In 2008, an overflowing Iowa River swamped the University of Iowa’s riverfront campus. In the wake of a flood that crested a foot above the school’s auditorium stage, art professor Steve McGuire found himself shepherding the school’s displaced studio arts program into a former Menards.
The disaster, however, also prompted a reconceptualization of the university’s programs. And McGuire—a sculptor with both a PhD on the philosophy of art-making, and an avid passion for bicycles—thought it an ideal time to bring bicycle frames front and center in the classroom.
“That first semester I had 17 students, one TIG welder, a torch, and one frame jig,” McGuire recalls. “And somehow we got through it.”
McGuire has only been teaching his handmade bicycle curriculum since 2010, but the underlying principle harkens back over a century, to the ‘Iowa Idea.’ In the 1920s and 30s, the University of Iowa endeavored to break down long-established barriers between ‘artists’ and ‘scholars,’ in the hopes of creating an incubator for interdisciplinary collaboration.
STEVE McGUIRE“No artist works in very strict parameters. They do a lot of investigation, over and over, and that investigation inevitably reaches across multiple fields. Those fields seep into their work and studio practice. In Iowa, that became a signature element of the education of artists.”
McGuire’s program—also known as “Design, Build, Ride”—has become renowned enough that some students apply to the university with every intention of graduating with both a diploma and bespoke wheels.
Others only learn of the program as freshmen, but end up re-engineering their college experience to ensure they take all three levels: Fabrication & Design: Hand-Built Bicycle I, II, and III. All three classes actually meet simultaneously, with a dozen frame jigs between them.
“I think having the three classes meet at the same time is really advantageous,” says John Richard, a local filmmaker. “I’m very interested in the dynamics of a one-room schoolhouse, where you have older students teaching younger students, and those younger students teaching even younger. There’s a waterfall of teaching.”
Richard, an Iowa City native, also first met the now 68-year-old McGuire in the classroom. This was back in the Reagan administration—making it not a university-level course, but a preschool one.
“I was old enough that I refused to get dressed, so my mom put a snow suit on me,” Richard recalls. “I remember being very hot in class. I don’t remember much of the art that I made.”
A lifetime later, McGuire approached Richard with the idea of filming a semester of handmade bicycle education.
“The bike class was an embodiment of Steve’s teaching practice,” Richard explains. “You teach people, from zero to sixty, how to build a bicycle in one semester. What else can you do?”
“Working with your hands mediates everything,” McGuire says. Many students stress that they’ll be the first to not complete the course for failing to learn TIG welding, but McGuire has yet to see it. “There’s something hugely rewarding with teaching people how to use tools. It gives them a level of confidence in just about everything else they do.”
McGuire, meanwhile, is currently preparing for another adventurous experience of his own: a 700+-mile, 22-day bicycle journey across Iceland. Upon arriving at their final destination, in the island’s Westfjords peninsula, McGuire and some of his students will release a weather balloon—built in the University of Iowa visual arts building—during the 2026 solar eclipse.