David Lobdell
David Lobdell is Professor Emeritus of Art at New Mexico Highlands University, internationally recognized sculptor, educator, and one of the leading figures of the contemporary cast iron movement. He founded the internationally acclaimed Iron Tribe Symposium in 2001, transforming Las Vegas, New Mexico into a destination for iron artists from around the world. A founding president and longtime board member of the Western Cast Iron Art Alliance, David has spent decades advancing cast iron art through teaching, exhibitions, public art, and community engagement. We are honored to have David serving as our local host for the 9th Biennial WCIAA Conference.
Isaac Sandoval & The Skillet
Isaac Sandoval is a multimedia artist living in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He received his BFA from New Mexico Highlands University and his MFA in Sculpture from Fort Hays State University. While school gave him the technical muscle, the work he makes now comes from lived experience, especially building and running The Skillet, the bar and restaurant he has owned for more than eleven years. It began as a 300-pound cast iron skillet sculpture before evolving into a surreal performance space where he would serve burgers inside an art installation. His studio sits next door, so most days he moves between painting, welding, cooking, and keeping the whole machine running on sweat, duct tape, and instinct.
The restaurant and the artwork continually feed one another. He paints the emotional weather of service industry life and makes sculptures from its psychic leftovers. Daily rituals, small disasters, and strange rhythms become devotional objects, internal organs, or jokes that cross the line and keep going.
Materials shift depending on what each piece needs—paint, plaster, resin, bronze, fiberglass, or cast iron. Metal casting, especially, changed how I think about making things. You melt something down, pour it into a mold, then crack it open and discover what made it through. That same idea runs beneath both his practice and his life. His job is simply to keep that portal open between what he is living every day and the world he is trying to build.
Rhiannon Scheidt -Highlands University
Rhiannon Scheidt is a contemporary sculptor and educator working in Las Vegas, New Mexico. She is an instructor at New Mexico Highlands University where she teaches sculpture, drawing, and design and is director of the Art Foundry at Highlands. Rhiannon learned sculpture and iron casting at East Carolina University where she earned her BFA in Sculpture. She has shown work both domestically and internationally while participating in artist residencies, iron pours, conferences, and teaching workshops. She was the 2023 Festival of Fire keynote speaker at Salem Art Works and has numerous works in outdoor sculpture parks throughout the country. Scheidt earned her MFA in sculpture and inter-dimensional studies at Alfred University while working with glass, steel, neon, wood, vinyl, natural fibers, and found objects. Her current experiential work creates immersive spaces of movement, light, and shadow and her cast iron work investigates the physical and psychological effects of time on the material world.
