Visual Artist Series
The Visual Artist Series is collaboratively organized and hosted by faculty and students. Funded by the Student Association through the Campus Arts Council, the series typically brings seven to nine artists to our campus every year. These artists give public lectures, workshops, demos and critiques. Artists from all media are represented in the series. They come from all over the U.S. and Canada and, from time-to-time, other countries.
Fall 2024
Hedy Yang, September 26, 2024
Hedy Yang, ceramic artist, will be the first presenter of the fall semester. Ms. Yang
majored in ceramics and minored in entrepreneurship at Michigan State University.
Her current work is inspired by her time spent in the Adirondacks after college. Each
piece is inspired by a photo of a sunrise or sunset and helps to embody an important
memory from that moment. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally and
currently works out of her private studio in Metro-Detroit as a full-time artist.
Ms. Yang will give a presentation on Thursday, September 26, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. in Yokum Hall, room 205.
Melissa Schulenberg, October 16, 2024
Melissa Schulenberg, printmaker, will be the second presenter of the fall semester.
Ms. Schulenberg is an artist/printmaker who currently resides in Canton, New York
where she is the L.M. and G.L. Flint Professor in Fine Arts at St. Lawrence University.
Growing up in Michigan and South Dakota, she was always interested in drawing and
painting but never knew about printmaking. It wasn’t until college, taking numerous
printmaking courses and working at the Bowdoia Art Museum, that she discovered the
wonderful world of prints. Schulenberg received her B.A. in studio Art from Bowdoin
College, Maine, an M.A. in printmaking from Purdue University, Indiana, and her M.F.A.
in printmaking from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She teaches various printmaking,
drawing and book art courses in her current position.
Schulenberg’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably in Australia, Ireland, Japan and New Zealand. Her work takes inspiration from observed organic forms, the natural landscape, and her immediate surroundings. At times her work offers the viewer two options simultaneously, presenting images as broad vistas and as microscopic investigations. These “scapes,” as she calls them, may contain a horizon yet offer a view into a smaller, contained environment. More recently, she thinks of her work as a process of building her own “alphabet,” forming visual vocabularies into new and unusual compositions. Formal explorations use her “alphabet” of stripes, humps and stumps, scars, thread, totems, shadows, woven textures and a torus shape, to name a few. Each composition aims to present a new compilation of visual notations, continually building and rearranging and playing with a growing visual alphabet.
Ms. Schulenberg will give a presentation on Wednesday, October 16, 2024, at 7:30 p.m. in Yokum Hall, room 205.
Tawni Shuler, October 30, 2024
Tawni Shuler, drawing and painting artist, will be the third presenter of the fall
semester. Ms. Schuler was born on a farm in Wyoming. Tawni Shuler was enticed to paint
and draw early on by the art of western painters Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell.
She attended the University of Montana, Missoula to complete her Bachelor of Fine
Arts degree and Arizona State University to complete Master of Fine Arts degree in
painting and drawing in 2008. She has since served as the programming director for
the Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana, an assistant professor in Watermedia at Utah
Valley University, an instructor of art at Sheridan College, media specialist for
the Arizona Natural History Association and illustrator for Crystal Publishing. Currently,
Shuler serves as the residency director for the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.
Her work has been shown at the Taos Center for the Arts, N.M.; Oates Park Art Center, Fallon, Nev.; Northwest Art Center, Minot, N.D.; Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, Augusta, Ga.; g2 Gallery, Scottsdale, Ariz.; Harry Wood Gallery, Tempe, Ariz.; Zane Bennett Gallery, Santa Fe, N.M.; Missoula Art Museum, Mont.; Woodbury Art Museum, Orem, Utah; Tucker Cooke Gallery, Asheville, N.C.; Smith Theatre Gallery, Farmington Hills, Mich.; Firehouse Gallery, Grant Pass, Ore. and was published in Southwest Art’s 2005 Annual Emerging Artist Issue. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Jentel Artist Residency Program, the former Brush Creek Ranch Artist Foundation and the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.
Ms. Shuler will give a presentation via Zoom on Wednesday, October 30, 2024, at 5 p.m.
Casey Callahan, November 19, 2024
Casey Callahan, graphic designer, art director and illustrator, will be the fourth
presenter of the fall semester. Ms. Callahan graduated with a B.F.A. in visual communication
from the University of Oklahoma and went on to work in Seattle across a range of mediums
including large scale advertising, packaging, branding, and campaign direction. Now,
Casey works as the lead designer at Burton Snowboards where she works primarily on
board graphics and product design.
Ms. Callahan will give a presentation on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, at 7:30 p.m. in Yokum Hall, room 205.
Spring 2025
Taliesin Thomas, February 13, 2025
Taliesin Thomas, Ph.D. is an artist-philosopher, lecturer, writer, and arts professional
based in Troy, N.Y. Since 2007, Thomas is the founding director of AW Asia and Art
Issue Editions, Inc., two private art collections that serve as the basis for collaborations
and curatorial projects with museums, institutions, and artists worldwide.
She is also the director of the Artist Training and Critical Forum Program at The Arts Center of the Capital Region. Thomas has lectured widely on contemporary art and has published with Yale University Press, Hyperallergic, Chronogram, Dirt, ARTPULSE, Journal of Daoist Studies, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, JCCA: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and ArtAsiaPacific magazine. Thomas studied studio art, aesthetic theory, and philosophy at Bennington College, Columbia University, and The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
Ms. Thomas will give a presentation on Thursday, February 13, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. Location TBA.
