What started as an illustration class assignment has turned into a money-making opportunity for Katelyn Goodman (’17) of Abilene.
A pop-card she created of Santa’s sleigh in flight is featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s new catalog and is also available for sale in the museum’s brick-and-mortar store on West 53rd Street in New York City.
Goodman, who graduated in May 2017 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, created the card as an assignment in Dan McGregor’s Fall 2015 Introduction to Illustration course for a contest.
McGregor heard about the competition through an ACU alumna, Erin Holland (’07), who works in art direction and design at the MoMA Design Store.
The contest provided a considerable challenge, McGregor said, “because it’s not just creating an appealing commercial image that folks will want to buy; it involves paper engineering – making mechanical features move and deploy smoothly and repeatedly – and making these features fold up into a card. It’s hard enough to create a flat image that looks good; it’s exceptionally challenging to make one look good in three dimensions. In many ways, this assignment for what’s traditionally a 2-D class crossed the boundary into sculpture.”
 
“In approaching the assignment, I wanted to combine my more traditional lens with the modernity that the competition might be looking for,” Goodman said. “For those reasons, I chose to do a more classic North Pole scene, but approached it with shape and color to give the card a more clean and angled contemporary look.”
Several of the ACU entries advanced through rounds of approval, including Goodman’s. “After the first round I thought my card had been dropped, only to find out a few months later that it was moving on to the final round. I was thrilled when I found out I was chosen,” she said.
“I’m thrilled for her,” McGregor said. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer, more humble and hardworking student.”
Goodman will receive royalties from sales of the card, but she is more excited about her work being featured by one of the most prestigious markets in the art world.
“I wouldn’t say I think of it solely as a money-making opportunity, although that aspect is definitely a benefit,” she said. “Just to be mentioned in the same sentence as the MoMA was an honor for me.”
READ MORE in a feature in the Abilene Reporter-News