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Past Visiting Artists

Visiting Artist Colloquium collage image

2023-2024 Visiting Artists

MARCH 1, 2024
ANTHONY TITUS: SURFACE MINING
HTTPS://ANTHONY-TITUS.COM/BIO

Anthony Titus Studio is an interdisciplinary practice that focuses on the relationships between contemporary art and architecture. Since its inception in 2005, the studio has produced numerous installations, objects as well as solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. The practice has consistently explored the uniquely constructed spaces between architecture, painting and sculpture. He received his undergraduate degree in architecture from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and a graduate degree in fine art from the University of Chicago. 

Parallel to his independent practice, Titus has taught and lectured about architecture and art since 2002 and is currently a tenured professor of architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2022 he was invited by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to deliver the annual John Hejduk Soundings Lecture. Titus is the recipient of a 2013 research grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The research project is titled Twisted Siblings: Relationships Between Contemporary Painting and Digital Architecture. His work has been exhibited and published widely and includes a recent solo exhibition titled Ruptures and Reconciliations at ‘T' Space in Rhinebeck, NY. In 2022 Titus was granted an award in architecture by The American Academy of Arts and Letters.      

LECTURE: Surface Mining
The lecture will focus upon the structure of my transdisciplinary practice of art and architecture.  I will speak about a selection of exhibitions, projects, and teaching pedagogy that spans the past decade. Emphasis will be placed upon the processes and procedures as well as the final product of the works. Looking to explore and discover new possibilities between the spaces of architecture, sculpture and painting. The conversation and exchange between these disciplines serves as a rich space of opportunity to enhance and expand our current understanding of space, form, color, and structure as participants in a larger cultural landscape. 

MARCH 29, 2024
SHAWN THEODORE
HTTPS://WWW.SHAWNTHEODO.RE/

Shawn Theodore (b. 1970) was born in Germany to American parents from Philadelphia, and currently lives and works in Philadelphia. Theodore was awarded the prestigious PDN’s 30 New & Emerging Photographers to Watch (2019), the Getty Images / ARRAY ‘Where We Stand’ grant, and a grant from the Knight Foundation for ‘A Dream Deferred’. Theodore was a two-time nominee for the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship and a nominee for the Magnum Foundation Fund. He is an Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of the Arts, a trustee of the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, and a former trustee of the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. 

Theodore first came into prominence for his color-saturated, silhouette-focused street photography work which garnered the attention of several media outlets as well as consumer-focused companies due to its graphic and illustrative nature. The first solo exhibition of his street photography was of his first photography project, ‘The Avenues’ in 2015 at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, as a part of Re-PLACE-ing Philadelphia, which was supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. 

Theodore’s first photographic monograph Birmingham was published by Kris Graves Projects in 2019. The book was made over a month’s time from the artist walking and photographing the various neighborhoods that constitute Birmingham, Alabama. The book examines the physical relationship between the African American community and its future while utilizing socioeconomic disparities as a contextual framework.

APRIL 12, 2024
AZZA EL SIDDIQUE
HTTPS://WWW.AZZAELSIDDIQUE.COM/
HTTPS://WWW.AMANT.ORG/RESIDENTS/60-AZZA-EL-SIDDIQUE

Azza El Siddique works in sculpture and installation. Her multi-faceted installations composed of architectural structures and materials use a catch-and-release system to address the manifestation of mortality, science, mythology, and spirituality in systems of power. Scent, smoke, vapor, and water are set up in environments that begin to shift, warp, deteriorate, rehydrate, infuse, and extract. Materials and structures are stripped down to their essential forms to instigate collapses, spills, and releases. Her work sets up a parameter of questions to explore what permeates death and what can be revived through it.

El Siddique, born in Khartoum, Sudan, currently lives and works in New Haven, CT. She received an MFA from Yale University School of Art (2019) and a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University (2014). In 2019, she was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, CanadianArt, and Border Crossings. She has shown her work at Helena Anrather, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Ontario; and the Gardiner Museum, Toronto.

2022-2023 Visiting Artists

Lucy Kim -  Sculptural painter

Lucy Kim is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture and biological media. In her hybrid works, she embraces distortion as a tool to deconstruct how we see what we see: the relationship between our evolved vision-centricity, constructed socio-cultural systems, and personal desires.  Kim is a recipient of the 2022 Creative Capital Award for her project printing images with bacteria that has been genetically-modified to produce melanin, the bio-pigment behind human skin, hair, and eye color. She began this project while an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and continues to develop it at Boston University, where she teaches. Through this project, Kim expands her committed study of our visual habits, which she first began in her sculptural paintings using unconventional processes in the studio. Kim is based in Cambridge, MA and is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University.

Naotaka Hiro - Painting, sculpture

Naotaka Hiro (b. 1972 in Osaka, Japan) lives and works in Pasadena, California. Hiro received his BA from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997, and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, in 2000. His work is in the collections of MoMA, New York; The Whitney Museum, New York; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; and many more.  Hiro’s work has also been exhibited at MOCA, Los Angeles; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; LAXART, Los Angeles; Centre d’Art Contemporain, La Ferme du Buisson, France, among others. Hiro has had solo exhibitions at Herald Street, London; The Box, Los Angeles; Misako & Rosen, Tokyo; Brennan & Griffin, New York; and Shane Campbell, Chicago. He is the recipient of grants and awards from the Art Matters Foundation and the Asian and Pacific Islander Artist Presenting Initiative.

Dufala Brothers - Mixed medium artists

In their multidisciplinary practice, Steven and Billy Dufala collaborate on new work in a variety of media. Moving freely between disciplines, they have created drawings, prints, sculpture, performance, music, and design. Their site-specific and installation work reflects on consumer culture, humor, violence, and waste and engages directly with communities of artists and makers in Philadelphia. The brothers co-teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and facilitate studio space for dozens of local artists. Billy also founded a residency program, Recycled Artist in Residency, at Revolution Recovery, a recycling facility in Philadelphia. They are represented by Fleisher/Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia.

Melissa Joseph

Melissa Joseph is a New York-based artist. She was raised in an Indian/American household in rural Pennsylvania and she worked as a textile designer and K-12 art educator for 13 years before attaining an MFA in 2018.   She uses her own family photo archive along with craft and found materials to consider themes of memory, family history, and the unique juxtapositions of diasporic life. Her work has been shown at the ICA Miami, Delaware Contemporary, Woodmere Art Museum, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Jeffrey Deitch Projects, MOCA Arlington and List Gallery at Swarthmore College. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artnet, New American Paintings, Le Monde, CNN, and Architectural Digest, Vogue, Artillery and ArtForum and participated in residencies including Dieu Donné, Fountainhead, the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, the Museum of Arts and Design and upcoming at Artpace San Antonio and Greenwich House Pottery in 2024. She is a regular contributor to BOMB magazine. 

2019-2020 Visiting Artists

Claudia R. Feio - Printmaking
Alex Jackson - Painting / Drawing
Sue Hettmansperger - Painting
Res - Photography
Stephanie Gonzalez-Turner - Architectural Interventions / Sculpture / Painting
Erica Wessmann - Sculpture / Drawing