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Alex Dotulong Turns Artist360 Grant Into Creative Momentum
Written By: Rachel Putman
When UAFS student Alex Dotulong applied for an , he hoped he’d earn some of the funds needed to upgrade his aging computer. Now that his award year comes to a close, he says the award actually gave him much more.
“Being awarded this grant gave me the encouragement that I needed after years of feeling that I reached stagnation in my practice,” he said. “It also offered me the chance to experience the grant application process for the first time.”
A senior graphic design major, Alex has spent the past year putting his $2,500 Artists 360 undergraduate grant to practical and creative use. He replaced his aging computer, which had become “a bottleneck” in his workflow, and used the time and tools it unlocked to push deeper into a blend of design, heritage, and research that now shapes his artistic practice.
“I have Katie Waugh to thank the most during the grant process,” he says. “She was eager to see students from UAFS be represented in a UA Fayetteville-dominated grant. She provided workshops to prepare us and brought in a representative from Mid-America Arts Alliance to talk to students who were interested.”
A Year of Practice
This year’s Artists 360 cohort was the first to benefit from “practice-based” funding—a shift that allowed artists to invest in their overall development rather than executing a single, grant-bound project. For Alex, that flexibility was key. Beyond upgrading his equipment, it helped him complete class assignments more efficiently, expand his studio research, and take on several design-heavy side projects—including a large-scale mural at the Fort Smith facility of Rheem Manufacturing Co.
His mural, titled Embrace, was chosen to accompany UAFS professor and muralist Bryan Alexis’ Flow in celebration of Rheem’s 100-year celebration here in Fort Smith. His design was selected from a pool of UAFS student submissions and painted with the help of his peers in the AIGA UAFS student chapter.
That team included Emerald Baker, Karina Juarez, Rylee Norris, Natalie Ophaso, and Ally Savage—all seniors in the Graphic Design program.
Working inside the Rheem facility gave Alex an entirely different perspective on public art. “Oh, it's very industrial,” he said, recalling the protective eyewear, steel-toed boots, and long days painting while machines rumbled nearby. “A lot of people working in the space would walk past and say, ‘this is a really cool thing,’ it felt really important.”
As he implemented his final design, he found himself thinking about how the work would be perceived from below. Employees at Rheem stand nearly 30 feet beneath the mural, so proportions and angles take on new meaning.
Alex compared this challenge to the intentional distortion in Michelangelo’s David. At its intended placement on the roofline of a Florentine piazza, the enlarged head and upper body were designed to look perfectly proportioned from a viewer’s low vantage point. The figure reads differently indoors because that original viewing angle was never used.
Alex has also been working on small works on paper, developing conceptual piece titled Power Hungry, Human Greed, an in-progress artist book that experiments with 3D printing, screen printing, and threadwork. He credits mentorship from Katie Waugh, chair of the Department of Art and Design, and Jay Fox, director of the soon-to-open Book Arts Center at UAFS with helping him bring the idea to fruition.
“I’ve been enticed to experiment outside of my comfort zone here,” he said. “I’ve been doing a lot of work on finding specific works and topics to research,” he said, “including Indonesian contemporary art and artists, post-colonial art, and how artists integrate their culture into their works.”
Since moving to the U.S. from Indonesia in 2015, Alex has always worked in design. He first encountered Adobe Photoshop in a seventh-grade classroom, and nearly two decades later, he’s focused on combining that digital fluency with a growing interest in post-colonial narratives, and cross-cultural storytelling.
“Last month marked 10 years since I left Indonesia,” he says, “and I have become even more keen to research Indonesian art and explore ways to integrate it with my work.”
In Power Hungry, Human Greed, Alex connects the imagery of power lines and expanding infrastructure to centuries-old colonial patterns. “Humans, even if they don't really think about it much, rely heavily on electricity nowadays,” he said. And as scars are carved into the earth to make way for electric poles through dense forests, Alex sees a connection. “That's how colonialism was, these empires basically carve through the communities and cultures that were originally there.”
As he builds this final project, he’s also writing a research paper on Indonesian contemporary artist Jumaldi Alfi and the ways his work engages with Indonesia’s colonial past. It all works together, he said.
“My intense passion to dive deeper into the history of art—and to become a catalyst to change the way the Western world views and displays non-Western art has become something I’ve thought about much more often throughout this year.”
Stepping into the Future
Alex credits the UAFS Art and Design Department with helping him prepare both his grant work and for the broader world of art and design beyond graduation.
“UAFS and its Art and Design Department have given me a lot of experience and resources to become a successful artist, graphic designer, art historian, and person after I graduate,” he says. “I am extremely glad to have chosen this place for my bachelor’s degree.”
Now, Alex is weighing possible futures that blend his design skills with his growing academic interests. He’s considering graduate programs in graphic design, with the goal of eventually teaching, and he’s increasingly drawn toward museum studies and art history with hopes to pursue a dual-degree in library information science with art history or PhD focused on non-Western art, particularly Indonesian contemporary movements.
“Non-Western contemporary art holds just as much weight as the contemporary art works seen in the museums across the United States and Europe,” he says. “But often, you only see relics of the past being displayed in sections dedicated to Asian or African art. I’d like to help change that.”
Media Relations
The UAFS Office of Communications fields all media inquiries for the university. Email Rachel.Putman@uafs.edu for more information.
Send%20an%20EmailRachel Rodemann Putman
- Director of Strategic Communications
- 479-788-7132
- rachel.putman@uafs.edu