2023-24 Artist-in-Residence

The Department of Art & Art History is pleased to host these distinguished guests in 2023–24. Each resident will be involved with our students in various ways, but we highlight the dates & times of their public talks below. Please join us!

Ashley M. Freeby '15

August 21–23, 2023
Artist’s talk:  September 21 at 5 p.m.
Hislop Family Auditorium, Holmes Hall 

Designer, artist and truth-teller, Ashley M. Freeby ’15 (b. 1986) uses natural materials, poetic language and minimalism to explore site, monuments, and data as a way of investigating the essence of memory and trauma. Unbound by medium, she allows her work to be centered by research, and truthful and uncensored narratives. Her recent project, (un)sterile soil, is a virtual installation of content where she highlights her work from 2016 to 2020, and collaborates with seven writers or artists to create a website over seven installments. (un)sterile soil, like much of Freeby’s work, is about the death and memory of Black bodies killed by law enforcement. She explores sites from above to below the surface to shift perspective and retain the memory for those lives lost. Freeby is a graduate of Bucknell University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, currently resides in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and is the Communications Director and Head Designer for Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency.

To Atatiana Koquice Jefferson, 2021
from the fertile grounds: flow down/up/onward quilt series
Appro. W: 10’ x H: 7’
Various cotton fabrics, threads, and natural cotton batting

Odette England

September 29-October 14, 2023
Artist’s talk:  October 5 at 5 p.m.
Hislop Family Auditorium, Holmes Hall 

Odette England is an Australian/British photographer who makes photographs about homesickness, gender-social relations, reproductive labor, estrangements, and rituals. She is 2022 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received grants from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund, and Anonymous Was a Woman, among others. In 2023, England is a PhotoAccess Artist Fellow in Canberra, Australia, an artist-in-residence at Marble House Project, Vermont, and a visiting artist for the Long-Term Photobook Program at the Penumbra Foundation, New York. She was named a finalist for the 2023 Foam Paul Huf Award. She has published three award-winning photobooks, including Dairy Character, winner of the 2021 Light Work Book Award, and shortlisted for Australian Photobook of the Year. Her fourth photobook, Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash, is shortlisted for the 2023 Images Vevey Photobook Award. England received her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Ph.D. in Art and Art History from the Australian National University. She is a visiting professor at Brown University and Amherst College.

To Be Developed, To Be Continued

Voluspa Jarpa

January 10-March 22, 2024
Artist’s talk:  TBA

Voluspa Jarpa’s practice began amid the resurgence of Chile’s artistic scene following the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990. She currently lives in Santiago de Chile. Jarpa works at the juncture of collective history and subjective experience, via the notion of cultural trauma. Incorporating public discourse, documents, state symbols, and urban space, as well as individual stories and psychoanalytic theory, she excavates the visual and textual materiality of the archive.

Her work analyzes the construction of hegemonic history and memory, taking into account its inherent erasures and absences. Her Minimal Secret works involve hanging installations based on pages of redacted governmental information, during the Pinochet regime and the Cold War era. Jarpa conceptually relates the documents’ deletions, which hide information from public consciousness, to the repressive mechanism of hysteria, which results in further social issues. Her project for the Chilean Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale, “Altered Views,” critically dissects aspects of European colonial history to expose the manipulation and violence behind the dominant narratives of modernity.

Significant exhibitions include solo shows at MALBA, Buenos Aires (2016) and La Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris (2010), and group shows at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunst Museum, Bern, and Migros Museum, Zürich, Switzerland; and the Jewish Museum, New York. Biennial participations include the Chilean Pavillon at the Venice Biennale  (2019), the Shanghai Biennale (2018), the São Paulo Bienal (2014), the Istanbul Biennial (2011), the Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011), and the Havana Biennale (1997). She is represented in the collections of MALBA, Buenos Aires; Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago de Chile; LARA (Latin American Roaming Art) Foundation; and Kadist Foundation, Paris/San Francisco. She was awarded the Julius Baer Prize for Latin American Artists (2020), the Illy Prize at Arco Madrid (2012), and was a finalist for the Prix Meurice de Paris in 2014.

Voluspa Jarpa
Zoo List, 2023
Installation: Floating Prints On Transparent PVC

Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani

March 28–22, 2024
Artist’s talk:  TBA

Curator’s talk: March 21 @ 5pm, Hislop Family Auditorium, Holmes Hall.

