Spring 2024 Visiting Artists, Curators and Critics
Cyan Zhou, current Mt. Royal 2nd year student presented her summer research work with the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI) via the HEMI/MICA Extreme Arts Summer Project/Internship on 9/16/26 at Johns Hopkins University.
Her research project was entitled Ephemeral Architectures: The Dissolving Thread—Narrating the Silkworm’s Labor and themes of the research included:
Critique of Biological Exploitation: Exposing how the silkworm became history’s ultimate "biological machine" through extreme domestication for human utility.
Reclaiming Industrial Waste: Transforming discarded, stripped sericin protein from a byproduct of silk "degumming" into a structured material for memory.
Poetics of Erasure: Utilizing water-soluble 3D printing to let printed classical poems dissolve, symbolizing the erasure of biological labor by time and industrial systems.
Her internship was completed in Mueller’s Lab with Principal Investigator Jochen Mueller and guidance from Phd student Daniel Ames.
ALUMNI ACHIEVEMENT
Paul's installation currently at the Smithsonian is a smaller version of his multimedia Thesis show installed in MICA's Main Building two years ago.
Recent alumnus Paul Emmanuel (Mt. Royal MFA '24) and his work currently at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art are singled out and reviewed (with photo) in today's New York Times by the Times' Chief Art Critic Holland Cotter.
Sara Cwynar
Cwynar is a contemporary artist who works with photography, collage, installation and book-making. Through the use of saved personal photographs and found images from both printed resources and the internet, her work communicates not only about the final image of a photograph but also about the process of image making. She has focused increasingly on video work to explore the medium’s narrative potential. For the last five years Cwynar has worked on a film installation trilogy (Soft Film, 2016, Rose Gold, 2017 and Red Film, 2018) exploring how desire manifests through objects. The artist’s most recent video installation, Glass Life, critiques capitalism’s constant pressure to conform and consume; it questions the effects of this torrent on the self. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Dallas Museum of Art; Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam; Milwaukee Art Museum; MoMA Collection, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Baloise Art Collection, Basel, Switzerland; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Soho House, Toronto; and TD Bank Canada Collection, Toronto.
Javier Tellez
Tellez’s projects have often involved working in collaboration with people diagnosed with mental illness to produce film installations that question the notions of the normal and the pathological. Combining different approaches to filmmaking, Téllez opens a dialogue that provides a fresh interpretation of classical myths, private and collective memories, and historical references. Tellez has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester (2018); the San Francisco Art Institute (2014); Kunsthaus Zürich (2014); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2011); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2005); and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2004). He has participated in group exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, NM; MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; Castello di Rivoli, Torino; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Renaissance Society, Chicago, as well as documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012); Manifesta, Trento, Italy; Sydney Biennial; and the Whitney Biennial, New York (all 2008); Venice Biennale (2001 and 2003); and Yokohama Triennial (2001). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999, and in 2016 the Global Mental Health Award for Innovation in the Arts from Columbia University, New York.
Carmel Buckley
Born in Derby, England, Carmel Buckley, Full Professor, Department of Art, The Ohio State University, received a Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture from Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic (United Kingdom) in 1978. She continued her studies at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of Madrid University from 1979-80 and, with a Mexican Government Scholarship, at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City from 1983-84. In 1988 she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the School of Visual Arts, New York as a Fulbright Fellow. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Art Sculpture Award and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Award.
In 1994 she had a solo exhibition at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. Recent solo exhibitions include The Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio (2009), Clay Street Press, Cincinnati (2011), and The Center For Recent Drawing, London, England (2012); two-person show at Clay Street Press, Cincinnati, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, England (2016-17); public art projects “Cloud’s Gold” & “Inhuman Colors,” Camp Washington, Cincinnati, OH, 2020. Group shows include Gallery North, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England (2005); Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati (2006); E:vent Gallery, London, England (2009); Sculpture Key West, Key West, Florida (2011); “Women to Watch” at the Riffe Center, Columbus (2018); Columbus Museum of Art, (2018); Anytime Dept., Cincinnati (2019).
