Past Kennedy Family Visiting Artists and Scholars
Roy Kaplan (2018, Spring)
H. Roy Kaplan was the executive director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews for Tampa Bay. He teaches courses on racism at the 鶹Ƶ. His most recent book is, “Understanding Conflict and Change in a Multicultural World.”
Michael Berryhill (2017, Spring)
Michael Berryhill is a Texas-born, New York-based painter. Oscillating between abstraction
and recognizable imagery, Berryhill’s modestly sized, brightly colored canvases reference
Post-Impressionism and Surrealism through a contemporary sensibility. Abound with
art historical references and evidence of process, Berryhill’s paintings are picture-puzzles
that require careful, slow looking to decipher their playful yet psychologically charged
content.
Berryhill received his MFA from Columbia University, a BFA in Painting from the University
of Texas at Austin, and he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture,
In Maine. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Angstrom Gallery, Los
Angeles; Blütenweiss Gallery, Berlin; Okay Mountain and Arthouse, Austin; Horton Gallery
and KANSAS in New York City, among others. He was a recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe
Art Foundation Studio program, and in 2012 received a New York Foundation for the
Arts Fellowship in Painting.
As the spring 2017 Kennedy Family artist in residence, Michael Berryhill co-taught
two painting and drawing courses with Professor Sue Havens, worked with graduate students,
delivered a public lecture in April, and was a guest artist instructor at Blake High
school in downtown Tampa.
Stephanie Syjuco (2017, Spring)
Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative
archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component
that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Working
primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems,
shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies
and empire. This has included collaborative projects in London, San Francisco, and
Belgium.
Born in the Philippines, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA
from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship
Award and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. Her work has been shown
in exhibitions at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, ZKM Center
for Art and Technology, Germany; Z33 Space for Contemporary Art, Belgium; Universal
Studios Gallery Beijing; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the California
Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others.
A long-time educator, she has taught at Stanford University, The California College
of Design, Art & Performance, The San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, Carnegie
Mellon University, and most recently joined the faculty at the University of California
at Berkeley in January 2014 as an Assistant Professor in Sculpture.
Jered Sprecher (2017, Spring)
Jered Sprecher is a hunter and a gatherer, constantly accumulating images produced
by the people and cultures around him. Segments of this collection of images then
emerge in his paintings. His work shows images that are revealed as fragments in the
midst of change, destruction, redefinition, and restoration. The sources they are
drawn from are changing and evolving, and the paintings are caught in that “still”
moment of change. Today, as the exchange of information increases on a daily basis,
it becomes more difficult to trace the heredity of images. One is seldom afforded
the time to begin to understand what one is viewing before the image has moved on
and evolved. It is out of this fast-paced exchange that he extracts elements that
resonate with a sense of vital meaning. He seeks to use this wide language of visual
marks and notations to describe that which humanity has in common, be it humor, mortality,
or yearning to understand what is beyond.
Sprecher’s work is based in an eclectic aesthetic. His paintings extract elements
from the high and low of visual culture. This culture and crush of images is in constant
flux. His paintings hold no single allegiance but are constantly shifting from one
form of representation to another. The paintings function as sources of both inductive
and deductive image-making processes. In our day-to-day life, one is seldom afforded
the time to comprehend what one is viewing under the barrage of images produced by
humankind. He tries to grasp a single moment, a glance, a small epiphany. The paintings
are haptic documents of everything and nothing.
Amanda Ross-Ho (2017, Spring)
Amanda Ross-Ho’s work is inspired by detritus: the clutter and remnants of daily existence
and the ‘negative space’ of things overlooked. Ranging from sculpture, installation,
painting, and photography, her work seeks to uncover the subtle beauty of coincidence
and anomaly.
Working from source materials as diverse as newspaper articles, narcotics agency
records, life aspiration manuals, and home-craft instruction booklets, Ross-Ho highlights
points of cultural ‘intersection’ to create extrinsic portraits of contemporary zeitgeist.
