Visiting Artists

Nyugen Smith

Wednesday, June 24
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Nyugen E. Smith is a Jersey City, NJ–based artist whose work investigates how stories are formed, transmitted, and disrupted within Black cultural life. His practice is grounded in an examination of the enduring effects of European colonial expansion and how those histories continue to shape experiences across the African Diaspora and the world at-large.

At the core of this inquiry is an interest in how inherited histories take root and reemerge through a range of intersecting concerns. Architecture, language, embodied action, ritual, intergenerational trauma, genetic memory, environmental change, and patterns of movement and displacement all function as points of convergence within his work.

Nyugen holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Museum of Latin American Art, and the Peréz Art Museum among others. He is the recipient of several awards including Creative Capital Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and the Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund.

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Garrick Imatani

Monday, June 29
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Colin Self

Wednesday, July 1
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Colin Self (b. 1987 Oregon, USA) is an artist, composer, and puppeteer based between Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany. They create music, performances, and new systems for interfacing with the human spirit, across a spectrum between the living and deceased. As many of their practices revolve around the temporary assembly of communities, their work envelops collaborative and dialogical experiments into play.

Self has been running XOIR since 2013, an alternative modality of group singing, and co-founded TIAPS, a performance school in Lincolnville, Maine in 2023, with their collaborator Monica Mirabile. Their most recent commissions include Where The Souls Go (2024), a play commissioned by the New Theater Hollywood, Kompass (2023), a trilogy composed for the Hannover State Opera, and Tip the Ivy (2022), an opera that premiered at Performance Space NY in 2022. Last year, they were a resident artist at Callie’s Berlin and will be an artistic fellow at La Becque in Autumn 2024. Their third LP, respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis (expanded) came out in February 2026 on RVNG Intl.

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Jeffry Mitchell

Wednesday, July 8
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Describing himself as a “gay folk artist,” Jeffry Mitchell rejects the irony and elitism often associated with the art world. Instead, he works from a philosophy of acceptance and constructs his art in vulnerable, deeply human terms.

Mitchell’s primary medium is ceramic and he is well versed in its traditions around the globe (references to Early American glazes, Pennsylvania Dutch pickle jars, asymmetrical Japanese aesthetic decisions and Chinese Foo Dogs abound). He takes a very direct approach to working, often eschewing refinements that commonly accompany many ceramic processes. The resulting pieces radiate an exuberant, unbridled immediacy. He feels that this unfettered approach is essentially relatable to our shared human experience.

Jeffry Mitchell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1980) in painting from the University of Dallas. He moved to Japan to teach English and stayed for three years, apprenticing with a traditional production potter and studying calligraphy. In 1988, he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. In 2012, the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle organized a retrospective exhibition "Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell.”

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Jess Perlitz

Monday, July 13
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Allison Schulnik

Wednesday, July 15
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Working in paint, sculpture, and animation, Allison Schulnik (b. 1978) seamlessly transitions between mediums, imbuing her work with a distinct sensibility that melds theatricality with intense emotional vulnerability. Known for her uncanny approach to traversing the internal and immaterial terrains of nostalgia, childhood memories, and dreams, Schulnik choreographs an honest, complex and contemporary portrait of new motherhood and life seen through the purple haze and black silence of the desert. Schulnik lives and works in Sky Valley, CA. Her films have been included in internationally renowned festivals and museums including MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Annecy, France; and Animafest Zagreb, Croatia. Solo exhibitions of Schulnik’s work have been presented at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Zieher Smith, New York, NY; Galeria Javier Lopez & Fer Frances, Madrid, Spain; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. Schulnik’s work can be found in numerous museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Santa Barbara Art Museum, Santa Barbara, CA; Museé de Beaux Arts, Montreal, Canada; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and The Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY. In the fall of 2022, Schulnik presented, Purple Mountain, her second solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the Pit LA, Dumb Phone, was on view in Winter 2024.

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Taraneh Fazeli

Wednesday, July 22
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Gail Spaien

Monday, July 27
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Cristóbal Martinez

Wednesday, July 29
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Liz Collins

Wednesday, August 5
5:30 PM
Osher Hall

Liz Collins is a New York-based artist and designer whose work moves fluidly between fine art and design. Embracing abstraction, optics, and extreme material contrasts, Collins pushes the boundaries between painting, fiber arts, and installation—laying bare expressions of energy, emotion, and the visceral complexity of existence. She holds a BFA and MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Collins's work was the subject of Liz Collins: Motherlode (2025–2026), her first major U.S. survey, at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, accompanied by her first monograph, published by Hirmer Publishers. Her work was featured in the 60th La Biennale di Venezia, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa (2024), and in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke, which traveled to LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Solo exhibitions include Candice Madey, New York; Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; Rossana Orlandi, Milan; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs; and Touchstones Rochdale, UK. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, the RISD Museum, the Tang Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the Museum at FIT, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), among others. Collins serves on the board of Queer|Art.

