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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…
Fall 2020
First Thursday Lecture Series
Sponsored by an Arts Alliance Grant
7-8pm EST via Zoom (Individual links below)
Boyden Gallery’s Fall First Thursday Lecture Series features the SMCM Art Collection, and is hosted in conjunction with the SMCM class Art History 440: The Gallery as Learning Lab
Each lecture will feature a 35-40 min presentation by the speaker, followed by a 15-20 min conversation featuring questions submitted by SMCM students. These conversations will be available on the Gallery’s website after the lecture.
First Thursday Lecture: Erin Peters
Director of SMCM’s Boyden Gallery and Fine Art Collection
Thursday, September 3rd @ 7:00 pm
Erin Peters will kick off the series with an Arts Alliance Members exclusive introduction to the sculpture in the College’s collection and fall semester activities.
Please contact the Arts Alliance at artsalliance@smcm.edu to request information for this lecture.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
Join or Renew SMCM’s Arts Alliance: https://www.smcm.edu/giving/arts-alliance/
Register in advance for this webinar:
https://smcm.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DQiklDGqQ7CrP6nhuDCEmQ
Art After Hours
Fridays 5:00 – 6:00 pm on Zoom
Meeting ID: 824 0250 3639
Passcode: Art2020
Art After Hours is a student-run live remote program designed to create a sense of community among art lovers and shine a light on artwork created by professionals, students, and hobbyists. If you are part of the SMCM community (student, staff, or faculty) and want to share your artwork or art experience, email Davita Fennell @ dmfennell@smcm.edu.
Upcoming spotlights:
- Interest Meeting: September 11
- Carrie Patterson: September 18
- Sue Johnson: September 25
- Emily Casey: October 30
- Jessye McDowell: November 6
Visiting Scholar Lecture: Alison Napier
“Batman, Catwoman, and the Museum Space”
Sept. 23rd at 6pm via Zoom
Superhero narratives do not have to engage in recent debates over the museum space as a racialized, colonized, patriarchal space to sell their stories. Traditionally, comics characterize museums as sacred civic spaces and institutions that function as cultural custodians and represent civilized society. Museum spaces are popular settings in Batman comics because villains view these sites as treasure houses and covet their contents. Batman’s role is to protect these museums, thwart criminals’ attempts to rob them, and restore institutional order in the wake of an attack. Since museums are complex cultural constructions that promote Western society’s patriarchal and colonial hegemony, Batman’s job is really to protect and reify an exclusionary cultural paradigm that promotes the Western worldview as “truth” and creates cultural “others” of non-Western peoples. His alter ego Bruce Wayne, an embodiment of white privilege, uses his status as an influential museum donor to co-opt the civic space, circumvent institutional rules, and assert his masculinity. In a strange about-face, Batman has become a problematic hero, while the morally and racially ambiguous Catwoman has emerged as a contemporary voice for the disenfranchised with storylines that address the class elitism and colonialism of museum institutions. Using depictions of museum spaces in Batman and Catwoman stories, this paper will demonstrate how comics and graphics are producing new narratives that attempt to expose and redress the legacies of colonization and patriarchal exclusionary norms.
First Thursday Lecture: Kimberly Cassibry
Historian of Ancient Art and Associate Professor at Wellesley College
Thursday, October 1st @ 7:00 pm
Kimberly Cassibry will speak on ancient casts and the politics of replication in relation to the College’s cast collection.
Zoom link to join the webinar:
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/97700746136
Passcode: 318750
Visiting Artist Lecture: Ophir Agassi
One to the Next
Wednesday, October 28 @ 8:00 pm via Zoom
Ophir Agassi will present work from his recent exhibition at The Painting Center in NYC. In these works, Agassi will discuss his exploration of archetypes that have accompanied humanity from time immemorial and engage the unprecedented transformations we are experiencing in our contemporary society through an investigation of the unexpected possibilities that arise when the identity of an archetype is allowed to shift. Karen Wilkin writes, “Ophir Agassi consistently confounds our expectations. He first captures our attention with familiar, literally iconic images from the history of art – a Madonna and Child, for example – but then compels us to ignore what we have recognized and concentrate, instead, on the Platonic, archetypical structures underlying even the most explicit narrative. The result is to destabilize meaning and assert the presence of the artist, provoking us to consider the fictive nature of art.”
Zoom info will be given out through email, social media, or can be found on the AAH google
classroom.
First Thursday Lecture: Cory Gundlach
Curator, Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Stanley Museum
Thursday November 5th @ 7:00 pm
Curator, Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, will discuss authenticity and African art.
Zoom link to join the webinar:
https://smcm.zoom.us/j/95786524696
Passcode: 108940
Spring 2020
Art SMP Group Exhibition
“Opening” via the Internet on Monday, April 27 @ 6:00 pm
Artist Presentations: Monday, May 4 (click here for the schedule)
Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the Art SMP student exhibition will be taking place online. The work of student artists Tara Auman, Gillian Borkoski, Emory Knott, Carol Morris can be viewed on the SMP 2020 site. The students will also give public oral presentations on Monday, May 4, via the Zoom platform. Please contact SMP mentor Jessye McDowell (jpmcdowell@smcm.edu) for a link to the event.
For information about Boyden Gallery events, please visit: https://www.smcm.edu/art/boyden-gallery/
Robots, Rayguns, and Alternative Views of Reality: Experiencing Art through the Sci-Fi Paperback Collection in the SMCM Archives
Exhibition Dates: January 21 – March 7, 2020
In showcasing the extraordinary collection of sci-fi novels donated to the College Archives by the family of beloved History Professor Thomas M. Barrett, visitors are invited to experience numerous artforms like literature, film, music, and cover art paintings and design. Exploration of these artforms will lead to the stories of Tom Barrett as a collector and the rise of the paperbacks in the 1950-70s for the sci-fi genre.
Opening Reception:Thursday January 23, 5:00-6:30
Celebratory remarks begin at 5:30pm
Speakers include Kent Randell, College Archivist; Carrie Patterson, Professor of Art; Joe Lucchesi, Professor of Art History; and History alum Ben Israel ’14.
The reception and celebration are co-sponsored by the Department of History at SMCM.
Inquiries: email boydengallery@smcm.edu or Gallery Director Erin Peters at eapeters@smcm.edu
AAH Awards Exhibition
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 29, 4:45-5:45pm
Exhibition dates: January 29 – February 18, 2020
Hallwalls Gallery, Montgomery Hall
ART SMP Travel Award: Carol Morris
ARTH SMP Travel Award: Jenna Gregory
ARTH SMP Travel Award: Erik Moe ‘19
Linda Nochlin Award: Justyce Bennet ‘19
Thomas Rowe Scholarship: Izzy Petersen ‘19
McCutcheon Family Award: Katia Meisinger ‘19
Photo-Documentation & Digital Editing Workshops
Photo-Shooting Session with Tristan Cai, Assistant Professor of Photography
Tuesday, February 4, 4:30 – 9:00pm, Sculpture classroom, MH 135
Digital Editing Session with Jessye McDowell, Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Animation
Wednesday, February 5, 4:45-5:45pm, Montgomery Hall Computer Lab, MH 49
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, Thomas Rowe Scholarship, McCutcheon Family Award and more! Successful submissions begin with quality images. The Art & Art History Department, in conjunction with the Boyden Gallery, 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 on Feb. 4 and the resulting digital images on Feb. 5 for the editing session.
