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Event Archive
Fall 2023
Welcome Back ART Party with pizza, snapshots and SWAG bags
Wed. Aug. 30, 4:45-5:45pm
Upper Monty Commons, Montgomery Hall
Attention: Current and Prospective Art Majors and Art Minors! We want to welcome you back to campus on Aug. 30th 4:45 – 5:45 with a chance to get to know one another and an opportunity for us to share news about the 2023-2024 academic year over pizza, snapshots, and Art major gift SWAG bags. So mark your calendars! For your reference, note that Sue Johnson is incoming department chair. Tristan Cai has returned from sabbatical. And welcome back to Mary Claire Nemeth, Betsy Kelly, and Rachel Heiss, AND in a new full-time position, Katia Meisinger as the department’s Art Studio Coordinator. New to the department is Layla Thompson-Koch. See you on the 30th @ 4:45 in Upper Monty Commons, Montgomery Hall!
Collaborative artist talk: Nancy McFalls ’95 and Shel Spangle ’95
Tues. Oct 3, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Two SMCM alums return to the College to create new work in The Artist House, visit classes and meet with current students. They will give a joint public lecture that describes their life journeys since graduation that include making art, international business, K-12 art education, UX and software design, world travel, entrepreneurship, and a mural business.
Collaborative Residency: October 2 – 9, 2023
Nancy McFalls ‘95
NANCY McFALLS ’95 graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 1995 with a major in Human Development while also studying Art. She earned an MBA in International Business from CIMBA. Nancy has 25 years of experience leveraging software to solve challenges in multiple industries with an entrepreneurial approach to business analysis, design, consulting, training, and leadership. She also has an art business that focuses on mural painting for a variety of public and private locations. She is currently a Senior Product Manager – Tech for Amazon Web Services in Arlington, VA. Previous positions include work as a project manager for NTT, Ltd., a User Experience Designer with Design for Context, and a software designer for Personify Corp among other positions.
Shel Spangle ‘95
SHEL SPANGLE ‘95 is a teacher and artist based in Baltimore, Maryland. She has been an educator in public schools in Oregon, Washington, and Maryland for over twenty years and currently teaches visual art at Sherwood High School in Sandy Springs, MD. Over time, Spangle has had the opportunity to mentor multiple teachers new to the profession, to travel to England, France, Spain, Greece, and Italy with art students and to study Spanish in Mexico with other teachers. She says, “I love bringing the light, the colors and the textures from my travels near and far to my work and guiding new generations of students to continue to explore their own ways of seeing the world around them. They are a constant inspiration.” Spangle holds a BA in studio art from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, an MEd from Portland State University and a Certificate in teaching English language learners from Loyola University of Maryland. https://shelspangle.weebly.com/about.html
Collaborative artist talk: Ruth Jeyaveeran and Elisa H. Hamilton
Mon. Oct. 30, 4:45-5:45pm Glendening Annex
In a joint lecture, Jeyaveeran and Hamilton will present their creative work that involves fibers and textiles, multi-media interactive installation, and socially engaged, community-based art that emphasizes shared spaces and the hopeful examination of our everyday places, objects, and experiences. While in residence at SMCM they will be working on a collaborative installation project to be shown on campus at the conclusion of their residency.
Supported by grants from The Arts Alliance, Lecture and Fine Arts Committee, Department of Art, and the Artist House Residency Programs.
Pop-Up Installation and Exhibition, Hallwalls, Montgomery Hall
Opening reception: Monday, Nov. 6, 4:30-5:30pm. Come and meet the artists! Refreshments will be served.
Collaborative Artist House Residency: October 26 – November 8, 2023
Ruth Jeyaveeran
“My work is based on traditional material practices. Drawing from my experience as part of the South Asian diaspora, I use fiber and textiles to examine the relationship between our bodies, the objects we use, and the natural world to confront feelings of otherness, alienation, and dissociation. The act of sewing, tying, and tangling fibers together is my attempt to remake and repair connections with my body, my environment, and my community.”
Born in Lusaka, Zambia, and raised in the Midwest, RUTH JEYAVEERAN lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent exhibitions of her textiles, soft sculptures, and installations include, Felt Experience at the Brattleboro Museum, Communion, an installation at Main Window Dumbo and Amplify, a public art installation at the Queens Botanical Garden. Her solo show, Soft Remains, will be exhibited at Field Projects in New York in 2023. She’s been awarded residencies at the Jentel Foundation, Lighthouse Works, Willapa Bay, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, La Napoule Art Foundation, and PADA Studios. Currently, she’s an Assistant Professor of Textile Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Elisa H. Hamilton
ELISA H. HAMILTON is a socially engaged multimedia artist who creates artworks and community-centered programs that emphasize shared spaces and the hopeful examination of our everyday places, objects, and experiences. Her work has been shown locally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions, and she has been the recipient of numerous commissions and grants to create artworks, community projects, and participatory programs. Collaborations include projects with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MA including Sound Lab, a community-centered participatory art project that was commissioned for inclusion in the exhibition “Listen Hear: The Art of Sound,” Creative Union, a community-centered participatory art project commissioned by the Currier Museum of Art, NH, Jukebox, permanent public art piece commissioned by the City of Cambridge, MA. Hamilton’s project Dance Spot has had many iterations and commissions including at Tyler School of Art. Hamilton earned a BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and an MA in Civic Media Art and Practice from Emerson College.
During her Artist House residency, Hamilton will highlight two projects: Can you see me? and Jukebox. Both projects focus on issues of identity and belonging, and hone in on the individual and collective aspects of being a part of a community. In addition to art, these projects connect to many subjects including oral history, archives, social justice, Black stories, multimedia storytelling, community activism, intergenerational learning, public discourse, and civic engagement. Can you see me? is a participatory art project that uses photography and image transfer as a vehicle for self-exploration. Participants are invited to reflect on visible and invisible aspects of their identity through the process of making and sharing their creations. Can you see me? invokes questions about how we are seen by others, who we really are, what we choose to share about ourselves. This project is installed in the Art Lab at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston from October 2022 to June 2023. Jukebox, a participatory public art project, transforms an original 1960 Seeburg jukebox from a machine that plays music to a machine that plays community stories. A number of the 100 Jukebox audio stories were recorded in partnership with the Cambridge Black History Project, an all-volunteer organization committed to researching, accurately documenting, preserving, and illuminating the journeys, accomplishments, and challenges of Black Cantabrigians. In addition, the recorded stories of Jukebox are part of the Archives and Special Collections in the Cambridge Room at the Cambridge Public Library. Hamilton was commissioned by the Cambridge Arts Council, City of Cambridge, as part of the Percent-for-Art Ordinance, to create a public art project responsive to the new Cambridge Foundry where Jukebox is permanently installed. Visit the Jukebox website to learn more.
