Maine College of Art & Design (MECA&D) is pleased to announce the schedule of its 2026 Visiting Artist Summer Lecture Series for the Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art program. This year’s lecture series will run between June 24 and August 5, 2026, and will feature acclaimed artists from across the country, including Liz Collins, Taraneh Fazeli, Garrick Imatani, Cristóbal Martinez, Jeffry Mitchell, Jess Perlitz, Allison Schulnik, Colin Self, Nyugen E. Smith, and Gail Spaien.
During an eight-week summer intensive for the MFA graduate candidates, MECA&D welcomes visiting artists for public lectures and studio-based engagement with students. The eight-week intensive serves as an opportunity to bond as an artistic cohort while exploring the interdisciplinary conversation that will challenge and inform the art created throughout their program. Included in the intimate exchange of ideas are the ten visiting artists, who will be on-site each week to visit MFA candidates’ studios and critique work.
Each lecture is open to the public and will be held in Osher Hall at MECA&D (2nd Floor, Porteous Building, 522 Congress Street, Portland, ME). Lectures begin at 5:30pm.
June 24, 2026: Nyugen E. Smith
Nyugen E. Smith (b. 1976) is a Jersey City, NJ–based interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates how stories are formed, transmitted, and disrupted within Black cultural life. His practice serves as 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.
June 29, 2026: Garrick Imatani
Garrick Imatani (b. 1974) is an interdisciplinary artist who works to draw attention to one’s embodied subjectivity. Recent projects focus on reimagining racialized historical erasures into more believable and inspired futures. He previously collaborated with illegally surveilled activists to readjust city archives and worked with the Grand Ronde tribe to replicate their sacred meteorite held at the American Museum of Natural History. This lecture is in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design.
July 1, 2026: Colin Self
Colin Self (b. 1987, Oregon, USA) is an artist, composer, and puppeteer based between Brooklyn and Berlin. They create music, performances, and new systems for interfacing with the human spirit across a spectrum from the living to the deceased. Their practices revolve around the temporary assembly of communities and the enactment of collaborative and dialogical experiments.
July 8, 2026: Jeffry Mitchell
Jeffry Mitchell (b. 1958) is a printmaker and ceramicist based in Olympia, Washington. A self-described “gay folk artist,” Mitchell rejects the elitism often associated with the art world. Mitchell’s primary medium is ceramic, referencing its traditions around the globe, including early American glazes, Pennsylvania Dutch pickle jars, asymmetrical Japanese pottery, and Chinese Foo Dogs.
July 13, 2026: Jess Perlitz
Jess Perlitz (b. 1978) is based in Portland, Oregon, where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project. Her work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA, as part of the museum’s ongoing artist installation series. This lecture is in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design.
July 15, 2026: Allison Schulnik
Allison Schulnik (b. 1978) lives and works in Sky Valley, CA. Schulnik’s practice spans the mediums of painting, sculpture, animation, and dance to create a body of work that is both cohesive and deeply expressive. Known for her films, which navigate the intangible landscapes of nostalgia, childhood memories, and dreams, Schulnik creates work characterized by a unique sensibility that fuses theatricality with emotion, bringing to life a world that feels at once familiar and surreal.
July 22, 2026: Taraneh Fazeli
Taraneh Fazeli (b. 1981) is an Iranian-American curator and cultural organizer. For the first half of her career, she worked at NYC-based arts institutions such as Artforum, e-flux, Triple Canopy, and The New Museum before becoming an independent artist and curator in 2016. Known widely for her exhibition, “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying,” her work is rooted at the intersection of the disability, diasporic, queer, organizing, and creative communities she calls home.
July 27, 2026: Gail Spaien
Gail Spaien (b. 1958, Hartford, Connecticut) is an American artist based in Maine. Her studio practice centers around the idea that a painting is a site of connection; an object that transmits emotion from one person to another. Spaien received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and BFA from the University of Southern Maine. After thirty years as a faculty member at the Maine College of Art & Design, she stepped away to be full-time in the studio.Martínez
July 29, 2026: Cristóbal Martínez, PhD
Cristóbal Martínez, PhD (b. 1974), is Genizaro from Alcalde, northern New Mexico. He is an artist, digital media systems designer, publishing scholar, and Professor of Expanded Arts at Arizona State University. Martínez co-founded the artist-hacker ensemble Radio Healer in 2003; joined the internationally acclaimed artist collective Postcommodity in 2009; and co-created, with post-Mexican artist-composer Guillermo Galindo, the experimental electronic music ensemble Red Culebra in 2018. Martínez has dedicated his life and career to interdisciplinary collaboration in contemporary art, and continues his work within these groups.
August 5, 2026: Liz Collins
Liz Collins (b. 1968) 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.