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Art 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington, DC 20016-8004 United StatesVisiting Artists Series
The Studio Art MFA program at American University presents visiting artists throughout the academic year. View past visiting artists by semester:
Fall 2024
Update: Julie Wills's artist talk has been postponed to spring 2025.
Rush Baker IV
November 7, 6 p.m.
Rush Baker IV (American, b. 1987, Washington, DC) embraces uncertainty in his painting practice, blending real and digital elements across diverse media. His method involves printing collaged images, layering them with plaster, concrete, paint, and resin to create textured works that reflect the urgency and chaos of the socio-political climate. Influenced by politics and Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist novels, particularly Parable of the Sower, Baker's work explores the tension between destruction and reconstruction, using abstraction as a strategy to alter preconceived ideas.
Baker’s energy is conveyed through chaotic interwoven layers, revealing compositions that address the promise of tomorrow while confronting the flaws of the present. His works challenge boundaries and invite viewers to see beyond the immediate.
Baker has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo shows at Future Gallery (Berlin), Scaramouche Gallery (New York City), HEMPHILL Artworks, and Honfleur Gallery (Washington, DC), among others. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, where he received the Jack Stewart Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting, and an MFA from Yale University, where he was awarded the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award. In 2023, he was a Trawick Prize finalist and an Artsy Foundations Prize finalist in 2024.
Currently, Baker is a 2024/2025 Grant Wood Art Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in Art at the University of Iowa. Baker is also a lecturer in the MFA Program at American University’s Department of Art in Washington, DC. His works are included in the collections of The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Phillips Collection, and The International African American Museum.
Image: Rush Baker IV, All Quiet II, 2024. Acrylic, resin, paper, plaster on canvas, 50 x 40 in.
Howie Lee Weiss
October 24, 6 p.m.
Known for stylized, precise, graphic imagery, Howie Lee Weiss’s artworks have been reviewed in such publications as Art in America, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Baltimore Sun. Weiss’s iconic drawings have been exhibited in galleries in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, DC. His artwork has also appeared in venues throughout Italy. In Japan, Weiss lectured with the Keisho Art Association in conjunction with an exhibit that featured his extensive, free-style sketchbook practice. Howie Lee Weiss is currently affiliated with Goya Contemporary Gallery and Gross McCleaf Gallery.
A professor for over 40 years and having influenced multitudes of students, Weiss currently oversees all aspects of the Senior Thesis Program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and coordinates studio programming and the Artist-at-Noon Lecture Series. Additionally, Weiss has taught all levels of drawing and painting at the college level. Twice, he has received the Trustee’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at MICA. He also had co-directed the MICA Summer Intensive Abroad program in Italy. At Princeton University and the AICA New York Studio Program, Weiss served as Visiting Professor. As a speaker and critic Weiss has visited several schools, including Vassar, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, University of Pennsylvania, Moore College of Art, University of Connecticut and the Corcoran College of Art. Weiss also taught drawing at Chautauqua Institute.
In addition to a focused and disciplined studio life, Weiss attends classical piano and opera concerts, and is married to a classical pianist. A Pennsylvania native who began to draw at the age of five, Howie Lee Weiss was raised in a working-class, northeastern coal-mining town in proximity to the sophisticated, elegant vacation resorts of the Pocono Mountains. Mr. Weiss earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art & Architecture and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
February James
October 3, 6 p.m.
February James currently lives and works in Washington, DC, where she was born, after living in Los Angeles for fifteen years. She received her BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. James has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Berlin and Turin, Italy. Her work was included in Singular Views: 25 Artists at the Rubell Museum in Washington, DC, in 2024, following her inclusion in What’s Going On, the museum’s inaugural exhibition in 2022-2023. In 2021, James was invited by Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont to create a room size installation in Set It Off, an exhibition they organized for the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, NY. She has been featured in multiple other group shows, including Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, Face-to-Face at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, New York and BodyLand, curated by Lauren Taschen at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. She was invited to contribute watercolors to a feature in The New York Times Style Magazine in February 2021. James has been represented by Tilton Gallery since 2020.
Spring 2024
Cynthia Daignault
April 11, 6:30 p.m.
Cynthia Daignault received her degree from Stanford University. She has presented solo exhibitions and projects at many major museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and White Columns. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Center for Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Daignault is a regularly published author, and editor of numerous publications. The first major monograph on her work, Light Atlas, was published in 2019, and a new paperback edition will be released in early 2024. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2016 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Award, a 2011 Rema Hort Foundation Award, and a 2010 MacDowell Artist Fellowship. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2024, she will present a new monumental commission at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Jerrell Gibbs
March 21, 6:30 p.m.
