Chester College of New England · Fine Arts · Graphic Design · Photography · Creative Writing · Professional Writing · Interdisciplinary Arts · Chester, New Hampshire

Announcing Visiting Artists Symposium 2009

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Chester College of New England presents the Visiting Artists Symposium Lecture Series. The lecture series is an integral part of a course in the college's upper level curriculum, which is open to all juniors and seniors attending the college. The lectures are free and open to the public as well as the entire college community. After the public session, the artists will be available to the students formally registered in the College's Visiting Artist Symposium (Course #IDA.301). All Visiting Artist Symposium lectures take place in Wadleigh Lecture Hall at 2:30 pm.

The Fall 2009 series is coordinated by Darrell Matsumoto, Chair of the Department of Photography, Media Arts, and Design

1 September
Margo Klass and Frank Soos, mixed media and writer

Medieval altarpieces, the work of twentieth-century random constructionist Kurt Schwitters, and that of Japanese architect Tadao Ando are among Margo Klass's influences. Her constructions have been exhibited by various galleries and museums from Maine to Alaska. In addition to private collections, her work is in the collections of the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks, the Anchorage Museum of Art and History, and Davistown Museum in Liberty, Maine.

Frank Soos has published two works of fiction - Early Yet and Unified Field Theory, which was the 1997 winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction - and one book of essays, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite. His short essay responses to Margo Klass's work represent a new and unexpected direction in his work.

Margo Klass and Frank Soos began their collaboration in 2002 and make their home in Fairbanks, Alaska.

15 September

Michele Penhall, curator of prints and drawings

Michele M. Penhall is Curator of Prints and Photographs at the University of New Mexico Art Museum and has organized exhibitions on art and science, portraiture, image and text, the landscape, and such artists as Gustave Le Gray and Eliot Porter. In addition, she was the principal investigator on an Earthwatch project (1999-2001) to recover and preserve photographic archives in Peru and Bolivia. She has written on Adolph de Meyer, Betty Hahn, Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Martín Chambi, Latin American, and contemporary photography. She received her BFA in Photography from the University of Hawai’i, her MA in Art History from Queen’s College, CUNY, and in 1997 her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of New Mexico where she wrote her dissertation on the Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi. She has organized a retrospective exhibition on the work of Patrick Nagatani that will open at the UNM Art Museum in 2010 and edited the companion book Desire for Magic.

22 September

Heidi Whitman, painter

Heidi Whitman teaches painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has also taught at MassArt and at Simmons College. Her recent exhibitions include Pierogi in Brooklyn, NY, the Southeastern Louisiana Contemporary Art Gallery, Harvard College, Wheaton College, Laconia Gallery, Clark University, and Simmons College. Her work is in many collections including The McMullen Museum of Art, Boston University, and the Boston Public Library. She has recently completed a public commission for the City of Cambridge. She holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and a Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

29 September
Ben Anderson, sculptor

Ben Anderson was born in Lewisburg, PA. After frequent moves, he finished high school in Santa Monica, CA. In 1980 he attended Bucknell University where his father was a painting professor. While on a semester abroad in London he visited the house of Henry Moore in Leeds, England. After returning to the US he transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design and studied sculpture with Jay Coogan and painter Stuart Diamond. After graduating with a BFA in 1984 he established a studio in the Foundry building in Providence, RI where he supported his art career by making molds for other artists and architects. It was at this time that the idea of appropriating objects from the natural world through the use of molds became a viable means for him to express ideas that were both narrative and formal.

Anderson received his MFA in 1992 from the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, CA where he worked with Newton Harrison, Kim Mac Connell and Ernest Silva. After retuning to Rhode Island in 1994 he taught part time at area colleges and universities, including RISD, Brown University, Bryant University and the University of Rhode Island where he was hired full time in 2005 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History.