Practicum for Student Writers: March 22 @ noon in Holmes 345

Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani is Georgian-born and New York-based independent curator, writer, and researcher. She holds undergraduate degrees in International Relations and Gender Studies from Tbilisi State University and Mount Holyoke College, and a graduate degree in Museum Studies from the City University of New York. Chkareuli-Mdivani's book,King is Female, published in October 2018 in Berlin by Wienand Verlag explores the lives of three Georgian women artists and is the first publication to investigate questions of the feminine identity in the context of the Eastern European historical, social, and cultural transformation of the last twenty years. Chkareuli-Mdivani has contributed articles to Hyperallergic, Flash Art International, Sculpture Magazine, MoMa.post, The Brooklyn Rail, The Arts Newspaper, JANE Magazine Australia, NERO Editions Italy, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, XIBT Magazine Berlin, Eastern European Film Bulletin, Indigo Magazine, Arte & Lusso Dubai and others. She has curated over 10 exhibitions in New York, Germany, Latvia, and Georgia. Her research involves the intersection of art history, museum, and decolonization studies with a focus on totalitarian art and trauma theory. As a researcher Chkareuli-Mdivani aims to synthesize historical and contemporary.

Ayana Ife

February 20-21, 2024
Artist’s talk:  February 21 at 7:00 p.m. Ayana Active: The Joy in Being Your Own Hero, Elaine Langone Center, 272 - Forum.

Co-sponsored with The Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives & Cultures

Modest fashion designer Ayana Ife has been dressing women for over fifteen years. She learned to sew at the age of six, and by age ten, she had already sold her first original garment. Throughout childhood, her talents as a fashion designer were realized through her love of sewing for others. She is an innovator who finds creative solutions to match the individual needs of her clients.

​As a modest fashion consumer, Ayana feels the industry deficit firsthand. She advocates for women and offers a solution to their problems. Her passion is to elevate the modest fashion experience so that women feel beautiful, comfortable, and heard with unique styles that empower them and represent their values. Ayana dresses women of all sizes, while listening to their concerns. She knows that modest fashion adds important variety to the industry and she is committed to establishing a permanent place for modest apparel in today's market. 

Ayana Ife has starred on Project Runway, and debuted her fully modest collection at New York Fashion Week. She has been featured and mentioned in magazines, such as Marie Claire, The New York Post, and Harper's Bazaar Arabia.

Katya Grokhovsky

March 14-24, 2024
Performance event:  March 22 TBA

Katya Grokhovsky is a Ukrainian born, NYC based artist, educator and a Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial. Grokhovsky holds an MFA from School of The Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Victorian College of the Arts and a BA in Fashion from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Grokhovsky is a recipient of numerous residencies including The California Studio: Manetti Shrem Visiting AIR at UC Davis, Sculpture Space, EFA Studio Program, SVA Art Practice AIR, Pratt Fine Arts AIR, MAD Museum AIR, BRICworkspace, Ox-BOW School of Art, Wassaic AIR, Santa Fe Art Institute, Watermill Center and more. She is an awardee of Brooklyn Arts Council Grants, FST StudioProjects Fund, New American Fellowship and many others.

Fantasyland, 2021

LaToya Hobbs

April 10-13, 2024
Artist’s talk:  April 10 at 7:00 p.m., An Embodiment of Joy, Rest, & Renewal

Elaine Langone Center 272 - Forum.

Co-sponsored with The Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives & Cultures

LaToya M. Hobbs is an artist, wife, and mother of two from Little Rock, AR, who is currently living and working in Baltimore, MD. She received her B.A. in Painting from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and M.F.A. in Printmaking from Purdue University. Her work deals with figurative imagery that addresses the ideas of beauty, cultural identity, and womanhood as they relate to women of the African Diaspora. Her exhibition record includes numerous national and international venues, including the National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia; SCAD Museum of Art; Albright Knox Museum, and Sophia Wanamaker Galleries in San Jose, Costa Rica, among others. Her work is housed in private and public collections such as the Harvard Art Museum, Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, the National Art Gallery of Namibia, the Getty Research Institute, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Other accomplishments include the 2020 Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize, a nomination for the 2022 Queen Sonja Print Award and a 2022 IFPDA Artis Grant. Hobbs is also a Professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a founding member of Black Women of Print, a collective whose vision is to make visible the narratives and works of Black women printmakers, past, present and future.

Erin and Anyah with Hydrangeas, 2023
Acrylic, and Collage on Carved Wood Panel
48” X 60” X 2 ½”

Past Participants:

2023 Fall: Ashley Freeby and Odette England
2023 Spring: Anthony Cervino, Juana Estrada-Hernandez, Christian Viveros-Faune, Jefried Lotti and Krystal Rodriguez
2022 Spring: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew
2021 Spring: Le’Andra LeSeur '10
2019–20: Fredman (Elyla) Barahona
2019 Spring: Everest Pipkin
2018 Spring: Cara Lewis & Alejandro Diaz
2016 Spring: Shani Peters (Nesbitt Artist Resident)