Collins's honors include an Anonymous Was A Woman Fellowship, a USA Fellowship, a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts grants. Residencies include Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Haystack.

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David Altmejd

Wednesday January 28
6:00–7:00 PM
Osher Hall

David Altmejd (b. 1974, Montreal) explores the constitution and disintegration of the self, producing sculptures that expand the range of figurative representation and conjuring abstract regions beyond the realm of recognizability. His work is centered on the human form, which in Altmejd’s vision includes not only the body but also the mind, the imagination, and the soul, not to mention the ways the material world is perceived and felt through these channels. To this end, each of his works arises from an ongoing intuitive relationship with the large array of materials with which they are built, including clay, foam, mirror, quartz, resin, and both synthetic and human hair. Traditional processes like casting exist alongside idiosyncratic forms of bricolage; no two sculptures are alike, even when they seem to address related subjects.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Laurel V. McLaughlin

Monday February 2
12:00 –1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, Curator and Director of the Collective Futures Fund, Tufts University Art Galleries is the guest juror of Lines / Loopholes: Maine College of Art & Design 2026 Faculty Triennial, on view in the ICA from January 16 – February 21, 2026.

Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, is a curator, art historian, writer, and educator. Her work explores research-based sculpture, installation, new media, and social practice works activated by performance concerning formal liminalities, globalized migration, and ecological networks. McLaughlin is a Curator and the Director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries. She has shared her scholarly and curatorial work in conferences ranging from PSI, Calgary; to the UAAC, Montreal, Toronto, and London; the CAA, New York; and the ASAP, Hong Kong and New York, and published her work in such as Art Papers, ASAP/J, BOMB Magazine, C Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, women & performance, and te magazine, among others. She co-edited the multidisciplinary reader Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production (Amherst College Press, 2024). Forthcoming writing from McLaughlin will be featured in the edited volumes Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury's Methuen Drama, 2025) and exhibition catalogs and readers Arnold J. Kemp: tender & haunted (No Place Press, 2026) Magical Thinking (Tufts University Art Galleries, 2026), and How do you throw a brick through the window... (Tufts University Art Galleries and John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2026). McLaughlin's scholarly and curatorial work has been supported by Rupert, Acción Cultural Española, the Dutch Consulate of New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Terra Foundation, and the Teiger Foundation.

Funded through the generous support of the Gene R. Cohen Charitable Foundation.

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ICA Faculty Exhibition Panel # 1

Friday, February 6
3:00–4:00 PM
Institute of Contemporary Art

Join Patricia Brace ‘06, Honour Mack, Ling-Wen Tsai, Owen Marc Laurion, and Alysha Kupferer for a panel discussion on Lines / Loopholes: Maine College of Art & Design 2026 Faculty Triennial.

Juried by Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, Curator and Director of the Collective Futures Fund, Tufts University Art Galleries, Lines / Loopholes: Maine College of Art & Design 2026 Faculty Triennial presents the work of nineteen artists who teach across the College in Academic Studies, Animation & Game Art, Ceramics, Printmaking, Photography, Painting, Sculpture, Textile & Fashion Design, Woodworking & Furniture Design, and Master of Fine Arts (MFA).

Funded through the generous support of the Gene R. Cohen Charitable Foundation. 

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Susan Jane Walp

Monday, February 9
12:00–1:00 PM
Osher Hall

With her keen observation, Vermont-based still life painter Susan Jane Walp captures ordinary household items or produce with a thoughtful, perhaps spiritual handling of light and texture.

Susan Jane Walp was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1949. Walp studied extensively at Boston University School of Fine Arts, Mount Holyoke College, The New York Studio School and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work is in the National Academy Museum of New York and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College. Walp has also been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Bogliasco Fellowship in Painting in Liguria, Italy.

Funded through the generous support of the Gene R. Cohen Charitable Foundation. Cohosted with the Painting Department.

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ICA Faculty Exhibition Panel # 2

Monday, February 16
12:00–1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Join Tracey Cockrell, Adam Fisher, Dylan Hausthor ‘15, Joshua Reiman, and sabine anja stxrm for a panel discussion on Lines / Loopholes: Maine College of Art & Design 2026 Faculty Triennial.

Juried by Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, Curator and Director of the Collective Futures Fund, Tufts University Art Galleries, Lines / Loopholes: Maine College of Art & Design 2026 Faculty Triennial presents the work of nineteen artists who teach across the College in Academic Studies, Animation & Game Art, Ceramics, Printmaking, Photography, Painting, Sculpture, Textile & Fashion Design, Woodworking & Furniture Design, and Master of Fine Arts (MFA).

Funded through the generous support of the Gene R. Cohen Charitable Foundation.

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Raúl The Third

Monday, February 23
12:00–1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Raúl The Third is a New York Times bestselling and three-time Pura Belpre award-winning illustrator, author, and artist living in Boston. Vamos! Let’s Cross the Bridge was awarded one of the year’s Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2021 from the New York Times and the New York Public Library. His work centers around the contemporary Mexican-American experience and his memories of growing up in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

¡Vamos! Let’s Go to the Market! is Raúl’s first authorial project, which he wrote and illustrated, and was colored by Elaine Bay. It was awarded a Pura Belpré Honor by the American Library Association and Reforma. Vamos! Let’s Go Eat was awarded the Pura Belpré Award in Illustration by the American Library Association and Reforma.

Lowriders in Space was nominated for a Texas Bluebonnet award in 2016-2017, and Raúl was awarded the prestigious Pura Belpré Award for Illustration by the American Library Association for Lowriders to the Center of the Earth. Lowriders Blast from the Past and Lowriders to the Rescue are the third and fourth books in the series. He was also a contributor to the SpongeBob Comics series.

He is the co-creator of Strollercoaster with Matthew Ringler and Elaine Bay from Little Brown and Company.

With award-winning author Jason Reynolds, Raúl the Third has illustrated the New York Times best-selling books Stuntboy in the Meantime and Stuntboy In-Between Time.

Raúl the Third and Elaine Bay are currently working on their latest graphic novel series, The Snips, with Little Brown and Company.

Funded through the generous support of the Gene R. Cohen Charitable Foundation.

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David Horvitz

Monday, March 2
12:00–1:00 PM
Osher Hall

David Horvitz’s participatory installation, Change The Names of the Day (based on his book of the same name), will be on view in the ICA starting on March 6, 20206 as part of the upcoming exhibition, Everyday Is All There Is.

David Horvitz was born in Los Angeles, where he still lives and works. He studied at the University of California and at the Waseda University in Tokyo. He also obtained an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, in 2010. Eschewing categorization, his expansive, nomadic body of work traverses the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the Internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, and natural environments.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace, Santa Fe (2025); JOAN, Los Angeles (2025); BiM Milano Bicocca, Milan (2024); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2022); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2021); 1708 Gallery Inc, Richmond (2021); Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2020); Musée d’Art Contemporain Avignon (2019); La Criée, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Rennes (2019); Albertinum, SDK, Dresden (2018); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur (2015); New Museum, New York (2014).

Selected group exhibitions include: Museum of Modern Art of Tarragona, Tarragona (2025); Town House, Los Angeles (2025); 12th SITE Santa Fe International, Santa Fe (2025); Victorian & Alber Museum – South Kensington Photography Centre, London (2025); The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (2025); Museion, Bolzano (2024); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2024); LACP, Los Angeles (2024); The National Gallery of Kosovo, Pristina (2024); Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau (2023); Athens Cultural Center, Athens (2023); Kupferstichkabinett – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin (2023); Dhaka Art Summit Dhaka (2023); The Wende Museum’s West Gallery, Culver City (2022); Protocinema, Istambul (2022); 58th Belgrade Biennial, Belgrade (2021); CNEAI, Paris (2021); Fondation Carmignac, Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles (2021); High Line, New York (2021); ICA, Los Angeles (2021); MAMbo, Bologna (2021); MGK Siegen (2020); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); SFMoMA, San Francisco (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); La Criée centre for contemporary art, Rennes (2017); TBA21, Vienna (2017); MOCAK, Krakow (2016); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2015); MoMA, New York (2015).

Funded through the generous support of the Gene R. Cohen Charitable Foundation.

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Supermrin

Monday, March 30
12:00–1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Supermrin–is an Indian artist whose sculptural practice combines foraged trees with a grass-derived bioplastic of her own invention. Drawing from biophilosophy, decolonial theory, architecture, material science, and speculative fiction, her research-driven work interrogates the capitalist and colonial logics embedded in the global lawn. Her long-term project, FIELD, was featured in Towards Another Architecture: New Visions for the 21st Century (Lund Humphries, 2024), a critical reappraisal of Le Corbusier’s legacy in the Global South amid escalating climate crises.

Supermrin’s work has been presented internationally at the Cincinnati Art Museum; MOCA Cleveland; the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries; Untitled Art Fair (Special Projects), Miami; PS122 Gallery, New York; Château de Vaudijon, Switzerland; and Tactile Bosch, Wales. She is a recipient of the 2025 Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grant, the Individual Excellence Award for Sculpture from the Ohio Arts Council, and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art. She is the Area Head of Interdisciplinary Practice at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Art, an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects in New York City, and a research fellow at Genspace in Brooklyn.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Marianne Fairbanks

Monday September 22
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Marianne Fairbanks is a visual artist, designer, and Associate Professor of Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including The Museum of Art and Design, NY, USA Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen Denmark, RAM Gallery, Oslo, Norway and The Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft, Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work spans the fields of art, design, and social practice, seeking to chart new material and conceptual territories, to innovate solution-based design, and to foster fresh modes of cultural production.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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David Buckley Borden

Wednesday, September 24
6:00 - 7:00 PM
Osher Hall

David Buckley Borden is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Using an accessible, often humorous, combination of art and design, David’s place-based projects highlight both pressing environmental issues and everyday phenomena. Informed by design research and community outreach, David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific landscape installations in the forest to data-driven cartography in the gallery. David is currently a Senior Advisor of Creative Practice and Innovation at the Center for the Future of Forests and Society at Oregon State University and an Associate Research Professor within the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Oregon where he regularly collaborates with research scientists to champion a cultural ecology of interdisciplinary environmental-communication.

Made possible by the Envision Resilience Public Art Studio, funded by MECA&D Sculpture Department.

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LJ Roberts

Wednesday, October 1
5:00 - 6:00 PM
Osher Hall

LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages, and mixed-media sculptures. Their work illuminates oft-erased and unacknowledged queer and trans histories, narratives, people, and places. Roberts creates conceptual and geographical maps and amplifies non-linear stories of queer culture and kinships that traverse the past, present, and future through material deviance and re-imaging craft practices. The artist has a particular interest in how queer and trans people encounter freedom, fear, possibilities, and perils while traveling on the road and living nomadically. Roberts has been active in HIV/AIDS activism for over 20 years and produced numerous collaborative projects that address the ongoing AIDS pandemic.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Pap Souleye Fall

Friday, October 3
6:00 PM - Performance
ICA at MECA&D

Pap Souleye Fall is a Senegalese-American artist who explores the transmedia potential between mediums, including sculpture, installation, performance, cosplay, digital media, and comics. Their work is produced within the context of the African Diaspora. Being of two worlds, Fall delights in the ability to construct their own reality between the polarities of two widespread cultures. Using common, found, and repurposed materials their multidisciplinary practice explores themes of speculative fiction, challenges the pretext of masculinity, Africanisms, and Afro-futurism.

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Pap Souleye Fall will perform DATADATAPASSIVEDATADATADEADLIVEDATA Friday, October 3, 2025, 6:00 pm, in The ICA at MECA&D in conjunction with the ICA at MECA&D's exhibition opening, otherwise, on view October 3 - December 13, 2025

Storytelling has long been a way for people to make sense of the world and find agency in the face of significant adversity. In otherwise, exhibiting artists utilize elements of fiction in their work, transforming real-life issues into something otherworldly and innovative. Some artists in the exhibition draw inspiration from specific sources such as science fiction, oral traditions, and mythologies, while others craft intricate narratives inspired by real-world histories. Collectively, the artists in otherwise explore the potential of fictional storytelling to reimagine and reclaim historical and contemporary oppressions, paving the way for bold new futures.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Ayana V. Jackson

Monday, October 6
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Ayana V. Jackson (b. 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey; lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and Johannesburg, South Africa) uses archival impulses to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography. By using her lens to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture, Jackson questions photography’s authenticity and role in perpetuating socially relevant and stratified identities.

Jackson’s practice maps the ethical considerations and relationships between the photographer, subject, and viewer, in turn exploring themes around race, gender and reproduction. Her work examines myths of the Black diaspora and re-stages colonial archival images as a means to liberate the Black body. The various titles of her series nod to the stories she is reimagining. Jackson often casts herself in the role of historical figures to guide their narrative and directly access the impact of photography and its relationship to the human body.

Jackson’s work is collected by major local and international institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, New York), The Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey), J. P. Morgan Chase Art Collection (New York, New York), Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, New Jersey), The National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, Illinois) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle, Washington). Jackson was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow for Photography and the recipient of the 2018 Smithsonian Fellowship.

In 2022, Jackson founded Still Art, an artist residency program focused on emerging Southern African contemporary artists of all disciplines in Johannesburg. From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya, her first major institutional exhibition at the National Museum of African Art - Smithsonian Institution opened in April 2023.

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Ayana V. Jackson joins the Visiting Artist series in conjunction with the ICA at MECA&D's exhibition, otherwise, on view October 3 - December 13, 2025.

Storytelling has long been a way for people to make sense of the world and find agency in the face of significant adversity. In otherwise, exhibiting artists utilize elements of fiction in their work, transforming real-life issues into something otherworldly and innovative. Some artists in the exhibition draw inspiration from specific sources such as science fiction, oral traditions, and mythologies, while others craft intricate narratives inspired by real-world histories. Collectively, the artists in otherwise explore the potential of fictional storytelling to reimagine and reclaim historical and contemporary oppressions, paving the way for bold new futures.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Vivian Beer

Monday, October 20
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Vivian Beer is a furniture designer/maker/sculptor based in New England. Her sleek, abstracted metal and concrete furniture combines the aesthetic sensibilities of contemporary design, craft, and sculpture to create furniture that alter expectations of and interface with the domestic landscape. Her Infrastructure, Streamliner, Anchored Candy and upcoming aeronautic series are physical manifestations of the cultural and industrial history of her materials even as they serve as intellectual bridges for their users, bringing them to a new way of conceiving the built world through a luxurious deployment of the senses.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Joe Donaldson

Monday, October 27
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Joe Donaldson is a New York City-based creative leader with over 15 years of experience specializing in design & animation. Currently the Head of Design & Creative Director at BUCK, as well as Adjunct Faculty at SVA.Donaldson has found themself intrinsically linked to the world of design, animation, & technology. Regardless of form, they strive to make the ubiquitous feel unique & find simple solutions for complex problems.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Lihua Lei

Monday, November 3
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Lihua Lei, grew up the daughter of rice farmers in rural Taiwan, crafting her first art pieces (her own toys) from the muddy earth beneath her. Her childhood was marked by polio and growing up a disabled woman, Lei says she was constantly grappling with bodily beauty standards–wondering if she fell short of femininity, and whether she could ever “fit in.” These questions endured as Lei emerged as an artist. With a background in art therapy, and a strong belief that she could connect to others’ suffering with her work, Lei came to Maine in 1998 for a summer residency at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Alisha B. Wormsley

Monday, November 10
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Alisha B. Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Wormsley’s work is dedicated to the expansion and creation of time and space and the rematriation of Black/Indigenous Matriarch. Alisha is a mother, and founder of Sibyls Shrine, an arts collective and residency program for Black artists who M/other. Sibyls Shrine and her project, There Are Black People In The Future, both focus on the redistribution of resources and reimagination and rematriation of Black and Indigenous futures. Wormsley is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. A 2023 Creative Time Commissioned Public Artist with Suzanne Kite, for their project Cosmologyscape, integrating media, public space, and public interaction, invitations for rest and dreaming rooted in practices of Afro-Futurism and Indigenous Protocol. Her newest film in process, Children of NAN: A Survival Guide, a film that presents tutorials and survival skills for future Black femmes, while exploring their relationship to ritual, craft, and the natural world won a 2023 Anonymous Was a Woman and New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Environmental Art Grants Recipient and Sundance Interdisciplinary Grantee. Wormsley is an Assistant Professor of Art in the area of Social Practice at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Alisha B. Wormsley joins the Visiting Artist series in conjunction with the ICA at MECA&D's exhibition, otherwise, on view October 3 - December 13, 2025.

Storytelling has long been a way for people to make sense of the world and find agency in the face of significant adversity. In otherwise, exhibiting artists utilize elements of fiction in their work, transforming real-life issues into something otherworldly and innovative. Some artists in the exhibition draw inspiration from specific sources such as science fiction, oral traditions, and mythologies, while others craft intricate narratives inspired by real-world histories. Collectively, the artists in otherwise explore the potential of fictional storytelling to reimagine and reclaim historical and contemporary oppressions, paving the way for bold new futures.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

Learn More

Sara Clugage

Monday, November 17
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Sara Clugage’s art practice focuses on economic and political issues in craft and food. She is Editor-in-Chief of Dilettante Army, an online magazine for visual culture and critical theory, and a 2024-2025 culinary resident at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. Sara has most recently been core faculty for the MA in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College and her most recent publication is the 2021 monograph from the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, & Performance. She is currently working on a book about Jell-O, animacy, & abstraction.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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