Artwork Documentation Workshop
Wednesday, November 29, 6:00 – 8:00 pm @ Montgomery Hall 132
Group Exhibition – ART 430 Capstone I: Creative Practices in Art
Exhibition on view: Monday, December 4 – Saturday, December 9
Opening reception: Monday December 4, 4:45-5:45pm
Boyden Gallery and Upper Commons, Montgomery Hall
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 11am -6pm, and Sat 11am-4pm
Spring 2024
Michael Bargamian ‘13
Artist Talk: Wed. Jan 31, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Artist House Residency January 29 – February 11, 2024
MICHAEL BARGAMIAN ’13 is a visual artist who currently lives outside Baltimore, MD. While his initial artist practice encompassed drawing, digital media, and painting, since 2018 his practice and output has been dedicated to collage making. With some 400 plus pieces in this ongoing “project” he wishes to pursue and ensnare viewers with scenes from absurdist real-world scenarios, visions of what could be just around the corner, or landscapes and situations that could very well occur if we just stray a bit off the beaten path. The practice of making new work is just as rewarding to him as it is to share the images with others and see what they think or where the image takes them. Outside of his own art making interests he has worked for several local Maryland organizations including the Howard County Government, the Columbia Art Center, and the Walters Art Museum. He graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2013 and completed a Master of Professional Studies certificate from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. He currently works in Laurel, Maryland for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
Artwork Documentation Workshop
Wednesday, February 7, 6:00 – 8:00 pm @ Montgomery Hall 132
Taj Reed ’23
Artist House Residency February 12 – February 19, 2024
TAJ REED ’23 (b. Trenton, New Jersey) is a New York-based artist and photographer. He holds a self-designed BA in Art, Literature, and Human Behavior summa cum laude from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and is a candidate at Hartford’s International Limited Residency Photo MFA program.
Taj has exhibited work at Hercules Art Studio Program in New York City, Agony Books in Richmond, Virginia, St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s Boyden Gallery, and digitally through the Maryland State Arts Council. In addition, his images have been featured by Booooooom, Pomegranate Press, Pearl Press, and other digital and print publications. Taj has dedicated himself, through his work, to exploring the communicative and self-actualizing potential of pictures and letters, using his practice as a tool to reckon with selfhood, cultural consciousness, memory, and American institutions.
During his stay at the Artist House, Taj will be working on his project Tulagi Place (2022 – ongoing). As Reed explains, this project “reckons with the turbulent effects of neoliberal politics on one particular Southern Maryland community over time with respect to the associated ideological relation to history, land, and the economically vulnerable at large. On April 25, 2022, the St. Mary’s County Planning Commission voted 4-3 in favor of a concept site plan with epochal implications. The proposed plan will supplant 1.75 acres of land for a 16-pump fuel-and-convenience store project led by Royal Farms, a privately held, billion-dollar chain prominent throughout the Mid-Atlantic. The gratuitous project, opposed by community members and local business owners, will raze buildings along Maryland Route 235 and Tulagi Place, an area that has served as a cultural and social center for the riverine town since the 1940s when World War II politico-economic efforts ushered in the development of “Instant Cities.””
Artist Talk: Mary Claire Nemeth, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art (SMCM)
Tuesday, Feb. 13 @ 4:45-5:45 p.m., Glendening Annex
MARY CLAIRE NEMETH holds a B.A. in Visual Arts and Art History from Columbia University, an M.A. in Apparel Design from Cornell University, and an M.F.A. in Textiles from Indiana University. As an artist she works in painting, drawing, screen printing, collage and alternative photography and is interested in representing the spiritual through nature, the ethereal, the in-between spaces, the intangible. She recently received two artist grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and was awarded a residency fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. At St Mary’s, she teaches courses in painting, drawing, textiles, and art history. She is currently working on a body of work that combines digital printing on Tyvek, collage, painting, and sewing.
Collaborative Artist Talk: Katie DeGroot and Kylie Heidenheimer
Tues. March 19, 2024, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Artist House Residencies: March 18 – 24, 2024
KATIE DeGROOT was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan and attended New York University earning a B.A. and Illinois State University. She says about her work, “When we think of a tree we usually conjure up an image of a perfectly pruned tree, balanced and symmetrical. In nature those rarely exist. Trees are individuals. Trees grow to survive, adapting to their given environment, growing into strange shapes, producing oddly shaped limbs, becoming contortionists to get to sunlight, and bowing to the will of other larger neighboring trees. They grow in context to each other and their neighbors, adapting as best they can to the situation they find themselves in. In many ways they are similar to us, part of a larger community, whose varied geography and specific environments challenge and form us as individuals.”
Katie DeGroot first began painting fallen branches and limbs found on the ground, responding to their interesting shapes and the wonderful natural decoration that adorned them. Soon she was collecting branches and even large trunks, festooned by lichens, moss and mushrooms and bringing them back to her studio. At first working with only individual branches, (Katie considers them her “muses”) she created singular portraits. Soon Katie started arranging the muses to interact between themselves, responding to something specific in the gesture or attitude of the actual real object. While she uses the branches as an observational starting point, Katie responds within the language of contemporary painting, not trying to realistically represent branches as natural objects. While DeGroot uses watercolors, she is not a “watercolorist,” she is a painter. Working with watercolors has also led Katie to exploring the watercolor mono-print process. Some of the artists that Katie admires and who inform her as an artist are Gladys Niilson, Alice Neel, Morandi, Matisse, Charles Burchfield, Catherine Murphy, Barbara Takenaga, and Arlene Shechet just to name a few. For more information on the artist: https://katiedegroot.com
KYLIE HEIDENHEIMER makes abstract paintings and watercolor monoprints that wrest and twist space. She was born in Gainesville, FL, grew up in St. Louis and moved to New York City where she went to Hunter College and earned her MFA. She has a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. She has a studio on The Lower East Side in NY and also works in Upstate New York. Her work has been in solo shows at J.C. Flowers & Co, Thomas Jaeckel Gallery and The Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York City as well as at Galerie Gris in Hudson, NY and Ohio Northern University in Ada, OH.
Heidenheimer won a Mercedes Matter New York Studio School Alumni Award in 2021 and a Jason McCoy Gallery Drawing Challenge in 2020. She was a Janet Sloane Resident at Yaddo in 2020 and also attended Yaddo in 2016 as well as prior residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Anderson Center of Disciplinary Studies, and The Millay Colony. Heidenheimer has shown in group exhibitions in New York City at Waterhouse & Dodd Gallery, O’Flaherty’s, 56 Henry Gallery, Thomas Jaeckel Gallery, Station Independent, The Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College, Equity Gallery, Feature, Inc. and Storefront Bushwick. She has exhibited regionally and nationally in group shows at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, Furnace Art on Paper Archive in Falls Village, CT, Joyce Goldstein Gallery in Chatham, NY, Indiana University’s J. Irwin Miller School of Architecture in Columbus, IN, The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY, UT Knoxville’s Downtown Gallery and The Kleinert James Center, Woodstock. For more information on the artist: https://www.kylieheidenheimer.com
Merrill Mason
Artist Talk: Wed. April 3, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Artist House Residency: April 1 – 27, 2024
MERRILL MASON has balanced a career as a museum administrator and a practicing artist for over 40 years. She graduated cum laude from Yale in the first undergraduate class to include women (1971) and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduate school she became a project coordinator at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia and eventually the head grant writer. In 2007 Mason moved to the American Philosophical Society as Director of the APS Museum where she oversaw exhibitions curated from the Society’s renowned collection of over 13 million manuscripts plus rare books and paintings. Throughout her years as a museum administrator Mason continued to produce artwork and to exhibit. Examples include Quilt National, Award of Excellence; multiple residencies at J.M. Kohler’s Arts Industry program; and a commissioned permanent bathroom installation at the J.M. Kohler Museum. She was adjunct faculty at University of the Arts and Maryland Institute College of Art, and a Visiting Artist at schools such as Cranbrook Academy of Art, University of the Arts, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently Mason works in multiple media including photography, textiles, and poetry. She is working on a quilt using Charles Darwin’s manuscripts of On the Origin of Species. She is also creating a series of smaller pieces using Darwin’s scientific notes. Mason’s studio is in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. For more information about the artist: https://www.merrillmason.com
Spring 2023
Through the Lens: Defining Community Through Photography
December 16, 2022 – January 29, 2023
Opening Reception: December 17, 2022
Lexington Park Library, Lexington Park, MD
In recognition of the increasing urgency to address equity issues, and to give voice to underrepresented communities, St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s Division of Inclusive Diversity, Equity, Access, and Accountability (IDEAA) and the Art and Art History Department, in a joint initiative with St. Mary’s County Arts Council, launched a photography mentorship program called Through the Lens in 2021. This free-to-participate program is a hands-on learning opportunity for underrepresented youths ages 16-18 (grades 10-12), led by Visiting Assistant Professor Elizabeth Kelly and assisted by St. Mary’s College student mentors Taj Reed ’23 and Khang Doan ’25. Participants will reflect on their communities and voice their concerns through photography. The participants’ artwork will be displayed from December 16, 2023, to January 29, 2023, at the Lexington Park Library at 21677 FDR Blvd., Lexington Park, MD, 20653.
Carrie Patterson: Sight to Site
January 24 – March 11
Steven Muller Distinguished Professor in the Arts Event
Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Guest Curator: Dr. Erin Peters
Opening Reception and Artist-Scholar’s Talk: Tues. January 24, 6:30-8:30pm, Artist Talk at 7:30pm
Catalogue pdf
Travel with painter Carrie Patterson on an artistic journey of process: roam and ramble through six continuous and connective parts of her practice in 35 artworks, many of which are shown publicly for the first time. Experience how Patterson constructs landscapes as complex and poetic objects, and envision how you would create your own.
Artist Talk: Elizabeth Kelly, Visiting Assistant Professor of Design and Photography
Wed. February 8, 2023
4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Elizabeth Kelly is a photographer and art educator based in Philadelphia, PA. Working primarily in traditional and alternative process photographic techniques. Her current work features large cyanotype prints on a variety of fabrics, audio visual work, archival photographic manipulation using mordançage, wet and dry plate photography on tin and glass, traditional photo workshops and collaborative photo essays. She is interested in the ethics of portraiture and expanding access to traditional photo education. Focusing on addressing the importance of art education on early expression and sense of self in children who live in communities with limited access to the arts. Kelly has been working to build a comprehensive traveling traditional photographic studio and workspace so she can expand her educational practice beyond the walls of the darkroom.
Kelly’s work addresses the human experience and the individuality of the communities and people in her photographs. Though her work may initially seem to cover many different subject matters ranging from the duality of self to the building of Pier no. 9 in Philadelphia, each project offers a look into a community, living or dead, through their images and their narrative history. Each of her bodies of work include or are fully composed of photographic prints and images made using traditional film photography or 19th century and contemporary alternative process image making techniques while addressing themes that have an impact on the contemporary art conversation.
Artist Talk: Maxine Payne
Wed. February 22, 2023
4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Maxine Payne is a photographer living and working in Arkansas, where her grandparents raised her. She received her M.F.A from the University of Iowa where she was also an Iowa Arts Fellow. Maxine was selected a Fellow of the American Photography Institute at New York University, as well as a Fellow of the College Art Association. Currently a Professor in the Art Department at Hendrix College, she works to find ways to engage community in her work and speaks to the idea of place. Maxine was awarded the 2013 National Museum of Women in the Arts, Arkansas Fellowship for her photographic work. Her collaboration with Alabama Chanin launched in Spring 2014 and her book “Making Pictures: Three for a Dime,” was published by Dust-to-Digital in 2015. Currently, Maxine shares the Margaret Berry Hutton Odyssey Professorship with author Tyrone Jaeger. Their collaborative project with Hendrix College students and alum, called Audio Visual Arkansas, focuses on collecting digital stories about Arkansans and can be seen at AVARK.net. She has also collaborated with anthropologist Anne Goldberg documenting the lives of rural women in Costa Rica, the U.S./Mexico border, Africa, and Vietnam. In 2017, Maxine collaborated with biologist Matthew Moran to document the environment and people of the “Big Woods” region in Arkansas. She has photographed hundreds of Arkansas Historic Bridges for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department since 2004. Maxine has continued her curatorial work with two historic photographic archives, the Massengill family photographs and the photographs of Ellie Lee Weems, both of which are included in The High Museum of Art’s 2023 exhibition and publication Photography and the American South since 1850. Her work can be seen at www.MaxinePayne.com.
Maxine will be in residence at the Artist House February 19-24, 2023. This residency and lecture are supported by the Artist House Residency Programs and the Department of Art.
Artist Talk: Dafna Steinberg
Wed. March 1, 2023
4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Dafna Steinberg is a lens-based artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. Her work embodies themes such as grief, personal intimacy, and gender. In the spring of 2022, she graduated from Moore College of Art & Design with an MFA in Socially Engaged Studio Art. Her thesis work examined at how artists can use photographic self-portraiture as a form of social practice and the gender dynamics of selfies during the first year of the COVID pandemic. Before tackling her MFA program, Steinberg worked as an adjunct studio art and photography professor at Northern Virginia Community College. In addition to teaching, Steinberg has been an exhibiting artist for over 15 years. Her work has been shown at institutions such as Grizzly Grizzly, LeMieux Galleries, Indianapolis Art Center, the Puffin Cultural Forum and the International Center of Photography.
“My current work focuses on grief after the death of my father and the experience of rediscovering intimacy in a post pandemic world. I am working on a series that documents my life in 2020 and 2021. Using photography, text, sound and object-based installation, I am showing my own experience with grief after the death of my father. My work aims to show how grief is pervasive and can affect new experiences with touch and intimacy in a post pandemic world. I would like to continue working on this project.
This exploration around myself and my body continues in my present projects. For much of my artistic career, most of my work has been creating self-portrait series. The themes of these works have varied but have all connected to my own personal experiences. While these images are meant to reflect my own life, there is always an element of make believe. Fact and fiction are not a binary, but rather a spectrum. My work plays with that line. I am interested in blurring the lines between fact and fiction to create personal visual stories that are relatable to a larger audience.”
Dafna will be in residence at the Artist House February 27 – March 10, 2023. This residency and lecture are supported by the Artist House Residency Programs and the Department of Art.
Art History & Art Capstone II Presentations
Monday, May 1, 2023 @ Boyden Gallery
Art History: 11:00 – 12:30 pm
Art: 1:00 – 4:00 pm
Schedule:
Art History St. Mary’s Project Presentations
Mentor: Joe Lucchesi
11:00 am – 11:30 am
Mary Richardson – Laborer, Artist, Athlete: Changing Cultural Perceptions of Ballet Dancers in 19th and 20th Century Visual Images
11:30 am – 12:00 pm
Katherine thor Straten – Contemporary Artists and Utopia: The Use of Science Fiction as a Response to Institutional Oppression
12:00 pm – 12:30 pm
Kathryn Dennis – Behind the Veil of Colorblindness: Seeing and Not Seeing Race in French and American Visual Culture
LUNCH: 12:30 – 1:00 pm
ART Capstone Presentations
Mentors: Sue Johnson (Fall ‘ 22) & Jessye McDowell (Spring ’23)
1:00 – 1:15 pm
Tony Rayo – Constructed Narratives: Examining Isolation and Identity Through Alternative Photography
1:15 – 1:30 pm
Ian Parsons – Building a Drawing: Collaging Scenes of the Self
1:30 – 1:45 pm
Todd Washington – Saying More By Saying Less
1:45 – 2:00 pm
Miranda Woodey – From Brushstrokes to Pixels: The Art of Healing
2:00 – 2:15 pm
Jessica Taylor – A Little Here, a Little There: Dabbling with Life and Spirit
2:15 – 2:30: BREAK
2:30 – 2:45 pm
Abigail Planta: Final Presentation
2:45 – 3:00 pm
Emery Moore – Playing Pretend
3:00 – 3:15 pm
Katie Koerper – Capstone Reflections
3:15 – 3:30 pm
Jessica Lane – Final Presentation
3:30 – 3:45 pm
Sam Boles – Storytelling and Self-Expression in Motion
3:45 – 4:00 pm
Meredith Bromley – Inspiration in Experimentation
4:00 pm – session ends
Pop Up Shop: ART 431 Capstone II
Tuesday, May 2, 2023 @ 12:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Lower Montgomery Hall
Affordable merchandise made by students in Capstone 2!
Fall 2022
Art and Art History Department Open House for Students
Monday, August 29, 11:30-12:30pm on the upper patio of Montgomery Hall
Rain location: Monty 135 classroom
There will be snacks!
Come by our Open House to hear about department news and upcoming events, learn about the Art major and minor, meet fellow art students and department faculty, get an Art Advisor if you need one.
Heesoo Kwon Artist Lecture
Monday, September 26 @ 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Heesoo Kwon is a visual artist and anthropologist from South Korea and currently based in Oakland, California. Kwon received her Master of Fine Art from UC Berkeley in 2019. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Et Al, San Francisco and CICA Museum and Visual Space Gunmulsai, South Korea. She has participated in group exhibitions at the CICA Museum; the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, UC Berkeley; Root Division, San Francisco; SOMArts, San Francisco; and Embark Gallery, San Francisco, among others. In 2012 Kwon received the Female Inventor of the Year Award from the Korean Intellectual Property Office. Her other accolades include the Young Korean Artist Award from the CICA Museum and the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize for Photos and Art Practice from UC Berkeley.
Co-sponsored by the Lecture and Fine Arts Committee, the Artist House Residency Program, and the Department of Art and Art History.
Lee Tusman Artist Lecture
Tuesday, October 18 @ 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Lee Tusman is an artist, programmer, and curator interested in the application of the radical ethos of collectives and DIY culture to the creation of, aesthetics, and open-source distribution methods of digital culture. He creates interactive media, artwork, software, bots, websites, virtual assistants, games, sound and radio stations alone and in collaboration. Areas of research and work include: decentralized networks, generative processes, sonification of data, alternative interface and performance tools, Linux and open source software, bots and digital assistants. He studied at Brandeis University and received his MFA at UCLA in Design Media Arts. He is a mentor for the Processing Foundation, a co-founder of Processing Community Day NYC, and an organizer at Babycastles gallery. Lee is host of Artists and Hackers podcast, and Assistant Professor of New Media and Computer Science at Purchase College.
Co-sponsored by the Lecture and Fine Arts Committee, the Artist House Residency Program and the Department of Art and Art History.
Chinese Landscape Painting: The Poetics of Space – Lecture by Dr. Celia Rabinovitch
Monday, November 7 @ 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
The landscape, broadly interpreted as nature, forms the source of inspiration for Chinese philosophy and art. The lecture uses key selections of Chinese poetry and sutras in translation to illuminate the themes of classical Chinese landscape painting of the Tang and Song dynasties that embody the poetic use of space to suggest sacred presence. We will discuss important paintings in Chinese art from archaic times through the Tang dynasty (618-907), when the arts flourished, and from the Tang through the Song and Yuan Dynasties (1279-1368) in album leaf, horizontal, and vertical scroll formats. Elements of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism inform Chinese art and provide insight into the traditional Chinese worldview. With an illustrated talk and selections from Chinese texts, we look at selected themes of Chinese art such as the centrality of nature and the landscape and the energy of calligraphy arising from Ch’an and Zen aesthetics. We will also comment on the unique tradition of the scholar-artists who developed art and landscape painting as a meditation on nature.
Celia Rabinovitch, an artist, writer, and scholar, holds a PhD in Chinese religions and modern art history (McGill University, Montreal), and an MFA in painting (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and has taught art and art history at major universities in North America. Her book, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art, (2003) uncovers the struggle between sacred and secular forces in art from prehistory to Surrealism, and cited by poets, artists, and historians and the book, Duchamp’s Pipe: A Chess Romance–Marcel Duchamp & George Koltanowski, 2020, uncovers the world of audacious bohemia through the intertwined lives of the Dadaist artist, Marcel Duchamp and the chess wizard, George Koltanowski. Her other publications explore connections among art, biography, poetry, and spiritual experience. She has written on contemporary Chinese art for Artweek San Jose, and for Metalsmith, and has taught courses on Chinese and Zen painting at the University of Colorado at Denver, Stanford University, and U.C. Berkeley. Influenced by Ch’an aesthetics and modern art, her luminous paintings have been shown in the USA, Canada, and Europe.
Workshop: Chinese Brush Painting with Dr. Celia Rabinovitch
Two short sessions (participants must attend the first session): Tuesday and Thursday, November 8 and 10, Montgomery Hall art classrooms 129 and 132, 12:20-1:35pm
Participation is free but requires registration. Email Professor Sue Johnson (srjohnson@smcm.edu) to sign up.
This workshop covers Chinese brushwork through ink and brush practice. The 2-part workshop introduces classical and modern brush practice where participants learn aspects of Chinese ink painting with free brush painting manuals as a resource. If you want to pursue the material further, you will have access to free online materials or pdf’s. In this workshop, Celia Rabinovitch shows how to paint circles, bamboo, chrysanthemums, and how to develop tones with ink washes or layers. We will look at how these influenced Western approaches in Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. As in Chinese brush practice, you will paint a visual rendition of a Chinese poem, copy a classical work, or practice brushwork. The last half of the workshop encourages students to collaborate by painting the connected areas of a large scroll. If you already have Chinese brush painting supplies, please bring them to use; brushes and ink will also be provided for this workshop to those who need them.
These events are co-sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, Arts Alliance of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Artist House Residency Program and the Department of Art and Art History.
Group Exhibition – ART 430 Capstone I: Creative Practices in Art
Exhibition on view: Monday, December 5 – Saturday, December 10
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 11am -6pm, and Sat 11am-4pm
Opening reception: Monday December 5:
- 4:30-5:30 in Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
- 5:30-6:30pm Open Studios in the Art Annex
Featuring work by senior ART majors: Samantha Boles, Katie Koerper, Jessica Lane, Emery Moore, Ian Parsons, Abigail “Gail” Planta, Tony Rayo, Taj Reed, Jessica Taylor, Todd Washington, and Miranda Woodey.
