Fall 2019

Trevor Paglen is a conceptual artist, writer, and geographer who uses lens-based technologies and public records to explore places, objects, and structures that are typically hidden from view. Concerned with military and corporate power and the phenomena of mass surveillance and data collection, Paglen is best known for the process of “limit telephotography,” in which high-power telescopes in conjunction with cameras are used to photograph deliberately remote places such as military bases, satellites, and prisons. More recently, Paglen has been preoccupied with inhuman modes of seeing, collaborating with researchers in a variety of fields to understand what machines see and how their way of seeing, which is integral to myriad technologies both banal and important, changes the very nature of perception in the twenty-first century.

Paglen holds a BA from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Geography from U.C. Berkeley. Paglen has had one-person exhibitions at Vienna Secession, Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Van Abbe Museum, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Protocinema Istanbul, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.

He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, Vice Magazine, the New Yorker, and Artforum. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for his work as a “groundbreaking investigative artist.” In 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and, in 2016,  he also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography. In 2017, he was a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant.

Fall 2018

American artist, curator, and writer, Lauren Fensterstock will be in residence at the University of Georgia as the 2018-2019 Dodd Chair. Fensterstock will work closely with faculty and students at the University of Georgia and will teach a graduate seminar in the fall and in the spring. Her fall course entitled From the Invisible to the Infinite: Mapping Studio Practice in Context, will probe artistic production via a variety of lenses from the molecular, to the systematic, linguistic, and global. While in residence, Fensterstock will also develop a new body of work that will be exhibited at the Dodd Galleries in the spring of 2019. She will give a public lecture in March of 2019.

Fensterstock is best known for creating elaborate sculptures and installations that explore the evolving history of our relationship to nature. By merging contradictory historic perspectives—from the Baroque to the Picturesque and Minimalism—she reveals the cultural roots of our concept of nature. Her intricate artworks are constructed in the material associated to women’s crafts, such as quilled paper and shell work, emphasizing the capacity of these media to reflect on the complexities of the world beyond the domestic sphere. While in residence at the Dodd, Fensterstock will research the making of large sculptures in the form of portals. At first appearing like monumental black slabs, these portals juxtapose the stark geometries of Modernism with detailed rococo patterning, while the inclusion of black mirrors will merge real and illusory space.

Fensterstock has held appointments at the Rhode Island School of Design and Virginia Commonwealth University, and previously served as Academic Program Director of the Interdisciplinary MFA in Studio Arts at Maine College of Art and as Interim Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. She is a United States Artist Barr Fellow whose work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at MOCA Jacksonville, The John Michael Kohler Art Center, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Drexel University. Other recent and upcoming exhibitions include Rijswijk Museum, Austin Contemporary, Des Moines Art Center, Wichita Art Museum, Gibbes Museum, and the Brandywine Museum. Her work is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery in New York. Lauren holds degrees from the Parsons School of Design (BFA 1997) and SUNY New Paltz (MFA 2000).

Spring 2016 to Spring 2018

Paul Pfeiffer is an artist of international stature, currently serving as the Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair. A pioneer and exemplary practitioner working in the fields of installation, photography, and video, he is best known for digitally manipulated images of athletes and celebrities, which he uses as an occasion to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer’s acclaimed objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities—professional sports, televised game shows, Michael Jackson, etc.—to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, politics, and nationhood.

Represented by the Paula Cooper gallery in New York City, Pfeiffer has had numerous solo exhibitions at a diverse array of institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2001), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2001), the Barbi-can Art Centre in London (2001), The List Visual Arts Center at MIT (2003), The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2003), The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu (2003), Gagosian Gallery in New York (2004), MUSAC in Léon, Spain (2008), Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2009),  and The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila (2015), among others.

Fall 2014 to Spring 2015

Strauss, born in 1970, is a photographer and installation artist living and working in her hometown of Philadelphia. She began photography in 2000 and had recently completed “Under I-95,” a 10-year project that resulted in a photography installation of those photographed under a section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Strauss has been recognized for her many accomplishments, including a Pew Fellowship, the George Gund Foundation Fellowship and a Leeway Foundation Seedling Award, among others. Zoe Strauss resided as the Lamar Dodd Chair during the 2014–2015 school year.

