty at UMass Boston. They do not just teach the theory and history of art, they live it.

Levine won international recognition in the New York scene of the nineties for his sculpture, owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. He recently shifted into video.

Ann Torke drove across country with sheets of acetate attached to her car. The residue from the trip, including dirt, insects, windshield wiper swipes, a license plate, and dried water droplets, collected on sheets juxtaposed with maps captures the experience of travel. Torke’s “The Residue Series: Everyday Accumulation” at the Boston Sculptors Gallery continues her interest in framing the detritus from everyday life. Her work has been exhibited in venues like Art in General, New York, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, the Newport Art Museum, Newport, and de Balie Amsterdam.

Cat Mazza's Stitch for Senate, an initiative of knit hobbyists making helmet liners for every United States Senator, just reached number 41. Building on the tradition of wartime knitting, a practice as old as the American Revolution, Stitch for Senate revives this cultural trend by engaging with political officials about the war in Iraq. Using software developed by Mazza, hobbyists knit in solidarity to persuade elected officials to support the troops by bringing them home. All the senators will receive their own helmet liner before the 2008 Senate race, after being displayed in the seating chart of the US Senate at a Washington DC venue.

Elizabeth Marran’s colorful tiny abstractions won the Mary & Maxwell Desser Memorial Award for painting at the venerable National Academy Museum in New York City in the 183rd Annual Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, “an exceptional selection (currently on view) of contemporary works by over 125 of the finest artists from across the country.” She conceptualizes her abstract images within a psychological framework where she references the relationship between order and chaos, discipline and lack of restraint, intention and accident. Her work is owned by collections that include the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Albertina Museum in Vienna, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and Boston Public Library. “The abstractions of Elizabeth Marran continue to reshape definitions of painting,” according to a review of the exhibition in ArtCal.

Margaret Hart (UMass Boston art department chair) has had an extensive list of exhibitions and involvements across the United States. Identity formation and the nature of the individual have always been central to her work. From this perspective, she uses different technology and materials to explore the interior and the exterior, and what's caught in between. Her “Tying the Knot" series represents the rocky transitional period as a person's emotional identity evolves from a singular perspective to the incorporation of another’s point of view. "The struggles of communication and self-reflection I dealt with are embodied in three key phrases; 'Walking on eggshells', 'Knots in my stomach', and 'On pins and needles',"according to Hart.

Wilfredo Chiesa has shown at over twenty-five solo exhibitions in galleries in the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, and Puerto Rico. His mural-sized fresco painting covering the front wall of the 15th-Century Church of San José in Old San Juan turned the front of the church into a spectacle of interplay between color, shadow, and texture, complementing the structure of the church. Chiesa’s paintings appear as a clear manifestation of the abstract artist’s unwillingness to directly reflect the known, but willingness to shed a light to the inner unknown.

The art faculty at UMass Boston often tell their students to treat their art as an author would treat writing - constantly revise their work up to a point where they feel satisfied with it - and then revise it some more. And, just as with writing, they assert that there are no boundaries whatsoever that should constrain what anyone's ideas of beauty and quality in art can be.

Are art professors stuffy academicians? At least not at UMass Boston. The art faculty are dedicated teachers of art and serious and dedicated artists as well. Their work also reveals that they, much like their own students, are passionate, growing artists engaged in the process of experiment and discovery.