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All 11 members of Lafayette’s art faculty will display some of their best work Oct. 20-Dec. 8 in an exhibition at the Richard A. and Rissa W. Grossman Gallery in Lafayette’s Williams Visual Arts Building, 243 North Third Street, Easton.
The Grossman Gallery is open from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
In connection with the exhibit, open studios will be held simultaneously 3-5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, at the Williams Visual Arts Building and the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI), 421 Hamilton Street. Shuttle service will be provided between the Williams Visual Arts Building, EPI, and the Williams Center for the Arts.
An open reception will follow from 5-7 p.m. in the Williams Visual Arts Building. A series of free lectures is also scheduled (see below).
Studio art faculty will present drawings to accompany their primary working medium. Each member will present two to four works that best represent his or her primary mode of production – painting, sculpture, or printmaking. Drawings displayed will seek to further define or describe the processes each artist uses to refine an idea.
“Drawings are notes and experiments, to some degree, and allow the viewer a chance to witness the editorial process that goes on in the artist’s studio,” says Jim Toia, director of the Grossman Gallery. “By displaying such works, we hope to give the viewer the opportunity to delve a bit further into the conceptual processes which occupy each artist’s working methodology.”
Art history faculty will exhibit books, catalogs, and papers in the lobby adjacent to the Grossman Gallery.
Studio art faculty showing works in the exhibit are Ed Kerns, Eugene H. Clapp II ’36 Professor of Art and director of the Williams Visual Arts Building; Curlee Raven Holton, associate professor of art and director of the Experimental Printmaking Institute; Jim Toia, director of community-based teaching and director of the Grossman Gallery; Lew Minter, media lab director and lecturer in art; Kim Thomas ’90, visiting part-time instructor of art; Nicole Maynard-Sahar, visiting part-time instructor of art; Emil Lukas, visiting part-time instructor of art; and Ross Gay ’96, Dean of Studies Humanities Fellow.
Art history faculty represented in the exhibit are Diane Cole Ahl, Arthur J. ’55 and Barbara S. Rothkopf Professor Professor of Art History and head of the art department; Robert Saltonstall Mattison, Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art History; and Ida Sinkevic, associate professor of art history.
The schedule of lectures follows:
An internationally known abstract painter, Ed Kerns has mounted more than 30 one-person shows in galleries in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, including three shows in the 1990s at M-13 Gallery, New York. He has also participated in more than 150 group exhibitions in the United States, Paris, Italy, Switzerland, and Mexico. His work is in numerous public and corporate collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Citicorp Collection; New York, N.Y.; the Bass Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Fla.; the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection, New York, N.Y.; and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas. It has been reviewed in many journals and magazines.
Kerns, whose interests also include drawing and two-dimensional design, joined the Lafayette faculty in 1980. He was awarded the Clapp Professorship in 1988.
Kerns has been the recipient of several major College-wide awards at Lafayette, including the Mary Louise Van Artsdalen Prize for outstanding scholarly achievement (2001), James P. Crawford Award for superior teaching (1996), Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for excellence in teaching and outstanding contributions to campus life (1992), Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Award for superior teaching and scholarly contribution to his discipline (1987), and the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture Award in recognition of excellence in teaching and scholarship (1985).
Kerns earned an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and a B.F.A. from The Richmond Professional Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University.
Curlee Holton’s special interests include printmaking, African American art history, drawing, and painting. He has mounted more than 30 one-person shows and has participated in more than 75 group exhibitions, including the Seventh International Biennale at the National Center of Fine Arts, Cairo, and shows at Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm Gallery, Mexico City. His works are in the collections of several universities, foundations, and corporations, including the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Villanova University, and Morehouse College.
Holton has participated in several residencies and special projects and has served as curator for a dozen exhibitions. He has also authored many articles and essays and presented numerous papers.
Holton joined the faculty in 1991. He was the 1999 recipient of Lafayette’s Carl R. and Ingeborg Beidleman Research Award, recognizing excellence in applied research or scholarship.
Holton earned an M.F.A. from Kent State University and a B.F.A. from Cleveland Institute of Art.
As director of the Community-Based Teaching program, Jim Toia coordinates art classes for area high school students with Lafayette faculty and advanced art students and open-studio drawing sessions for community members.
