FACULTY ARTISTS

Skowhegan's Board of Governors, all working artists, invites a new faculty of Resident and Visiting Artists to campus each year to guarantee a diversity of perspectives.

Five Resident Faculty live on campus alongside the participants and an academic staff for the duration of the nine-week program. These artists are highly accomplished and represent a cross-section of the contemporary art world. The structure of Skowhegan's program is provided by one-on-one studio visits with each of the faculty members, and through the series of lectures given by the faculty over the summer.

Six Visiting Faculty complement the Resident Faculty by joining the community for shorter visits throughout the summer. The diversity within the faculty group helps allow discussions to be dynamic and substantive and much of the mentorship takes place outside of the formal studio visit hours. This is what sets Skowhegan apart as an experience.

Please check back for announcements regarding the upcoming 2024 Faculty Artists.

2023 Resident Faculty

Courtesy of the artist

Candida Alvarez (A '81)

Candida Alvarez is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.

Her work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Addison Gallery of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, among others. Alvarez was recently granted the Arts and Letters Award in Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a 2022 recipient of a Latinx Artist Fellowship. She was awarded the 2021 Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting by the Foundation for Contemporary Art, NY, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptors Grant in 2019. Alvarez is an alum of the Yale School of Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is currently the F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1998.

Alvarez is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

Courtesy of the artist

Ajay Kurian

Ajay Kurian is an artist, writer, and educator.

He was born in Baltimore, MD in 1984. Kurian employs a fluid, multimedia vocabulary, which aims to articulate the social and environmental conditions that govern our desires, fears, and contradictions. His interests include literature, philosophy, spiritual histories, science fiction, anime, and new materials.

Courtesy of the artist

Shaun Leonardo (A '04)

Shaun Leonardo's multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly—an arts-based diversion program for system-impacted youth at the Brooklyn-based, non-profit Recess—is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment. Since co-founding the Assembly program 7 years ago, Shaun has served as its lead artist, implementing research and partnerships for the program’s growth. In 2021, Shaun expanded his role to Co-Director, guiding the organization's continuous evolution as an engine of social change.

Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, and profiled in the NewYork Times and CNN. He was recently honored as a Community Innovator for his work in diversion by the Center for Justice Innovation. His solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, was presented at MICA, MASS MoCA and The Bronx Museum. And his first major public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, recently premiered at Four Freedoms Park Conservancy.

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Park McArthur (A '12) & JASON HIRATA (WEEKS 1-3)

Park McArthur is an artist who experiments with personal and social meanings of debility, delay, and dependency under the guidance and instruction of disability. With Constantina Zavitsanos, McArthur has exhibited artworks and published texts in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility.

Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 2019 McArthur joined the Department of Art and Design at Rutgers University, New Jersey as Tepper Family Endowed Chair.

Jason Hirata’s contingent artworks often arrive via conditional and organizational dependencies. Recent group exhibitions include The Wig, Berlin; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; Theta, New York; Artist Space, New York, and he has presented work as solo exhibitions at Ulrik, New York; Fanta-MLN, Milan; 80WSE, New York; and Kunstverein Nürnberg.

Hirata attended the University of Washington and with Park McArthur he currently teaches in the Art & Design Department at Rutgers University.

Steve Locke, 2021. Photo: Ross Collab

Steve Locke (A '02)

Steve Locke (b.1963) was born in Cleveland, OH and lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, Locke’s practice critically engages with the Western canon to interrogate the connections between desire, identity, and violence. In 2001, Steve Locke received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Extending his commitment to a painting practice, Locke began to seek alternative ways to amplify public engagement around his art, partnering with institutions, municipalities, and even the US Postal Service to reach new audiences.

Throughout his artistic career, Locke’s work has questioned how we ascribe meaning to portraiture. Speaking about the series when you’re a boy…, which he began in 2005, Locke says that he makes “drawings and paintings that explore relationships between and among men. The exchange of looks, the privilege of looking and the wish to be seen are positions I explore to reveal the ways men respond, desire, and relate to each other.”

  • Other works by Locke imbue portraiture with menace and pain. #Killers (2017–present) presents viewers with skillfully rendered portraits of men and women who have killed Black people.

    These chilling images, in Locke’s words, “direct the viewer to the source of this kind of violence against black people. The source is these men and the inchoate, and unnameable whiteness that creates and supports them. … They are killers adrift in the lie of whiteness.” Locke’s Homage to the Auction Block (2019–present) interrogates similar themes. Re-envisioning Josef A. Albers’s 1950–1976 Homage to the Square series, these compositions mark a significant formal departure from the artist’s earlier works. Imbuing Albers’s reductive imagery with an ominous charge, Homage to the Auction Block abstracts a slave auction block to its most basic geometric silhouette— reflecting Locke’s belief that “the basic Modernist form is indeed the slave auction block.” Queering the pure formalism and color theory of Albers, Homage to the Auction Block unpicks the intertwined histories of race and modernism. Locke’s practice ultimately pushes viewers to confront and critically engage with a complicated present and painful past.

    As he concludes, “If art is anything, it’s a public discourse. I’m not making art because I’m trying to express myself or share my feelings with the world because my feelings are no different than anyone else’s. I’m not special because I’m an artist. What I can do is I can make people pay attention to things through composition, through color, through scale, through organization through conceptual frameworks. I can make people look at something and think about it.”

    Steve Locke’s work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions, including the daily practice of painting, Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA (2021); in the name of love, Gallatin Galleries, New York University, NY (2019); Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray), curated by Pieranna Cavalchini, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA (2018); Love Letter to a Library, Boston Public Library, MA (2018); The School of Love, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA (2018); there is no one left to blame, curated by Helen Molesworth, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2013), traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2014); and Rapture, curated by Erin Dziedzic, Hall Street Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, GA (2008). He has also participated in a multitude of group exhibitions, including Feedback, The School, Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY (2021); The BIG Picture: Giant Photographs and Powerful Portfolios, Fitchburg Art Museum, MA (2020); Recruiting for Utopia: Print and the Imagination, Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA (2020); Coded, curated by Alexandria Smith, Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, MA (2018); Nine Moments for Now, curated by Dell Marie Hamilton, Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2018); Gay, curated by Ivan Monforte, Longwood Art Gallery, Bronx Council of the Arts, NY (2014); Paint Things: Beyond the Stretcher, curated by Evan Garza and Dina Deitsch, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2013); and Making a Mark, curated by Helen Shlien, Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA (2002). Locke’s work is in the collections of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA, among others. He is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2022); the Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2020); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014); the LEF Contemporary Work Fund Grant (2009); and the Art Matters Foundation Award (2007).

Courtesy of the artist

Constantina Zavitsanos (WEEKS 4-6)

Constantina Zavitsanos works in media based time. Through sculpture, performance, text, and sound Zavitsanos seeks to elaborate what’s invaluable in the re/production of debt, dependency, and means beyond measure. Zavitsanos’s work has been shown in New York at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, Artists Space, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA PS1 and Participant Inc.; and internationally at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, and Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, Germany; at Arika in Glasgow, Scotland; at Artspeak in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and various other venues.

With Park McArthur, they co-authored “Other Forms of Conviviality” in Women & Performance (Routledge, 2013) and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). They co-organized the cross-disability arts events “I Wanna Be With You Everywhere” at Performance Space New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Zavitsanos is a recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art & Activism at CCS/Bard College (2022), the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Roy Lichtenstein Award (2021), the Wynn Newhouse Award (2015), and the New Museum Research Artist Residency: Speculation (2015). They serve as a mentor in the QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP program and are a member of the leadership council for CRNY. Zavitsanos lives in New York and teaches at the New School.

