Visual Arts Faculty
Barry Bartlett creates ceramic sculptures that take on questions of conflict, evolution, warfare, suburban sprawl, kitsch, and commemoration.
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.
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
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.
Tracey Cockrell is an interdisciplinary artist who frequently collaborates with other artists, writers, & musicians. Using sympathetic resonance as a metaphor and as a means of sound propagation, she builds sculptures and experimental musical instruments that explore the origins of language and challenge the authority of language for making meaning.
Razan Francis' work centers on the visual culture of the Islamic world with a focus on Iberia and the Mediterranean. She explores the relationship of cultural identity and artistic practice in multi-ethnic and multi-religious environments and the discourse of images and craftsmanship in Islamic cultures.
Chelsea Knight is a video and performance artist working in New York. Knight creates narratives and environments where expressions of language collide with those of power. She was recently an Artist in Residence at the New Museum (NYC) and a resident at the MacDowell Colony (New Hampshire).
Annette Lawrence’s art transforms raw data into drawings, objects, and installations. Her work is grounded in examining what counts, how it is counted, and who is counting.
Michael Sylvan Robinson '89 (he/they) is an internationally-exhibited genderqueer fiber artist, activist, and leader in arts education; their contemporary fiber art intersects fashion, sculpture, street art and queer activism through innovative use of textile collage and text-based art techniques.
Instructor/Technician
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.
Veronica Melendez is a visual artist, curator, and founder of La Horchata magazine. Through illustrations of iconic household products to photographs documenting the diaspora of Central Americans in Washington D.C., her work speaks to the broader theme of how we as humans create home.
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.
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.
John Umphlett MFA '99 is open to experimentation through the love of material handling and repetitive practice. His work can be a representation of an action or a snapshot of a moment that takes hours to fully view. The focus of life and death are recognized within his work as vibrating bookends.