Spring 2022
Fundamental Regions: The Math/Art of Susan Goldstine
Exhibition opening and Susan Goldstine’s Steven Muller Artist-Scholar’s Talk: Monday February 21, 5 – 6:30pm
A Steven Muller Distinguished Professor in the Sciences Event
Boyden Gallery Exhibition, Montgomery Hall
Exhibition on view: January 18 – March 12, 2022
A Steven Muller Distinguished Professor in the Sciences Event
The Boyden Gallery invites you to experience the visual arts through the intellectual practice of mathematics with Susan Goldstine, 2019-2022 Steven Muller Distinguished Professor in the Sciences.
Susan Goldstine’s scholarship shows that symmetry is a way of transforming an object or system that preserves its essential structure through making artworks. The transformation sparks the process of scholarly and artistic discovery in creating mathematical ideas in physical form. As the tangible manifestation of this intangible process, the artworks on display are organized into three mathematical themes that help shape context and space. Follow the sequence in the seven artworks in “Growth,” observe the common structure in the thirteen works in “Symmetry,” and investigate the inspirations provided by a set of famous theorems about maps through the five artworks in “Topology.” We encourage you to search for the overarching theme of distilling complex systems down to their essences in textures, shapes, shadows, and movement in “Fundamental Regions.”
Boyden Gallery is located on the 2nd floor of Montgomery Hall of the St. Mary’s College of Maryland campus. Gallery hours are T-F 11-6 and Sat 11-4.
Photo-Documentation Workshop with Professors Tristan Cai and Jessye McDowell
Thursday, February 10 @ 4-7pm
Drawing Studio (Montgomery Hall 135)
Additional hours for artwork documentation will be offered by Visual Arts Technician Katia Meisinger (meet in the ARTH office suite, across from the Drawing Studio):
- Wednesday, February 16, 12pm – 5pm
- Friday, February 18, 10am – 3pm
Due to COVID safety precautions, please sign up for a time here, and limit each time slot to four people.
There are lots of opportunities for artists but almost all of them require that you have high-quality images for your artworks for applications, exhibitions, and online portfolios. In fact, here at St. Mary’s, it is the season for all sorts of calls for entry, including the Annual All-Student Show and Department of Art & Art History scholarships and awards.
Successful submissions begin with quality images. The Art & Art History Department is offering the opportunity for you to take images of your work in a workshop context. Professional lighting setup and cameras along with expert guidance will be provided.
Bring your artworks (2D and 3D) along to the workshop on Feb 10 to:
- Learn best practices for photo-documenting and scanning artworks
- Take high quality pictures of your artworks
- Learn digital editing tools to enhance your images
- Prepare to enter your work for exhibitions & awards
Power and Photography
Lecture by Tristan Cai, Assistant Professor of Photography, Department of Art & Art History
Wednesday, February 9, 2022, 12 Noon-1pm (via Zoom)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/87274383658
Meeting ID: 872 7438 3658
Passcode: 283227
In this lecture, Professor Tristan Cai will share his recent art project, The Aesthetics of Disappearance based on narratives of indentured servitude in colonial Southeast Asia and Pacific region. Cai will delve into his research materials and unpack present-day observations of the colonial legacies left by the British empire. He will also highlight the role which photography plays in historiography and how with creative appropriation of historical images, we can present alternative points of view and resist historical amnesia.
Assistant Professor of Photography, Tristan Cai is a 2021 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award winner, and an internationally active artist. His works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions at DECK, Singapore, Lucie Foundation’s MOPLA, Los Angeles, Phoenix Art Museum, Noorderlicht Photography Festival Netherlands, Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul and more. Cai has been serving as Assistant Professor of Photography in the Art and Art History Department at SMCM since 2016. Artist website: https://www.tristancai.com
SMCM All-Student Show
Exhibition dates: March 29 – May 7, 2022
Opening reception: Monday, March 28, 5:00-6:30pm
Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Submission deadline: Sunday, February 20, 2022
Check Boyden Gallery website for online submission portal link: https://www.smcm.edu/boyden-gallery/
Saul Ostrow: A career by chance
Wednesday, March 2 @ 12-1pm (via Zoom)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/87343496300
Meeting ID: 873 4349 6300
Passcode: 291838
Artist House Residency: March 1-15, 2022
Most often when people talk about their career – they represent it as a straight line: while in school they know what they wanted and went after it, end of the story… My career has been a roller coaster of chance encounters, each one opening the way to opportunities I had never imagined. This lecture is a brief account of that life.
Saul Ostrow was trained as an artist, and since 1990 has been known primarily as an independent critic, curator. Presently he is Art Editor at Large at Bomb Magazine. He has also served as Co-Editor of Lusitania Press (1996-2004) as well as the Editor of the book series Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture (1996- 2006) published by Routledge. In 2010, he founded Critical Practices Inc. an all-volunteer, non-profit organization whose projects include curatorial projects, open forums, and a broadsheet publication. His writings have appeared in numerous art magazines, journals, catalogues, and books in the USA and Europe. His most recent publications have included: Off-register: the work of Ivelisse Jiminez, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2018); A Rear View: Recent Works of Gustavo Prado, Ventriloquist Press, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2016); “The Art of Bearing Witness,” Dread Scott: A Sharp Divide, Rowan University; Adam Henry: Acceptance and Deferral, Meesen De Clercq, Brussels, Belgium; Cuban Women Artists, Donald and Shelly Rubin Collection, Lowe Museum, University of Florida, Miami, Florida; Boris Lurie: When to Say, No! Museum Janco, Tel Aviv and Gallery. Ostrow received his MFA in Art from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Since 1986, he has curated over 70 exhibitions in the US and abroad including: Here’s Looking at Her: Images of Woman from the ESK Family Foundation Collection, Mana Contemporary Art Center, Jersey City, NJ (2015); The Gravity of Sculpture, Dorsky Projects, NYC (2013); The Lure of Paris: American Abstract Artists in Paris 1950-59, Loretta Howard Gallery, NYC (2009); Modeling the Photographic: The Ends of Photography, McDonough Museum, Youngstown, Ohio (2007). His most recent project was Positions Matters at Galerie Richard, NYC and Minus Space, Bklyn (June, 2018). Forthcoming exhibitions are: Drawing on Likeness: Ivelisse Jiminez, Gustavo Prada, Lidija Slavkovicat the Hollywood Art Center, Florida (2020) and The Image in The Ground at Loretta Howard Gallery NYC (2020). Website: https://bombmagazine.org/authors/saul-ostrow
Activating your Imagination: The Flag Book
Bookbinding Workshop with Mara Adamitz Scrupe
Saturday, March 26 @ 10am-3pm
Montgomery Hall art studio classroom 129
Space is limited to 16 participants. RSVP to Sue Johnson at srjohnson@smcm.edu with the subject line: Flag Book Workshop.