Anderson’s work continues to draw upon the natural world. He collects and mediates sampled objects through tools, molds and die casting, expressing his ideas of form and narration. His work is included in numerous private collections, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He has received a number of awards for his work in ceramics; the 1999 Byers’ Choice Award of Philadelphia, PA; a National Award in Ceramics, the 2005 Directors Choice, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the 2003 Rhode Island State Council of the Arts, Individual Artist Grant. In spring 2009 Anderson served as Artist in Residence at the Gordon School, East Providence, RI.

6 October

Susan E. Evans, photography/video

Susan E. Evans is a conceptual artist working with photography, video, sculpture, installation, and hybrid media. Evans has used a multi-disciplinary approach to her work throughout her career and whenever possible pulls content from a variety of sources, experiences and concepts. She is fascinated by the disparity of a unified understanding or comprehension of common symbols and imagery though standardized structures and utilizes these to explore ideas about language, identity, context, structure, information processing, categorization, comodification and meaning. Evans is currently experimenting with contemporary content in large format wet-plate photographs (Ambrotypes) and actively researching different language theories, anthropology and memory systems.

Susan E. Evans started her photographic exploration at the age of eight in a small basement darkroom. Evans received a BFA in both Photography and Holography from Goddard College and a MFA from Cornell University in Photography and her work is represented by WM Hunt of the Hasted Hunt Gallery in Chelsea, NY, Mark Sink of Gallery Sink in Denver, CO, and Gallery Lichblick in Koln, Germany. Susan E. Evans has work appearing in both public and private collections worldwide. Some of which include the following: George Eastman House, Los Angles Contemporary Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Centro De La Imagen; Mexico City, Mexico; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Akron Museum of Art, Akron Ohio; The Henry Museum, Portland Oregon; Center for Photography Woodstock, NY; Center for Creative Photography; Tuscon AZ; Collection Dancing Bear; and the George Meredith Collection.

13 October

Viera Levitt, independent curator

Viera Levitt worked as a curator in one of Slovakia's leading Contemporary Arts Museum, the Jan Koniarek Gallery, located in the historic town of Trnava from 1997-2005. She became director of this space in 2002, becoming the youngest director ever in a public art museum in the Slovak Republic. From 1996 to the present, she has curated or co-curated more than forty exhibitions in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and the USA. In 2006, Ms. Levitt moved to Rhode Island.

In 2008, Ms. Levitt curated an exhibition of Central European video art, ‘Close Encounters’ at the University of Rhode Island Fine Arts Center’s Galleries that included video-art displayed at the historic Kingston Train Station, a place where art had never been exhibited before. In 2009, Viera Levitt in collaboration with AS 220, invited European artist Ilona Nemeth to show her interactive sound project ‘27m’ in public spaces of Providence, RI.

In the Summer of 2009, ‘Mobile Art Project’, organized in collaboration with the Hera Gallery will bring art in a truck to diverse populations in Southern Rhode Island (sound installation Aqua Alta by China Blue).

She is a member of IKT – International Curatorial Association (www.iktsite.org) and AICA – International Association of Art Critics. Since 2002 Viera Levitt has been a member of the Multiplace network, helping to organize new media festival Multiplace.org and since 2008, she has been a board member of the Hera Educational Foundation, RI.

20 October

Paola Ferrario, photographer

Paola Ferrario was born in Rho (Milan) Italy in 1963. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1988. Since then, she has completed narrative and documentary photographic projects in Italy, Guatemala, and the United States. Among her awards and fellowships are the Friends of Photography/Calumet Emerging Photographer award (2000), the Paul Taylor/Dorothea Lange Prize from Duke University (2001), a Puffin Foundation Grant(2003) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography (2004). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. She is currently the Harnish Visiting Fellow at Smith College in Nothampton, Mass., where she teaches classes in photography and digital media.

