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The Senior Thesis

In the final year of study, each student will develop a focused body of work, and mount a solo exhibition in our beautiful Zilkha Gallery. That exhibition is the culmination of a two-semester thesis tutorial, and is developed in close critical dialogue with a faculty advisor. The exhibition is critiqued by the faculty advisor and a second critic, and must be passed by a vote of the faculty of the art studio Program. The senior thesis exhibition provides a rare opportunity for the student to engage in a rigorous, self-directed creative investigation and in a public dialogue about his/her work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hyunmin Lee '04

Hyunmin Lee is a senior animator and an assistant director for Disney. She has worked on the following films: Whinnie the Pooh, The Frog Princess, Pups of Liberty, The Mr. Men Show, Christmas is Here Again, The Chestnut Tree.

Liz Magic Laser '03

Liz Magic Laser lives and works in New York City. Her works have involved collaborations with actors, dancers, surgeons, and motorcycle gang members. Laser recently attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the LMCC Workspace residency program. For chase, her recent solo show at Derek Eller Gallery (NYC), she staged a performance of Bertolt Brecht’s Man equals Man in New York City bank vestibules. Laser’s video work has been screened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the New Museum and the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. Other exhibitions include the Prague Biennale 4 (Czech Republic), Artisterium 2009 (Tbilisi, Georgia) and Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1 where her performance Flight also recently debuted. Laser is continuing to develop Flight with the award of a Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art grant.

Glenn Ligon '82

Glenn Ligon is best known for his landmark series of text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Pryor. Ligon’s subject matter ranges widely from the Million Man March and the aftermath of slavery to 1970s coloring books and the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe—all treated within artworks that are both politically provocative and beautiful to behold. Ligon has had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2011, and had solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Brooklyn Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Dia Center for the Arts in New York, and has participated in the following group shows: Whitney Biennial (1991 and 1993), Biennale of Sydney (1996), Venice Biennale (1997), Kwangju Biennale (2000), Documenta 11 (2002), and Learn to Read at the Tate Modern, London (2007). He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Matters, the Joan Mitchell Foundation , and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.He is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery.

Danielle Mysliwiec '98

Danielle Mysliwiec creates abstract oil paintings, which present themselves as intricately woven surfaces that are at once coming together and coming undone. In addition to being a painter, Mysliwiec co-founded a feminist performance group called Brainstormers in 2005, which challenges gender discrimination in the art world. She has exhibited her work with various galleries and museums including Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, Galeria Marta Cervera, The Peter Fingestin Gallery, Momenta Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Mysliwiec has received awards and residencies from the Puffin Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been reviewed in publications including The Brooklyn Rail, ArtNews, Art Fag City, NYFA Current, and Artnet. She has held teaching positions at Hunter College, The School of Visual Arts, Yale University, and San Francisco State University. She joined the faculty at American University as Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing in the fall of 2010.

Juliana Romano '04

Juliana Romano is a painter, whose colorful images of people focus on psychological desires and melancholy. The images come indirectly from media sources. Each figure represents ideal beauty, but Romano’s divergent palette and choppy brushstrokes suggest conflict that is beyond repair.She is represented by Marvelli Gallery in NYC.

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.

Sarah Schorr '99

Sarah Schorr is a photographer represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work focuses on the tension between the performance and the candid nature of female identity.

Ben Weiner '03

Ben Weiner is an American contemporary artist. He is represented by Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, and Benrimon Contemporary in New York. His hyper realisticoil paintings depict macroscopic still life environments of unnatural substances such as hair gel, pearls, and oil paint globs. Weiner derives imagery for paintings and videos by magnifying and photographing commonplace materials of artifice, such as beauty products, art supplies, and artificial food ingredients. His work focuses on the experience of imitation in daily life in the digital age, as well as the merging of object, subject and medium.Weiner’s work has been included in exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Carnegie Art Museum (Oxnard, California), The Riverside Art Museum, and Artspace. His work is in collections including Sammlung Mondstudio (Germany), Progressive Insurance (OH), and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation.

The Senior Thesis

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