The graduate program at Maine College of Art has a unique tripartite faculty structure with Core, Visiting, and Advisory instructors delivering the curriculum and working individually with students wherever they may live. We have had more than fifty Visiting Faculty from 1998-2010 and over one hundred Studio Advisors from 1998-2009.

Below are profiles of the current core faculty, studio instructors, and staff. These are followed by our summer Visiting Faculty profiles for 2010.

CORE FACULTY + COURSE INSTRUCTORS

REBECCA DUCLOS, Director (until  September, 2010) and Core Faculty (Studio Arts)

Prior to her current work as an independent writer, curator, and director of the graduate program in Studio Arts at the Maine College of Art, Rebecca worked for over ten years in museums and galleries in Canada and the UK. Since 1994, she has taught at Deakin University (AUS), the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). She is currently a research fellow at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University and  teaches part-time in the Art History department at McGill University in Montréal.

Rebecca has recently curated the Telepathic Drawing Session at Articule, Voir/Noir at the Musée d’art de Joliette, As Much as Possible Given the Time and Space Allotted with David K. Ross at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, and Magnify with Lauren Fensterstock at the ICA in the Maine College of Art. Recent publications include a chapter in Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture and Performance, curatorial essays on Mary Wong’s work in Rearranging Desires: Curating the ‘Other’ Within and on Lyne Lapointe’s work in  La Clef, as well as an article on the Jardin de Metis garden “Pomme de Parterre” in the journal Locus Suspectus. Rebecca has also contributed essays and reviews to the Leicester Museum Studies series, The Future of Collecting (1999) and Exploring Science in Museums (1996). She has been the web editor for Reading Montréal and Alphabet City and is currently a commissioning editor for the Alphabet City/MIT Press series.

Rebecca is a past fellow of the American Association of University Women, the Cultural Theory Institute and the Centre for Museology at the University of Manchester (UK), as well as a participating in the 2004 dissertation workshop at the Getty Research Institute. Rebecca received her PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom). She studied in Canada for her MA in Museum Studies (University of Toronto), B.Ed. in Art Education (York University), and BA in Classical Studies and Near Eastern Archaeology (University of Toronto). She currently lives in Montréal and works in Maine.

LAUREN FENSTERSTOCK, ICA Interim Director (until August, 2010), MFA Academic Director (beginning September 1, 2010), and Core Faculty (Studio Arts)

Lauren Fensterstock is a Maine-based artist and curator who draws from historical resources to frame new propositions.  Her recent work focuses on the history of garden design to explore the intertwined roles of nature and metaphor in shaping personal environments. Lauren’s artwork has been featured in recent exhibitions at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, ME; San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, CA; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, OR; Dorsky Gallery, NY; Kohler Art Center, WI; Portland Museum of Art, ME; DUMBO Art Center, NY; Boston Center for the Arts, MA; and Albany Airport, NY. Her work is represented by Aucocisco Gallery, Sienna Gallery, and Walker Contemporary.

Over the past three years, Lauren has served as Interim Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art where she curated numerous projects including A Meticulous Ferment: Beth Lipman & Kirsten Hassenfeld,  Arthur Ganson: Machines Contemplating Time,  Lisa Young: Transcendence and Temporality, and thematic exhibitions Twilight and Exchange. In 2008 Lauren curated AFI: Upside Down, a multi-museum exhibition for the Benaki Museum and Pieros Street Annexe in Athens, Greece.  Lauren has also worked as Director of the Hay Gallery in Portland, as Curator of the Saco Museum, and writer and regional editor for Art New England from 2005-7. Her writing has been published internationally, including “Permissable Pilfering” published by the Benaki Museum, Greece; “Judith Allen: Gathering Tiers” published by the Jill Yakas Gallery, Greece;  and a recent short essay featured in Jim Campbell: Material Light, published by Hatje Cantz, Germany.  Lauren has taught, lectured, and critiqued around the country including Maine College of Art, RISD, Mass Art, U Oregon at Eugene, SUNY New Paltz, Vermont College, and Bowdoin. She was honored to be named Maine’s 2010 Visual Arts Fellow by the Maine Arts Commission and holds degrees from The Parsons School of Design (BFA 1997) and SUNY New Paltz (MFA 2000).