27 October

Christine Choy, filmmaker

Choy was trained as an architect; she received her Master of Science degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planing, and Preservation, Columbia University and Directing Certificate from the American Film Institute. Choy is a full professor at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Served as a Chair of Graduate Film/TV Program from 1994 to 1997, again from 2002 to 2005. She also taught at Yale and Cornell Universities as well as SUNY Buffalo. She was a visiting scholar at Evergreen State College, Oslo and Volda film Institute, Norway

Choy has received over seventy international awards include an Oscar Nomination, she also was a recipient of numerous fellowships among them, John Simon Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Asian Cultural Council and the best cinematography award from the Sundance International Film Festival.

Choy is an educator and a creative artist; a pioneer Asian American film maker ,she has produced/directed/photographed more than eighty works in various forms. Her works have been broadcasted on HBO, PBS, Sundance Channel, Life Time, NHK, and many other stations. Her works have also been featured at Berlin, Cann, Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, Hong Kong, Pusan International festivals as well as the Asian American International Festival in S. F., L.A and New York.

She is the founding director of School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, a member of Project Vetting committee of the Film Development Fund, Hong Kong and an International Trustee Member of the Asia Society from 1995 to 2002. She has been appointed as a member of the Fulbright committee from 2005 to 2008.

3 November
Fred Lynch, illustrator

Fred Lynch grew up in Cumberland, Rhode Island. He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1986 and since that time has been creating illustrations for a broad range of clients. His work has won recognition from The Society of Illustrators, American Illustration Magazine, Communication Arts Magazine, Print Magazine. Clients include Random House, The Washington Post, PBS, Viking Penguin, Bank America, IBM, Fidelity Investments, Aetna Insurance, Motorola and The Atlantic Monthly.

Fred’s fine paintings have gained recognition as well, and are exhibited in national and regional shows. He makes sketches from his imagination, paints from life, and sees where the images take him. Fred aims to look closely at the overlooked and to make the ordinary extraordinary.

In addition to freelance illustrating and painting, Fred has, since 1989, been a member of the Illustration Faculty at Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1997, he has been a professor of Illustration at Montserrat College of art. Fred lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two sons.

10 November

Barbara Bernstein, drawing and installation artist

Barbara Bernstein (BFA RISD, MA,MFA University of New Mexico, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture) is the Artist in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in Rome among others. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad including the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, PA and the Kinesset in Jerusalem, Israel. Most recently was a solo exhibition site specific installation at the Wilson Museum in Roanoke, VA.

17 November

Ashley John Pigford, artist, designer, musician

Ashley John Pigford is an artist, designer, musician and educator who works across a wide range of art and design media including video, sound, installation, performance, sculpture, micro-electronics and letterpress. His current employment as Assistant Professor of Visual Communications in the Department of Art at the University of Delaware is paired with an active art/design studio practice. Ashley received his MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006 after a successful career as a proprietor of graphic design in Los Angeles, CA.

1 December

Lana Z. Caplan, film/videomaker

Lana Z Caplan is a Boston-based film/videomaker, photographer and installation artist. She works with super8, found footage, video, interactive projections, and alterative processes photography in her pieces that explore relationships, mortality and social issues.

Recent screenings and exhibitions include: MadCat Women’s International Film Festival (San Francisco, CA); "FICCO"(Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, (Mexico City); Festival Cap Sembrat 3, (Barcelona, Spain); Danforth Museum of Art, (MA); National Gallery of Art, (San Juan, Puerto Rico); Gallery NAGA, (Boston, MA); John Stevenson Gallery, (NY, NY); Photographic Resource Center, (Boston, MA); William Benton Museum of Art, (Storrs, CT).

Recent grants and awards include: Puffin Foundation, Individual Artist Grant; Wexner Center for the Arts, Residency Support; Massachusetts Cultural Council, Professional Development Grant; Vermont Studio Center, Artist-in-Residence, Artist Grant; Contemporary Artist Center, North Adams, MA; Polaroid Corporation, Materials Grant. She earned a B.A. from Boston University and an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art. Caplan also teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA.