LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting (MFA)

Spring 2017 Hoffberger Visiting Artists

Sharon Butler

Sharon Butler is a New York painter, arts writer, and the publisher of the popular blogazine Two Coats of Paint, which was recently selected as one of the ten best art websites by Time Out New York. In 2016, she mounted a well-received solo show at Theodore:Art in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and was named the Patricia Highsmith-Plangman Resident at Yaddo. She is currently affiliated with Parsons The New School, and the MFA Program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and is grateful for support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, Creative Capital, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program.

Her current projects include a series of digital drawings made for Instagram (published at The Harvard Review), paintings based on those drawings (on view with SEASON at Pulse Miami, 2016), and, in June, she founded a Stock Club for artists.

Nathlie Provosty's

Nathlie Provosty's work explores paradox with a particular attention to formal nuance. Known for highly sensual, abstract oil paintings that appear to be word forms, body fragments, or unidentifiable shapes, their ambiguities are grounded by an involved relationship to the materiality of paint and an investigation of color. Provosty was born in 1981 in Cincinnati, Ohio and studied painting and art history at Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA, 2004) and the University of Pennsylvania (MFA, 2007). The year between her education she lived in India as a Fulbright fellow. In the summer of 2007 she moved to New York. Her first one-person exhibition in the city opened in 2012 at an experimental artist-run gallery called 1:1, and since she has exhibited nationally and internationally including at Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York; A Palazzo Gallery in Italy; Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery in Belgium; and Stefan Lundgren Gallery in Spain. The artist's distinctions include the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012) and a Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program studio residency (2009-10), and paintings are included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Colby Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art.

Carroll Dunham

Carroll Dunham was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949, he lives and works in New York City. He graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1972. Dunham has developed a characteristic, highly personal style for which he is well known. His scenes involving interactions between multiple cartoonish and biomorphic figures in colorful compositions slowly grew out of an initially abstract vocabulary and now engage in often sexually suggestive narratives. He has had over eighty-seven solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennale in 1985, 1991 and 1995, PS.1, NY, MOMA, the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Aldrich Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, the Saatchi Gallery in London, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. His work is in the collections of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, the Museum Ludwig in Köln, the Tate Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has been written about extensively in all major art publications and in 2004 he received the Skowhegan Medal for Distinction in Painting.

Stephen Ellis

Stephen Ellis lives and works in New York City; he was born in 1951 in High Point, North Carolina. He studied at the Boston University Art Program and the New York Studio School, and he received a BFA from Cornell University. There is a balance in Ellis's paintings between ordered geometric austerity and the flowing irregularity of the painter's hand. Building up the canvas with many translucent layers of paint, he opens windows of contemplation in a measured field.

The many publications that have reviewed his work include Art in America, Artforum,The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Ellis has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Foundation for the Arts. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Brooklyn Museum. The museums that hold his work in their permanent collections include the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Brooklyn Museum, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and Fond Nationale Art Contemporaine (FNAC) in Paris.

Steve DiBenedetto

Steve DiBenedetto was born in 1958 in the Bronx, New York and lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1980. He has established himself as an idiosyncratic artist who has brought the pursuit of painting into the unpredictable chaos and flux that categorize the Post-Modern world. DiBenedetto has consistently rejected formalism taking instead a position where the canvas and the act of painting initiate a site for struggle, invention, and, ultimately, reinvention. Utilizing an inventory of leitmotifs, including the helicopter, octopus, wheel, and glass office tower, DiBenedetto paints and repaints his subjects in states of apocalyptic trauma where content and technique become unified, while the boundaries between the objective and subjective become uncertain.

His work has been shown most recently in a solo museum exhibition at the Aldrich Museum, his works have also been exhibited at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, N. C., University Art Museum, SUNY Albany, NY., The American Academy of Arts and Letters and New Britain Museum of American Art. He is represented by Derek Eller Gallery, and David Nolan Gallery in New York, and has recent shows at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, Mario Diacono, Boston, and Galerie Rolf Ricke, Köln, Germany. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and he has received the 

Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award.

Peter Soriano

Peter Soriano was born in 1959 in Manila, Philippines and now lives and works in New York and Maine. He received his BA from Harvard College in Cambridge and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine both in in 1981. Originally a sculptor Soriano moved to a more temporal medium and began to work primarily in drawing and wall sized murals in the early 2000's. He considers drawing as a vehicle to locate various physical, metaphorical and psychological spaces and his room installations elicit both a physical and thoughtful response.

His work has been shown at numerous museums and galleries here and in Europe including his recent installation "Permanent Maintenance" at Colby College Museum of Art Waterville, ME, the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, CO, Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, Inc., NY, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, France. Reviews of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Art in America, ARTnews, Time Out, and Hyperallergic. His work is in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France, the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NYand the Musée des Beaux Arts, Tourcoing, France among others. He is represented by Lennon Weinberg in New York, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, Gallerie Bernard Jordan, Zurich.

Amer Kobaslija

Amer Kobaslija was born in 1975 in Banjaluka, Bosnia. In 1993 he fled his war-ravaged homeland landing in a refugee camp in Nuremberg, Germany. Later he traveled to Düsseldorf, where he attended the Kunst Akademie. In 1997, Kobaslija was offered asylum by the United States and immigrated to Florida. In Sarasota, he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Ringling College of Art and Design. In 2003 he went on to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Montclair College of the Arts in New Jersey and has since established his base in New York City. Kobaslija teaches studio art at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. 

In 2005, he was awarded a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation; the following year, he received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow for painting, Kobaslija has had numerous one-person exhibitions in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Orleans. He is represented by George Adams Gallery in New York where he has had seven solo shows in the last decade, including the 2015-16 traveling survey exhibition "Amer Kobaslija: Places, Spaces." In conjunction with this exhibition, George Adams Gallery published a comprehensive monograph on Kobaslija's art and life. 

Kobaslija's paintings have been reviewed and reproduced in numerous publications including The New York Times, Art in America, ARTNews, Art & Antiques, New York Magazine, New York Time Out, The Village Voice, The Florida Times Union, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Japan Times.

Peter Williams

Peter Williams was born in the early 1950's in Nyack, NY, he lives and works in Willington, where he teaches at the University of Delaware. He received an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art and a B.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. There was a buzz around his 2015 show at Novella Gallery and his 2013 show at Foxy Productions, both in NY; but already in 2007 Tom Micchelli of Hyperallergic had written, "Peter Williams is a troubling painter for troubling reasons. There is a disconnect between his sophisticated paint handling-which can veer from dry pointillist dots to hard-sculpted tonalities to bejeweled washes and drips, all in the same picture-and the low-culture effrontery of his images."

Williams himself says it like this: "I slowly have come to realize that some of the police in this country think they have permission to kill minorities. They already incarcerate millions and they are, simply put, exterminating the rest. It's shocking that this continues even though there is documentation and videos of these acts of violence. So I feel free to expose this ignorance and make art that bears witness to these events."

He has shown consistently for the last 40 years and his work is in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts. He received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and was included in the Whitney Biennale. 

Anthony Cudahy

Anthony Cudahy is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in 2011 from Pratt Institute, and co-curates a publishing project named Slow Youth. His work has appeared in shows across the United States and the UK. In 2016, he exhibited a body of paintings entitled NARSOLIPS at Cooler Gallery in Brooklyn and has also recently shown at Farewell Books (Austin, TX) and Mumbo's Outfit (Manhattan, NY). He has been in group shows at Hap Gallery, Deli Gallery, ATHICA, the Nancy Margolis Gallery, Vox Populi, the Perfect Nothing Catalog, and the Knockdown Center. His work has also been featured and reviewed in publications including Mossless, the Paris Review, Hello Mr., Marco Polo Quarterly, and Cakeboy. He is a former resident of the Artha Project.