Jerrell Gibbs (b. 1988; Baltimore, MD) opposes deceptive perceptions of Black men by questioning master narratives and their connection to a muted visual history. Gibbs’ paintings are acts of resistance, asserting power over visual stereotypes. He paints the Black male figure with adornments, such as flowers, and contextualizes them in moments of peace, rest, and solitude. These gestures function to dismantle the visual misrepresentation of violence, trauma, and pain.
Gibbs is committed to creating paintings that are both authentic and truthful, and he reveals Black men as God-fearing, husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. His paintings highlight joy, beauty, and the mundane, all components within the vastness of Black life. The compositions, which are often taken from his family archive, focus on placement, size, proportion, as much as they do on mark-making and painterly gestures. His assertions of legacy highlight the performative nature of heritage and displaces an audience unaccustomed to more extensive and wide-ranging portrayals of Black life.
Gibbs graduated with an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2020. His work is in the permanent collection of the Brandywine Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the CC Foundation, and the X Museum Beijing.
Sydney Vernon
February 22, 6:30 p.m.
Sydney Vernon (b. 1995, Prince George’s County, MD) superimposes personal family photographs and folklore with both real and imagined histories, quietly critiquing the global depiction of Black life and bodies. Combining elements of painting, drawing, and collage, Vernon’s multilayered works blend memory and history into new forms, at once imagining a poetic contextualization and a demand for recontextualization, coalescing symbols and ornaments with the spirit of her figures.
Kendall BusterFebruary 8, 6 p.m.
Innovative sculptor Kendall Buster is widely known for the unusual merger of art and science in her practice. Trained as a microbiologist, Buster creates sculptures that have been described as “biological architecture,” referencing the molecular world by recreating its shapes and forms on a monumental and microscopic scale. Buster earned a BFA degree from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. Additionally, she participated in the Independent Study Studio Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY.
This program is presented in conjunction with Buster’s two current solo exhibitions. See SOLSTICE at The Kreeger Museum through February 24, and SEED at the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art through February 25.
Fall 2023
Abigail DeVilleNovember 30
Abigail DeVille was born to an Afro-Dominican mother who immigrated to Harlem in the early 1960s and an African American father who was raised in the Bronx, Abigail Deville holds close both Harlem and the Bronx in her life and in her work. She explores both earthly sites, such as an empty Harlem lot thought to be a seventeenth-century burial ground for free and enslaved Africans, and the cosmos as a site of expansive dreaming and potential for marginalized peoples. DeVille utilizes recognizable structures and symbols, such as scaffolding, spaceships, mannequins, and the United States flag, to traverse the local and the galactic while interrogating freedom as both a constitutional value and personal liberation.
DeVille’s most recent solo exhibitions: In the fullness of time, the heart speaks truths too deep for utterance, but a star remembers; JTT NYC (2023); Original Night at Eric Firestone Gallery (2022-23); Bronx Heavens, Bronx Museum of the Arts (2022-23); Light of Freedom, organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy (2020-21), and traveled to the Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2021), the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2021-22), and Kenyon College (2023); The American Future, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland (2018-19); Lift Every Voice and Sing (amerikanskie gorki) at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2017-2018); Empire State Works in Progress (2017) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; No Space Hidden (Shelter) at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017-2018), and Only When It’s Dark Enough Can You See The Stars at The Contemporary, Baltimore (2016). DeVille was a 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award recipient, 2022 Nancy Graves Foundation Award grantee, 2018 United States Artists Fellow, 2017-2018 Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome, 2015 Obie Award for Design, 2015 Creative Capital grantee, 2014-15 fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, 2013-14 Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2012 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient. DeVille received her MFA from Yale University and BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Steven CushnerNovember 14
Steven Cushner in conversation with Stan Klein. Presented in conjunction with CUSHNER on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center through December 10.
Inspired by the human instinct to identify patterns in daily life, Steven Cushner's (American, born 1954) work is created through the performance of painting as the distillation of gesture into iconography.
His imagery is derived from the obvious logic of simple functions like the mechanics of a stack of firewood, the weave of a fisherman’s net, or the movement of a buoy in the ocean. Each work, varying in scale from enormous to tiny, has a commanding presence that teases out the relationship between what something looks like and how it acts. Spanning three decades, Cushner's pedagogical stream of work has established him as a singularly significant painter.