JULIE POITRAS SANTOS, Core Faculty (Studio Arts)

Julie Poitras Santos creates temporary works of site-specific performance, and installations using a diversity of media. Employing methods of dialogue, research and translation, she enacts ritual pathways, exploring the landscape of liminal space and the bridge. Her work creates narratives that investigate these places of connection. Poitras Santos’ solo and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Reykjanesbaer Art Museum in Iceland and at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, Spain, among others. She has attended residencies and created performances and projects in Vermont, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Iceland. Previously, she taught Sculpture at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and while living in Barcelona from 2004-2007 she worked as the Artistic Director of Can Serrat, a residency program.  She received her BS from Tufts University in 1990, and her MFA from the University of Colorado in 2000.  She lives in Portland, Maine.

ROBERT R. RILEY, Course Instructor (Independent Curating)

Robert R. Riley is an independent curator, arts administrator, writer, and educator, in contemporary art with a concentration in forms of electronic and time-based media. Bob has served as the first curator of video and performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1981-1987) and as founding curator for media arts at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1987-2000).  He has also worked as Director of the Nelson Art Gallery and Fine Art Collection at University of California, Davis, and with San Francisco Camerawork. Bob has directed seminars in new genre and media history at The San Francisco Art Institute and often lectures as adjunct faculty at art colleges and universities most recently at Mills College, California and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He is author of several texts including “Bruce Nauman’s Philosophical and Material Explorations in Film and Video” in A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s;  “Time and Data: The Media Art of Jim Campbell”; “Machine Media” Steina and Woody Vasulka; and “Liquid to Light: The Evolution of Projected Image Media” in The San Francisco Tape Music Center 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde.

PETER SIMENSKY, Core Faculty (Studio Arts)

Peter Simensky is a Maine-born, New York-based artist whose work spans numerous media including sculpture and installation, three-dimensional design, collage, video, photography, performance, print, and textiles. He has participated in numerous group shows in US and International museums, institutions and galleries including Sculpture Center, Palais de Tokyo, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Andrew Kreps Gallery, and Museum 52. He is a 2007 NYFA Grantee and was a Workspace Resident at DieuDonne Papermill in 2007-08. He was recently an artist in residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He received his BA at the University of California, Berkeley in Art History and Studio Art in 1999 and his MFA at Hunter College in 2003. In the same year Peter was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was a photo editor at Artforum from 2001 to 2003 and has taught at Hunter College, University of California San Diego, and New York University.

KENNETH WHITE, Course Instructor (independent Curating), Visiting Faculty summer 2010 (Week 5)

Kenneth White is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. In Syracuse, NY, Kenneth curated the Thursday Screeners weekly repertory cinémathèque as well as the Thursday Screeners Visiting Artist Program, which included appearances by Michael Snow, Carolee Schneemann, and Su Friedrich. He also co-presented artist talks by Martina Kudlácek and Peter Kubelka, and 16 mm film retrospectives of works by Kubelka, Marie Menken, and Maya Deren. In addition, Kenneth was a curator of the Spark Video Program, a monthly exhibition of local and international video art, and served as educational outreach director of the Syracuse International Film Festival. In July 2006, he co-founded the Portland Film + Video Artists Collective. PFVAC has presented five events since their founding and will soon release a DVD compilation of new video by members in early 2010.

Kenneth’s own films and videos have screened at such venues as Anthology Film Archives; Hong Kong University; University of Lima, Peru; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival; and the Northampton Independent Film Festival; among others. His writing is published in The Symptom: Jacques Lacan in the U.S., Trumbull Magazine, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, INCITE!: Journal of Experimental Media + Radical Aesthetics, Millennium Film Journal, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Kenneth will guest-edit a special section of Millennium Film Journal #54 (forthcoming 2011) devoted to new scholarship on Carolee Schneemann. Recent projects include Just Look Around This Place, a program of new works in video curated for Baer Ridgway Exhibitions of San Francisco in January 2010. In April, he participated as a panel discussant at the exhibition Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises, a major new retrospective of Schneemann’s work, at the Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York – New Paltz.

He has taught media production and aesthetics at Syracuse University and the Maine College of Art and has received support for his work and programming from Maine Arts Commission, Maine Humanities Council, Syracuse University, Maine College of Art, and Eastman-Kodak. Currently, Kenneth is a graduate student in the Art History / Film Studies Ph.D. Program at Stanford University. He received his B.F.A. from Syracuse University in 2005.

STAFF

RACHEL KATZ, Operations Coordinator (until September 1, 2010), MFA Administrative Director (beginning September 1, 2010)

Biography forthcoming.

SUMMER VISITING FACULTY

HOPE GINSBURG, Visiting Faculty  (Week 1)

Hope Ginsburg grew up outside of Philadelphia and received her BFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art. After attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture she moved to New York City where for the next eight years she produced installations and performances by immersing herself in disciplines such as beekeeping, textile manufacturing and organic farming. She then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to study at MIT where she received a Master of Science in Visual Studies.

Hope has exhibited her work at venues such as P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (NYC), The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), SculptureCenter (NYC), Socrates Sculpture Park (NYC), American Fine Arts (NYC), and Kunst-Werke (Berlin). In addition, she has had solo exhibitions at Solvent Space (Richmond), as well as the Julia Friedman Gallery (NYC) and Parlour Projects (NYC). She has been an artist-teacher in the MFA programs at Vermont College and Maine College of Art, and a visiting artist at institutions including the Bauhaus University, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and NSCAD University. Ginsburg served on the advisory board of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 2004-2006 and she has been on the board of Mildred s Lane in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania since 2008.

In the fall of 2007 she moved to Richmond VA where she is an Assistant Professor in the Art Foundation and Painting & Printmaking departments at VCUarts. Her ongoing project, Sponge, is currently in residence at the VCUarts Anderson Gallery.

HARRY GAMBOA JR. Visiting Faculty  (Week 2)

Since 1972, Harry Gamboa Jr. has been actively creating works in various media/forms that document and interpret the contemporary urban Chicano experience. He co-founded the influential performance art collective, Asco (Spanish for nausea) that was active in East L.A. from 1972-1987. His work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. He has been awarded several individual artist fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gluck Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, Art Matters, Inc., the California Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Harry  is currently a member of the faculty at California Institute of the Arts, School of Art, Program in Photography and Media and has also taught at various universities and art institutions in the UC system (UC Los Angeles, Riverside, Irvine,  Santa Barbara, and San Diego) as well as at CSU Northridge, CSU Los Angeles, and Otis/Parsons. He has delivered artist talks at Harvard University, UC Berkeley,  Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Cornell University, Claremont Graduate University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., and RIDER.

REGINE BASHA, Visiting Faculty  (Week 3)

Regine Basha is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn who has worked nationally and internationally for the past 17 years. As a curator, Regine is interested in various formats to disseminate art and ideas including exhibition, public commissions, radio, live presentation, temporal interventions, and virtual and print media. She has worked on solo exhibitions with artists such as Daniel Bozhkov and Dario Robleto and Julieta Aranda and special sound commissions with Steve Roden and Stephen Vitiello.

Recent exhibitions include “The Marfa Sessions” town-wide sound interventions with Ballroom Marfa; “The Activist Impulse” with artists Emily Jacir, Judi Werthein, Kristin Lucas, Andrea Geyer and Valerie Tevere + Angel Nevarez; and a show about alternate forms of learning called “Substitute Teacher” at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Forthcoming in 2011 is “An Exchange with Sol LeWitt” with Cabinet Magazine and Mass MoCa. Regine is also the Co-Founder of Fluent~Collaborative in Austin, Texas (where she was based for five years) and the Co-Founder of www.grackleworld.com, a site for curators to share touring exhibitions. She currently sits on the board of Art Matters (New York), Aurora Picture Show (Houston) and is a Curatorial Associate to Cabinet Magazine’s new event space. Her writing has appeared in numerous artists catalogs and in publications such as Modern Painters, Cabinet, Art Papers, Bidoun, and Art Lies.