In these workshops you will learn:
- Best practices for photo-documenting artworks
- How to take high quality pictures of your artworks
- Digital editing tools to enhance your images
- How to prepare to enter your work for exhibitions & awards
Call for Entries: All Student Art Exhibition, Boyden Gallery
Submission Deadline: February 20, 2020
CHECK BACK for more details in January 2020
The All Student Art Exhibition is an annual celebration of student creativity and accomplishment in the visual arts. Each year, an outside juror selects artwork for the exhibition that best represents the quality and diversity of student creative work. Boyden Gallery invites and encourages all SMCM students, regardless of year or major (Fall 2019 graduates and continuing education students included) to participate. It doesn’t matter if your work was inspired by a class assignment or a library daydream, as long as you made it, submit it! We are especially interested in representing a wide variety of ideas, techniques, and approaches to visual art.
Call for Entries: AAH Department Awards (Art)
Submission Deadline: February 20, 2020
CHECK BACK for more details in January 2020
Lisa Scheer
Professor of Art and the Steven Muller Distinguished Professor of the Arts
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Lecture: Finding Form: A Sculptor’s Story
February 24, 4:45-5:45pm, Cole Cinema, Campus Center
In her Steven Muller Distinguished Professor of the Arts Lecture, Ms. Scheer will address both the inspirational and the pragmatic in her art making practice by sharing insights into, and examples of, her sources and process.
Lisa Scheer, a member of St. Mary’s College art faculty since 1981, is this year’s recipient of the Steven Mueller Distinguished Professor in the Arts. She is a DC-based artist who is widely known for both her public and private scaled sculptures. She has exhibited her work at many distinguished Washington area institutions including one-person exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the American Institute of Architecture, and the Kreeger Museum. She has received several national grants and awards, including a Pollock Krasner Foundation fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a Maryland Arts Council Fellowship. Her gallery affiliations have included the Nancy Drysdale Gallery, and Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington, DC. She maintains a studio in the Mt. Vernon Square neighborhood of Washington, DC. where she works in frequent collaboration with her artist husband, Hugh McKay.
Ms. Scheer creates sculptures that are abstract yet infused with subtle suggestions of imagery and narrative. Her love of expressive architectural environments has led her to create large-scale sculptural installations and public sculptures that directly integrate into surrounding architecture and landscape features. The dominant aspect of Scheer’s sculpture practice since 2005 has been the creation of public commissions. Her projects include works created for the Reagan National Airport, the Eastern District Federal Courthouse in Brooklyn, NY, the BWI Airport in Baltimore, and the Petworth Metro Station in DC. She has also completed many commissions in partnership with private developers that enliven public streetscapes and building interiors including works located at the Park Van Ness Center in Washington, DC, the Clarendon Center, in Arlington, VA), and Tysons Park Place II, McLean, VA.
Golden Paint Demo
Thursday Feb. 27th @ 8:00 – 10:00 AM in Montgomery Hall 132
Amy Shawley, Golden Paint Representative, is returning to showcase the Williamsburg Oil Paint Products. This is a reserved seat event and only 25 spaces are available. To register: contact Professor Patterson at ccpatterson@smcm.edu
Michelle Kohler ‘01
Artist House Residency: March 1-15, 2020
Artist Talk: Letters
Monday, March 2, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Michelle Kohler ’01 is a conceptual artist working in Washington DC. Using the constraints of domesticity, her work emerges at the intersection of art and everyday life. Through text, installation, and performance, Michelle examines the distance between the numinous and the mundane, self and other. Inspired by 17th Century tantric paintings, she uses a typewriter to transcribe spiritual texts into contemplation forms. The mechanical up and down, left and right motion of the typewriter frames her interest in non-dualism. Practicing the ideals set out in texts, she playfully seeks boredom and discomfort as opportunities for creative intervention. Through collaborations, Michelle interrupts accepted stories and habits, often trying to embody the experience of another person.
Michelle received a MAT in Art from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland with a BA in Art. For the past 5 years, Michelle has been a resident artist in motherhood. As an ARIM artist she has collected a year’s worth of number 2 pencils from the playground, gone hunting with her father, and published The Bhagavad Gita Typestracts, the complete Bhagavad Gita written in visual form. She is a decorative painter, a certified yoga therapist, and a former DC Public School teacher. Michelle’s work has been shown at Gradient Project Space in Thomas, WV. She is the beneficiary of the 2011 McCarthy Tall Tales Prize, a geodesic dome owner, and spent her honeymoon hiking 1000 miles on the Continental Divide Trail.
Artist website: http://michellekohler.net/bio
Saul Ostrow
Artist House Residency: February 27-March 15, 2020
Lecture by Saul Ostrow
Wednesday, March 11, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Ostrow talks about his curatorial practice and how he develops an exhibition from concept to work selection. His discussion will use as case studies two recent exhibitions: Drawing on Likeness: Ivelisse Jiminez, Gustavo Prada, Lidija Slavkovic at the Hollywood Art Center, Florida (2020) and The Image in The Ground at Loretta Howard Gallery NYC (2020).
“Trained as an artist – I made the transition from artist to critic/curator. The premise for my practices as both artist and critic/curator are not significantly different other than in the form they take. My approach to both began with the proposition that art is fundamentally a form of habits, an automatic reaction rather than something initiated anew each time. Through a lack of attention to various acts, losing its core ability to affect conscious change in its underlying structure. Through this elevation of art, which was at first a response to something outside itself, becomes internalized (formalized), and transformed into something that appears to be automatically and spontaneously existent “from inside” – that is a system or a category of thing whose objective necessities take on the appearance of being unavoidable occurrences. Problematically these imagined imperatives are transformed into dispositions – states of preparation, a tendency, or a structure “waiting” to become an imperative a quality which will become inherent to an emergent art, rather than some previous art practice.” – Saul Ostrow
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 Lodge 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 Slavkovic at 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
Residencies and all public events have been cancelled. We hope to reschedule at a future date.
Deirdre Murphy
Deirdre Murphy’s paintings, prints, sculptures, and public art are made with the attentiveness of a scientist. Her interest lies in the micro/macro patterns found in both art and science that reveal our connectedness. Examples include migratory avian flight patterns and their shared commonality with immigration routes, or light pollution maps that mirror viral molecular patterns, or aerial views of watershed systems that reveal vascular patterns. Through the act of creating, Murphy brings focus to the dichotomy and vastness of her sources, providing a heightened perspective for the viewer. Collaborative residencies with scientists include: Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Powdermill Nature Reserve ( Bio Field Station for Avian Research/Carnegie Museum of Natural History), Lacawac (Bio Field Station, Drexel University), and Integral Molecular at University City Science Center. Her Warbler Migration Public Art Installation resides in Dublic, California is an example of a collaboration between scientists and artists. The sculpture represents migratory flight maps of the Orange Crowned Warbler and speaks directly to her dedication to conservation and environmental justice. Her most recent mural was commissioned by Dickenson College, through a collaboration between biology and art. In 2019 she has a solo show at Integral Molecular, exploring the subject matter of Ebola and HIV viruses, and another solo show at the University of Maine in 2020. While in residence at SMCM, Murphy will be preparing for upcoming exhibitions and creating exploratory work based on her time in the St. Mary’s landscape.