Steven Cushner is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and received his Master of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Maryland in 1980. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Stan Klein lives in Chicago and exhibits his work under the name Vito DeSalvo. Stan/Vito earned his/their BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. They have exhibited at the Joanne Dobrick Gallery, Chicago, Judith Racht Gallery, Sawyer, Michigan, the Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, Maine, and the Greenkill Gallery, Greenkill, NY. Stan/Vito have work in the collection of the McDonald's Corporation and have completed many private commissions. Stan operates Firecat Projects Gallery in Chicago, and has worked as a studio assistant for Kenneth Noland, Andrew Wyeth, and Tony Fitzpatrick.
Steven and Stan are childhood friends. They studied art together as high school students and went off to art school. Steven has lived in Washington DC for 45 years. After earning his MFA, Steven spent 10 years as an art handler, then began a long teaching career. He has lived and worked in the same house and studio for close to 40 years. Stan has worked as a framer, museum exhibition specialist, studio assistant, gallery owner, and usher at Wrigley Field. Between them, they have 90 years of living and working experience in the art world and have many stories to share.
Ronny QuevedoOctober 19
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981) was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and lives and works in the Bronx, NY. Quevedo’s practice spans installation, drawings, and prints, incorporating and subverting aspects of abstraction, painting, collage, cartography, and sports imagery. Deeply engaged with notions of identity and the intersection of mainstream and historically marginalized cultures, Quevedo reenvisions pre- and post-colonial iconographies, offering nuanced examinations of personal and social histories. This recuperation of indigenous languages of abstraction, the revalorization of their associated labor, and the centering of a living connection between contemporary and centuries-old cultural markers remain key to Quevedo’s ongoing practice.
From the materials he uses to the themes he explores, Ronny Quevedo’s work is rooted in an exploration of his own history and identity, initially using his art as a way to understand the lives and experiences of his parents. Quevedo’s father was a professional soccer player in Ecuador and the artist often incorporates the reconstructed and reorganized lines of athletic fields in his work. Similarly, the influence of Quevedo’s mother’s work as a dressmaker is evidenced in his incorporation of mediums like muslin and wax tracing paper. “To me,” says Quevedo, “there is no division of significance; these humble technical materials can be imaginatively and resourcefully transformed. My family history, which contained lots of adaptation, embodies this capacity for transformation.” By contextualizing these materials with ostensibly precious materials like gold and silver leaf, Quevedo invites the viewer to interrogate the simultaneous valuation of certain luxuries and erasure of the artisans who create them.
Photo: Ross Collab
Asad RazaSeptember 28
Asad Raza in conversation with AU Professor Alexandra Silverthorne.
Asad Raza (born Buffalo, USA) creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Diversion, first shown at Kunsthalle Portikus in 2022, diverts a river through the gallery space. Absorption, in which cultivators create artificial soil, was the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney (2019), later shown at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020) and Ruhrtriennale (2021). In Untitled (plot for dialogue) (2017), visitors played tennis in a sixteenth-century church in Milan. Root sequence. Mother tongue, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, combines twenty-six trees, caretakers and objects. Schema for a school was an experimental school at the 2015 Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial. Raza premiered the feature film Minor History at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019.
Raza’s works often inhabit intimate settings such as The Bedroom at the 2018 Lahore Biennale. For home show (2015), at his apartment in New York, Raza asked artists, friends, and family to intervene in his life, while Life to come (2019) at Metro Pictures featured participatory works and Shaker dance. With Hans Ulrich Obrist, he curates a series of exhibitions inspired by Édouard Glissant, including Mondialité (Villa Empain, Brussels), Trembling Thinking (Americas Society, New York), Where the Oceans Meet (MDC Museum of Art and Design, Miami), and This language which is every stone (IMA, Brisbane). Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and NYU, where he helped organize a labor strike.
Asad was the co-director of the Washington Project for the Arts' 2023 symposium: "How can we gather now?"
Spring 2023
Jonathan VanDykeMarch 9
Jonathan VanDyke's work reflects on the unfolding of art objects in dynamic relationship to the passing of time. He seeks a reclamation of the sensorial realm, with an emphasis on modes of attention and embodiment. Manifested through installations, paintings, videos, sculpture, writings, collaborative projects, and live and durational works featuring performers from the queer community of which he is a part, VanDyke's work prioritizes slowness, pauses, subtexts, and doubt.
