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Melissa Dean, multi-media artist

July 4-23

Melissa Dean received a B.A. from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she majored in studio art with a concentration in alternative photography. Her senior work earned the Frank McCutcheon award from the Department of Art & Art History, established for a senior student who shows promise as an artist. Currently, her work primarily consists of lithographic prints, combining text and imagery to portray collective memory and archived experience, while exploring the physicality of the art object. Her work has been shown in several galleries in Maryland and Washington DC, has garnered awards in juried exhibitions and is held in private collections. In Fall 2004, Dean will begin the M.F.A. program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Professionally, Dean has worked for the non-profit art studio Pyramid Atlantic, taught Digital Arts at a DC high school and photography at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop.

Claire Watkins, sculptor

August 2-22, 2004

Claire Watkins received her M.F.A. in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004. As an undergraduate student, she studied in the fiber department at the Kansas City Art Institute. After obtaining a BFA, Claire lived in New Mexico, where she made and exhibited art while co-owning a small manufacturing business. She now lives and works in Richmond, VA.

Erick Johnson, painter

August 28-September 23, 2004
Artist Talk: Monday, Sept. 13, 8:30pm, Library 321

Erick Johnson is a New York based abstract painter whose current work “investigates the versatility of the calligraphic gesture as a carrier of compound meaning, simultaneously referencing natural and psychological phenomena, reflecting the fleeting and the fugitive as well as concrete physicality. Abstraction bridges the gap between actual experience and actual material, both of which are becoming increasingly rare in our current condition.” Johnson received an M.F.A. in painting from Bard College in 2004 and a B.A. from Empire State College in 1999, and studied in Lacoste, France with the Cleveland Institute of Art program. He was recently in the exhibition, "Band of Abstraction," at the Van Brunt Gallery in New York City and "Finesse," at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and his work has been shown in several one-person exhibitions including shows at the Salena Gallery of Long Island University and P.S. 122. He has been awarded residency fellowships by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center.

Charlene W. (Suny) Monk, fiber artist

September 27-October 8, 2004

Suny Monk is trained as a ceramist and for the last twenty years has produced one-of-a-kind wearable art and has been a partner in a clothing design and fabrication business. Since 1997 Suny has served as the Executive Director of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts located in Amherst, Virginia, a working retreat for professional writers, artists and composers that provides time and space to pursue their work. She earned a B.A. from Marietta College and an M.F.A. from Ohio University. Formerly, she taught art for independent and public schools and was a partner in a fine jewelry and crafts gallery in South Carolina. She has exhibited both ceramics and fiber art at Phoebus Gallery, Hilton Head, S.C., at Marietta College, Marietta, O.H., and at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Most recently, she was a resident at Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, I.L. She has served as a panelist for the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and as a consultant for the Appomattox Governors School for Arts and Sciences. She is a board member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Lynchburg, Virginia and Virginians for the Arts, a statewide advocacy group for arts and artists. She is also a member of the board of Alliance of Artists Communities.

Craig Pleasants, sculptor and installation artist

October 11-21, 2004
Gallery reception and artist talk: Monday, Oct. 18, 5-6pm, Boyden Gallery

Craig Pleasants’ has worked in a variety of media over the last twenty-five years. His sculptures and installations have been shown at The Alternative Museum, White Columns, Artist’s Space and Berland/Hall Gallery in New York City, the Musee d'Art Contemporain in Marseille, France, Washington Project for the Arts, in DC, Maryland Art Place, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Jersey City Museum. His artists books are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and his interactive multi-media piece The Three Little Pigs: as it was originally passed into English folklore in 1620 is one of the longest-running artworks on the world-wide web, having originally launched in 1996. He has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the South Carolina Arts Commission, and Art Matters. He is the Program Director of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a former board member of the Alliance of Artists Communities and a current board member of Riverviews Artspace, an artist’s live/work building in Lynchburg, Virginia. Pleasant’s work will be on view at St. Mary’s College of Maryland as he creates a site-specific installation piece as part of the Boyden Gallery exhibition, HOUSE (October 18 – November 13, 2004).

