Visiting Artists

Marianne Fairbanks

Monday September 22
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Marianne Fairbanks is a visual artist, designer, and Associate Professor of Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including The Museum of Art and Design, NY, USA Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen Denmark, RAM Gallery, Oslo, Norway and The Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft, Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work spans the fields of art, design, and social practice, seeking to chart new material and conceptual territories, to innovate solution-based design, and to foster fresh modes of cultural production.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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David Buckley Borden

Wednesday, September 24
6:00 - 7:00 PM
Osher Hall

David Buckley Borden is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Using an accessible, often humorous, combination of art and design, David’s place-based projects highlight both pressing environmental issues and everyday phenomena. Informed by design research and community outreach, David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific landscape installations in the forest to data-driven cartography in the gallery. David is currently a Senior Advisor of Creative Practice and Innovation at the Center for the Future of Forests and Society at Oregon State University and an Associate Research Professor within the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Oregon where he regularly collaborates with research scientists to champion a cultural ecology of interdisciplinary environmental-communication.

Made possible by the Envision Resilience Public Art Studio, funded by MECA&D Sculpture Department.

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LJ Roberts

Wednesday, October 1
5:00 - 6:00 PM
Osher Hall

LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages, and mixed-media sculptures. Their work illuminates oft-erased and unacknowledged queer and trans histories, narratives, people, and places. Roberts creates conceptual and geographical maps and amplifies non-linear stories of queer culture and kinships that traverse the past, present, and future through material deviance and re-imaging craft practices. The artist has a particular interest in how queer and trans people encounter freedom, fear, possibilities, and perils while traveling on the road and living nomadically. Roberts has been active in HIV/AIDS activism for over 20 years and produced numerous collaborative projects that address the ongoing AIDS pandemic.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Pap Souleye Fall

Friday, October 3
6:00 PM - Performance
ICA at MECA&D

Pap Souleye Fall is a Senegalese-American artist who explores the transmedia potential between mediums including sculpture, installation, performance, cosplay, digital media, and comics. Their work is produced within the context of the African Diaspora. Being of two worlds, Fall delights in the ability to construct their own reality between the polarities of two widespread cultures. Using common, found, and repurposed materials their multidisciplinary practice explores themes of speculative fiction, challenges the pretext of masculinity, Africanisms, and Afro-futurism.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Ayana V. Jackson

Monday, October 6
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Ayana V. Jackson (b. 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey; lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and Johannesburg, South Africa) uses archival impulses to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography. By using her lens to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture, Jackson questions photography’s authenticity and role in perpetuating socially relevant and stratified identities.

Jackson’s practice maps the ethical considerations and relationships between the photographer, subject, and viewer, in turn exploring themes around race, gender and reproduction. Her work examines myths of the Black diaspora and re-stages colonial archival images as a means to liberate the Black body. The various titles of her series nod to the stories she is reimagining. Jackson often casts herself in the role of historical figures to guide their narrative and directly access the impact of photography and its relationship to the human body.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Vivian Beer

Monday, October 20
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Vivian Beer is a furniture designer/maker/sculptor based in New England. Her sleek, abstracted metal and concrete furniture combines the aesthetic sensibilities of contemporary design, craft, and sculpture to create furniture that alter expectations of and interface with the domestic landscape. Her Infrastructure, Streamliner, Anchored Candy and upcoming aeronautic series are physical manifestations of the cultural and industrial history of her materials even as they serve as intellectual bridges for their users, bringing them to a new way of conceiving the built world through a luxurious deployment of the senses.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Joe Donaldson

Monday, October 27
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Joe Donaldson is a New York City-based creative leader with over 15 years of experience specializing in design & animation. Currently the Head of Design & Creative Director at BUCK, as well as Adjunct Faculty at SVA.Donaldson has found themself intrinsically linked to the world of design, animation, & technology. Regardless of form, they strive to make the ubiquitous feel unique & find simple solutions for complex problems.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Lihua Lei

Monday, November 3
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Lihua Lei, grew up the daughter of rice farmers in rural Taiwan, crafting her first art pieces (her own toys) from the muddy earth beneath her. Her childhood was marked by polio and growing up a disabled woman, Lei says she was constantly grappling with bodily beauty standards–wondering if she fell short of femininity, and whether she could ever “fit in.” These questions endured as Lei emerged as an artist. With a background in art therapy, and a strong belief that she could connect to others’ suffering with her work, Lei came to Maine in 1998 for a summer residency at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Alisha B. Wormsley

Monday, November 10
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Alisha B Wormsley (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science, and technology through the Black matriarchal lens, challenging contemporary views of modern American life through whichever medium she feels is the best form of expression. Recent exhibitions, projects and public art commissions include; Creative Time open call with collaborator Suzanne Kite, a solo commission for the new International Arrivals Corridor at the Pittsburgh International Airport, and a solo exhibition at CUE Arts Foundation. Wormsley’s ongoing project, There Are Black People In The Future recently exhibited at the Oakland Museum, VCUArts Qatar, Speed Museum, Southbank Arts London, Times Square Arts, gives mini-grants to open up discourse around displacement and gentrification and was awarded a fellowship with Monument Lab. In 2020, Wormsley launched an art residency for Black artists whose mother called Sibyls Shrine. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts with longtime collaborator Li Harris, an Awardee of the Sundance Interdisciplinary grant, the Carol Brown Achievement award among others. Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College and is an Assistant Professor of Art and Social Practice in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Sara Clugage

Monday, November 17
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Sara Clugage’s art practice focuses on economic and political issues in craft and food. She is Editor-in-Chief of Dilettante Army, an online magazine for visual culture and critical theory, and a 2024-2025 culinary resident at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. Sara has most recently been core faculty for the MA in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College and her most recent publication is the 2021 monograph from the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, & Performance. She is currently working on a book about Jell-O, animacy, & abstraction.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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