Throughout Ross-Ho’s work is a sense of de-familiarization and detachment, a numbing
alienation contrived from everyday ephemera. In pieces such as Seizure, a large inkjet
print of drug paraphernalia snapshots is mounted on a make-shift evidence table. A
representation of a representation, the illicit glamour, allure, and enticement of
busted crime is laid out for scrutiny, rendered vacant and sanitized through its photographic
distancing.
Shaun Leonardo (2017, Spring)
Shaun Leonardo is a multidisciplinary artist who uses modes of self-portraiture as
a means to convey the complexities of masculine identity and question preconceived
notions of manhood. The portraits take the form of cutout paintings, drawings, and
sculptures, while and are also brought to life through performance.
“Leonardo’s work negotiates societal expectations of masculinity; achievement; collective
identity; and the experience of failure.” -Patrick D. Wilson
“Shaun Leonardo uses his body to communicate and portray imagery, in this case, hyper-masculine
images of physicality— – at the expense of his own physical comfort. The function
of the male body has long been a signifier of self-worth. The body affirms and legitimizes
his feeling of control and agency over his environment. In this sense Shaun “El C.”
Leonardo is performing two very distinct actions at once. On the one hand, he uses
performance as a venue for discussion of how men have internalized culture’s preconceived
notions of how men should act and appear. And on the other hand, his performances
call attention to how these expectations are not only strange, but also not applicable
to the rest of men at large. We are not all superheroes, that these spectacles of
masculinity contain elements of absurdity and arbitrariness. Leonardo’s work calls
our attention to these spectacles not for their immediate content but rather as symbols
of our cultural acceptance of an arbitrary and potentially irrational masculine norm.”-Dave
Sinaguglia
“Even more radical in the context of [sport], however, is the idea of relating masculinity
to performance, for the very notion of performance strips [sport] of its spontaneity,
its essential naturalness, and subjects a chance series of athletic events, governed
by instinctual, precognitive behavior, to the analytical potential of scripting –
—quite literally, to the process of representation.”-Christopher Bedford
Liz Wells (2017, Spring)
Liz Wells writes and lectures on photographic practices. She edited,” Photography:
A Critical Introduction” (2015 5th ed.) and “The Photography Reader” (2003, new edition);
she is also co-editor for photographies, Routledge journals.
Publications on landscape include Land Matters, Landscape Photography, Culture and
Identity (2011). Exhibitions as curator include Light Touch, Baltimore- Washington
International Airport (February 12 – June 21, 2014); Sense of Place, European Landscape
Photography (BOZAR, Brussels, 14 June 14-– 15 September 15, 2012).
Wells is Professor professor in Photographic Culture, Faculty of Arts and Humanities,
Plymouth University, UK.
Aspen Mays (2017, Spring)
Aspen Mays was raised in Charleston, SC. She received her MFA from the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from The University
of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2004. Mays joined CCA in 2015, and she is an Assistant
Professor in Graduate Fine Arts and Undergraduate Photography.
In her photographic work, Mays has been called a “Postmodern mystic.” Her work challenges
the expectation of photography as a documentary and categorical medium, and her research
explores the visualization of knowledge in both visual art and observational sciences.
She is interested in the fantasy of objectivity in photographic processes, the artifacts
and archives of these processes, and the desire for transcendence in the ordinary
and prosaic.
Her solo exhibitions include Every leaf on a tree at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago, IL; Sun Ruins at GOLDEN, New York; Newspaper Rock at Light Work in Syracuse,
New York; and Ships that Pass in the Night at the Center for Ongoing Projects and
Research (COR&P) in Columbus, OH. She was also included in the national survey of
Contemporary Art in the United States, State of the Art, at the Crystal Bridges Museum
of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Art
Papers, the New Yorker and the New York Times.
Honors include a Rotary Fellowship in 2006, where Mays studied photography in Cape
Town, South Africa while volunteering in a clinic for bead- working artisans living
with HIV. Mays was a 2009-2010 Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile, where she spent
time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the
sky. She is also a member of the international photographic collective, Piece of Cake.
Ben Fain (2017, Spring)
Ben Fain (American, born London 1980) is best known for his controversial public -performances,
parades, and allegorical parade videos, often sited amidst a lush, pastoral Americana.
Fain’s work foregrounds the float as an atavistic site for sculpture erupting out
of the slow, ritual time of parade, recognized as a living, cultural moment.
Floats function as ghostly characters, stand-ins for an absent, often abject and
fecal body traveling as a fleeting image through the narrative space of the parade
event. Fain’s floats become fetish containers for cultural beliefs; infinitely adaptive
platforms populated by stickmen and doppelgangers charged with mysterious energies,
documented in his videos.
The absent body, reduced to its simplest symbols, is manipulated through the narrative
transfer enacted by the parade, proliferating outwards and creating micro-narratives
powered by conjecture, confusion and rumor. For Fain, public parade culture is a return
to the vital, the bodily, and the organic, with the float as talisman, emerging with
purpose from Limbo.
Basma Alsharif (2016, Spring)
Artist/Filmmaker Basma Alsharif presents her work through a narrative on the development
of her practice as coinciding with the normalization of vivid images of trauma.
Her lyrical use of history, language as poetics as aesthetics, and soundscapes as
immersive environments, weave together disparate materials into multi-layered works.
Interrogating the representation of violence as apathy producing, Alsharif's work
centers on the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes and
natural environments through video, film and installation.
Basma Alsharif was raised between France and the US. Since receiving a Master of
Fine Arts in 2007 from the University of Illinois at Chicago, she developed her practice
nomadically between Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Amman, and the Gaza Strip. Major exhibitions
include: les Module at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum,
the Jerusalem Show, Yamagata Documentary Film Festival, the Berlinale, the Sharjah
Biennial, Videobrasil, and Manifesta 8. She received a jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial
9, the Marion MacMahon award at Images, and was awarded the Marcelino Botin Visual
Arts grant. Basma is represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris, distributed by Video
Data Bank and Arsenal, and is currently based in Los Angeles.
Ken Fountain (2016, Fall)
Ken Fountain spent the better part of 20 years writing, recording and touring as a
musician. Somewhere in there he began to make a living producing promotional art for
members of the Chicago music scene. His rediscovery of animation happened while on
that path, and it made him divert his course indefinitely.
After only a few years animating in the Chicago advertising market, Ken was invited
to move to LA to begin working for DreamWorks Animation –— contributing animated performances
to feature film titles such as: "Monsters Vs. Aliens,", "Shrek Forever After,", "Megamind,",
"How to Train Your Dragon: The Gift of the Night Fury,", "Kung Fu Panda 2", and "Puss
in Boots," – —and most recently to work as an independent animator for Blue Sky Studios
on "The Peanuts Movie" and Google Spotlight Stories "Pearl," directed by Oscar-winning
director Patrick Osborne ("Feast").
Now, after having the opportunity to create performances for worldwide blockbusters,
Ken has decided to split his creative time between producing animation for education
(Crackerbox Studio), educating animators (SplatFrog.com, and iAnimate Workshops),
and animating for feature film and television – —all from the comfort of his country
home in central Virginia.
Dr. Jenny Anger (2016, Fall)
Jenny Anger is a professor of art history at Grinnell College, where she has taught
since earning her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture at Brown University
in 1997. Anger’s specialty is twentieth20th -century European art history and theory.
Her first book, “Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art” (Cambridge University
Press, 2004), situates Klee’s art within the problematic of the decorative as it was
articulated and contested especially in the early years of the twentieth 20th century.
Anger’s second book, “Metaphors of Modernism: Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme,”
is expected to appear in 2017. The book argues for the unacknowledged centrality of
metaphor in modern art through an exploration four recurrent metaphors—piano, water,
glass, and home—that shape the realm of possibility of art in the two titular organizations:
Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm in Berlin (1910-32) and Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier’s
Société Anonyme in New York (1920-50).
Anger’s teaching at Grinnell reflects her research commitments. In addition to sections
of “Introduction to Art History,” Anger’s regular courses are “Modern Art in Europe,
1900-1940,” “Art Since 1945,” “American Art,” and “Berlin: Borders and Transgressions”
(co-taught with German professor Daniel Reynolds). Anger has also utilized the Grinnell
College Art Collection to teach the department’s triennial Exhibition Seminar three
times: on photogravures of American Indians by Edward S. Curtis, on German Expressionist
prints, and on the theme of repetition in art more broadly. The resultant student-curated
exhibition, Repeat, Reveal, React: Identities in Flux, ran at the Faulconer Gallery
from 29 January to 21 March 2010. Finally, Anger has been pleased to offer a senior
seminar on several topics to date: “Avant-Garde Exhibitions and the Myth of the White
Cube,” “The Gesamtkunstwerk,” “Modernism and the Market,” “Modernism and Postmodernism,”
and “Twentieth-Century Art and Philosophy in Dialogue” (co-taught with philosophy
professor Alan Schrift).
Gordon Hall (2016, Fall)
Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York. Hall has exhibited and performed at SculptureCenter,
The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum of American
Art, Movement Research, EMPAC, Art in General, Temple Contemporary, Night Club Chicago,
Kent Fine Art, Foxy Production, The Hessel Museum at Bard College, White Columns,
and at Chapter NY, among others. Hall has also organized lecture and performance programs
at MoMA PS1, Recess, The Shandaken Project, and at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, producing a series of lectures and seminars in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney
Biennial.
Hall’s writing and interviews have been featured in a variety of publications including
V Magazine, Randy, Bomb, Title Magazine, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary
Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter) and in Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge,
2012). Hall was awarded an LMCC Process Space Residency in 2016, a Triangle Arts Foundation
Residency in 2015, the LMCC Workspace Residency for 2013-14, attended the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and the Fire Island Artist Residency in
2012.
Hall holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago.
Franklin Evans (2016, Fall)
Franklin Evans creates painting installations with the artist’s studio as his subject.
Born and raised in Reno, NV, he lives in New York, NY. He has degrees from Stanford
University, University of Iowa, and Columbia University.
Since 2005, he has had twenty solo exhibition in the United States and Europe and
numerous group exhibitions at venues, which include, among others: MoMA PS1, New York,
NY; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln,
MA; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Weatherspoon Art Museum,
Greensboro, NC; Futura, Prague, Czech Republic; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY;
The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco,
CA; Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA; Federico Luger, Milan, Italy; Ameringer
McEnery Yohe, New York, NY; Sue Scott, New York, NY. His work has been featured and
reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Art in America, New York Magazine,
Artforum, The New Yorker, Modern Painters, Brooklyn Rail, Art-Agenda, Flash Art International,
Hyperallergic, Art New England, Sculpture Magazine, among other publications.
Awards and grants include MacDowell Fellow; Yaddo Fellow; The Marie Walsh Sharpe
Art Foundation Space Program; LMCC Workspace Program; Pollock- Krasner Foundation
Grant; NYFA Fellow Painting. Evans work is included in the public collections of the
Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Weatherspoon
Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Sweeney Art
Gallery, University of California, Riverside, CA; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH;
The Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland, OH; Salomon Foundation, Annecy, France;
Collection AGI, Verona, Italy. Evans is represented by Ameringer McEnery Yohe (New
York), FL Gallery (Milan), and Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston).
Angelina Gualdoni (2016, Fall)
Angelina Gualdoni's works on canvas take the patterns, interiors and abstraction as
their main focus, locating the rhythm of the everyday sublime in the language of color
field painting. Often staining both sides of the canvas, her paintings operate as
fluid scrims between still life, color field and pattern and decoration. Gualdoni's
paintings have been the subject of solo and group shows nationally and internationally
at the Queens Museum, NY, St. Louis Art Museum, MO, the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago, IL, The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut, the Museum de Paviljoens, Netherlands,
and the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY. Her work resides in the Saatchi Collection,
as well as the MCA, Chicago, and the Nerman Museum, Kansas City.
She has been the beneficiary several grants and fellowships, including Artadia, Pollock-Krasner,
NYFA (2008, 2015), and has attended residencies at MacDowell Colony, Skowhegan School
of Painting and Sculpture, International Studio and Curatorial Program, and Chateau
La Napoule. Gualdoni received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in
Baltimore, her MFA from the University of Illinois in Chicago.
She resides and works Brooklyn and is represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery in New
York. Gualdoni is one of 11 co-curators at an artist-run exhibition Regina Rex, located
in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Gina Osterloh (2016, Spring)
Grounded in questions inherent to photography such as vision, perception, the history
of framing bodies, seriality, and the call for a body to gesture – Gina Osterloh’s
interdisciplinary practice addresses perception and personhood through photography,
video, film, performance, and installation.
Her photographs depict life-size constructed sets and drawings created solely for
the camera, along with figures that mimic or partially disappear into their constructed
environments – while visual strategies focus on color and pattern to create slippages
between foreground, figure, and background. Osterloh’s 16mm film, “Press and Outline,”
investigates the tracing of the silhouette as an early form of photography and the
desire to fix the image of self and other. For her lecture at the University of South
Florida, Osterloh will discuss the function of the performative body, repetition,
mimesis, and seriality in her work. Along with her own practice, Gina Osterloh is
currently researching artists that make connections between formal strategies, materiality,
and larger questions of identity.
Gina Osterloh (b. 1973) earned her BA from DePaul University in 1996 and her MFA
from the University of California, Irvine in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include
Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures, New York (2015), Nothing To See Here There Never
Was (2015) at Silverlens Gallery in Manila, Philippines, Press Erase Outline Slice
Strike Make An X Prick! (2014) at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, Anonymous Front
(2012) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Group Dynamics
and Improper Light (2012) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Osterloh’s work
was also included in Fragments of an Unknowable Whole (2014) at the Urban Arts Space,
at Ohio State University, and This Is Not America: Resistance, Protest and Poetics
(2014) at the Arizona State University Art Museum. Recent reviews include The New
Yorker Magazine magazine and Artforum. Osterloh lives in Los Angeles and currently
teaches at California State University, Fullerton and Santa Ana College. Her work
is represented by Higher Pictures (New York), François Ghebaly (Los Angeles) and Silverlens
(Manila, Philippines).
Ben Bellas (2016, Fall)
Benjamin Zellmer Bellas (b. 1976 Meadville, PA; lives and works in Miami, FL) received
his Bachelor’s degree in Studio Arts from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, and
his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. Bellas has since
spoken at venues like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian
American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center.
His recent solo exhibitions include, The letter that you’re writing doesn’t mean
you’re not dead, CUAC, Salt Lake City, UT (2015); Until the brilliance is extinguished,
Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA (2015); and Soft Movements in the Same Direction,
The New Gallery, Calgary, Canada (2014). Bellas’ group exhibitions include Bring out
your dead, Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago, IL (2015); Burn it Down, Heaven Gallery,
Chicago, IL (2014); and Elastic de facto, Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles (2013). In
2012, he won the Franklin Furnace Fund for his work, and later received a grant from
the Maryland State Arts Council in 2014. Bellas has been featured in The Washington
Post, WAMU NPR, and Sculpture Magazine, and is currently an Assistant Professor of
Art and Art History at Florida International University, Miami.
Zachary Harris (2015, Fall)
Zach Harris will lecture on themes related to his studio practice and recent work, including durational looking, pictorial illusion and imagination, color as logic’s poetry, lost secrets of masters, refinement and nature of form, primacy of drawing, awakening the spatial serpent, and historical conceptions of art, among others. The artist lives in Los Angeles and received his MFA from Hunter College, New York.
Alec Soth (2015, Spring)
Alec Soth was born and based in Minneapolis and received an undergraduate degree from
Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. One of today’s most prolific and celebrated
photographers, the artist has exhibited throughout the United States, as well as in
many European countries and in Asia and South America.
His works are in the permanent collections of, among others, the Brooklyn Museum
of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
In 2013, Alec Soth received a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as his third McKnight
Photography Fellowship. In 2004 he was in both the Whitney Biennial in New York and
the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil. His exhibitions and photographs have been reviewed
or written about in such prestigious publications as Art Forum, The New Yorker, The
New York Times, Art in America, Aperture, The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, and the
Chicago Tribune—among more than 200 separate citations, worldwide.
Alec Soth’s published books include Sleeping by the Mississippi, NIAGARA, Fashion
Magazine, Dog Days Bogata, The Last Days of W, and Broken Manual. In 2008, the artist
started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. Recent and current projects
include: “Songbook,” published by MACK and on view at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York,
solo exhibitions at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis
and Loock Galerie in Berlin, opening in April.
During his Kennedy Residency, the artist worked with undergraduate photography students
in their classes and with graduate students from throughout the department.
Rania Matar (2014, Fall)
Born and raised in Lebanon, Rania Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. Originally trained
as an architect at Cornell University, she studied photography at New England School
of Photography and Maine Photographic Workshops. She currently works full time on
her personal photography and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, most recently
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as part of She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers
from Iran and The Arab World, and in solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary
Art, Boston, where she was finalist for the prestigious Foster Award;, at Carroll
and Sons Art Gallery Boston, Southeast Museum of Photography Florida;, Blue Sky Gallery
in Portland, Oregon;, Sana Gallery in Singapore;, Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany;,
Leica Gallery in Solms, Germany; and Fotofest 2014 in Houston. Notable exhibits in
2014 include The Middle East Revealed: A Female Perspective at Howard Greenberg Gallery,
New York; Ordinary Lives at Arab-American Museum, Dearborn, Michigan; Women of the
Middle East at Toot Tung Art Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand and Alliance Francaise de
Singapour; The Other and Me at Sharjah Art Museum. Her images are in the permanent
collections of several museums and private collections worldwide. Matar has won numerous
awards, including 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011, and
2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowship, first place at the New England
Photographer Biennial and Women in Photography International; and honorable mentions
at 2010 UNICEF Picture of the Year Award, Lens Culture Exposure International, Silver
Eye Center for Photography Fellowship, and CENTER.
Tim Roda (2012, Spring)
Tim Roda’s art career began at Pennsylvania State University where he earned BFA degree
in 2002. He earned his MFA in 2004 from the University of Washington, Seattle. There
his work developed a language that migrates within arenas of installation, photography,
and performance. The props or devices he includes in the images are made of paper,
wood, tape, and clay, often used for their disposable or re-usable nature.
Roda has said of his artwork: “I started using photography because of its properties,
both abstract and physical. It is the only medium I can use to best depict my vision
of life, art and time.” In recent years Tim Roda’s artwork has attracted international
attention including eight solo exhibitions in Germany, five in New York, three in
Seattle, three in Toronto and two in Chicago.
He was honored with a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 2008-2009. “Butcher’s Block”
was the title of the artist’s lecture in February 2012. His course was a wide-open,
interdisciplinary experiment that grew beyond the studio/classroom of FAH 133. The
artist’s office in FAH 133, was a popular gathering spot for students to discuss their
art practice and their futures. Of particular significance was Roda’s work with students
at Blake High School of the Arts - and the “Exquisite Corpse” project that resulted
in the sale of works to fund two art scholarships for Blake students at USF.
Jason Lazarus (2011, Fall)
Jason Lazarus is a Chicago-based artist, curator, educator, and writer. His photo-based practice has expanded to include public archive projects and the use of impossibility as a medium. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bank of America LaSalle Photography Collection, and the Milwaukee Museum of Art.