Sotirios Michou 1936-2010

For almost three decades, from 1974 to 2003, Professor Sotirios Michou held the chair for crafts at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, where, even more importantly, he founded the new minor subject Fine Arts/Intermedia Design (IMG) for art educators. This new subject area, unique in Germany, would exercise a widespread and lasting impact on the field of art education. Michou (1936 - 2010), an autodidact, showed his first exhibitions in Karlsruhe in 1959. In the early 1970s, he taught artistic crafts at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. Michou began to incorporate the medium of video into his artistic work in 1970, and two years later he had his first job as theater director, at the Zimmertheater in Tubingen. Starting in 1974, Sotirios Michou taught a crafts class at the Stuttgart Art Academy, where he was appointed Chair of the Crafts Department three years later. In his almost three decades in his Stuttgart post, Michou developed the field of interdisciplinary design, theater and performance at the Stuttgart Art Academy into an academic subject for art educators that was recognized throughout Germany, attracting scores of students to Stuttgart.