Kate MacDonnell, photographer

October 25-November 12, 2004
Artist Talk: Thursday, October 28, 8:30pm, Library 321

Taking advantage of the objective nature of the camera, Kate McDonnell makes images of un-peopled domestic and public interiors. Looking for a balance between familiarity and anonymity, she shoots the in-between places of home focusing on the personalized touches created by the inhabitants of these often standardized environments. In a connected body of work, she focuses on the in between times of travel. McDonnell is from Upper Marlboro, MD and currently lives in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.F.A from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. In 2004 she was awarded a young Artist Program Grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and her photographs have been included in exhibitions at the WPA/Corcoran, Woodstock Center for Photography and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Vesna Pavlovic, photographer

November 15-December 10, 2004
Artist Talk: Wed. Nov. 17, 8:30pm, Cole Cinema

Born in Yugoslavia in 1970, Vesna Pavlovic lives and works in Belgrade. She graduated in cinematography studies at the Academy of Drama Arts in Belgrade. Her work has been exhibited widely, including sixteen solo shows and numerous group exhibitions. Contributed to various collaborative photographic, video and art projects, such as Sadness, Winter Diary, L'origine du Monde, White Light/White Hit, Crossover and Zombie town. Awarded by the 40th October Salon in Belgrade in 2001 for her series of photographs: Herzlich Willkommen im Hotel Hyatt Belgrad, April 1999. In 2003 commissioned by European Cultural Foundation to co-ordinate the Art For Social Change network joint art project titled The BookProject, http://www.thebookproject.net/, presented at the Almost Real conference in Centraal Museum in Utrecht in March 2004.

Susana Viola Jacobson, painter

January 14-February 2, 2005
Artist Talk: Monday, Jan. 24, 8:30pm, Library 321

Susana Viola Jacobson earned a B.F.A. at the University of Utah and a M.F.A at Stanford University. She teaches graduate painting and graduate seminars in drawing and color/collage, undergraduate Visual Studies and has co-taught interdisciplinary courses on public art and Las Vegas through Architecture and Historic Preservation at UPENN. She has previously taught at Yale University, the University of Iowa, Stanford University and Humboldt State University, she has also been a Visiting Artist at The Vermont Studio Center Press (2001), Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation (1999), Yaddo (1992), The University of Georgia in Cortona, IT (1984) and the Roswell, Museum & Art Center (1982-83). Her awards include an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Grant (1992), an NEA Individual Artist’s Grant (1984)) and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Scholarship (1970). Her work is included in the collections of Anderson Museum of Modern Art, the Roswell Museum, Banker's Life Insurance Company, Principal Financial Group National Headquarters, the Humboldt Area Foundation, Stanford University, the Salt Lake Art Center. She has been a visiting critic and speaker at numerous universities, exhibited throughout the U.S. and is a USFSA bronze medalist in ice dancing.

Noah Angell, photographer

February 14-25, 2005
Artist Talk: Tues. Feb 15, 8:30pm, Library 321

Noah Angell is a young artist currently living in Washington DC, who makes performative and time-based works spanning diverse media - video, performance, sculpture and combinations thereof. These works are often concerned with topics such as anonymity, questions of language and interpretation, and methods of communication and signification found in pedestrian space. Angell earned a B.F.A. from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and studied art at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Recently he has been a guest critic at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Linnea Paskow, painter

March 3-16, 2005
Artist Talk: Thurs. March 3, 8:30pm, Library 321

Linnea Paskow’s work deals with memory and longing. It often pertains to the place she grew up and the light and the tidewaters areas of St. Mary’s county. In the studio, she recreates fragments of these places with collage and drawings and subsequently turns them into paintings, distilling what was important about an event and particular moment. She is currently working with “the strange convergence of the memory and the reality, astonished at the distortions of time and interpretation.” Paskow received a B.A. in fine arts from Haverford College in 1998, studied painting, drawing and printmaking in Italy at the International School of Art in Montecastello and at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence. In 2002 she received an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Pennsylvania. She was awarded a Deborah Lafer-Scher grant from Haverford and two residency fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been recently exhibited at the Painting Center in New York City and at the Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.