The Department of Art & Art History and the Artist House Residency Programs will offer an exciting bookmaking workshop led by internationally known artist and educator Mary Phelan. The workshop is free to members of the SMCM community and Arts Alliance members. No previous experience is needed. This workshop is supported by a grant from the Arts Alliance and funding from The Artist House Residency Programs and the Department of Art and Art History.
Workshop Description
Based on a simple accordion book structure you will learn step-by-step how to create the innovative flag book. After a brief introduction discussing various structures used in contemporary artist books, you will make your own flag book. It is a versatile structure that allows you to attach drawings, photographs, text, fabric, or other materials to the flags in an open creative exploration that can be used as a catalyst for exploring and documenting your ideas in a compact portable book.
Mara Adamitz Scrupe Biography
Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a visual artist, writer and documentary filmmaker and the author of six prizewinning poetry collections and she has won, been shortlisted or nominated for many international poetry awards and prizes including Canterbury International Arts Festival Poet of the Year (UK), Forward Prize for Poetry (UK), Pushcart Prize (USA) Rubery Book Award (UK), Brighthorse Poetry Book Prize (USA), Grindstone International Poetry Competition (UK), Fish Prize (Ireland), Aesthetica Award (UK), Erbacce-press Poetry Book Prize (UK), Plough Prize (UK), Ron Pretty Prize (Australia), Periplum Book Award, Cornwall Festival Competition (UK), Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Award, (Australia), and National Poetry Competition (UK). Her cross-disciplinary creative work explores a terrain of psychic, emotional and physical kinship with the workings of the nature while reflecting on the many paradoxes of human nature and our interactions with the natural environment. Mara’s poetry and essays have been published in literary journals worldwide, her environmental installations, sculptures and artist books are held in international museum collections and her documentary films about rural places have won significant awards. She has received numerous creative grants and fellowships including MOZAIK Foundation EcosystemArtX Future Art Award, National Endowment for the Arts/CEC ArtsLink fellowship, District of Columbia (Washington, DC) Individual Fellowship, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and the Virginia Individual Artist Fellowship. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), and has been awarded residencies by the Montalvo Arts Center, the Irish Museum of Modern Art Residency Programme (Dublin), and USF Verftet-AiR/Bergen (Norway). She is Dean and Professor Emerita of the School of Art, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Website: www.scrupe.com
Artist Talk: Kyoung eun Kang
Wed. Mar 30, 12pm -1pm (Zoom)
Artist House Residency: March 25 – April 4, 2022
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/86521343549
Meeting ID: 865 2134 3549
Passcode: 637178
Kyoung eun Kang is a New York-based artist born in South Korea. She received a BFA and MFA in painting from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea, and an MFA from Parsons, The New School for Design, New York, NY. Kang works in a wide range of media, including live performance, video, painting, photography, installation, text, and sound pieces. Her work explores geographical and cultural identity and universal human themes such as affection and attachment, raising questions about how we foster and maintain human connection in an ever-changing world. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including Collar Works, NY; NURTUREart, NY; BRIC Project Room, NY; Soho 20 Project Room, NY; Here Arts Center, NY; A.I.R gallery, NY; The momentary, AR; The Korean Cultural Center, Washington, DC; Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Australia; Museum of Imperial City, China, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Korea. Kang has participated in multiple residencies, including at Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, NY; I-Park Foundation, CT; ChaNorth, NY: NARS Foundation, NY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, NE; Lower East Side Rotating Studio Program, NY,and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME. She is a recipient of fellowships at New York Foundation for the Arts, NY; BRIC Media Arts, NY; and A.I.R Gallery Fellowship Program, Brooklyn, NY.
Artist website: https://kyoungeunkang.com
This residency is sponsored by Lecture and Fine Arts Committee, Environmental Studies Program, The Artist House Residency Programs and the Department of Art and Art History.
Anna Niskanen and Amanda Lucia Côté Collaborative Lecture
Wednesday, April 20th, 12pm-1pm
Artist House Residencies: April 15-May 15, 2022
Lecture: During this lecture, Cote and Niskanen will engage in a dialogue with each other about their art practices. The conversation between the two artists will reveal the progress they have witnessed as young artists and close friends over the last 14 years.
Both of their works are based on visual studies of their environments: Niskanen’s artistic practice involves the examination of natural phenomena and Amanda works with the abstraction of urban sceneries in New York and Los Angeles. In addition, they will discuss collaboration, peer support and the artist-run space Kosminen in Helsinki, Finland.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/89403188185
Meeting ID: 894 0318 8185
Passcode: 543217
In painting, Amanda Lucia Côté follows a process of layering opaque and transparent layers to outline negative space, barriers and division. Focusing on fluidity between objective and non-objective imagery, she depicts shifting elements in defined space. Her work explores abstraction and observation in city environments drawing attention to gathered items, passages, temporary fencing and construction sites. Each work is a study in color, mixing in direct reference of naturally occurring pigments in landscape with the contrast of bright manufactured colors.
Born in New York, USA, 1990. Amanda Lucia Côté received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts. She has participated in Artist in Residence Programs such as NES Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland and Byrdcliffe Residency in Woodstock, New York. Côté has taught hand-building ceramics and pigment mixing workshops. Her works have been shown nationally in New York, Miami, San Francisco and internationally in Iceland and Finland. Côté lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Artist website: http://www.amandacote.com
This residency is sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program, The Artist House Residency Programs and the Department of Art and Art History.
Anna Niskanen (b.1990) is a Helsinki based Finnish visual artist. She graduated from Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture in 2017 (MA) majoring in photography and 2014 (BA) from the joined undergraduate program. She has exhibited in Finland, Iceland, China and Russia in solo exhibitions, group shows and festivals. Her works have been seen for example at Mänttä Art Festival, Lianzhou Foto Festival, Wäinö Aaltonen Museum, Porvoo Art Hall, Vaasa City Art Gallery and she will have a solo exhibition at Hippolyte Gallery in Helsinki in 2023. Niskanen has attended artist residencies in Paris and Reykjavík.
Niskanen is a member of the Finnish national Photographic Artists’ Association and the Association of Finnish Printmakers. She is also a founding member of collective, gallery and bookshop Kosminen in downtown Helsinki. In the past three years she has received multiple personal and collaborative grants both from Finnish government organizations and private philanthropic ones; most previously a one-year working grant for 2022 from Arts Promotion Centre Finland. Her travel to the St. Mary’s College of Maryland Artist House residency is supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Artist website: www.annaniskanen.com
This residency is sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program, The Artist House Residency Programs and the Department of Art and Art History.
Friday, April 22, 2022 @ 10am-12pm
Amanda Lucia Côté Workshop: Colors of the World
Kindly email Prof. Cai (jcai@smcm.edu) to sign up for this workshop, limited spots available.
Participants will be provided a hands-on learning experience in mixing pigments with oil and acrylic bases. Grinding and mixing pigments from natural materials will be discussed. Small samples of mixed paint can be taken home. No previous art experience is necessary for participants. The scheduling of this workshop will be done to facilitate ENST students interested in taking part.
Monday, April 25th, 2022 @ 11am -1pm
Anna Niskanen Workshop: Cyanotype
Kindly email Prof. Cai (jcai@smcm.edu) to sign up for this workshop, limited spots available.