Dr. Karen Blough, March 3, 2025
Dr. Karen Blough, professor emerita of art history, will give a presentation on Monday,
March 3, at 5 p.m. in Yokum Hall, room 205. Dr. Blough taught art history at SUNY
Plattsburgh from 1999 to 2022. The author of numerous journal articles concerning
medieval manuscript illumination and religious women’s art patronage in the Middle
Ages, Dr. Blough recently edited and contributed to the monograph entitled A Companion to the Abbey of Quedlinburg in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2023). She regularly presents her work at national and international professional
conferences. Dr. Blough has also served as a peer reviewer for various journals and
publishers and for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The subject of Dr. Blough’s presentation is a 15th-century Hebrew manuscript known as the First Darmstadt Haggadah, on which she has published two articles in the Journal of the Early Book Society (2020 and 2024). The manuscript’s illustration cycle includes three full-page images that are unique within the Haggadah context, while a fourth represents a familiar theme that is, however, depicted on an unprecedented scale. Two of the full-page illustrations were painted around 1430 and depict men and women interacting with books within a fantastical architectural environment. Several of the motifs in this pair of miniatures cleverly subvert contemporary Christian visual tropes to express the superiority of Judaism over Christianity. The third and fourth full-page illustrations were introduced into the existing volume in 1475. One depicts a stag and rabbit hunt, a traditional metaphor for persecution that appears in many Ashkenazi manuscripts while on the facing folio, traditional fountain of youth iconography is manipulated so as to depict the virtuous contemporary Jewish family. Blough demonstrates how all four of these miniatures reflect Jewish persecution in late medieval Europe, relating specifically as they do to the personal experiences of the manuscript’s scribe, Israel ben Meir, in Germany and his grandson, Israel ben Meir Jaffe, several decades later in Italy.
Melissa Levin & Alex Fialho, April 2, 2025
Melissa Levin and Alex Fialho, curators, will be our third presentation of the spring
semester. Alex Fialho is an art historian, curator and PhD candidate in Yale University’s
Combined PhD program in the History of Art and African American Studies. For the 2024–2025
academic year, Fialho is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los
Angeles. Fialho’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogs for the Whitney
Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park and the
Andy Warhol Museum, among others. Fialho previously worked for five years as Programs
Director of the New York-based arts non-profit Visual AIDS.
Melissa Levin is a values-driven arts administrator and artist-centered curator. Levin is currently the inaugural New York City-based Program Officer with the Jerome Foundation, supporting early career artists in Minnesota & NYC. Previously, she worked at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for more than 12 years, where—as Vice President of Cultural Programs—her role encompassed wide-ranging institutional and artistic leadership, including overseeing LMCC’s artist residencies, exhibitions, and public programming. Levin holds a B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College. She currently serves on the boards of the Artist Communities Alliance and Danspace Project.
Fialho and Levin have curated exhibitions together starting in 2014, including Trisha Brown: Embodied Practice and Site Specificity; and (Counter)Public: Art, Intervention, & Performance in Lower Manhattan from 1978–1993. Since 2016, they have curated critically-acclaimed exhibitions dedicated to the late artist Michael Richards’s art, life, and legacy including Michael Richards: Are You Down? (MOCA North Miami, 2021; North Carolina Museum of Art, 2023; Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2023–24); Michael Richards: Winged (LMCC, NY, 2016; Stanford University, CA, 2019). At Stanford, they also co-organized the academic symposium “Flight, Diaspora, Identity, and Afterlife: A Symposium on the Art of Michael Richards.”
Ms. Levin and Mr. Fialho will give a presentation via Zoom on Wednesday, April 2, 2025 at 7:30 p.m.
Jeremy Dennis, April 16, 2025
Jeremy Dennis, photographer, will be our fourth presenter of the spring semester.
Mr. Dennis is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled Tribal Member of the
Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, N.Y., and lead artist and founder of the
non-profit Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc. on the Shinnecock Reservation. In his
work, he explores Indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation.
Mr. Dennis will give a presentation on Wednesday, April 16, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. in Yokum Hall, room 205.
Amanda Browder, April 29, 2025
Amanda Browder, sculptor, will be our fifth presenter of the spring semester. Ms.
Browder received an M.F.A./M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in Brooklyn, producing
over 25+ large-scale fabric installations all around the world. Amplifying multiple
voices, she collaborates with local community groups and sources her textiles from
local donations. Over her tenure she has sewn with over 5000+ individuals around the
world and worked with numerous local partners. Exhibitions include: Triennale Brugge,
Project 1: ArtPrize; SPRING/BREAK Art Fair; New Museum, Ideas City Festival; Nuit
Blanche Public Art Festival/LEITMOTIF Toronto; Dumbo Arts Festival; Abroms-Engel Institute
for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, Ala.; ArtsWestchester, Westchester, N.Y.; Allegra
LaViola Gallery, NYC; White Columns, NYC; CounterPointe/ Norte Maar, Brooklyn; No
Longer Empty, Brooklyn; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo. Published in Unexpected Art: Chronicle
Books and Strange Material; Arsenal Pulp Press. She received her first NEA grant in
2016 with the Buffalo Art Museum and later with the St. Charles Art Center in 2018
and the Sioux City Art Center in 2023. She is also a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA artist fellow.
Artist in Residence: UNLV Las Vegas, Erie Arts & Culture and Reach Projects, in Blue
Hill, Maine. Photos and reviews have appeared in New York Times to Fiber Art Magazine
to Hyperallergic and founder of art podcast badatsports.com. This tradition of interviews has manifested in the new podcast “Sewing Community,” stories of volunteers who live and sew in Westchester, N.Y. made in collaboration
with ArtsWestchester during the “Metropolis Sunrise” project. She is currently finishing
a six-building project with the Sioux City Art Center in Iowa, “Razzle Dazzle" which
worked with over 600+ volunteers and hosted over 90+ Public Sewing Days in 2023-24.
Ms. Browder will give a presentation on Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. in Yokum Hall, room 205.