Artist website: http://www.deirdremurphyart.com
Murphy’s Artist House Residency and programming is co-sponsored by The Department of Art & Art History, The Lecture and Fine Arts Committee, and the Environmental Studies Program.
Make and Take Art Event
Join Art students Tara, Jasper, and Carol to marbelize paper, and make a book!
Join Professor Carrie Patterson and her community art class to have a “Color Reading” and find out more about the AAH majors, minors, and course offerings! Festive food and beverages will be provided.
Kyoung eun Kang
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. Her work ranges from live performance to video, painting, photography, installation, text and sound pieces. Her work explores the geographical and cultural identity and universal aspects of human behavior such as affection and attachments. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including NURTUREart, NY; BRIC Project Room, NY; Soho 20 Project Room, NY; Here Arts Center, NY; A.I.R gallery, NY; The Korean Cultural Center, Washington, DC; Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Australia; Museum of Imperial City, China, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Korea. She is a recipient of residencies and fellowships at Elizabeth Murray artist residency, I-Park Foundation, ChaNorth, and sound pieces. For the last few years she has been meeting and videotaping Mexican flower sellers in New York City; a Hasidic family in Brooklyn; as well as a 90-year-old elderly couple who live in Nebraska. She has developed special relationships and trust with them through simple gestures and actions. She also has been closely working with her family in Korea. She often introduces particular Korean stones, and care packages sent from her mother in Korea or other objects from her childhood and Korean culture into new environments to question what heritage, culture, and family means Bric Media Arts, NARS Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, LES studio program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and New York Foundation for the Arts.
Artist website: https://kyoungeunkang.com
Amanda Cote & Anna Niskanen (collaborative residency)
Amanda Lucia Côté
In her paintings, Amanda Lucia Côté follows a process of layering to hide and expose with soft forms and incorporating industrial materials like plexiglass and metal mesh in contrast. Focusing on the 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 piles and gathered items, passages, temporary fencing and construction sites. Côté works in opaque and transparent layers to depict negative space, barriers and division.
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 Brooklyn, New York.
Artist website: http://www.amandacote.com
Anna Niskanen
Niskanen examines natural phenomena and landscape through a photographic canon. Her previous works interpret for example tidal waves, lava rock formations and bush fires. She draws attention to her memories of place, space and scenery by breaking apart landscape and travel photographs and putting them back together to create tangible art objects, prints on various organic materials.
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 and Russia in solo exhibitions, group shows and a triennial. In 2017 she self-published her first photography book “Lustrum”, having previously been nominated for the Nordic Dummy Award for the same project in 2015. Niskanen has attended artist residencies in Paris and Reykjavík. This year she will take part in the renowned Mänttä Art Festival in June as well as have her first solo exhibition in Helsinki in September at Gallery Huuto.
Niskanen is a board member of the Photographic Artists’ Association of Finland since 2017. 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 travel grant for continuing working in Iceland, a personal grant for new works and exhibition costs in 2019 (both Arts Promotion Centre Finland) and a three-year grant for the Kosminen gallery and collective from Kone Foundation. Artist website: www.annaniskanen.com
Niskanen and Côté’s Artist House Residency and programming is co-sponsored by The Department of Art & Art History, The Lecture and Fine Arts Committee and the Environmental Studies Program.
ART SMP Group Exhibition
Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Opening Reception: TBD
The SMP Exhibition will be rescheduled and/or relocated due to the COVID-19 crisis. Please stay tuned for updated information.
Student artists: Tara Auman, Gillian Borkoski, Davita Fennell, Emory Knott, Carol Morris and Briana-Melanie White
Fall 2019
ART SMP Marathon Open Studio
Wed. Sept 18, 4:45-6:00pm, Art Annex Studios. Open to all.
ART SMP students open their studios to show the works completed during the “10 works in 10 days Marathon”.
Students: Tara Auman, Gillian Borkoski, Davita Fennell, Emory Knott, Carol Morris, Bri White and Claire Youmans
Dorotha Grace Lemeh
Artist House Residency: September 3 – October 15, 2019
Artist Talk: Monday, September 16, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Dorotha Grace Lemeh is an artist, poet and educator who works across disciplines in her creative work to produce powerful installations. In her own words, Lemeh explains: “Visual storytelling is the means in which I use to examine rather interesting, and at times, complex narratives associated with the body—specifically that of women. In my art, I utilize various artistic methods to delve into historic, literary, and popular cultural themes, which, at times, offer a different understanding of the (usually binary) roles that are either assigned to, and/or taken on by women. Using the ideas of fragmentation and acceptance, I tend to create art that strays into the in between spaces of identity, beauty, and desire. Here in these areas I create visual pieces that play within the intersections of object- text- image, object-to-image and image-to-image subject matter. At times, I reference and use archetypal stereotypes, personal and historical narratives in my art to seek out the hidden messages that for various reasons are removed from the prying eyes of others.” —dglemeh
As a visual artist, Dorotha Lemeh has to her credit over 80 exhibitions. Internationally her works of art have been exhibited in Bulgaria, Beijing & Huairou China, England, Italy, Ireland, Mali, Tlaxacala-Mexico, and Nigeria. Nationally, she continues to participate in exhibitions in New York, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida, Minnesota, Arkansas, Tennessee, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Texas, Washington D.C., and Washington State. Her artworks were included in museum exhibitions at the following venues: Florida Museum for Women in the Arts in Deland, Florida, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, National Civil Rights Museum in Tennessee, Noyes Museum of Art in New Jersey, Arlington Museum of Art in Texas, and Euphrat Museum of Art in California. Reviews of Professor Lemeh’s artwork have appeared in On View Magazine 2013; The International Review of African American Art; Arts & Antiques Magazine; Crossing Boundaries & Frontiers, Bamako, Mali; Gumbo Ya Ya: An Anthology of African American Women Artists by Dr. Leslie King- Hammond; and Painting in Acrylics. Her art images are also included in catalogues Biennale Interazionale Dell’ Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy 2001 & 1999, International Triennial of Painting: Sofia Bulgaria, Black Women in the Academy II, and Celebrating Visual Traditions II. From 1995 – 1997 Dorotha Lemeh sat on the National Board of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), and the College Art Association’s Committee on Women in the Arts, whose charge is not only to promote the scholarly study and recognition of the contributions of women in the visual arts, but also develop linkages with organizations concerned with compatible interests, and to monitor the current status of women in the visual arts professions. As a published author and writer, she contributed the chapter “Myth, Reality, and Legend: El Ponder de la Mujer” featured in the award-winning book, Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands, which received the Southwestern Book Award. Her writing has also appeared in the international feminist journal, n.paradoxa. Her art and writing was featured in Women of Power Magazine. Reviews of Dorotha Grace Lemeh’s artwork have appeared in The International Review of African American Art; Arts & Antiques Magazine; Crossing Boundaries & Frontiers, Bamako, Mali; Gumbo Ya Ya: An Anthology of African American Women Artists by Dr. Leslie King- Hammond; and Painting in Acrylics. Images of her art are also included in catalogues Biennale Interazionale Dell’ Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy 2001 & 1999, International Triennial of Painting: Sofia Bulgaria, Black Women in the Academy II, and Celebrating Visual Traditions II. Her recent achievements led her to serve as a reviewer for Oxford University Press. Dorotha Lemeh received her MFA in painting & drawing from The Pennsylvania State University’s School of Visual Arts (SoVA) and her Bachelor of Science in Studio Art from The Tennessee State University.
Lemeh’s Artist House Residency and programming is co-sponsored by The Department of Art & Art History, The Lecture and Fine Arts Committee, and the African and African Diaspora Studies Program.
Clare Nicholls ‘10
Artist House Residency: October 1-19, 2019
Artist Talk: Wednesday, October 9, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
“Weaving is hand work and is digital. Digital came from digits, from counting on our fingers. Now digital means information that is delivered via computer program– an array of ones and zeros arranged in grids.
Grids are the overlay to interface with everything. Cities are planned on a grid, icons snap to a grid, a grid overlays an image to edit. When Clare was a teenager, she would draw in MS Paint pixel by pixel, placing each tiny square of color with the most precision the mouse would allow. That same digital grid is how she decides how to build shapes on the warp.
Weaving is also the marriage of image and object, building fabric from scratch. The revelation between empty warp and finished cloth feels mythic: at first there was nothing, and now here is something. Weaving tells stories, textiles are connected to text. The rhythm of shape and color in her tapestries is a poem. A line of color running up the side is marginalia. The knots that finish the cut ends are a signature. Clare dyes her own yarn to brew her own vocabulary; she salvages yarn from thrift stores and by unraveling sweaters to reclaim words that have been lost to her.
The weaving process has a sense of unearthing what is lost, sometimes. Language shifts, myths are retold. Artist Rowland Ricketts once said, “Sitting at the loom connects you to the origin of things.” Through weaving it is possible to re-trace those origins and find new paths beyond the present.” – Clare Nicholls
Clare Nicholls is an artist and educator living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Clare is a weaver and artist who loves touching soft things and is obsessed about knowing everything. Formerly the manager of The Shed, an exhibit makerspace within the Maryland Science Center, she wrote programming and taught workshops focused on STEAM education in informal contexts. Clare also teaches weaving workshops for the public around Baltimore, MD. Her professional goal is to connect people to process.
Clare earned a BA in Art and Art History from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2010, and obtained a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2013. She most recently showed work in RITUALISMS at the Target Gallery in Alexandria, VA in January 2019. She has also shown work at the School of Design Gallery at Stevenson University, Boyden Gallery at St. Mary’s College, and the Riggs and Leidy Galleries at MICA. Clare also lectured on how weaving structures have influenced garments throughout history at the School of Design at Stevenson University.
Valerie Hardy
Teaching Fellow/ Artist-in-Residence (Fall semester 2019)
Artist Talk: Wednesday, October 30, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Valerie Hardy earned a B.A. in Graphic Design from American University, and an M.F.A. in Painting from American University. She has taught painting, drawing and 2D Foundations at The College of William & Mary, and has been awarded residencies by the Cité des Arts Internationale (Paris, France) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA). Her work has been shown in exhibitions at the Matney Gallery, Matthews & Shank Gallery, Muscarelle Museum of Art, Longwood Center for the Visual Arts, the Washington Studio School, and the Peninsula Fine Arts Center among others. Hardy will teach ART 206. Introduction to Painting in fall 2019 at SMCM.
Over her entire artistic career, Hardy has focused on the interplay of the objects, the spaces, the light, the people, that catch her eye. Her challenge is to reveal the relationships among and between them, in a way that says something visually interesting while representing these things as identifiably themselves.
http://www.valeriehardy.com/home
Miriam Schaer
Artist House Residency: November 2-15, 2019
“I have been creating artist books, including one-of-a kind sculptural works and limited editions, for more than 30 years, using both traditional and non-traditional materials. I also make prints, installations, multiples and multimedia projects. I frequently use clothing — everything from dresses and children’s garments to bustiers, basques, brassieres, and aprons — as materials for my books, manipulating and embellishing the fabrics to serve as enclosures, inside which I explore personal, feminist, social and spiritual themes, such as housework, family ties, non-motherhood, and religion. I especially love using objects created for other ends so that their reinvention serves broader themes. The book as a transformational object is an ancient, even romantic notion. Traditionally, books embody stories. Mine do too, while also expressing the multiple roles thrust on women by culture, the media, and themselves. That my techniques sometimes involve a layered complexity defying easy explication transforms the works into physical representations of the illusion of something under control.
Recently, my work has focused on the relationship of women, motherhood, and the absence of motherhood — in particular, how women without children fare in a world that values women largely for their fertility. I became sensitized to the relationships among these conditions as my own mother began to exhibit signs of dementia. As we all age, how do we negotiate the role reversals inherent in coping with parents who live beyond the point at which they can care for themselves and become, like small children, individuals cared for by their own children, now adults? Finding no simple answers, I hope my work stimulates a dialogue about these difficult issues.” – Miriam Schaer
TWO EVENTS with Miriam Schaer
Artist Talk: Monday, November 4, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Bookmaking Workshop with Miriam Schaer
Spinal Bling: The Transformative Magic of Link-Stitch Binding
Saturday, November 9, 2019
10:00am-3:00pm, Montgomery Hall Art Studios, Room 132
All materials provided – No previous experience needed
Free to Arts Alliance members and SMCM students
Registration required. Limited to 20 participants. Email: srjohnson@smcm.edu
Generous funding support for the workshop has been provided by a grant from The Arts Alliance
In just one workshop session, each participant will make a beautiful book (shown above) from start to finish. No previous experience needed. Instruction by well-known New York book artist, Miriam Schaer. As part of the session, lunch will be organized as a communal ‘potluck’ or brown-bag lunch. Also on hand will be SMCM Professor of Art, Sue Johnson and Teaching Assistant, Carol Morris.
Link-Stitch Binding, sometimes referred to as French-Stitch, is a wonderful, elegant sewing structure that creates a lacey matrix of vines across the spine of any codex to which it is applied. Workshop students will learn to use the stitch on its own and also with ribbons as a sewing support to create exposed-spine bindings that are both beautiful and functional. Students will also learn to make cover boards for their books. By the end of the workshop, students will finish at least one book using this approach.
Miriam Schaer is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She exhibits extensively in the U.S. and abroad and is represented in numerous collections, including Yale University Museum, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture at Duke University, the Tate Gallery in London, and The Bainbridge Museum outside of Seattle, WA. Her work has earned a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, inclusion in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum, and artist residencies in Spain, Estonia, India and Egypt. Her work about societal bias against childless women, Baby (Not) On Board: The Last Prejudice?, has been exhibited by the International Museum of Women. A U.S. Fulbright Scholar, Schaer spent part of 2017 in the Republic of Georgia, where she established the Artist Book Collection at Telavi State University. This spring she has work included in Freed Formats: the book reconsidered, in various locations throughout Connecticut and Hand & I, about embroidery and social practice Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, NY, curated by Yulia Tikanova. From 2009-2017, she was a Senior Lecturer at Columbia College Chicago in the Interdisciplinary MFA in Book, Paper, Print and Media, and has been a visiting artist at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, Academy of Arts, Tallinn, Estonia, and Faculty of Fine Art, University of Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro. Schaer’s essay The Motherhood Imperative: Fertility, Feminism, Art, is included in “Maternal in Creative Work: Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art,” edited by Elena Marchevska and Valerie Walkerdine, will be published by Routledge in Fall 2019. She is represented by the Central Booking Art Space in New York, and by Vamp and Tramp Booksellers, in Birmingham, Alabama. She is currently serves on the board of The Center for Book Arts in New York.