LOIS ANDISON, Visiting Faculty (Week 4)

Lois Andison is a sculptor/installation artist based in Toronto, Ontario. Her art practice ranges from kinetic sculpture, where she uses movement to initiate an experience/exchange between the viewer and the work, through to video and photography, which she uses to document and interpret motion. The latter approach can be seen in her yearlong timelapse video composed of still images of an urban garden and through her motion studies, which are observations of the still and the moving. Her sculptural works address the mediated body and the performative and often involve an element of humor. Lately her conceptual interests in language as a medium, and kinetic type as movement, have led her to incorporate text in her sculptures.

Lois is currently a tenure-track assistant professor in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches digital imaging and sculpture. She also co-teaches a tech art course where art and engineering students work collaboratively on projects. Previously she taught design in the Art & Art History Program, a collaborative program between the University of Toronto and Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Oakville, Ontario. Lois has exhibited nationally and internationally including shows in such cities as Mexico City, Boston, New York, Montreal, Lethbridge and Buffalo. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards and her work is part of both private and corporate collections. Her work is represented by the Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, and Galerie Art Mûr, Montreal.

KENNETH WHITE, Visiting Faculty (Week 5)

See biography above.

KIT WHITE, Visiting Faculty (Week 6)

Kit White is a New York based painter whose work explores the bonds between materiality, as represented by metaphorical landscape, and abstraction. His paintings explore the relation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the self-conscious act of depiction and the illusion that emerges from paint by its own force. Kit’s work has been the subject of twelve solo gallery shows in New York, numerous group exhibitions, and is in the collections of many museums, including the Guggenheim Museum. He received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award for Painting, was a nominee for the National Artists Award, and was a Visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. He is currently a Professor of Painting in the MFA Program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Kit has a degree in Fine Arts at Harvard University and has written criticism for many national publications. Additionally, he is the author of the forthcoming “101 Things to Learn In Art School” to be published by MIT Press.

JEANNE RANDOLPH, Visiting Faculty  (Week 7)

Jeanne Randolph is one of Canada’s foremost cultural theorists who has been writing, publishing and lecturing for over thirty years. She is the author of four books: Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming (1993); Symbolization and Its Discontents (1997), Why Stoics Box (2003), and The Ethics of Luxury: materialism and imagination (2007). She is also the author of numerous published articles in Canada, as well as in  Australia, Spain, England and the United States. Her writing is marked by an innovative approach to her chosen subject, an ethical philosophical meandering that blends cultural theory and art criticism with personal history and a poetics of the imagination.

Jeanne is also known as engaging lecturer and performance artist whose free association soliloquies–ranging from Freud to architecture to boxing to Barbie Dolls to Wittgenstein–have been delivered in universities and galleries in North America and abroad
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BERNIE  MILLER, Visiting Faculty (Week 7)

Bernie Miller has exhibited his work in Canada, USA, France, Italy, Sweden, Austria, Poland and Germany and has been commissioned to do major public artworks in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton. He was a director at YYZ Artist’s Outlet in Toronto for 16 years and served on the curatorial committee of the Toronto Sculpture Garden for 5 years. Bernie has participated in residency programs at the Cité des Arts in Paris, France as well as at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff, Alberta. He was a peer advisor for the Technology Rhetoric and Utopia Residency also at the Banff Centre and has contributed articles to a number of publications including Money Value Art: StateFunding, Free Markets, Big Pictures He also co-edited with Melony Ward, a collection of essays, Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos. He has contributed texts to a number of catalogues and has reviewed exhibitions for noted art publications. Bernie lives and works in Winnipeg and is represented in Toronto by Paul Petro Contemporary Art. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art and is the recipient of the Ontario College of Art Medal.