LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting (MFA)

Spring 2016 Hoffberger Visiting Artists

Jason Karolak

Jason Karolak is a painter living and working in Brooklyn. Rooted in a drawing process, his paintings are composed of brightly colored linear elements set against a context of dark grounds. Through addition and erasure, Karolak builds permeable structures that fluctuate between a graphic surface and a deeper dimensional space. His abstract, elemental works explore scale in relation to architecture and the body, as well as the filtering of experience and information.

Jason Karolak was born in Rochester, MI in 1974. He earned a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1997 and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. He has shown extensively across the U.S., including recent solo exhibitions at McKenzie Fine Art in New York and Robischon Gallery in Denver. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, and Hyperallergic, among others. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Drew University.

Seth Cameron

Seth Cameron is a painter and a writer. He teaches the Intradisciplinary Seminar at The Cooper Union and serves as President of BHQFU, New York's freest art school. Since 2001 his primary practice has been as part of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, an artist-cum-institution that creates installations, videos, paintings, sculptures, performances and institutions that reveal their collective creative agency within the seemingly monolithic forces of art and social history. The Foundation has exhibited in The Whitney Biennial, the Venice Bienniale, and the Lyon Bienniale. The Foundation has exhibited with The Lever House, Acquavella Gallery, and Vito Schnabel in New York, Bruno Bischofberger and Thomas Ammann Fine Art in Zurich, Almine Rech in Brussels, and McClaine Gallery in Houston. In 2012 the Foundation did a national arts education tour with Creative Time. In 2013 The Brooklyn Museum hosted its first museum retrospective. BHQFU, founded in 2009, is a learning experiment where artists work together to manifest creative, productive, resistant, useless, and demanding interactions between art and the world. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, BHQFU offers completely tuition-free courses on a variety of subjects during fall and spring semesters, hosts public programs and exhibitions year-round, and operates cost-free artist studio residency programs.

Mira Schor

Mira Schor is a New York-based painter and writer noted for her advocacy of painting in a post-medium visual culture and for her contributions to feminist art history. In both painting and writing, Schor's areas of interest include the gendered production of art history, the analysis and praxis of painting in post-modern culture, and the relationship between political and conceptual concerns with the materiality of expression. Schor's recent paintings are philosophical meditations on the place of painting in contemporary culture, on the visual artist as a thinker, on painting as a uniquely sensual space for the visualization of thought itself. She addresses the terms of contemporary psychic, theoretical, and economic spaces as they affect creativity. The central theme in these paintings is the experience of living in a moment of radical inequality, austerity, and accelerated time, set against the powerful pull of older notions of time, craft, and visual pleasure.

Schor has had solo exhibitions in New York City at Momenta Art and Marvelli Gallery. She exhibits her work at Lyles & King Gallery in New York and is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum Online. Interviews have appeared on Bomblog, Hyperallergic, BlouinArtinfo, and blog.Art21. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in New York City, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, P.S.1, the Neuberger Museum, and the Aldrich Museum. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art (both Duke University Press), and of the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. She is the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, published by Yale University Press. Recent writings have also appeared in Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail. Schor received her MFA in Painting from CalArts. Schor is the recipient of awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundations as well as the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism and a Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in Fine Arts at New York’s Parsons The New School for Design.

Karla Wozniak

Karla Wozniak lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Gregory Lind Gallery, and group exhibitions at the Knoxville Museum of Art and Regina Rex in New York City. Wozniak’s distinctions include a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship (2011); participation in the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program (2011); participation in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program (2009-10); and MacDowell Colony Fellowships (2007, 2005). Her work has been featured in a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Village Voice, and The Huffington Post, among others. Her work is included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Knoxville Museum of Art permanent collections. Wozniak is currently an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts.

Wendy White

Wendy White was born in Deep River, CT, and lives and works in New York City. She earned a B.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a M.F.A. from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She was the recipient of a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and is included in Phaidon’s anthology Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting. Wendy White has had solo exhibitions at Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Brussels, Belgium; Leo Koenig Inc., New York, NY; Galeria Moriarty, Madrid, Spain; Van Horn, Düsseldorf, Germany; University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, TN; Sherrick & Paul, Nashville, TN; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; and David Castillo, Miami, FL. Group exhibitions include Futbol: The Beautiful Game, curated by Franklin Sirmans, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Informal Relations, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis; Hue & Cry, Sotheby's S|2, New York, NY; Idealizing the Imaginary: Invention and Illusion in Contemporary Painting, Oakland University, Michigan; Third Thoughts, curated by Barry Schwabsky, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain; Borderland Abstraction, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha NE; and So Athletic, curated by Susanna Prinz, Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, Germany.