His intensive formal experimentation is informed by the immersive, hands-on workshops that he leads internationally. VanDyke proposes a relational art practice – one that tempers the will of the individual artist, taking into account the life of objects, the sustainable use of materials, the possibilities of collaboration, and the myriad points of view and points of entry of diverse audiences.
Jonathan VanDyke grew up in the countryside in Pennsylvania and has been based in Brooklyn since 2002. Solo exhibitions have appeared at 1/unosunove, Rome; abc Berlin; Four Boxes Gallery in Denmark; Loock Galerie Berlin; Tops Gallery Memphis; Vox Populi Philadelphia; Scaramouche in NYC; The Columbus Museum in Georgia; and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, among others. Solo performances have appeared at Este Arte in Uruguay; Storm King Art Center; The Albright Knox Art Gallery; The National Academy Museum; the Power Plant in Toronto; and as part of Performa 11 in NYC. In 2019 he was included in the landmark exhibition Queer Abstraction at The Des Moines Art Center, and in 2022 he was appointed as Artist in Residence for The Chelsea Music Festival, through which he presented multi-media work in various venues in NYC. He had served as a Visiting Artist in Residence at The University of Alaska, The University of Chicago, and Krabbesholm Højskole in Denmark, and has served on the faculty of Mass Art, The University of the Arts, The Corcoran School at GWU, Cornell University, and The University of the Arts. He is currently an Artist in Residence in Studio Arts at Bard College. Learn more about VanDyke.
Brendan FernandesMarch 23
Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance hall, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Brendan is also the recipient of the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Noguchi Museum, New York, NY; Munch Art Museum, Oslo, Norway; The Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC; and The Girl’s Choir + Danish National Radio, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Sam VernonFebruary 2
The phenomenon—“transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” – can be proven by studying powerful historical intersections between art and activism amidst globalization and paradigm shifts in the States and beyond. This talk will explore the essential function of Sam Vernon's interdisciplinary studio practice and archival research to address socio-political impact using installation to confront questions concerning personal narrative, historical memory and identity. Learn more about Sam Vernon.
Holly Bass, Deirdre Darden, and Hannah Barco January 27
With the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art
Holly Bass is a multidisciplinary performance and visual artist, writer, and director. Her work has been presented at spaces such as the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Museums, the Seattle Art Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach (Project Miami Fair) and the South African State Theatre. Her visual artwork includes photography, installation, video and performance and can be found in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the DC Art Bank, as well as private collections.
Bass will be joined in conversation by independent curator Deirdre Darden, who guest curated between a rock and a soft place, currently on view at Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA), and Hannah Barco, Associate Curator and Festival Director, Tephra ICA.
Fall 2022
Erika Ranee
November 17
"My recent paintings express the hums and beats of small worlds writ large. I build each painting through a form of layering, drawing from the detritus of my daily experiences. I'm interested in the preservation of stories and in harnessing moments of stasis as a counterpoint to the transient impermanence of this digital communication age." - Erika Ranee
Erika Ranee received her MFA in painting from UC/Berkeley. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Painting 1996 and 2021, an AIM Fellowship from the Bronx Museum, and was granted artist residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was an AIRspace resident at Abrons Arts Center/2009 and was awarded a studio grant from Sharpe Walentas/2011. In 2018 her work was featured in group shows at the Southampton Arts Center, at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery and Freight+Volume—as well as two concurrent solo exhibitions at Ground Floor Gallery and BRIC/Project Room. The following year she exhibited in her first international show at Wild Palms in Dusseldorf, Germany. In 2021 her work was featured in New York at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, Platform Project Space and in a solo at Freight+Volume. Selected group shows in 2022 include The Landing Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Hollis Taggart Gallery in Southport, CT and at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NYC. She is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery and works in New York. Learn more about Ranee.
Dominic ChambersOctober 27
With the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art
Dominic Chambers (b. 1993, St. Louis, MO; lives and works in New Haven, CT) creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection.
Chambers will be joined in conversation by Andrew Wasserman, Professorial Lecturer, Department of Art, American University. Moderated by Jaynelle Hazard, Executive Director and Curator, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA). This program is presented in anticipation of the Dominic Chambers: What Makes the Earth Shake exhibition at Tephra ICA.
Marcus Civin
October 27
In this presentation, Marcus Civin will share the various ways he works with text through writing about other artists and in performance. Marcus' writing has appeared in Afterimage, AIGA Eye on Design, Artforum, Art in America, Art Papers, Aufgabe, Boston Art Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Camera Austria, Damn Magazine, Maake Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, and Momus. Exhibition and performance venues include St. Charles Projects, School 33 Art Center, Boston Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Station Gallery at the University of Southern California, and UMASS University Hall Gallery. He is Assistant Dean in the School of Art at Pratt Institute. Please visit marcuscivinwriting.com and @marcuscivinwriting on Instagram.
Spring 2022
Julia Kwon
January 13
Julia Kwon is an interdisciplinary artist whose work comments on the objectification of Asiatic female bodies, challenges the notion of authenticity, and examines the complexities of constructing identities within the context of globalism, cultural hybridity, intersectionality, and the collective struggle for social justice.
Image: Julia Kwon, The Blanket Statements You Use on Me and Every Other Yellow Women, 2019. Satin, brocade, custom designed fabric, and wire, sewn in the format of enlarged Korean object-wrapping cloth called bojagi, 2.75 x 14 x 14 ft.
Chan Chao
February 17
Chan Chao was born in Kalemyo, Burma. He has published three photography books, “Burma: Something Went Wrong”, “Letter form PLF” and “Echo”. He has an upcoming publication titled “Two Places on Earth”, due out in January. Chao’s Burma portraits were featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His photographs have been exhibited at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, NY, G Fine Art in Washington DC and Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
Image: Chan Chao, Melissa, December 2006. Country of Origin: Peru. Courtesy of the artist.
Macon Reed
March 17
Macon Reed is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, painting, and participatory projects. Primarily, they create large immersive, handmade installations that host extensive participatory programming through a queer and intersectional feminist lens.
Image: Macon Reed, These are Not Fables.
Panel Discussion: Danielle Abrams + Mary Ellen Strom
March 21
Danielle Abrams + Mary Ellen Strom have been selected as the inaugural artists for the Pauli Murray Residency for Art and Racial Justice. Responding to Abrams + Strom's previous work, the artists and faculty panelists each drew on their own areas of expertise to consider key questions related to art and social justice, including: what are the stakes and challenges of creating artistic work that directly engages with questions of race, power, and history?
Image: Danielle Abrams, Mary Ellen Strom
Ghana Thinktank Artist Talk
April 4
Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, asking the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world. Ghana ThinkTank’s innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures, challenges assumptions about who is “needy,” and turns the idea of expertise on its head by asking people in the “third world” to solve problems of people in the “first world.”
Fall 2021
- Cara Ober, artist, editor-in-chief at BmoreArt
September 29 - Amber Robles-Gordon, artist
Larry Ossei-Mensah, curator
Mikhaile Solomon, founder Prizm Art Fair
Pablo Guardiola, artist (of Beta-Local)
October 7 - Monsieur Zohore, artist
October 22 - Danielle Abrams + Mary Ellen Strom, artists
October 28 - Seeing Climate Change Symposium with
Monica Jahan Bose
Lauren Bon
Jesse Ribot
Signe Wilkinson
James Mayhew
November 6-7 - Philip Brookman
November 17 - Anil Revri + Eleanor Heartney
November 20
Image: Amber Robles-Gordon, Reflexiones sobre el yo, la virgen maría y el colonialismo, Reflections of self, the Virgin Mary and colonialism, 2020. Mixed media, collage on canvas, 18 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Spring 2021
Clifford Owens
February 18
Clifford Owens is an artist who makes photographs, performance art, works on paper, videos, installations, and texts. His art has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally.
Portrait of Clifford Owens. Photo by Karina Aguiler
Nicole Awai
March 4
Awai earned her Master’s Degree in Multimedia Art from the University of South Florida in 1996. She attended the Showhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in 1997 and was artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000. Awai was a featured artist in the 2005 Initial Public Offerings series at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2011 and an Art Matters Grant in 2012.
Image: Nicole Awai, Reflection Pool, 2019. Acrylic paint, resin, graphite, nail polish, plastic, shells, crystalline solids and paper 38” x 50”. Photo credit: Max Yawney
Legacy Russell
March 25
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual.
Image: Portrait of Legacy Russell. Photo Credit: Daniel Dorsa
Guadalupe Maravilla
March April 6
Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary artist who was part of the first wave of undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s from Central America. As an homage to his own migratory history, and to that of others, Maravilla makes work that acknowledges the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, notably belonging to Latinx communities.
Image: Guadalupe Maravilla, Portals. Sculptural Installation at ICA Miami
Fall 2020: Queer Threads
TJ Dedeaux-Norris
September 17
TJ Dedeaux-Norris (fka Tameka Jenean Norris) was born in Guam and received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012. Norris has recently participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals including at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Yerba Buena Museum, San Francisco, CA; among many others.
Image: T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Nina Simone (Mississippi Goddam, 1968), 2019. Reclaimed fabric, bedsheets, tablecloth, acrylic paint, sequins, curtain rod. 87 × 88 in.
Paolo Arao
October 1
Paolo Arao is a Brooklyn-based, Filipino-American artist working with textiles He received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Arao has shown his work widely and has presented solo exhibitions at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, Glass Box in Seattle, Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Franklin Artworks in Minneapolis, Jeff Bailey Gallery and Barney Savage Gallery, both in NYC.
Image: Paolo Aaro, Evolving Quilt Project (ongoing). Sewn canvas, corduroy, cotton, denim, silk, wool. Currently 125 x 250 inches.
Oliver Herring
October 15
Oliver Herring was born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1964, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from the University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, England, and an MFA from Hunter College, New York. Among Herring’s early works were his woven sculptures and performance pieces in which he knitted Mylar, a transparent and reflective material, into human figures, clothing, and furniture.
Image: Oliver Herring, Untitled (Flower for Ethyl Eichelberger). 1991-92 Knit transparent tape. 85 x 85”.
Sheila Pepe
October 29
Sheila Pepe received a BA from Albertus Magnus College in 1981, a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1983 and a MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1995. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1994 and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in 1984. Pepe has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions as well as collaborative projects, most recently in Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present, ICA/Boston, MA, and We have never participated: 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China.
Image: Julia Kwon, Sheila Pepe Your Granny's Not Square, 2008. Shoelaces, yarn, and hanging hardware. 84 x 144 x 42 inches. Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum
Angela Hennessy
January 13
Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary art. Through writing, studio work, and performance her practice examines mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth.
Image: Angela Hennessy, Black Rainbow, 2017. Crocheted synthetic and human hair, artist’s hair, LED light strip, frame. 10' x 15' x 5'.
Past Visiting Artists
- Marina Abramovic
- Olive Ayhens
- Kenny Bailey
- Sanford Biggers
- Robert Bordo
- Iona Brown
- Michael Ray Charles
- Susanna Coffey
- Diana Cooper
- Tara Donovan
- Leonardo Drew
- Nicole Eisenman
- Michelle Grabner
- Joanne Greenbaum
- Chris Hanson
- Hendrika Sonnenberg
- James Hyde
- Shirley Kaneda
- Titus Kaphar
- Anish Kapoor
- Nina Katchadourian
- Karl Kauper
- Annette Lawrence
- Kalup Linzy
- Lori Lobenstine
- Ayako Maruyama
- Donald Moffett
- Linda Montano
- Carrie Moyer
- William PopeL.
- William Powhida
- Rob Pruitt
- Dorothea Rockburne
- Dan Steinhilber
- Gary Stephan
- Tobias Sternberg
- Robert Storr
- Stephen Westfall
- Sam Moyer
- Valerie Hegarty
- Terry Adkins
- Gianna Commito
- Courtney Smith
- Matthew Rich
- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
- Saul Chernick
- Nina Katchadourian
- William Powhida
- Stephen Madoff
- Marina Abramovic
- Susanna Coffey
- Dan Steinhilber
- Robert Storr
- Gary Stephan
- Dorothy Frey
- Jeremy Long
- Alison Hall
- Amber Scoon
- Beverly McIvers
- Julie Langsam
- Hilary Harkness
- Erik Thor Sandberg
- Kurt Kauper
- Howardena Pindell
- Michele Greet
- Sanford Biggers
- Galo Moncayo
- Jiha Moon
- Isabel Manalo
- Gary Stephan
- Charles Spurrier
- James Hyde
- Vibeke Sorenson
- Joshua Shannon
- Louis Fishman
- Keith Mayerson
- Mark Kenison
- Scott Reeder
- Jefferson Pinder
- Alexander Dumbadze
- Chitra Ganesh
- Randall Packer
- Elena Sisto
- Annette Lawrence
- Susan Fisher Sterling
- Mary Coble
- Leslie King-Hammond
- Ann Pibal
- Dean Smith
- Jill Downen
- Frank Trankina
- Amy Raehse NA