Carolyn Working, 2020
Pen on paper
11 × 14 inches (27.94 × 35.56 cm) 

Carolyn Lazard (WEEKS 7-9)

Carolyn Lazard is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York and Philadelphia. Their work has been shown in several institutions including MMK, Frankfurt; MoMA, New York; mumok, Vienna; KW, Berlin and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Long Take, a co-commission between the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Their work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the 2022 Venice Biennale. Lazard is a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2021 United States Artists Fellow. They hold a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Image description: 
A black line drawing on brown toned paper. The drawing is of a person with coiled natural hair resting in bed while looking at an Apple brand laptop. The figure lays on a pillow with their head propped up by their hand. Their face is mostly obscured by the laptop revealing only one eye. Their body is covered in a blanket. The folds of the blanket take up half of the surface of the drawing.

2023 Visiting Faculty

Courtesy of the artist

Gregg Bordowitz

Gregg Bordowitz is currently the newly hired director of the Independent Study Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He recently retired from his role as the founding Director of the Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, now celebrating its tenth year. 

In addition to being a committed teacher, Gregg Bordowitz is an award-winning artist, writer, and activist. His work is the subject of a traveling retrospective spanning thirty years of activity. The exhibition is titled Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well. First organized by the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College (2018), the retrospective exhibition continues to travel in expanded versions including new artworks; presented at the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), and MoMA PS1 (2021), with forthcoming exhibitions in Europe during 2024 and 2025. 

Courtesy of the artist

Anthea Hamilton

Born in 1978 in London, Anthea Hamilton is a British artist known for creating large-scale installations and surreal artworks.

She graduated from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2000 and the Royal College of Art, London, in 2005. Her practice encompasses film, installation, performance, and sculpture, and her work is frequently site-specific. Hamilton’s approach combines archival study, popular culture, and scientific research with resonant images and objects in unusual and surreal ways. Her installations engage visitors with imagined narratives that incorporate references from art, cinema, design, and fashion. Conversation and collaboration are also key to the way she works. In 2016 Hamilton was short-listed for the Turner Prize for Project for Door (2015). In 2017 she became the first Black woman to be awarded a commission to create a work for Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries.

Courtesy of the artist

Diane Severin Nguyen

Diane Severin Nguyen is an artist who works with photography, video, and installation. Nguyen currently lives and works in New York.

Recent selected solo exhibitions include SculptureCenter, New York (2022); Renaissance Society, Chicago (2022); and Maison Européenne de la Photographie (2023). Nguyen’s films have been screened at New York Film Festival, New York; IFFR, Rotterdam; Berlinale, Berlin; and Yebisu Festival, Tokyo. Recent group exhibitions have been held at the Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2023), the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022–2023); ‘GHOST 2565 Triennial’, Bangkok (2022); Greater New York 2021 at MoMA PS1, New York (2021); Made in LA at the Hammer Museum and The Huntington (2020–2021); and ‘Bodies of Water: 13th Shanghai Biennale’, Power Station of Art (2021). Nguyen is a recent recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2023). 

Courtesy of the artist

Ahmet Ögüt

Ahmet Ögüt born in 1981 in Diyarbakır, is an artist, sociocultural initiator, and lecturer.

Working across a variety of media, including photography, video, and installation, Ögüt often uses humor and small gestures to offer his commentary on rather serious or pressing social and political issues. Ögüt is regularly collaborating with people from outside of the art world to create shifts in the perception of the common. He has exhibited widely, more recently with solo presentations at MoCA Skopje – Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunstverein Dresden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Chisenhale Gallery, and Van Abbemuseum.

Courtesy of the artist

Alison Saar

Alison Saar’s sculpture, prints and paintings address issues of race, gender and spirit.

She studied art and art history at Scripps College and received an MFA from the Otis Art Institute. Her awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment Fellowships, and the United States Artists Fellowship. Alison has exhibited at many museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Her art is represented in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She currently resides in Los Angeles and is represented by L A Louver Gallery.

2023 Paul Mellon Distinguished Fellow

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Walter Hood

Walter Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California.

Hood Design Studio is a cultural practice, working across art, fabrication, design, landscape, research and urbanism.He is also the David K. Woo Chair and the Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He lectures on and exhibits professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. In Spring 2020, Walter was the Diana Balmori Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and the Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar for the Harvard GSD Loeb Fellowship.