Stephen Ellis
In Ellis's paintings there is a balance between ordered geometric austerity and the flowing irregularity of the painter's hand. Equally adept as a critic and a writer, Ellis has written extensively on contemporary art for European and American publications including Parkett, Tema Celeste, and Art in America. He has been an Associate and Contributing Editor of Art in America as well as editing for Artforum and Parkett. Ellis has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Foundation for the Arts. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Brooklyn Museum. His work is in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Brooklyn Museum, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and Fond Nationale Art Contemporaine (FNAC) in Paris among many others. The many publications that have reviewed his work include Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Yu Yeon Kim
Yu Yeon Kim is an independent curator of numerous international exhibitions including One Breath: Infinite Vision, Ink Studio Beijing (2019); New Conjunctions & Intersections, UN (2015) ; Idyllic Synthesis, Seoul Metropolitan Museum (2013); Mediation Biennale, Poland (2008); DMZ, Paju Book City, Korea (2000-6); Liverpool Biennial (2004) ; Translated Acts, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico, Queens Museum of Art, New York, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2001-3); Gwangju Biennale (2000) ; Mexico Cinco Continentes y Una Ciudad Biennale (1998) ; Johannesburg Biennale, S.Africa (1997).
Vesela Sretenović
Sretenović has been a long-time curator of modern and contemporary art with special interests in cross-disciplinary art practices and in bridging theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience. She has been at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC since 2009, first as a Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and now as a Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives and Academic Affairs. During her tenure, she initiated and oversaw a series of ongoing art projects called Intersections, inviting contemporary artists—national and international, emerging and established—to engage with the museum permanent collection and architecture and create new work(s). The participating artists included, A. Balasubramaniam, Sanford Biggers, Los Carpinteros, Linling Lu, Marta Perez, Ranjani Shettar, Alyson Shotz, and Richard Tuttle, among many others. In addition, Sretenović had organized monographic exhibitions of prominent artists including Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Antony Gormley, and the first museum retrospective of Cuban artist Zilia Sanchez. Additionally, she works on independent research and curatorial projects, including a large group exhibition for the Gray Art Gallery at New York University featuring women-identifying visual artists who over the past 25 years were recipients of Anonymous Was A Woman Award (AWAW), founded by an artist-philanthropist Susan Unterberg. Prior to joining the Phillips, Sretenović was a curator at Bell Gallery, Brown University, while also teaching contemporary art and art theory at the Rhode Island School of Design. Earlier in her career, she worked for the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She holds a BA in Art History from University of Belgrade, Former Yugoslavia, an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Doctoral degree in Humanities from Syracuse University.
Larry Ossei–Mensah
Larry Ossei-Mensah uses contemporary art as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. The Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic has organized exhibitions and programs at commercial and nonprofit spaces around the globe from New York City to Rome featuring artists such as Firelei Baez, Allison Janae Hamilton, Brendan Fernades, Ebony G. Patterson, Modou Dieng, Glenn Kaino, Joiri Minaya and Stanley Whitney to name a few. Moreover, Ossei-Mensah has actively documented cultural happenings featuring the most dynamic visual artists working today such as Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Federico Solmi, and Kehinde Wiley. A native of The Bronx, Ossei-Mensah is also the co-founder of ARTNOIR, a 501(c)(3) and global collective of culturalists who design multimodal experiences aimed to engage this generation’s dynamic and diverse creative class. ARTNOIR endeavors to celebrate the artistry and creativity of Black and Brown artists around the world via virtual and in-person experiences. Ossei-Mensah is a contributor to the first-ever Ghanaian Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennial with an essay on the work of visual artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Ossei-Mensah is the former Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at MOCAD in Detroit. Ossei-Mensah currently serves as Curator-at-Large at BAM, where he curated the NY Times heralded the exhibition Let Free Ring in January 2021. Ossei-Mensah has had recent profiles in such publications as the NY Times, Artsy, and Cultured Magazine, and was recently named to Artnet’s 2020 Innovator List.
Barry Schwabsky
Schwabsky is an American art critic, art historian and poet. Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation (the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States) and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Schwabsky's essays have appeared in many other publications, including Flash Art, Contemporary, Artforum, London Review of Books and Art in America. His art criticism books include: Words for Art: Criticism, History, Theory, Practice (Ram Publications); The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press); and contributions to Abstract Painting: Concepts and Techniques and Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press). He has published books on Jessica Stockholder (Phaidon Press), Mel Bochner, Chloe Piene, Karin Davie, Dana Schutz, Alex Katz, Gillian Wearing: Mass Observation (Merrill Publishers), Henri Matisse and Alighiero Boetti, among others.