He has taught sculpture and painting courses at Lafayette since 1997. He has also taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the County College of Morris, Randolph, N.J., where he also served as gallery director.
Toia is represented by the Kim Foster Gallery, 529 West 20th St., New York City. He has mounted 13 solo exhibitions and his work has appeared in more than 40 group shows in the United States and abroad. His work is included in several collections, including those of AT&T and the Dallas Museum of Art. He has received numerous grants and awards, including a 2001 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Sculpture Fellowship and a 1996 Geraldine Dodge Foundation Arts Grant.
Toia received an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts and a B.A. from Bard College.
Lew Minter has developed and taught courses at Lafayette since 1987. His primary teaching areas are design, media studies, and computer graphics. A painter, sculptor, and designer, he has mounted five solo shows of his paintings and sculpture and participated in a dozen group exhibitions. His work is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Rome and dozens of private and corporate collections. An award-winning designer and proprietor of Lew Minter Graphic Design, he provides a wide variety of services to clients.
Minter earned a B.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Kim Thomas graduated from Lafayette with honors in studio art. Her primary teaching areas are drawing, painting, and design. In 1995 while earning her M.F.A from the University of Pennsylvania, she was named Penn’s outstanding fine arts graduate. Her experience includes teaching courses at Lehigh University. She was artist in residence in Lafayette’s Experimental Printmaking Institute in 1997. Her work has appeared in several exhibitions, including shows at the Muse Gallery in Philadelphia and The Bowery Gallery and Gallery Korea in New York
Nicole Maynard-Sahar, whose teaching areas include drawing and principles of studio art, joined the Lafayette faculty in 2000. She has taught studio art and art history courses at Brookdale Community College, Lincroft, N.J., and silkscreen workshops at the Printmaking Council of New Jersey, North Branch, N.J.
She has mounted seven solo exhibitions of her works in galleries, universities, and corporate facilities. Her work has been in 11 group shows.
She is the recipient of the 2000 Curator’s Choice Award from ArtAdvocate.com. While earning her M.F.A. at the University of Pennsylvania, she received two awards, the Sewall Sillman Color Prize and the Angelo Savelli Painting Prize. She received a B.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art.
After graduating from Edinboro University with a B.F.A in 1986, international painter and sculptor Emil Lukas spent eight years in New York and Europe before settling down in Stockertown, Pa., located in the Lehigh Valley just minutes from Lafayette.
His work has appeared in more than two dozen solo exhibitions since 1985, including, in the last two years, shows in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Paris, Bologna, and Köln. His art has also been included in numerous two-person and group exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, and has been reviewed in many newspapers, magazines, and journals worldwide.
In a 2000 Lafayette exhibition, “Marks That Make Themselves,” Lukas chose works representing one area of interest for the artist — using a diverse range of objects like plaster, potato chips, fish heads, and house flies to produce spontaneously crafted marks in paintings and sculptures.
“The studio is a living system and I merely try to nurture and control how it functions,” he says. “Instead of making paintings and sculptures, I feel closer to the act of using characters. These characters are my own self-made language, system, alphabet, and personal vocabulary.”
“Mr. Lukas’s works are philosophically engaging because they call attention to gaps in ordinary thinking,” says reviewer Ken Johnson in The New York Times.
As Dean of Studies Humanities Fellow Ross Gay is teaching an introductory art course and a unique class on art and poetry and interacting with students in a variety of other ways.
The recipient of the 1996 George Wharton Pepper Prize as the senior who “most nearly represents the Lafayette ideal,” Gay was a double major in art and English and starting defensive end on the varsity football team. He earned honors in studio art and received the Vivian B. Noblett Prize, given to the outstanding senior in studio art, and the Gilbert Prize for superiority in English.
His fellowship is the latest in a series of contributions to the enrichment of his alma mater’s cultural scene. He collaborated this summer with Chris Michaud ’03, an art and music double major from Millerton, N.Y., and Kerns in a distinctive painting project that included use of text on the canvas. He also led a workshop on poetry and painting for high-school students participating in art classes conducted by Lafayette’s Community-Based Teaching program.
In addition, Gay exhibited his work with artists Melvin Butler and Roderick Jordan at the David A. Portlock Black Cultural Center and participated in poetry readings. His poems have appeared in Sulfur, Columbia, American Poetry Review, and Harvard Review, among others. While at Lafayette he is continuing work toward a Ph.D. in literature at Temple University. He received an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.
