Visiting Artist Biographies

Kamrooz Aram is a contemporary artist whose paintings and drawings bring together traditional and contemporary cultural references to create scenes reflecting “the carnivalesque, absurd, magical and scary present day.” Aram was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1978 and received his MFA from Columbia University in 2003. He has had solo exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA), North Adams, Mass.; Wilkinson Gallery, London; and Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, New York. His work made the March 09 cover of Art in America magazine, and he has been included in various group exhibitions internationally, including the Busan Biennale (2006), P.S.1/MoMA’s Greater New York 2005, and the Prague Biennale I (2003). He lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Peter Buchanan-Smith, designer and art director, started his own New York-based graphic design company, Buchanan-Smith, in 2006. A frequent collaborator with authors, artists, and musicians, he won a Grammy for his cover design of Wilco’s 2004 album a ghost is born. He has also worked with Maira Kalman, David Byrne, Brian Eno, Isaac Mizrahi, and PAPER magazine.

Rebecca Cleman is the director of distribution of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Since joining EAI in the year 2000, she has programmed many screenings devoted to the history of video art for the New York Underground Film Festival; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Union Cinema, Milwaukee; Anthology Film Archives; and ISSUE Project Room, among others. In October 2007, with Elizabeth Kessenides, attorney at law, she organized a panel addressing copyright in the art world. She has also participated in panels hosted by the New School (The Aesthetics of Transition: Building Cultural Spaces for New Media Works, 2005) and Orchard Gallery (the Collapse and Proliferation of the Moving Image, 2006). In March 2008, she was a panelist for Moving/Images: Preserving Downtown Time-Based Works, organized by The Fales Library of NYU.

Diana Cooper cannot be easily categorized; she engages in a unique practice that combines drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. Although essentially abstract, these unabashedly handmade visual hybrids suggest a narrative of cause and effect in which apparent chaos and randomness develops inherent logic, or conversely, orderly structures turn paradoxical. Cooper shows at Postmasters Gallery in NYC.

Christopher Cozier is an artist and writer living and working in Trinidad. He has participated in a number of exhibitions focused upon contemporary art in the Caribbean and internationally. Since 1989 he has published a range of essays on related issues in a number of catalogues and journals. He is on the editorial collective of Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, published and distributed by Duke University Press. The artist has been an editorial adviser to BOMB magazine for their Americas issues (Winter, 2003, 2004 & 2005) A documentary produced by Canadian video artist and writer, Richard Fung entitled, Uncomfortable: the Art of Christopher Cozier, was launched in Toronto in January 2006. The artist is a Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of The University of Trinidad & Tobago (UTT) and was artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College during the Fall of 2007.

Alonzo Davis, an African-American artist, uses paint, bamboo, copper, leather, indigenous textiles, and mixed media to reflect the magic of the Southwest United States, Brazil, Haiti, West Africa, and the Pacific Rim in works which are installed in public, corporate, and personal art collections.

Dennis Farber came to MICA in 1998 from the University of New Mexico and 25 years in both the New York and Los Angeles art worlds. His work has been exhibited regularly in the United States and abroad. It was included in MoMA's millennial exhibition, OPEN ENDS, 1960- present, Innocence and Experience, and has been included in major museum exhibitions and traveled by both the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum in New York. It is in permanent collections of major museums, universities, and corporations around the United States.

Joanne Greenbaum lives and works in New York. Her art is one of maximum attention and maximum risk, disguised as an obsessive game. It is loaded with analogies, historical references and, most importantly, lessons of the hand. In these large, cartoon-like abstractions, there is an entire primer on the gambles and rewards of painting. Over the past 10 years, she has participated in numerous group shows in the U.S. and Europe and had solo exhibitions at D'Amelio Terras in New York, greengrassi in London, and Galerie Nicolas Krupp in Basel, Switzerland. Later this year she will have a solo show at Boom/Shane Campbell in Chicago, and in 2008 a career-spanning survey of her work will be mounted at the Haus Konstruktiv museum in Zurich. The survey will then travel to the Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, Germany.

Irene Hofmann is the executive director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. She has organized acclaimed exhibitions such as the 2002 and 2004 California Biennial, and Girls’ Night Out, a national touring exhibition featuring work by a new generation of women photographers and video artists, currently on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. She curated the first United States museum exhibition of work by the Swiss artist Fabrice Gygi and served as the venue organizer of the current John Waters photography retrospective, Change of Life. She has held positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Hofmann holds a BA in art history from Washington University in St. Louis, and a MA in modern art history, theory and criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Philipp Lachenmann lives and works in Munich. After an apprenticeship as a molder, he studied with the painter and stage designer Henry H. Gowa, studied film at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, HFF, Munich. In addition, he worked as a professional photographer. From 1989 to 1994, Lachenmann studied art history, communication studies, and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, graduating with an MA. His works deal with topics like images as medial deserts and surfaces of collective memories whose self-referentiality could be revealed through interventions in their formal appearance.

Robert Lobe explores both the relationships and conflicts between nature and technology. The sculptures of Robert Lobe stand at the forefront of American contemporary art. Born in Detroit, the artist grew up in Cleveland and studied art techniques at Oberlin College, Ohio, from 1963 to 1967. He then completed his formal studies at Hunter College, New York, in 1967 and 1968. As early as 1969, Lobe's sculpture gained national recognition when his work was included in the famous Whitney Museum exhibition, Anti-Illusion. His first one-man exhibition took place in New York in 1974. Since that time his fine art has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza Sculpture Garden, the Texas Gallery, Houston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Department of Environmental Protection, New Jersey, and elsewhere.

Luba Lukova is a designer and illustrator. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Library of Congress and Bibliotheque Nationale de France. She has received a Grand Prix Savignac at the International Poster Salon and the Golden Pencil Award at the One Club. She received an honorary degree of doctor of fine arts from Lesley University.

Julien Maire, a French artist, investigates the possibility of images across a broad range of invented, performed, rescued, and found technologies. His works have been exhibited widely throughout Europe and in the fall he will have a major exhibition at The Wood Street Gallery in Pittsburgh.

Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, a collaborative artist team since 1998, have worked and exhibited globally, seeking to surface and discuss issues revolving around marginalized members of society. Their work, which moves fluidly between large-scale public projects, performative sculpture, painting, photography, video, and self-portraiture, challenges audiences to face issues of race and social justice in communities, history, and the family. Embedded within their work, whether it is of an historical, personal, or civic-based nature, is their standing as an interracial couple.

Kazuko Miyamoto left Japan for New York in 1964. In 1969, she met the artist Sol LeWitt, with whom she engaged in a life-long creative and conceptual dialogue. Central to her work has always been the notion of the line as a link between two points. In Miyamoto’s artistic career this line has evolved from being part of a geometric grid towards a more organically shaped object. In recent years Miyamoto explored elements of dance and performance based on ideas of improvisational music. In 1972 Miyamoto became a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, founded in 1972 as the first artist-run, not-for-profit gallery for women artists in the world. In a close work relationship with LeWitt, Miyamoto fabricated many of his sculptures in the past 39 years. In 1986, she established gallery onetwentyeight, the Lower East Side’s longest continuously running alternative art space. Miyamoto has participated in countless national and international exhibitions in the past 40 years. To name a few: 55 Mercer Gallery, New York; Marilena Bonomo Gallery, Italy; Lodz Biennale, Poland; Neue Galerie Linz, Austria and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Her work is included in a wide selection of important public and private collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Cara Ober '05 is a visual artist with a writer’s addiction to words. Ober’s narrative works utilize specific phrases and fonts to suggest multiple voices, perspectives, and time periods. Rather than illustrating the text, the images create discord and contrast, layering metaphorical and nonsensical outcomes over personal notation. Ober is a 2006 Maryland Individual Artist Grant recipient for painting and took second prize in the 2007 Bethesda Painting Awards. She received a Warhol Grant for Emerging Curators in 2006, and a Best in Show Award at the Torpedo Factory’s juried painting exhibit in 2006. Ober earned an MFA in painting from MICA in 2005 and a BA in fine arts in 1996 from American University.

Peter Rostovsky fastidiously crafts sculptures and delicately executes paintings exploring the impasses that haunt "historical memory" and utopian imagination. Rostovsky hones in on historical and contemporary symbols of societal hopes and aspirations with his re-worked renditions of exhausted artistic genres, such as landscape painting, monumental sculpture, and kitsch iconography. Cleverly approaching the deeply rooted problematics of these antiquated genres, Rostovsky exposes the absurdity of searching for heroes and epiphany through images of grandeur.

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. He first received national attention in 1989 when his art became the center of controversy over its use of the American flag. President Bush declared his artwork, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? as “disgraceful” and the entire U.S. Senate denounced this work when they passed legislation to “protect the flag.” His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NY) and the Akron Art Museum (Ohio). He has been awarded a Mid Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship in Photography, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture (2001) and Fellowship in Performance Art/Multi-disciplinary Art (2005), and a Creative Capital Foundation grant. In 2000, he participated in the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue directed by Anna Deavere Smith at Harvard University. He has appeared on numerous local and national TV and radio shows including Oprah, The Today Show, and CBS This Morning, speaking about his work and the controversy surrounding it. He has been written about in The New York Times, Art In America, ArtNews, The Village Voice, Time, The London Guardian, and several other newspapers, magazines, and books. Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times, described one of his works as “quite resonant.”

Georgianna Stout is founding partner and creative director at 2×4. Her work has ranged from extensive retail and packaging projects to large-scale identity and environmental graphics/wayfinding programs. She recently completed branding, identity, retail, and environmental programs for the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dia:Beacon, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Prior to founding 2×4, Stout worked at Bethany Johns Design, producing publications and identity programs for arts organizations and other cultural institutions.

Jo Smail was born and educated in South Africa. In South Africa, she taught in the fine art department at the University of the Witwatersrand, the Johannesburg College of Art and the Johannesburg Art Foundation. She was represented by the Goodman Gallery. She has taught at MICA since 1988, and is currently represented by Goya Girl Contemporary Art Gallery in Baltimore and Washington, and Axis Gallery in New York. Solo shows include: 2008 McLean Project for the Arts, Mclean, Va.; 2007 Goya Contemporary; 2006 Axis Gallery, New York; 2004 Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, La.; 2004 Goya Contemporary, Baltimore. She has had reviews published in: The New York Times, Art in America, Art on Paper, City Paper Baltimore, Baltimore Sun and The Hudson Review, among others. She is represented in private collections internationally, and in public collections, including the National Gallery of South Africa, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Chase Manhattan Bank, Mobil Corporation, and The United States Embassy, Johannesburg.

Marc Swanson lives and works in Brooklyn. He uses a variety of materials--from crystals and glitter to lumber and deerskin--to make sculptures that examine renewal, personal history, mortality, and rites of passage. He received an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and has recent solo exhibitions at Bellwether Gallery in New York and Julia Friedman Gallery in Chicago. Approaching his practice as a means of self-exploration, Swanson’s work examines the notion of masculine identity through a variety of media ranging from film, sculpture, installation, and painting. Reconciling queer sensibility with the ultra conservatism of rural folk arts, Swanson’s Psychic Studies approaches themes of power, spirituality and tradition through an aesthetic of heightened sensuality. Psychic Studies takes the form of a large reflective wall mount; its radial motif suggestive of a web, shield, mystical symbol, or hunting lodge fixture. Constructed from painted wood and mirrored acrylic, Swanson’s form exudes the timeless potency of illicit allure of kitsch.

Jackie Tileston received a BA from Yale University and a MFA from Indiana University. Her works have been recognized through fellowships from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Bellagio Residency, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, M-AAA/NEA Fellowship Award, and Core Fellowship Residency, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Tileston's work has been featured in solo exhibitions and galleries across the U.S., including Westby Gallery, Rowan University; Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, Del.; and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.

Saya Woolfalk is a New York-based artist who uses a craft-based approach to create all-encompassing, imaginary spaces where she playfully reworks naturalized forms of race, gender, sexuality, and power. She completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio 2007, holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from Brown University. She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, N.Y.; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Ind.; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.