Christopher E. Harrison

This series of artworks uses appropriated and self-created images that address the mythic, and sometimes truthful, African-American cultural persona. By rendering the surface decay of images, textured materials, and language, the visual disintegration within the works informs the breakdown of the cultural psyche that has persisted over centuries of oppression, miseducation, and division of the Black race throughout history.

Stevie Hanley

My practice is centered on carrying out the Mormon mission I was never allowed to undertake due to a failed church-led “sexualreorientation” therapy in my youth. Engaging with intimacy, radical empathy, cosmic retribution, and the elevation of psychic baseness, I am, as Vaginal Davis describes me, a “dainty Satanist.”

Andy Hall

My work is a material daydream; a thing barely there. After I experience something in the world, the studio answers a simple question for me: What would that look like? This series emerged on drives along dark highways during which I questioned the knowing voice of GPS maps. If measurement is defined as marks we use to gauge something, what happens when the marks outsize our ability to feel? I understand a 50-foot extension cord, but tell me to turn right in 1,000 feet and my brain goes funny. I make stuff as a filter for these irrational encounters or moments

A. Elizabeth Allen-Cannon

For me, painting is a place to explore the amorphous and unstable qualities of feminine stereotypes, as well as constructions of feminine authorship and selfhood. What characterizes a feminine gesture? Is it hesitant? Sassy? Insecure? Demure? Anemic? How does one construct the self while both identifying with and being repulsed by traditional gender scripts? These questions produce a range of style and mark-making that subverts the singular authorial voice, resulting in a schizophrenic femininity across the work. Often the content feels dated, sentimental, and

Solomon Adufah

I was born and raised in Ghana, in West Africa, but currently reside in the United States. In my practice, I aim to create genuine and authentic portraits of people who make up the beautiful continent of Africa. The paintings expose viewers to a global perspective rather than a narrative meant to portray a single viewpoint. My work reflects the diversity and richness lost in the deceptive mainstream representations of the African people and explores a self-referential perspective on the Black image. I develop this group of portraits through a vital practice that requires physical

Meghan Eilleen Borah

With subject matter inspired by urban fashionistas I see on the street, personal beauty regimens, time spent walking alone in high heels, 1960s girl groups, and disco culture, my work is a continued exploration of the female figure in context. At its core is an ongoing interest in the relationship between theater and everyday life: the feeling of constantly being on stage. My work celebrates the power that comes with crafting variable feminine facades, yet acknowledges the inherent vulnerability of seeking unattainable states of permanence and perfection.

Arnold Kemp

Title: 
Dean of Graduate Studies
Last Name: 
Kemp
Head Shot: 
Bio: 

Arnold J. Kemp is a poet and artist. At Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco he was a founding curator, and he worked there from 1993- 2003. He was working with Kathy Acker, as Yerba Buena’s first visiting artist, before she became too ill to complete the residency. Alternately Kemp engaged Dennis Cooper as a visiting artist and co-curated “Guide to Trust No. 2” an exhibition inspired by Cooper’s novels. Kemp is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. His artworks are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2016 Kemp became the Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Affiliation: 
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Nick Van Zanten

In nestling paintings and prints within painted and printed acrylic boxes, I undermine the assumptions made about paintings at a time when they are more likely to be seen in reproduction than in person. Each piece is made up of the painting-object and the painting-vitrine together. Both present a geometric abstraction, and together they create an optical effect across the space between them. The relationship between the two parts, the viewer’s gaze, and the intervals between them all form part of a system. A photograph of any of these pieces, on the Web or in

Ron Ewert

“I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the teachings of the great explorer of the truth . . . No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. . . . In a free hour, when our power of choice is

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