http://www.miriamschaer.com/
Golden Paints A-Z Lecture & Demo
Monday, November 18, 1:30-3:30pm
Upper Montgomery Commons
FREE
Must be signed up to receive free literature packet & small bag of acrylic paint samples
Email Sue Johnson to sign up: srjohnson@smcm.edu
The Golden Paints lecture/demo is a two-hour free educational presentation on paint that covers a broad range of acrylic products and gives attendees a brief introduction to Williamsburg Oils and QoR Watercolors. The lecture covers pigment properties and paint formulations, gels, pastes, grounds, color mixing, drying time, health & safety concerns, and much more! Various acrylic materials and techniques will be demonstrated to enrich your understanding of the medium, among these you will learn basic tips for how to extend paint, make glazes, image transfers, acrylic “skins”, and how to mix paints with gels and pastes to create exciting textures! Discover the possibilities and become inspired with how these fabulous materials can be added to your own creative process!
Margot Douaihy
Artist House Residency: December 3 -13, 2019
Creative writer Margot Douaihy (b. Scranton, PA) leverages language as a tool of immersion and inquiry. As a process-based artist working in diverse genres—poetry, literary fiction, hardboiled crime fiction, true-crime verse—she allows the creative identity of a project to locate the final form. A queer writer, Douaihy filters ideas
through a phenomenological lens, mining the patterns and occlusions that shape awareness in a text. She inhabits and subverts tropes, such as the femme fatale and noir signatures, to shake the heteronormative, perceptual constructs that limit storytelling modes. In her poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms, Douaihy foregrounds voice and a bold re-imagining of place. Raw, visceral, lush, obsessed—carefully crafted with line-level immediacy—Douaihy’s dialogue-driven, narrative experiences often mask complex, subterranean simmering. From her poetry collections to her hardboiled-inspired sleuth series, an ethos of ache unites her work.
Douaihy earned a BA in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh Writing Program, an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Douaihy is the author of Scranton Lace (Clemson University Press), the Lambda Literary Finalist Girls Like You (Clemson University Press) and I Would Ruby If I Could (Factory Hollow Press). Her book, Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, is under contract with Clemson University Press. A Board Member of Philadelphia Stories and Founding Member of the Creative Writing Studies Organization, Douaihy’s work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, Colorado Review, Madison Review, Tahoma Literary Review, North American Review (forthcoming), South Carolina Review, Adirondack Review, Wisconsin Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Tishman Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Windfall Room, and the Storyscape Literary Journal . A
frequent speaker, presenter, and workshop leader, she has held teaching positions at Marywood University. Currently, Douaihy is a Lecturer at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, NH, where she also serves as the Editor of the Northern New England Review literary journal.
Douaihy’s residency is sponsored by the Artist House Residency Programs. During her residency she will work on a true-crime project, Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr (under contract to Clemson University Press) on which she collaborates with her partner and illustrator, Bri Hermanson. Douaihy will also make a class visit to the ART 347 Book Arts course.
ART SMP In-Progress Exhibition
Exhibition dates: December 9-14
Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Students: Tara Auman, Gillian Borkoski, Davita Fennell, Emory Knott, Carol Morris, Bri White and Claire Youmens
Spring 2019
Christopher Merrill
Artist House Residency: January 15 – February 3, 2019
Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water and Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and five books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, and The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War.
His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, his journalism appears in many publications, and his awards include a knighthood in arts and letters from the French government. He has held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, he has conducted cultural diplomacy missions in over thirty countries for the U.S. State Department, and in April 2012 President Obama appointed Merrill to the National Council on the Humanities. http://www.christophermerrillbooks.com
Behind the Scenes with Curator Sami Wright (SMCM ’18)
Monday, January 28 @ 1:00pm, Boyden Art Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Refreshments served!
- Interested in working in archives or collections management?
- Thinking about how to become a professional curator?
- Wondering what paths your SMCM Art History major or minor might lead you to?
- Curious about the work that goes into curating an art exhibition?
Please join SMCM alumna Sami Wright (Art History and History, ’18) for an informal student discussion about her work as a curator, a behind-the-scenes tour of her process as curator of the current Boyden Art Gallery exhibition American Modernism in the Bocour Collection, and her professional path from SMCM Art History graduate to working with collections and archives.
Sami Wright ’18 graduated SMCM with a double major in Art History and History and a minor in Museum Studies. She spent the summer following graduation as an Edward W. Pell Graduate Fellow in Collections at Fort Ticonderoga, where she worked on cataloging and digitizing part of the Fort’s print collection. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA and works as a Studio Assistant for Boston Photography Workshops and as the Project Photographer for the Casey Family Papers Digitization Project at Historic New England.
Art History to Art World: Conversations with SMCM Alumni in Museum and Gallery Fields series
Department of Art and Art History 2018 Scholarship Awards Exhibition
Opens Monday, January 28 – through February 8, 2019
Hallwalls, Montgomery Hall

See artworks and posters by the award winners:
Karol Carlsen, Thomas Rowe Scholarship Award
Kelsey Joyce, McCutcheon Family Art Award
Brooke Lamplough, ART SMP Travel Award
Izzy Petersen, ART SMP Travel Award
Sami Wright, Linda Nochlin Award
Photo-Documentation Workshop with Professors Tristan Cai and Jessye McDowell
Part 1- Lighting and Photography
Monday, February 4 @4.45-8.00pm, 3rd Floor library, Beanbag lounge
Part 2- Digital Image Editing
Wednesday, February 6 4.45-6.00pm, MH49 Digital Lab
Bring your artworks (2D and 3D) along on Feb 4 and the resulting digital images on Feb 6 for the editing session.
In this 2-part workshop:
- Learn best practices for photo-documenting artworks
- Take high quality pictures of your artworks
- Learn digital editing tools to enhance your images
- Prepare to enter your work for exhibitions & awards
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, The Rowe Scholarship Award, The McCutcheon Award, and more!
Successful submissions begin with quality images. The Art & Art History Department, in conjunction with the Boyden Gallery, 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.
Lori Rubeling
Lecture: Human-Centered Design Research Practices and Case Studies
Wednesday, February 27, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m., Glendening Annex
Artist House Residency: February 24 – March 3, 2019
Lori Rubeling’s creative interest centers around how spatiality can be represented in drawings, in aesthetic concepts, and in material form. Since 1981, she has studied and produced spatial art and design in theatre arts, theoretical architecture, interior architecture, and sculpture contexts. She has also produced a 200-volume sketchbook library.
Her current practice-led research asks the question:
How can encounters with and observational drawing(s) of historic material artifacts inform the comprehension and valuing of the histories of design?
Rubeling is also actively involved in curation of art and design and human-impact design practices. Her leadership in this area includes a two-year Gallery@ Case[werks] curator residency, as program committee member for the Society for History and Graphics, and as co-curator for D Center Baltimore’s monthly impact design conversations.
Rubeling’s undergraduate education includes the study of fine art and theatre at Towson University; interior architecture studies at MICA; and the completion of a BFA Studio Art degree from the Corcoran School of Art. Her graduate studies include studying theoretical architecture w/ Daniel Libeskind at Cranbrook Academy of art. She holds a Masters of Arts in the Liberal Arts degree from St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD. She was a member of Daniel Libeskind’s Cranbrook Academy of Art architectural studio that won a Stone Lion Prize at the 1985 Venice Architectural Biennale for the Three Machines Palminova Project. She has also received sculptural works commissions from the City of Detroit and from Baltimore’s Artscape. Rubeling exhibits nationally and internationally: In 2013, she was a visiting artist and lecturer at Art•Sun’s 25th anniversary exhibition in Kurashiki, Japan. She has been awarded four Stevenson University scholarship research grants; been a visiting artist and designer for Washington, DC’s Art Barn summer programming, Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum and Artscape, and the Northeast Regional Honors Council. Her human-centered teaching practice has been recognized by the President of Stevenson University, the Mayor of Baltimore, and the US Department of Commerce.
Rubeling currently teaches in the Graphic Design Department, in the School of Design at Stevenson University. Subjects taught at Stevenson include foundation art and design studios, rapid visualizing drawing scenarios, visual design theory, history of design, aesthetics, theatre collaboration, and exhibition design. She also teaches drawing systems at Morgan State University in the graduate architecture program. Her previous teaching positions include MICA, CCS College of Art and Design, and Mt. Saint Mary’s University. This residency and related events are co-sponsored by the Lecture and Fine Arts Committee, and the Environmental Studies Program and the Department of Art and Art History.
Michelle Kohler ‘01
Artist House Residency: March 1 – 10, 2019
Michelle Kohler ‘01 is a conceptual artist working in Washington, DC. Using the constraints of domesticity, her work emerges at the intersection of art and everyday life. Through text, installation, and performance, Michelle examines the distance between the numinous and the mundane, self and other. Inspired by 17th Century tantric paintings, she uses a typewriter to transcribe spiritual texts into contemplation forms. The mechanical up and down, left and right motion of the typewriter frames her interest in non-dualism. Practicing the ideals set out in texts, she playfully seeks boredom and discomfort as opportunities for creative intervention. Through collaborations, Michelle interrupts accepted stories and habits, often trying to embody the experience of another person.
Michelle received a MAT in Art from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2001 with a BA in Art and Art History (ART). For the past four years, Michelle has been a resident artist in motherhood. As an ARIM artist she has collected a year’s worth of number 2 pencils from the playground, gone hunting with her father, and published The Bhagavad Gita Typestracts, the complete Bhagavad Gita written in visual form. She is a decorative painter, a certified yoga therapist, and a former DC Public School teacher. Michelle’s work has been shown at Gradient Project Space in Thomas, WV. She is the beneficiary of the 2011 McCarthy Tall Tales Prize, a geodesic dome owner, and spent her honeymoon hiking 1000 miles on the Continental Divide Trail. In addition to creating new work, while in residence at the Artist House Michelle will participate in the ART SMP mid-term reviews and visit the new Professional Practices course as a visiting artist.
Farhad Bahram
Artist House Residency: March 16 – 26, 2019
Open Studio: Monday, March 25, 4:45-5:45pm, Montgomery Hall 105
During his residency, Bahram will also visit classes in photography and digital art classes, and the SMP seminar.
Farhad Bahram’s project, ‘Looking Glass’, is the outcome of several conversations with 15 Iranian individuals, living in the United States, whose identities are often assumed by others to only comprise their nationality. In this installation I tried to portray their complexity, depth and presence by asking them to share in a series of words and images that more accurately reflects their identity.
Mirroring the rich, interdependent, and shape-shifting world we live in, our sense of self is increasing in complexity and changing throughout our lifetime. This fluid self consists of many intersecting factors such as gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental and physical differences. By ignoring this diversity, each of us are too easily reduced to a label of ‘threat’, ‘resource’ or ‘irrelevant’. This inaccurate labeling darkens the glass we see others through and ourselves in.
About Farhad Bahram
Bahram has shown nationally and internationally ranging from venues such as ArtHelix Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Gowanus Loft, Brooklyn, NY; East of West Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Mission Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA; Reed College, Portland, OR; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Umpqua Valley Arts Center, Roseburg, OR; Plâtre et Moi Gallery, Paris, France; Laatikkomo, Jyväskylä, Finland; Aaran Gallery, Tehran, Iran; Fravahr Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran; Sazmanab Center for Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran.
Bahram’s work has been reviewed and featured in Art Practical, PBS News Hour, Voice of America, The Santa Fe New Mexican, and IranWire, among others. His practice and research have been supported by grants and awards from the Tokyo Foundation for International Research, Ford Alumni Center, University of Oregon and Society for Photographic Education. Born in Iran, Bahram lives in Eugene, where he works as a Career Instructor at the University of Oregon since 2015.
Artist website: http://farhadbahram.com/lg.html
Elena Gross ’12
Independent writer and cultural critic
Artist House Residency: April 1-7, 2019
Elena Gross is an SMCM alum, graduating with a BA in Art History in 2012. She is an independent writer and cultural critic living in Oakland, CA. Elena received an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in 2016, and after graduating with her BA in Art History and a Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies minor. She specializes in representations of identity through fine art, photography, and popular media. Elena is the host of the arts & visual culture podcast, what are you looking at, published by Art Practical. Her most recent research has been centered around the work of artist Lorna Simpson and conceptual and material abstractions of the body in photography. While in residence at the Artist House, Elena will work with students in the “Curation and Exhibition” course on their semester-long project about African American photographer Robert McNeill and will visit “Sexuality and Modernity” to discuss queer critical perspectives in contemporary art.
Parran Collery
Artist House Residency: April 8 – 29, 2019
Artist Talk:Wednesday, April 17, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Parran Collery is a ceramic artist based in southern Maryland, where she is the artist/owner of a studio from which she runs an art business called Eartha Handmade Tile. Founded in 1997, Eartha Tile creates a collection of limited production tiles for sale in shops and galleries throughout the US, and also creates custom commissioned mosaic designs and one of a kind artwork. Collery received a BA from the University of Vermont (summa cum laude) in 1989 and a MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in 1992. She taught undergraduate Ceramics at Rutgers from 1990-92, and was an Adjunct Instructor of Ceramics at Toms River Community College from 1993-95. At Toms River she taught all levels of ceramics including Independent Studies. She also apprenticed at Peace Valley Tile Studio in Bucks County PA for four years before founding her own studio.
For the past 30 years, Collery has exhibited her sculptures and tile designs extensively through the states. Museum exhibitions include group shows at the Flemming Museum, Burlington VT, and the Heckscher Museum in Huntington NY. Other exhibitions include shows at Mackerel Sky Gallery, East Lansing MI, Backas Gallery, Baltimore MD, Carroll County Arts Council, Westminster MD, Indigenous Gallery, Cincinnati OH, Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center, Solomons MD, Pewabic Pottery Invitational, Detroit MI, and North End Gallery, Leonardtown, MD. She has also participated in several American Craft Council shows. Collery has been a resident artist at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Maine (1999 and 2006). She is also a highly popular Artists in Education visiting artist resident, working with young students at over 15 primary and secondary schools in MD and VA since 2000 to facilitate and create permanent ceramic tile installations. These projects include numerous wall mosaics, bench projects, and free-standing mosaic garden sculptures. In addition to dozens of private commissions, commercial tile installations by Collery include The Ruddy Duck restaurant bar countertop in Solomons MD, The Rock Bar entry floor in DC, and welcome sign installation at Annmarie Art Center, Solomons MD. She is currently completing a 30-panel bird identification project for Annmarie Art Center, to be installed in 2018. She has also received two public art grants: DC Commission for the Arts H Street Revitalization Project 2004, and the 2017 inaugural Town of Leonardtown Public Art Grant, in partnership with the MD State Arts Council.