Kira Lynn Harris, multi-media installation artist

March 21-April 8, 2005
Artist Talk: Mon. March 28, 8:30pm, Cole Cinema
Additional Talk: Mon. April 4: Black Art at the Millennium, 8:30pm, Cole Cinema

Living in New York City since 1998 Kira Lynn Harris is a native of Los Angeles, CA. She is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1999. Currently a member of the artist group, Nomads and Residents, she was a 2001 – 2002 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Other residencies include Art Omi in upstate New York and World Views at the World Trade Center, a residency program through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. An artist whose minimalist work often posits an intersection of the formal concerns of space, light and the phenomenological with issues of individual subjectivity as well those of culture, race and gender, Ms. Harris has won several awards including a 2003 Artist in Residence (video production grant) from Harvestworks in New York, California Arts Council Artist in Residence grants and the 1998 Lorser Feitelson Emerging Artist award. Ms. Harris has been exhibiting her art widely in the past several years; her work has been shown in galleries and museums in California, New York, Washington, DC and in Italy. Her work has been favorably reviewed in New York Times, Flash Art, Time Out New York, zingmagazine, the Los Angeles Times, Artweek and LA Weekly among other publications.

Robert Seng and Lisa Hein, collaborative installation artists

April 11-29, 2005
Artists’ Talk: Wed, April 13, 8:30pm, Library 321

Robert Seng and Lisa Hein have collaborated on more than 20 site projects over the last eight years. The Manhattan-based artists are known for their zero-residue ideal of playful intervention. They have scrambled cabinets in a Brooklyn tenement, and light fixtures in Christie’s staircase. Institutional settings induce such wry critiques as the insertion of scattershot windows into riot-proof Brutalist architecture. In galleries, Seng and Hein treat the white cube like the inside of a skull, turning the space’s frame-like isolation toward the psychology of exposed wiring and lowered ceilings. Architecture becomes metaphor for the emotional economy -- making literal its barriers, its passages and displacements. Seng and Hein currently have site works on view at Johns Hopkins University, SUNY Purchase, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They received an Architecture Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2000. Robert Seng has created installations for Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park and Creative Time’s 42nd St. Project, all in New York. A Seattle native, he attended the University of Washington and Central Washington University on the G.I. Bill, earning an MFA in 1980. Lisa Hein had three one-person shows at Pat Hearn Gallery, NY during the 1990’s. She has participated in group shows at P.S.1, Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena in San Francisco, and Galerie Philomene Magers in Cologne. Born in Connecticut, raised in England and India (among other places), Hein graduated magna cum laude from Yale College in 1976.

Alonzo Davis, mixed media artist

May 16-June 10, 2005

Alonzo Davis’s art choices and world views are inspired by travel. It is through travel that he seeks influences, cultural centers, energies, new terrain and the power of both the spoken and unspoken. The magic of the Southwest United States, Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, and West Africa has penetrated his multi-faceted studio work. Davis works in series, which includes woven paintings, collage and prints. The creative springboards for these works are elements of quilts, hides and indigenous textiles. Davis is an experienced teacher and administrator, serving as the Dean of the Memphis College of Art (1993-2002) and Dean of the San Antonio Art Institute (1991-92). His work has been shown at Georgia Southern University, Perry Nicole Fine Art, Memphis College of Art, Louisiana Tech University, California State University, and he has created many public art commissions including Memphis Public Library, Hartsfield International Airport, River Beach Subway in Boston and the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.