Visual Arts Faculty
Beverly Acha is a New York-based visual artist working in painting, printmaking, and drawing. Her work engages visual and spatial languages of landscape, architecture, and diagrams. Through a process-based practice that embraces formal and material play, Acha’s work investigates the spaces between knowing and seeing, experience and memory, and the real and imagined.
J Blackwell '95's recent works are called Neveruses (never•uses). Neveruses are lumpish, androgynous painting-objects comprised of scavenged plastic bags and colored fibers such as wool yarn and silk thread. These hybrid devices are neither useful nor redundant, although both are implied.
Terry Boddie’s work as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist explores the intersection of history, migration and memory and how these forces impact historical and contemporary photographic representation.
Thorsten Dennerline produces paintings, drawings, and artists’ books. The main focus of his work originates from an interest in poetry, which has led to collaborative projects with writers in book form, and in paintings and drawing projects that explore the poetic possibilities of the landscape.
Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms, and spans video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text and data.
Yoko Inoue’s multidisciplinary art practice anthropologically examines complex relationships between people and objects, the commodification of culture, and the assimilation and transformation of cultural meaning and values. Using ceramic medium she explores the socio-political and economic implication of products and globalization.
Jonathan Kline’s artwork straddles the divide between photography’s contemporary, hybrid, and digital nature and its most traditional and original forms.
Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, performance, and painting, on topics of national identity, economy, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. She is a 2017 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, as well as the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Art.
Mary Lum’s paintings, collages, and wall works, which have been praised by critics and exhibited widely, draw attention to the overlooked but subliminally powerful architecture of modern life.
Vanessa Lyon's teaching and research range from early Renaissance to modern and contemporary visual culture with a focus on European painting. She is especially interested in transhistorical and transcultural approaches to gender, race, and representation in early modern visuality, and the legacies of the 'Old Masters' in subsequent art and its histories.
Anina Major (she/her) is a visual artist from the Bahamas whose work investigates the relationship between self and place. Anthropological research and oral histories play fundamental roles in her practice as she engages with ceramic material to map migrations of tradition and identity.
Aysha Peltz’s ceramics blur the lines between utility and art, as the material properties of clay itself—the way it swells, fissures, and tears under its own weight—create a certain kind of poetry.
Ann Pibal’s widely recognized and highly acclaimed paintings have been exhibited extensively, in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Sue Rees has exhibited her set designs, animations, installations, and video works worldwide and has worked collaboratively with choreographers, directors, and musicians in the United States, Europe, and India.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporates improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements and feminist experiments with language and narrative.
Donald Sherefkin is an architect whose projects range from urban loft renovations to rural retreats to sacred spaces, extending from the heart of New York City to New England.
Anne Thompson is an artist whose curatorial practice focuses on political critique, site specificity and activities that move beyond institutional spaces.
John Umphlett MFA '99 is an innovator and inquisitive thinker, consistently searching for new experimental processes. Entranced within material parameters and properties, he finds ways to fuse those findings with the ephemeral human body.
Elizabeth White is an artist whose work ranges in form from photography to digital collage, installation, drawing, and social practice. Informed by a background in sociology and media studies as well as visual arts, she is interested in the social impact of photography and related technologies, and the politics of visual culture.
Visiting Faculty
Antonio Sergio Bessa is chief curator emeritus at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. A scholar of concrete poetry, Bessa has organized several critically acclaimed exhibitions on themes related to text-based art, and has published essays on concrete poetry.
Colin Brant’s luxurious, color-drenched, paintings and drawings present an inquiry that is both reverent and skeptical, offering examinations of landscape as personal, politicized, and perpetually evolving historical space.
Lily Carone is a horticulturist, artist, and educator based in western Massachusetts. Her work reflects and engages with ecology, both in subject and material.
Julia Ferrari, artist, poet, letterpress printer, has been making handmade books for the past 30 years.
Luiza Folegatti is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist and visual anthropologist. Her practice combines research on gender, migration, photography, and Latin American studies with social advocacy for immigrant rights.
Anna Hepler is based in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Her work, which is both hand-held and architectural in scale, overturns first impressions – wire forms flatten into drawings, clay impersonates metal, plywood coils like rope, plastic inhales, and exhales. Hepler values embarrassment, uncertainty, blunder, and fragility as active agents in her studio process.
Matt Katz is a leader and innovator of online ceramic material science education and research. He loves to use his knowledge of art and engineering to make ceramic science accessible for all levels of makers.
Nicholas Oh is a multidisciplinary artist working across ceramic sculpture, installation, and performance. Oh is interested in diasporic narratives and intersections between Eastern and Western cultural traditions. His research centers on historical artifacts and the impact of imperial trade routes. He recreates and repositions these objects as markers of diasporic Asian-American narrative.
Instructor/Technician
Eddy Leonel Aldana is a Latinx artist whose work examines his family’s place in the Guatemalan diaspora, and how colonialism and U.S. intervention created a climate for displacement during his family’s lifetime.
John Crowe works primarily in video and large scale installation. Without narrative, but with a physical mis-en-scene, appropriated video/film loops and sculptures distill cinema into vignettes.
Joshua Primmer is a maker of utilitarian ceramics and multimedia sculpture that are as much about form, function, process, and material as they are about peaceful monumentality. He has shown his work across the United States and in Canada.
Gus Ramirez is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist that focuses on exploring queer identities and representation in an overwhelming binary world. Through the utilization of interdisciplinary arts that combine to create a historical reference and explorations, they unite to make a queer adjacent history.
Corinne Rhodes is an artist-printmaker and runs Cherry Press Printmaking Workshop in Rutland, MA. For the past three years she has been immersed in developing techniques and materials for non-toxic lithography, which she teaches at Cherry Press and other printmaking workshops, colleges/universities and art schools/institutions.
Olivia Saporito '20 creates work that explores the intersection between object and image, aiming to construct the materiality of memory through the mode of lens-based sculpture.