ART SMP Exhibition
Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
More information coming soon!
Bethany Springer
Artist House Residency: May 16 – June 6, 2019
“My current work lies somewhere between romanticism and realism, an inquiry into place and identity as influenced by history, heritage, globalization, and the information age.
How place is established, reinforced, and lost is referenced through the juxtaposition of disparate historical and contemporary images, metaphors that find ironic commonality through online searches. Often, I use search engines as a tool to interpret and inhabit the world beyond my own heritage and environment, pairing a simple word or phrase with a complex network of associations connecting semiotics, historical origin, consumer items, and fads. In an attempt to have a deeper understanding of place and of the objects that represent place over time, I recreate images found on the internet or repurpose objects that have historical significance yet have lost their value in present society. I find it important to travel to locations referenced in my work so I may collect information from institutions and residents who have deep roots in their community. The resulting installations are usually hybrids of collected research, a fusion of personal and digital information that visually manifests the fragile link tethering identity to place.”
Bethany Springer has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Arkansas Arts Council, Iowa Arts Council, the University of Arkansas Community and Family Institute, and the Center for Digital Technology and Learning at Drake University in Des Moines. Springer has been in residence at Full Tilt Creative Centre and Terra Nova National Park in Newfoundland, Canada, The Arctic Circle in the International Territory of Svalbard, the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Selected exhibitions of her work include Maryland Art Place (MAP) in Baltimore, Boston Center for the Arts, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, CT, Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ, City Gallery East in Atlanta, the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, and Full Tilt in Newfoundland. She is currently an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Fall 2018
Carrie Patterson, Professor of Art, Department of Art and Art History
Brown Bag Lunchtime Talk: Painting, Writing, and Everything under the Kitchen Sink
Tuesday, September 11, 12 Noon-1pm, Glendening Annex
Carrie Patterson, Professor of Art at SMCM, returns from sabbatical to deliver a Brown Bag Lunchtime Talk: Painting, Writing, and Everything under the Kitchen Sink. Patterson is a visual artist working in Leonardtown, Maryland. Her artwork considers how color, form, and line metaphorically measure the human condition as experienced through the body. She earned a B.F.A in studio art from James Madison University and an M.F.A in painting from The University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, she was a student resident at The New York Studio School where she worked with second generation abstract expressionists: Charles Cajori, Mercedes Matters, and Rosemarie Beck. Her artwork has been exhibited across the country with solo shows in New York City, Philadelphia, Virginia, and Minnesota. In 2017 her solo show titled: Lightbox consisted of brightly colored cardboard constructions and stacked floor paintings at Hood Gallery at Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia. Recently, she has been making painted constructions based off her lived experience of architectural forms and their relationship to the landscape. Most recently her work was included in a group exhibition titled: X Marks the Spot, Women of the New York Studio School. She is a Professor of Art at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and former owner of Yellow Door Art Studios, a community art school. Her art curriculum called The Yellow Line features lesson plans for early childhood and K-12. Currently she is developing a course titled How to See for The Great Courses.
Janis Goodman
Brown Bag Lunchtime Artist Talk
Tuesday Sept 18, 12:00-1:00pm, Glendening Annex
Note: Janis will be returning to SMCM in February for an Artist House Residency
Janis Goodman’s work moves between the narrative and the deconstructed. It is based on the laws of nature but governed by intuition and experience. Years of hiking national parks and kayaking rivers along the mid-Atlantic and New England have formed the backdrop of her work. Her fascination with natural disasters additionally fuels the sense of the absurd and the possibility of chance. Goodman’s oil paintings travel and negotiate the ripples and tides of estuaries and coves. They also follow the invisible energy paths connecting the dots between the observed, imagined and remembered. Her color expands in all directions suggesting chaos, impermanence and random activity. The paintings don’t specifically pay witness to an event but set up a strategy of cause and effect. They slow down the motion that is invisible to the eye and give the observer visual signs of a time or a direction. Goodman’s paintings rely more heavily on perception than fact. Her work continues to explore the relationship between the environment, global shifts and the perception of constancy. She suggests in her paintings the humblest of relationships that exist in the environment.
Janis Goodman, is a Professor of Fine Arts at the Corcoran College of Art + Design/George Washington University in Washington, DC. She is the coordinator of the Fourth Year Fine Arts Program as well as a Professor of Drawing and Painting. She is the arts reviewer for WETA TV, Around Town, a PBS affiliate in Washington, DC. Goodman is a recipient of numerous DC Commission on the Arts Grants as well as a National Endowment Exhibition support grant. In 2017 she received the Franz and Virginia Bader Award for excellence in art. Goodman is a founding member of the socially engaged Workingman Collective. Goodman is included in North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary by Nancy Heller and Who’s Who in American Art. Her work was highlighted in the book 100 Artists of Washington, DC by F. Lennox Campbello. She is represented by Turtle Gallery, Deer Isle, ME; Thomas Deans Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; and Lee Hansley Gallery, Raleigh, NC. In Washington, DC her work can be found at Neptune Brown Gallery and Reyes + Davis. Recent solo shows include exhibitions at Thomas Deans Fine Art, Atlanta; JK Gallery in Los Angeles; Reyes + Davis in Washington, DC; Lee Hansley Gallery in Raleigh, NC; and Michael Connor’s Gallery in New York. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, The Washington Post and The City Paper.
ART SMP Open Studios – Marathon, Art Annex (100 Main)
Monday, September 17, 6:30-8:00pm
Fall 2018 SMP in Studio Art students will spend the first three weeks of this semester working on an art-making Marathon, culminating in this open studio event and potluck. At this point in the semester, students will have made at least 20 artworks responding to a series of prompts, and all are welcome to come by and see how students have pushed their boundaries and energized their creative spirits, in preparation for their year-long SMP projects. The event will be held at the Art Annex, located next to the Physical Plant and across from the tennis courts.
SMCM Faculty Exhibition: Finding Elsewhere
September 24 – November 10, 2018
Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Opening Reception: Monday, September 24, 2018, 4:45-5:45pm
Gallery open hours: Tues-Fri 1:00-6:00pm / Sat 11:00-4:00pm
Artists: Tristan Cai, Giulia Piera Livi, Jessye McDowell, Carrie Patterson, and Lisa Scheer
Exhibition curator: Kate Pollasch ‘10
The SMCM Faculty Exhibition: Finding Elsewhere is on display until November 10, so stop in on your way to class or on a rainy day to view the wonderful artwork from SMCM’s very own faculty.
The six artists and professors in this exhibition, Tristan Cai, Giulia Piera Livi, Jessye McDowell, Carrie Patterson, Lisa Scheer traverse a range of mediums from digital modeling, printmaking and artist books, to painting and installation. While their use of formal choices of composition, color, subject, light and more vary widely, common thread lines run through each artist, pulling individual practices into the warp and weft of a multicenter group exhibition.
Giulia Piera Livi
SMCM-MICA Artist House Teaching Fellow 2018
Artist Talk: Thursday October 11, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Giulia Piera Livi is a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist whose work in painting and installation is an investigation of interior space and design, focusing on the acute and the polite, the domestic and the utilitarian. Her immersive rooms employ color and form to work out ideas of the weirdly functional. Livi’s work has be exhibited both nationally and internationally including at Viridian Artists Gallery (New York, NY), VAE (Raleigh, NC), Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA), Studio Arts Center International (Florence, Italy), Maryland Art Place (Baltimore, MD), Gallery B (Bethesda, MD), School 33 Art Center (Baltimore, MD), Woskob Family Gallery (State College, PA), and the Philadelphia Sketch Club (Philadelphia, PA). Livi earned a B.F.A. from Penn State University (2015) and an M.F.A. from the Mount Royal School of Art at MICA (2017). She was a 2017 Bethesda Trawick Young Artist Award Winner, and a 2017 and 2018 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Semi-Finalist. In fall 2018, Giulia will teach two courses in the Department of Art and Art History: ART 204: Introduction to Drawing and ART 239 Painting and Drawing from Life.
This year’s popular departmental field trip to NYC will take us to Brooklyn! One of New York City’s most vibrant boroughs, Brooklyn has a long history of culture and creativity. On our one-day trip we’ll stop at the Brooklyn Museum of Art–whose displays of global art are among the most innovative in the country–and visit artist studios in the up and coming neighborhood of Bushwick. In between, we’ll have time to enjoy beautiful Prospect Park, historic Grand Army Plaza, and the diverse food and shopping in surrounding neighborhoods. Spend some time looking at art and exploring a new place with your professors and classmates!
Watch out for more details and an informational meeting early in September. This trip is designed to be easy and affordable for all St. Mary’s art and art history students. Participation is first come, first served. If you have any questions, contact Professor Emily Casey at eccasey@smcm.edu.
Behind the Scenes with Curator Kate Pollasch (SMCM ’10)
Boyden Art Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Monday, November 5 @ 1:30pm
- Interested in working in a museum or art gallery?
- Thinking about how to become a professional curator?
- Wondering what paths your SMCM Art History major or minor might lead you to?
- Curious about the work that goes into curating an art exhibition?
Please join SMCM alumna Kate Pollasch (Art and Art History, ’10) for an informal student discussion about her work as a curator, a behind-the-scenes tour of her process as curator of the current Boyden Art Gallery exhibition Finding Elsewhere, and her professional path from SMCM Art History graduate to writer and curator.
Kate Pollasch ‘10 is an Art History graduate of SMCM. She holds an MA in Modern art History and Theory and an MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has held positions with The American Visionary Art Museum, The Art institute of Chicago, the Roger Brown House Museum, Sullivan Galleries, and Rhona Hoffman Gallery. She is a contributing writer for New City, The Seen, and Elite Daily. She was a 2015-2016 HATCH Curatorial Resident at Chicago Artists Coalition. She was the 2017 Terrain-HATCH Public Art Curatorial Resident and also the 2017 Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation Curatorial Fellow. She was also the 2018 guest curator of Sullivan Galleries Low-Res MFA exhibition.
Art History to Art World: Conversations with SMCM Alumni in Museum and Gallery Fields speaker series
Curator’s Panel Discussion, SMCM Faculty Exhibition: Finding Elsewhere
Monday November 5, 4:45-5:45pm, Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Moderator: Exhibition Curator, Kate Pollasch ‘10
Panelists: Tristan Cai, Giulia Piera Livi, Jessye McDowell, Carrie Patterson, and Lisa Scheer
Exhibition: American Modernism in the St. Mary’s College of Maryland Bocour Collection
Boyden Gallery, Montgomery Hall
Dates: Opens in late November and will run through the Spring semester
Opening celebration: December 11 @ 4:30 Pizza Party in the Gallery
Drawn from an art history St. Mary’s Project by alum Sami Wright ’18, this exhibition explores the vibrant history of modern American art through a singular body of paintings in the college’s collection. Acrylic paint producer Lenny Bocour was a central figure in the New York art scene from the 1950s through ’80s. The artists who used his paints paid homage to him in their work, and repaid him through gifts of art works. In turn, Bocour gifted portions of his collection to St. Mary’s College of Maryland. The result is a unique insight into the excitement and experimentation among an expansive group of artists–both known and unknown–during a dynamic period in American art history. The exhibition’s highlights from the Bocour collection showcases remarkable works on the college’s campus, as well as the stellar state of undergraduate research at St. Mary’s today.
Join us for a kick-off celebration (and a break from finals) on Tuesday, December 11 at 4:30. We’ll have a pizza party in the gallery to toast the exhibition and the end of the semester.
Bonnie Veblen ‘09
Lecture: Widening Circles: Life and Learning After Graduation
Monday November 12, 4:45-5:45pm, Glendening Annex
Artist House Residency: October 10 – December 8, 2018
Bonnie Veblen is an artist currently living in Davis, CA. She graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2009 with a B.A. in Art and Art History, and minors in Environmental Studies and Biology. She completed a Post-Bac at Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in Pont-Aven, France in the fall of 2009. In 2014, Bonnie graduated from the Center for Massage and Natural Health and is certified to practice massage therapy in California. She has worked as an illustrator, graphic and web designer, medical assistant, and massage therapist. Bonnie exhibited some of her photography in a duo exhibition at Yoga on York in Baltimore in 2013. Her illustrations have been published in The Complete Photo Guide to Perfect Fitting (Creative Publishing) and Windpower Engineering & Development (April 2018). Her work is also available to view on the web.
Bonnie’s current artwork and writing explores the intersections of wildness, interconnection, transformative cycles, nervous system regulation, and wholeness. She often pairs images with words in the form of poetry or prose, so that they become a living unit, mutually informing and adding dimension to each other. Bonnie works in watercolor and acrylic as well as photography to distill the essence of natural spaces and beings she encounters in her daily life and her travels. She is especially interested in the experience of genius loci, the spirit or essence of a place, which is particular to that place alone given all of the qualities that meet there, and how that experience can have deep impact on a person’s interior process and wellbeing.
Open Studio @ The Artist House with artists-in-residence, Giulia Piera Livi and Bonnie Veblen
Thursday, November 15, 4:45-5:45pm
All are invited to visit the Artist House studios to see the works of Bonnie Veblen and Giulia Piera Livi. Mattapany Road just above the playing fields. Please walk or carpool as parking is very limited.
ART SMP Open Studios and Public Critique
With Visiting Critic James Williams II, Program Manager @ the Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, DC
Art Annex Studios
Monday, December 3
Open Studios from 4:30-5:00 pm
Public Critique with Visiting Critic 5:00-9:45pm
The culminating event of the Fall Semester’s SMP in Studio Art will be an open studio event, followed by a public critique in the Art Annex (located next to the Physical Plant and across from the tennis courts). Visitors are invited to see the artwork the students have made over the course of the semester, and to be observers in a formal critique with a visiting critic. This semester’s critic will be James Williams II, a painter and the Program Manager at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, DC.