Spring 2014

Kota Ezawa’s work takes the form of animated videos, light boxes, slide projections, and prints. He recreates iconic moments from the media, popular culture, and the history of photography by interpreting photographic images into drawings. Removing much of the visual information found in the source material, Ezawa’s images become less real and more symbolic. His recent solo exhibitions include Offsite: Kota Ezawaat Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, and The Curse of Dimensionality at Haines Gallery in San Francisco. In 2013, group exhibitions include: SLOW: Marking Time in Photography and Film at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Fl; The Unphotographable at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and Out of the Ordinary at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Kota Ezawa resided as Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Spring 2014 Dodd Chair.

Fall 2013

Kendall Buster first studied microbiology and received a BS degree in Medical Technology before pursuing an education in art. She earned a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University as well as participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Studio Program in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues nationally and internationally including The Hirshhorn Museum and the Kreeger Museum in Washington, DC, Artist’s Space and The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, The Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee, The Boise Art Museum in Boise, Idaho, Suyama Space in Seattle, Washington, the Bahnhof Westend in Berlin, and the KZNSA Gallery in Durban, South Africa.

Her most recently completed commissioned project is a site-responsive sculpture created for The Soleri Bridge in Scottsdale, Arizona. Other projects include a pier for The Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park, and large-scale permanent installations for The Frick Chemistry Building at Princeton University, Gilman Hall at Johns’ Hopkins University in Baltimore, The San Francisco International Airport, and The Biomedical Center at The University of Houston. Buster has been interviewed by Neda Ulaby on NPR’s Morning Edition as part of a series on art and science and was the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in the Arts. She currently lives and works in Richmond, Virginia and is a professor in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. www.kendallbuster.com

Lola Brooks began her arts education at Pratt Institute and then went on to study with Jamie Bennett and Myra Mimlitsch-Gray at SUNY New Paltz. In 1996 Lola was included in the Talente exhibition in Munich and since then has participated in many gallery and museum shows around the country including Sparkle then Fade at the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington. Lola’s use of stainless steel drives the conceptual content of the work and her underlying interest in material hierarchies. The Recipient of the Sienna Gallery Emerging Artist Award in 2002, Lola’s work has been reviewed and/or included in many publications including four of the Lark Books jewelry series; American Craft, Metalsmith, Out, W, Vogue and BlackBook magazines.

Lola teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, and University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She has also taught at SUNY New Paltz, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Her work can be found in the collections of the Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY, the Racine Museum of Art, Racine, Wisconsin, the Museum of Art and Design, NYC as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Spring 2011

David Humphrey has received numerous awards for his paintings, drawings, installations and prints. These include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and two New York Council for the Arts Grants. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally with over 30 solo exhibitions in Canada, London, New York, California and Pittsburgh, among others. Humphrey’s work can be found in major public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Carnegie Institute, the Denver Art Museum, and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.

Humphrey received his BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore and his MA from New York University. He lives and works in New York City and is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Currently he is a Senior Critic at Yale School of Art. David Humphrey was selected as a top candidate for the Lamar Dodd Distinguished Chair position because of his record of research, and his recognition in the field as an artist, writer, critic and curator.

“My paintings are frequently depictions of depictions. I will copy an amateur painting, for instance, the way a band might cover a song written by someone else, or the way a singer renders an old chestnut. I try to get inside the other person’s point of view to stretch my own. Sometimes the pre-existing image, like an eccentrically generic landscape, will provide a location for one of my paintings. Sometimes a sad clown or beloved pet painting will provide the protagonist. My handmade renditions, though, take a lot of liberties with the originals. I will add characters or exaggerate and mutate elements. But the work will evolve from contact with the original and will carry iconographic elements, and sometimes feelings, into the finished state.”

Fall 2011 Spring 2012

Kristen L. Morgin earned a BA degree from California State University in Hayward and an MFA degree from New York state’s Alfred University. A native of Georgia, Kristen now works as an independent artist in Gardena, California. Previously she held positions as diverse as a gallery docent, a children’s playhouse set painter, a secretary in an auto glass shop, and a tenured professor of art. Morgin has had solo shows at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles and Viento y Agua Gallery, Long Beach. Selected group exhibitions include Trans-Ceramic Art 3rd World Ceramic Biennale, Icheon, Korea; Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Becausethe Earth Is 1/3 Dirt Art Museum of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Fall 2008 to Fall 2010

Since the early 1970’s Paul Kos’s work has challenged conventions of art media and subject matter. For a global audience, he staged new possibilities for artistic treatments of time, space and cultural systems. Kos, one of the founders of the Bay Area conceptual movement, has exhibited internationally and has work represented in major museum collections including New York’s MoMA, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, SFMoMA, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Paul Kos has engaged, over 30 years, the paradoxes in art and community, temporality and faith, by means of playfully diverse installations and objects.
—Jonathan Gilmore, Art Historian, Princeton University, April 2004

Kos was raised as an observant Catholic, but such religious allusions in his work seem less about organized ritual than the desire to challenge the principle of the disenchantment of art. In his most famous work, Chartres Bleu (1983–86), re-created in the exhibition (the original is at the di Rosa Preserve in Napa), Kos monitored the passage of time in shots of a 27-panel stained-glass window in the choir ambulatory of the cathedral at Chartres. Each of 27 monitors, which are stacked in the shape of the window, shows a time-lapse video, condensed into a 12-minute sequence, of a different glass panel photographed regularly over the course of 24 hours. Evolving from an extremely bright, nearly illegible array of colors, to clearly defined narrative scenes of the Life of Mary, to almost complete darkness, the work offers a reflection on modes of temporal experience and represents an attempt to reinvest a debased modern technology with a 13th-century medium’s charge of the divine.

Fall 2007 to Spring 2008

Born in Ireland and raised amidst Protestant-Catholic strife in Belfast, David Sandlin has spent his career discussing America, for all her hypocrisy and charm. His family moved to the United States in 1972 and settled in Birmingham, Alabama, affording David the quintessential Southern American experience. Sandlin earned his BFA from the University of Alabama in 1979; he has lived and worked in New York for more than 25 years where his work has evolved from street art to bumper stickers to paintings and installations. He is represented by the Gracie Mansion Gallery and has shown stateside at La Luz de Jésus Gallery in Los Angeles, the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, as well as many others. He has been featured abroad in galleries in Switzerland, Japan, Australia, and Canada. Sandlin is the author of several books; the first, Land of 1,000 Beers, details “Sinland” which he describes as “a thematically unified body of work—you could call it Dante’s Divine Comedy meets Hank Williams.”

My obsession with exploring American Puritanism was already full-blown by the time I went to college, where I’d go to sleazy country music clubs…and see people who would just go absolutely crazy with drinking and carousing on Saturday night, then get up and go to some little Baptist church the next morning and get born again.
—David Sandlin

As the Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair of Art for 2007-08, Sandlin gave a public lecture about his work on September 11, 2007. He held an exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Visual Arts Building in January 2008.

Fall 2006 to Spring 2007

Nina Bovasso lives and works in New York. Her art is included in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Collectie KPN in the Netherlands, among others. She had recently had solo exhibitions at Aliceday in Brussels, Belgium, University Art Museum at SUNY Albany and Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio and was showing new works on paper with Daniel Sturgis at The Apartment in Athens, Greece.

Fall 2005 to Spring 2005

I paint what I see around me, and I look with an accusing eye at what man has created…I am just a filter, a many-colored voice…I paint to kill La Muerte, and also to kill Cruelty, Injustice, Violence, Ignorance and Hypocrisy. —Luis Cruz Azaceta, from an interview with Friehelm Mennekes,1988

Luis Cruz Azaceta studied with the famed Neo-Expressionist artist Leo Golub and has been represented by New York’s prestigious Frumkin Adams Gallery since the mid-1970s; now George Adams Gallery. His work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Galeria Ramis Barquet in Chelsea, New York, Fredic Snitzer Gallery in Miami and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans among others. Cruz Azaceta was born in Havana in 1942. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1960 shortly after Castro’s revolution and became a U.S. citizen in 1967. As the Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair of Art for 2005–06, Cruz Azaceta gave a public lecture about his work on August 30,2005. He had an exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Visual Arts Building in February 2006.

Fall 2004 to Spring 2004

Willie Cole (born 1955 in Newark, New Jersey) is a noted contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual and visual artist. His work uses contexts of postmodern eclecticism, and combines references and appropriation from African and African-American imagery. He also has used Dada’s readymades and Surrealism’s transformed objects, as well as icons of American pop culture or African and Asian masks.

Fall 2003 to Spring 2003

Michael Lucero, held the distinguished position of Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair at the University of Georgia during the 2003–2004 academic year. Lucero earned his MFA at the University of Washington in 1978 and has since exhibited extensively throughout the United States. His work is featured in prominent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea.