Art Studio

The art studio program enables students to become fluent in visual language — its analytical and critical vocabulary and the rigors of its technique and method — as a means to explore intellectual issues and human experience. To this end, students learn technique while searching for a personal vision, beginning with basic studies in drawing and introductory art history, proceeding through study of various media, and working toward the successful completion of the major's comprehensive requirement — the presentation of a one-person exhibition in the spring of the senior year. The program seeks to reflect the diversity of technical and intellectual approaches practiced in the field of visual art and is open to interdisciplinary experimentation as well as traditionally focused studies.

Alumni Spotlight

Joe Dahmen '97
Joe Dahmen is a designer whose work engages resource consumption in architecture and the infrastructure that supports it. Dahmen is currently Assistant Professor of Design and Sustain- ability Integration at the University of British Columbia School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He is a co-founder of Terratech, a startup company using advances in nanotechnology to provide the global construction industry with low-carbon replacements for conventional masonry materials. He was recently Chief Executive Officer at Bodega Algae LLC, an alternative energy startup funded by the National Science Foundation to develop technology for advanced biofuels, and has consulted on rammed earth globally. Dahmen has presented his projects at MIT, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, New York Academy of Sciences, Lund University (Sweden), Bigelow Laboratory for Oceanographic Research, the Federal Highway Administration, and area architecture firms. He has published scholarly articles on the unreinforced masonry bridges of Anadalusia, Spain, and has contributed to articles on covered bridges in the Northeastern United States.

Alumni Spotlight

Jeffrey Deitch '74

Jeffrey Deitch is Director of The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.  Prior to that, he created and directed Deitch Projects for 15 years, a gallery in NYC known for producing ambitious projects by contemporary artists. Deitch Projects was known for embracing the new convergence of art, music, performance, film and design.

Alumni Spotlight

Vince Fecteau '92

Vince Fecteau is known for working with ordinary materials such as foamcore, seashells, string, rubber bands, paper clips, walnut shells, and popsicle sticks, and transforming them into beautifully precise handcrafted sculptures. Constructed of papier-mâché, Fecteau often works on several sculptures at a time, taking a year or longer to finish each work. He layers materials and textures, revealing a painstaking creative process that alters significantly the original spherical shapes. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including the 2002 Whitney Biennial and a 2008 solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Focus: Vincent Fecteau, New Work. In 2005, the Guggenheim Foundation announced Vincent Fecteau as recipient of their fellowship. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtHe is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

Alumni Spotlight

Amber Frid-Jemenez '97

Amber Frid-Jemenez is an artist, designer and technologist whose work confronts issues ranging from politics and surveillance to representations of women in media. Her recent work includes interactive video installations, performance-based participation from large-scale online audiences, and painting. She has presented her work internationally at institutions including Banff New Media Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, Cornell University, Harvard University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, American Institute of Graphic Arts and at independent venues such as Art Interactive, Upgrade! International (online), WMMNA (online), and DFN Gallery (New York). Frid-Jimenez was a 2008 Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellow Nominee, 2008 Fellow for Extending Creativity in Digital Media for the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the 2006-7 Steven R. Holtzman Fellow for Digital Expression. She joined the faculty of the Department of Design at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (KHiB) as Associate Professor in interaction design,. She is also a research fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands.Amber specializes in the field of computational design.

Alumni Spotlight

Lexi Funk '91

Lexi Funk is co-founder and CEO of Brooklyn Industries, a business that has grown since 1998 from making messenger bags out of used billboard vinyl to a full men’s and women’s lifestyle clothing and accessories retailer. Funk is determined to build a global retailer that fills a void in the clothing market with artistic clothing for urban dwellers. In 2010, she was awarded the Metro New York Entrepreneur of the Year in.

Alumni Spotlight

Lyle Ashton Harris '88

Lyle Ashton Harris is an artist who works in video, photography and performance. His work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Centre d'ArtContemporain in Geneva. During 2000 and 2001, Harris was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He has received numerous awards for his photography and is currently represented by CRG Gallery in New York. Harris' photographs have also appeared in international magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek and Vibe. He is an Assistant Professor of Art and Art Education at NYU.

Alumni Spotlight

Rachel Harrison '89

Rachel Harrison is an internationally recognized sculptor based in New York, and is represented by Greene Naftali gallery. Her work was exhibited during the 2003 Venice Biennale.She is known for collapsing sculpture and painting into raw hybrid totems. Harrison's sculptures, combining biomorphic and geometric abstract forms with found objects and video, and address her interest in the leap of faith involved in the experience of an art object. Rachel Harrison’s work draws from a wide range of influence, wittily combining art historical and pop cultural references through a diverse play of materials. Her work can be found in the following public collections:Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY Art Gallery at Ontario, Toronto AstrupFearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway Baltimore Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York migros museum fürgegenwartskunst, Zurich Musee des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, Montreal Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam MOCA, Los Angeles MCA, Chicago Museum Ludwig, Cologne Museum of Modern Art, New York Philadelphia Museum of Art Seattle Museum of Art SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Alumni Spotlight

Aki Sasamoto '04

Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based, Japanese artist, who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and whatever medium necessary to get her ideas across. Her works have been shown both in performing art and visual art venues in New York and abroad.  Sasamoto co-founded and co-directs Culture Push, a non-profit arts organization, in which diverse professionals meet through artist-led projects and cross-disciplinary symposia.  Sasamoto's performance/installation works revolve around everyday gestures on nothing and everything.  Her installations are careful arrangements of sculpturally altered found objects, and the decisive gestures in her improvisational performances create feedback, responding to sound, objects, and moving bodies.  The constructed stories seem personal at first, yet oddly open to variant degrees of access, relation and reflection.