Elana Herzog

Elana Herzog lives and works in New York City. She received a BA in 1976 from Bennington College and an MFA in 1979 from Alfred University. Her solo exhibition, SHIFT; The Angel of History, was recently on view at Studio 10 in Bushwick, New York. In 2014 Herzog mounted a major project, Valence, at The Boiler (Pierogi), in Brooklyn. She has had solo exhibitions at Lmak Projects in New York City, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; Smack Mellon in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University; Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York City; Diverse Works in Texas; De-Warped and Un-Weft, a survey of Herzog’s work since 1993, was at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri in 2009. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Norway, Sweden and Iceland, Canada, Chile and the Netherlands, and she has participated in numerous group shows at institutions such as the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, The Kohler Museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, David Castillo Gallery in Miami, and at The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design New York City.

Herzog's work will be presented in a solo booth at Volta, in New York City, in March 2016, by Studio 10, Bushwick. She is currently presenting a solo project as part of "Light," at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

Herzog has been awarded residencies at the Josef and Annie Albers Foundation, at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, Australia, at the Farpath Foundation in Dijon, France, and at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Residency in Dumbo, New York. She received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2009, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2007, the NYFA Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2007 and 1999, the 2004 Lillian Elliot Award, the 2003 Lambent Fund Fellowship and the 1999 Joan Mitchell Award. She was a 2008-2009 Workspace Resident of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Dieu Donne Paper.

She is currently a lecturer at Yale University.

Claiming that everything she does “relates back to painting,” Anna Betbeze eschews the canvas and turns instead to an assortment of textiles, which she dyes, cuts, scorches, shaves, and otherwise distresses, transforming them into lush, oversized, painting-like wall hangings. Though she has worked with fabric, leather, and terrycloth (in towel and robe form), she focuses on white, shaggy Flokati rugs. She began experimenting with the rugs after noticing that the marks of wear on the one on her floor were surprisingly beautiful.

Ms. Betbeze received a B.F.A. from the University of Georgia in 2003 and an M.F.A. in painting/printmaking from Yale in 2006. She has held solo exhibitions at Kate Werble Gallery, New York; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Lüttenmeijer, Berlin; and François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MoMA PS1; Galerie Perrotin, Paris; Luxembourg & Dayan, New York; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and Ramiken Crucible, New York. Ms. Betbeze was the recipient of a Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize in 2013–14. She was appointed as a lecturer in painting/printmaking in 2009.

Lan Zhenghui

Lan Zhenghui was born in 1959 in Sichuan, China. He graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1987, and currently, he lives and works in Beijing, China. His work has been collected by museums, universities, and private collections. Lan Zhenghui was most recently prominently featured in the Rubell Collection exhibition CHINESE 28 in Miami 2013.

Occupying the esthetic confluence between traditional Chinese Ink painting and Western abstract expressionism, Lan Zhenghui’s work reinvents both. He lets the ink follow and discover its own momentum in bold, kinetic, strokes. He has liberated ink from being determined by form. But the spirits of Chinese landscape linger like ghosts in the canvas. They haunt both the process – the brushstrokes, the vectoring – and the resulting shapes. Mountains, rivers, storms, even figures, surge and evaporate subliminally. It was said of the Fauvists and Matisse that they had liberated color from the imperatives of form.

He has had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art and Design, James Cohan Gallery, NY, PKM Trinity Gallery, Seoul, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary, Phoenix, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Weatherspoon Art Museum, U of N Carolina, Greensboro; Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, the Whitney Museum of American Artat Phillip Morris, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Baumgartner Gallery, Washington, D.C., Dieu Donne Papermill, NY, Kiang Gallery, Atlanta, Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, and the A/C Project Room, NY

Awards include Artist-in-Residence Grant, NY State Council on the Arts in 1990, National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Jerome Foundation in 1991, in 1993 The Louise Nevelson Award in Art and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY, in 1994 he received a NY Foundation for the Arts Grant, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, in 1995 a National Endowment for the Arts Award, in 1997 the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Worcester Art Museum, MA, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Berkeley Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Keltie Ferris

Keltie Ferris was born in Louisville, KY, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with a BFA from the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include Paintings and Body Prints at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Keltie Ferris: Doomsday Boogie at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California, and Body Prints at Chapter NY, New York. In 2016, she will have a solo exhibition at the University Art Museum at SUNY Albany, New York. Her works have been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Texas; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; The Kitchen, New York; and Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis. She was recently awarded the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting by the Academy of Arts and Letters, where her work was included in their 2014 Annual Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts.