Visual Arts Faculty

Barry Bartlett creates ceramic sculptures that take on questions of conflict, evolution, warfare, suburban sprawl, kitsch, and commemoration.

J Blackwell’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.

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.

Jon Isherwood is a sculptor who has pioneered high-tech CNC technologies, led international projects, and designed opportunities to investigate the sites where the intellectual and physical become visually entangled.

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 cross-cultural exchange, the intersectionality of gender, race, and theology in early modern visuality, and the legacies of the 'Old Masters' in subsequent art and its histories.

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.

In her work as a documentary filmmaker and film editor, Kate Purdie focuses on finding and portraying insights into the human experience by delving into lives and ideas that speak to themes of work, family, and community.

Robert Ransick draws inspiration from the social and political world we live in, history, and the potential for a future that is better.

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.

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.

An artist whose practice involves writing and curating, Anne Thompson creates community through collaborative projects that move art outside its institutionalized spaces.

Elizabeth White is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

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.

Camille Hoffman's current work is a mixed-media meditation on Manifest Destiny and its representation in the romantic American landscape. Reflecting on the embedded and latent meanings around light, nature, the frontier, borders, race, gender and power in influential American landscape paintings of the 19th century, she uses materials collected from her everyday life, including holiday-themed tablecloths, discarded medical records, nature calendars, plastic bags and paint, to craft imaginary landscapes that are grounded in accumulation, personal narrative and historical critique.

Baseera Khan is a New York-based artist who sees bodies as constantly subject to volatile social environments globally and most notably within capitalist-driven societies such as the United States. Volatility creates a need for Khan to self-censor and develop secretive environments. Living between surveilled and othered, she can find exile anywhere and kinship by its side. These life lessons transform into motives of obscurity that lead her to a careful deployment of material and linguistic shifts. The use of fashion, photography, textiles and music, sculpture and performance manifest Khan's native femme Muslim American experience, a legacy for her aesthetic concealment.

Anina Major 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.

May Hemler is a photographer whose work focuses on the body, pain, illness, and disability. Hemler works across many photographic mediums and formats, in digital, large, medium, and 35mm, black and white, as well as color. 

Anna Kroll is an artist whose work incorporates installations, Instagram feeds, livestreams, flip books, writing, and audio experiences in an exploration of performance and technology. Additionally, through her background in dance, there is a value placed on corporeal place, presence and personal experience for both audience and creator in Kroll's work. 

Colleen Murphy is a digital artist and animator who is intrigued by solitude, thought processes, and empathy. She highly values the creation process and is continually adapting her workflow.

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 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.