A specialist in Renaissance art, Diane Ahl explores the varied historical and spiritual contexts in which art was created and experienced. She is the author of Benozzo Gozzoli, published by Yale University Press in 1996, the first comprehensive study in the 20th century of the work of the Italian artist known for his illustrations of 15th-century life in Florence. The book was named an Outstanding Academic Book of 1997 by CHOICE, the publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, and co-awarded the 1998 Otto Grundler Prize at the International Congress of Medieval Studies.
She edited Leonardo da Vinci’s Sforza Monument Horse: The Art and the Engineering in 1995 and was coeditor of Ritual, Spectacle, Image: Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy, published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press. She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio, containing essays on the influential Florentine painter of the early Renaissance, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is co-curator of an international exhibition on Benozzo Gozzoli, to be held in Italy in 2002, and co-author of its catalogue.
Ahl is authoring another major work, Italian Painting in the Fifteenth Century, for Yale University Press, and a book on Fra Angelico, one of the greatest 15th-century painters.
A member of the Lafayette faculty since 1977, Ahl has taught 14 different art history courses and one interdisciplinary First-Year Seminar, and team-taught two courses, including one in Vienna, Austria, and one in Florence, Italy. She was awarded the Charles A. Dana Professorship in 1998 and named to the Rothkopf chair when its establishment in honor of Lafayette President Arthur J. Rothkopf ’55 and his wife, Barbara, was announced Oct. 26.
She has received a Fulbright Fellowship, Renaissance Society of America Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and an American Philosophical Society Fellowship. She was president of the Italian Art Society, a professional organization affiliated with the College Art Association of America and the International Congress of Medieval Studies.
Ahl has been the recipient of several major College-wide awards at Lafayette, including the Mary Louise Van Artsdalen Prize for outstanding scholarly achievement (1999), the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Award for superior teaching and scholarly contribution to her discipline (1996), the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture Award in recognition of excellence in teaching and scholarship (1984), and the Lafayette Student Government Award for Superior Teaching (1981).
Ahl earned a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.
Robert Mattison’s areas of special interest and expertise include contemporary art and 19th-century drawing, painting, architecture, and sculpture.
He is the author of three books on the work of contemporary painters, Masterworks: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella in the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, published by Hudson Hills Press in 1995; Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World (Hudson Hills Press, 1990), and Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years (UMI Research Press, 1987).
He is completing Breaking Boundaries: Robert Rauschenberg Studies. He has also authored numerous articles, essays, and exhibition catalogs.
Mattison has organized some 15 exhibitions, including, most recently, shows of works by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Gregory Gillespie, Philip Guston, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Frank Stella, and Mies van de Rohe.
A member of the Lafayette faculty since 1981, Mattison was named Metzgar Professor in 2001. He has taught a dozen different art history courses and several interim-session courses in Vienna, Austria, on fin-de-siecle art.
He has been the recipient of two major College-wide awards at Lafayette, the Sears-Roebuck Award for superior teaching and scholarship (1991) and the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture Award in recognition of excellence in teaching and scholarship (1988). He has also received several grants and fellowships.
Mattison earned a Ph.D. and M.F.A. from Princeton University; an M.A. from Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and a B.A. from Middlebury College.
Ida Sinkevic’s special interests include ancient, Byzantine, medieval, Islamic, Eskimo, and pre-Columbian art. She is the author of the book The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi: Architecture, Programme, Patronage, published in 2000 by Ludwig Reichert Verlag, Weisbaden, Germany, and articles on Byzantine art and architecture. She has delivered papers and chaired sessions at conferences on Slavic, Byzantine, classical, and medieval studies.
She developed and teaches the First-Year Seminar Monuments, which examines the pyramids at Giza, the Parthenon, Chartres Cathedral, Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence Cathedral, and the Empire State Building in their historical, cultural, and technological contexts. She is a member of the faculty of the interdisciplinary Russian and East European Studies program.
A member of the Lafayette faculty since 1994, Sinkevic has been the recipient of two Lafayette fellowships. She earned a Ph.D. and M.F.A. from Princeton University, an M.A. from Southern Methodist University, and a B.A. from University of Belgrade (Yugoslavia).