In this cyanotype workshop, we will explore the surroundings and use local plants to create photograms in the sun. Each student gets to make their own cyanotype that they will be able to bring home. No previous art experience is necessary for participants. Seats are being saved in this workshop to facilitate ENST students interested in taking part.
Art History SMP & Art Capstone Presentations
Monday, May 2 @ Boyden Gallery, 1:00 pm – 4:15 pm
ARTH Presentations:
1:00 – 1:20 pm: Elise Evans: SMP 1 midyear presentation
1:25 – 1:55 pm: Seb Moffett: SMP 2 final presentation
ART Capstone Students:
2:00 – 2:15 pm: Alayna Dietz, “Beautiful Darkness”
2:20 – 2:35 pm: Briana King, “Relationships with the Self: Investigating Emotional Vulnerability”
2:40 – 2:55 pm: Rayna Klein, “Witchy Stuff: Gender, Identity, and the Spiritual Realm”
3:00 – 3:15 pm: Maggie Malia, “Flux: Capturing the Infinite Self”
3:20 – 3:35 pm: Sydney Rourke, “Exploring Beauty Standards through Portraiture”
3:40 – 3:55 pm: Lillie Spotts, “Visual Identity and Embodied Perceptions”
4:00 – 4:15 pm: Jamie Than, “Identity and Fantasy in Wig Design”
Fall 2021
Opening Reception & Artist Talk: Metropolis Scrolling with Eli Hill
Wednesday September 8 @ 5:00-6:30pm
Boyden Gallery Exhibition, Montgomery Hall
Exhibition dates: August 30 – November 20, 2021
Recent SMCM alum, Elijah Hill ‘21, excites and entices visitors to join him on an unorthodox journey with six large-scale paintings and twenty works on paper. Until November 20, Boyden Gallery is alive with neon electricity, while distinctly stratified with layers of complexity – surprising details await discovery.
The exhibition incorporates in-process video projection with music selected by the artist, so visitors become a part of Metropolis Scrolling with Eli Hill. Using a plethora of media, Eli translates his experience as a young black man raised in Washington, DC into imagery and sound. Relying on personal, distinct symbolism, he weaves a non-linear story of joy, chaos, resolve, and determination. This story captures mundane imagery and pop culture references to highlight humor, absurdity, and survival through gesture, marking, color, symbolic representation, and scale.
This body of work was created during a competitive summer 2021 St. Mary’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship under the mentorship of Professor Carrie Patterson and made possible by the Office of the Provost and the St. Mary’s Foundation. Boyden Gallery and Collection is supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council (msac.org).
Lunchtime Artist Talk: Mollie Schaidt, When Pigs Fly
Note: this lecture has been changed from hybrid to fully remote. Please join via the Zoom meeting info below!
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/87490698574
Meeting ID: 874 9069 8574
Passcode: 704985
Mollie Schaidt is a photographer and sculptor from Virginia. She recently earned her MFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Schaidt received her BFA in Photography and Print Media, and 3D Media with an emphasis in Sculpture, from Old Dominion University. She is concerned with systemic issues and social injustices impacting the lower socio-economic class in the United States. She examines the long-term effect of poverty on this population. Schaidt’s current ongoing project, When Pigs Fly, is an experiential and personal work depicting her family and their current condition in a cycle of poverty. Mollie is teaching photography classes at St. Mary’s College this fall.
https://mollieschaidt.com
Lunchtime Artist Talk: Meeting Ground Collaborative (Susan Main and MJ Neuberger)
Wednesday October 6, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Attendance for the lecture is virtual only.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/82860168306
Meeting ID: 828 6016 8306
Passcode: 663545
Artist House residency: Oct 4 -28, 2021
About Meeting Ground:
Meeting Ground is a collaborative collection of projects that considers the ground as a point of entry to shared space where interconnection between earth and self, individual and other is made visible. Artists, curators and activists Susan Main and MJ Neuberger invite participants to look down and attend to the spaces they walk upon.
Individual and collective actions in parcels of equal and finite measure are interwoven across distance and international boundaries while ritual impressions made in soil suggest reconnection to indigenous bodies. Haptic and visual experiences combined with geolocation and context encourage deeper exploration of the ground, light, air, and water we hold in common.
Meeting Ground collaborators Main and Neuberger were Project: Soils resident artists at SWALE House on Governor’s Island in 2019 and 2020. They received a 2020-21 Wherewithal grant funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of its regional regranting program and managed by Washington Project for the Arts. Their collaborative work brings together artists and non-artists through simple prompts that encourage co-creation and re-imagination of shared space. From Project: Soils porch chats, quarterly seasonal gatherings, and participatory acts of intention and attention, Meeting Ground explores the limits and possibilities of aesthetics to open up/decolonize/re-center a meeting with the ground. Through 2021, Meeting Ground projects are featured at Cultivate. More information can be found at https://www.meetinggroundprojects.org/.
Susan Main’s multi-disciplinary work explores individual and social contracts between space, time, and attention, pairing the unmediated event with tools that attempt to measure, define, locate, and orient. Using drawing, painting, video, projection, documentation, and collaboration, her work investigates the liminal, transitory qualities of attention and mediation. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at The Hillyer Art Space (Washington, D.C.); Hosfelt Gallery (San Francisco) and Peng Gallery (Philadelphia); a translocal telematic performance and collaboration with artists in Afghanistan; and selected group exhibitions at McLean Center for the Arts (Virginia), and “Wildland” at the Silber Art Gallery (Goucher College, Baltimore). Awards include a Juror’s Merit Award in the New American Talent exhibition juried by Lisa Phillips, a Full Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and the RTKL Fellowship. In addition to an active studio practice, Main is a curator, educator and currently serves as a Curatorial and Gallery Program Consultant at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland. She is the founder of Cultivate- an evolving collection of interdisciplinary artists, writers, and researchers driven by investigations of landscape, place, and the commons. www.susanmain.net
MJ Neuberger’s work arises from her ritual attempts to return to a body abandoned in childhood trauma and abuse that she traces in part to colonial history in her mother’s native Philippines. Referencing indigenous ceremonies and elemental processes, Neuberger’s installations, sculptural work, and images suggest acknowledging shared vulnerability and reconnecting with an indigenous, nature-based self as a path toward integrating traumatic memory and reoccupying colonized bodies.
Neuberger was active in Steve Cannon’s A Gathering of the Tribes, founded the Great Wide Open series of community-based collaborations, and her work has been featured at Art Resources Transfer and the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York as well as regionally and internationally. She has written for The Nation, Spin and the Village Voice, where she solicited work from Hilton Als, Lisa Jones and Gary Dauphin, whose essay is cited in bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. mjneuberger.wordpress.com
TWO outdoor events on SMCM campus with Meeting Ground:
Meeting Ground (artist and activist team of Susan Main and MJ Neuberger) will lead two events for the campus community with coordination and collaboration from the Wellness Center, Office of Sustainability, Environmental Studies Program, The Department of Art & Art History and The Artist House Residency Programs.
Meeting Ground invites you to ground yourself individually and as a simple, collective action that centers our relationship to the earth and to the complex history of the land beneath our feet.
To ground is to connect with the surface of the earth to become balanced and fully present in your body — to be here.
Tuesday, October 19 @ 4:00-5:00pm: Meet @ the grass lawn in front of Campus Center and to left of the Library entrance
Meeting Ground: Collaborative Space/Collective Action
Ground as Witness: Healing and history
Ground yourselves and hold space for all those impacted by the subjugation of enslaved and indigenous people by institutions of settler colonialism in local sites. Hold ground in common even as we acknowledge disparities in access perpetuated in many spaces through colonizing processes.
Commemorate with ephemeral evidence. Share and reflect.
Wednesday, October 20 @ 4:45-5:45pm: Meet @ River Center Lawn
Meeting Ground: Collaborative Space/Collective Action
Human and Nature: Reconnecting with the more than human
Grounding ourselves in the physical ground, the ecosystem of site, with the more than human. Coming into presence with ephemerality and cycles of the natural world. Share your ground (if you choose to) in words, images, song, sound…
Lunchtime Lecture by Dr. Celia Rabinovitch, Through Her Own Eyes – Surrealist Women Artists in their own words
(Frida Kahlo, Lucita Hurtado, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington)
Wednesday November 3, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Attendance is virtual only.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/84461435032
Meeting ID: 844 6143 5032
Passcode: 759326
Dr. Celia Rabinovitch’s lecture, Through Her Own Eyes, looks at the intertwining artistic biographies of surrealist artists who either originated or moved to North America, including Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Remedios Varo, who resided in Mexico. The talk includes references to major historical events and relationships between the artists. An artist and art historian, Rabinovitch has written two books: Duchamp’s Pipe: A Chess Romance – Marcel Duchamp & George Koltanowski (2020) – that also explores imagist poetry – and Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros and the Occult in Modern Art, (2003) – that looks at art as a state of mind – and many articles. https://www.duchampspipe.com
Artist House Residency: Nov 1 – Dec 15, 2021
Biography
Celia Rabinovitch is an artist and writer whose paintings of mood and luminous atmosphere evoke the uncanny. Shown in Canada, the USA and Europe, her art was selected for the Florence Biennale (1999) and Terra Infirma, an international exhibition on climate change, Dr. Bernard Heller Museum, New York (2018-19). Light, space and images of nature or the built environment – as if observed for the first time- inform her paintings. Her art weaves varied influences from contemporary life, imagist poetry, Chinese landscape painting, and modern art – especially cubism and surrealism, design, and history. Selected solo exhibitions include The Grotto Cycle at the Beck Center Museum, Cleveland, YYZ Artists Outlet, Toronto and the Jeanne Brewer Gallery of the University of California-Berkeley; Quattro, a four-person exhibition in Vienna of artists exhibited in the Florence Biennale; and at Canessa Gallery, UCSF Alumni House, and the California Institute for Integral Studies – all in San Francisco, as well as exhibitions in Boulder and Denver, Colorado, and in Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg, Canada. She was the John A. Sproul Fellow in Canadian Studies, Fine Arts, and Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley 2013; and artist in residence at the University of Victoria, Canada, 2016.
She earned an MFA in painting at the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in history of religions and art (Chinese religions and art, modern art history) at McGill University, Montreal, and has taught and directed university programs in Canada and the USA. Her art has received awards from the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony for the Arts, the California College of Art, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Canada. She has lectured at McGill University; and held positions as Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Theater, University of Colorado-Denver; Assistant Professor; and taught graduate and undergraduate painting and drawing in the Department of Studio Arts, College of Fine and Performing Arts, Syracuse University; Professor, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. She was a Program Director for Fine Arts, Music, and Graphic Design at the University of California, Berkeley (1992-2002); Instructor, Painting and Drawing, Cabrillo College, Santa Cruz (2000-2003) and Director and Professor, School of Art, University of Manitoba (2003-2008; Professor 2008-2020). celiarabinovitch.com
Lunchtime Artist Talk: Mary Phelan, Explorations in Text & Image
Wednesday November 10, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Attendance is virtual only.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/81919525262
Meeting ID: 819 1952 5262
Passcode: 597400
In this artist talk, Mary Phelan will present her creative work in printmaking and book art that portrays the geography of loss in images exploring the transition between darkness and light. Selecting fragments of images and reworking them produces an ambiguous moment where the image feels both recognizable and unknowable. The metaphoric visualization of this transition between life and death creates a sense of meaning and wonder.
Artist House Residency: Nov 1 – Dec 15, 2021
Biography
Phelan is Professor Emerita at University of the Arts where she was awarded the Cynthia Iliff Koehler Award for Distinguished Teaching. She was co-founder and served as director of the MFA Book Arts + Printmaking program and has been the coordinator in the undergraduate Fine Arts, Expanded Drawing and Print Media program. She received her MA in Printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BS in Art Education from the College of Saint Rose.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and been collected by many museums, libraries and universities, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt, the New York Public Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Primarily working in prints and book art her work portrays the geography of loss through images exploring the transition between darkness and light. After receiving a Visiting Scholar Residency, she conducted research at the American Academy in Rome.
Phelan has regularly taught workshops including at Penland School of Craft, Women’s Studio Workshop and the Artist/Teacher Institute. She has curated numerous exhibitions on contemporary book arts. Phelan has served as a board officer and member of the American Printing History Association and the College Book Art Association national organizations, and the Print Center and Second State Press in Philadelphia.
www.maryphelan.org
Activating Your Imagination: The Flag Book
Bookbinding Workshop with Mary Phelan
>> This workshop will be rescheduled for the spring semester – more info coming soon! <<
Workshop Description
Based on a simple accordion book structure you will learn step-by-step how to create the innovative flag book. After a brief introduction discussing various structures used in contemporary artist books you will make your own flag book. It is a versatile structure that allows you to attach drawings, photographs, text, fabric, or other materials to the flags in an open creative exploration that can be used as a catalyst for exploring and documenting your ideas in a compact portable book.
Experience and Identity: Capstone 1 – Creative Practices in Art Group Exhibition
December 6 – December 10, 2021
Opening reception: Monday, December 6, 4:45-5:45PM
Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Featuring work by senior ART majors Alayna Dietz, Rayna Klein, Maggie Malia, Sydney Rourke, Lillie Spotts, and Jamie Than. Diverse projects include experiential wig design, narrative illustration focused on identity, female beauty standards revealed through photography, contemporary depictions of goddesses, animation of female freedom and empowerment, and an exploration of gender through self-portraiture.
Spring 2021
Faculty Lecture: Emily Casey
Finding the Early United States at Sea: Cartography, Hydrography, and Nation Formation
Friday, March 12 @ 2:45 pm
Emily Casey will present recent research on the 18th-century Anglo-American atlas Atlantic Neptune, as part of a larger investigation of the role of cartography in the formation of the United States. During the talk, Emily Casey will share some of her archival discoveries relating to a specific edition of the atlas in the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the nation’s first successful lending library and oldest cultural institution, where she had a research fellowship this fall. She will reflect on how this research will fit into her book project, Hydrographic Vision: Representing the Sea and British America, 1750-1800.
All 2020-21 Faculty Lectures will use the same Zoom link: https://smcm.zoom.us/j/8623005159
Meeting ID: 862 300 5159
PW: 218157
Mike Tomassoni’s Virtual Birthday and Celebration of Life
Thursday, March 11 @ 7:00 pm
All are welcome to join.
Feel free to share with anyone who might be interested in attending. Anyone with this link can join!
Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84199877015…