Visiting Artists

Audrey Barcio

Monday, September 9, 12:00pm

Audrey Barcio is an artist who uses elemental abstract symbology to posit a primordial heritage of abstraction voiced in the multifarious present. Her work addresses hidden structures and challenges perception to reveal more than what’s visible.

Audrey Barcio is a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant recipient and a 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship nominee. She earned her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her BAE from Herron School of Art and Design and has completed residencies at the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, Vermont Studio Center and Rodgers Foundation. Her work has been covered by New American Paintings, New Art Examiner, Occhi Magazine, PATTERN, NUVO, and Las Vegas Weekly. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Syracuse University, Tube Factory Artspace, Las Vegas Government Center, Echo Arts Bozeman and New Harmony Contemporary. Her work is included in the collection of the Barrick Museum of Art, Las Vegas and The Rogers Foundation.

Funded through the generous support of the Gene R. Cohen Charitable Foundation.

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Ling-Wen Tsai

Monday, September 16, 12:00pm

Ling-Wen Tsai (蔡姈妏) was born in Taiwan. Her practice spans a broad range of mediums and disciplines including: installation, performance, sculpture, video, photography, painting, and drawing. While embracing these different mediums, she strives to free them from the confines of definition. Her recent projects explore how our surroundings, whether natural or built, have an influence on our state of mind and shape our lives.

Tsai is Professor of Sculpture and MFA at Maine College of Art & Design (MECA&D). She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Washington University, a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, and a graduate certificate in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). She also holds a BS degree from Chung-Shan Medical University in Taiwan.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Miel-Margarita Paredes

Monday, September 30, 12:00pm

Miel-Margarita Paredes (born in Suva, Fiji), specializes in metal raising and forming, fabrication, chasing & repousse, enameling, mechanical toys and animal imagery, as well as a stop-motion puppet skeleton builder known for Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022), ParaNorman (2012) and The Boxtrolls (2014).

Paredes studied metalsmithing at California College of Art and Craft in Oakland (BFA) and the University of Wisconsin in Madison (MFA). Their metal work incorporates the animal figure and traditional ornamental devices into small-scale sculpture and mechanical toys, interpreting the ways in which humans manipulate our environment to suit our needs; deconstructing and reconstructing both inanimate and animate objects.

As an armaturist, Paredes fabricates steel ball and socket armatures for stop motion animatable puppets. They have fabricated head mechanics, body armatures and puppet costume accessories for In The Know on Peacock and built armatures, costumes and puppet accessories for The Tiny Chef Show Season 2 on Nickelodeon.

Samuel Levi Jones

Monday, October 7, 12:00pm

Samuel Levi Jones is inspired by questions of authority, representation, and recorded history. The artist is known for challenging historical and contemporary power structures through the act of taking apart "source" material, generating new perspectives from which to grapple with society’s ongoing ignorance and apathy. Jones’s practice centers on physically undoing objects associated with systems of power and control, often rearranging deconstructed books into grid-like compositions that expose their flaws and question their assumed command of the truth. As he explains, “I am ultimately thinking about information that is selectively left out.” His works examine urgent questions of how oppression is embedded in systems of law enforcement and education, as well as industries in medicine, athletics, and fine art.

Samuel Levi Jones Jones was born in Marion, Indiana, in 1978, and lives and works in Indianapolis, Indiana. Solo exhibitions include The Empire is Falling at The Dayton Contemporary, Ohio; Left of Center at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indiana; and Unbound, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York. Recent museum exhibitions include Art of California: Greater than the Sum, SFMOMA, San Francisco, California; Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Infinite Blue at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Illinois.

Tucker Marder

Monday, October 21, 12:00pm

Tucker Marder is an artist living and working between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Long Island, New York. Working in a wide range of mediums including puppetry, film, and horticulture, Tucker uses humor and absurdity to promote an exuberant environmental ethic, countering pessimistic prevailing trends towards ecological hopelessness. He has exhibited at the National Aviary, Phipps Botanical Garden, and the Store Front for Art and Architecture. He received his MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2016 and has been an artist in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia. Tucker is the founder of the Folly Tree Arboretum, a cultural archive of trees devoted to ecological storytelling.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Jennifer Ling Datchuk

Monday, October 28, 12:00pm

Jennifer Ling Datchuk is an artist born in Warren, Ohio and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is an exploration of her layered identity – as a woman, a Chinese woman, as an “American,” as a third culture kid. Trained in ceramics, Datchuk works with porcelain and other materials often associated with traditional women’s work, such as textiles and hair, to discuss fragility, beauty, femininity, intersectionality, identity, and personal history. Her practice evolved from sculpture to mixed media as she began to focus on domestic objects and the feminine sphere. Handwork and hair both became totems of the small rituals that fix, smooth over, and ground women’s lives. Through these materials, she explores how Western beauty standards influenced the East, how the non-white body is commodified and sold, and how women’s – globally, girls’ – work is still a major economic driver whose workers still struggle for equality.

Datchuk holds an MFA in Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a BFA in Crafts from Kent State University. She has received grants from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, travel grant from Artpace, and the Linda Lighton International Artist Exchange Program to research the global migrations of porcelain and blue and white pattern decoration. She was awarded a residency through the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum to conduct her studio practice at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany and has participated in residencies at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, Vermont Studio Center, European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands, Artpace in San Antonio, Texas and the Arts/Industry Residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and Kohler Company in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Aja Barber

Wednesday, November 6, 6:00pm

Special Event with the Portland Public Library

Aja Barber is a writer, stylist and consultant whose work deals with the intersections of sustainability and the fashion landscape. Their work builds heavily on ideas behind privilege, wealth inequality, racism, feminism, colonialism and how to fix the fashion industry with all these things in mind.

Aja Barber is the author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change and Consumerism and a contributing editor for ELLE UK covering topics including ethical fashion, sustainability, circular economy and independent business.

“In the 'learning' first half of the book, I will expose you to the endemic injustices in our consumer industries and the uncomfortable history of the textile industry; one which brokered slavery, racism and today's wealth inequality. And how these oppressive systems have bled into the fashion industry and its lack of diversity and equality. I will also reveal how we spend our money and whose pockets it goes into and whose it doesn't (clue: the people who do the actual work) and will tell my story of how I came to learn the truth.

Sharon Portelance

Monday, November 18, 12:00pm

Sharon Portelance received her BFA in 1982 at the Portland School of Art now Maine College of Art & Design and received her MFA in Metal in 1992 from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Portelance maintains an active studio practice, exhibiting both nationally and internationally. Her work can be viewed in collections that include the Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, Washington, The Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY, the Okresni Muzeum Ceskeho Raje in Turnov, Czech Republic and at the Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry Museum in Athens, Greece. Her work has been featured in Ornament Magazine, Metalsmith Magazine, and in the Lark Book publications 1000 Rings and 500 Bracelets. She has been an artist in residence in the Czech Republic, in Estonia at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn in the United States at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and has just completed a residency at the Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry Museum in Athens, Greece.