Visiting Artists and Scholars

Aaron Coleman

Thursday, September 14, 2023
Room 105, Wham Building at 7 pm

Artist Bio:  Aaron Coleman is a multi-disciplinary artist, Associate Professor and Kenneth E. Tyler Endowed Chair at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. He received his MFA from Northern Illinois University in 2013. Aaron was a co-founder of the Sienna Collective for Students of Color in the Arts at the University of Arizona and in 2021 received the Provost Award for Innovations in Teaching as well as the College of Fine Arts Undergraduate Mentorship Award. Aaron has participated in international residencies and exhibitions and has received numerous awards for his work in printmaking, sculpture and installation including the 2021 Black Box Press Foundation’s Art as Activism Grant. His work can be found in the collections of The Janet Turner Print Museum, the Ino-cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan, The Yekaterinburg Museum of Art in Yekaterinburg, Russia, the National Library of France, and the Artist Printmaker and Photographer Research Archive among many other public and private collections. 

Mel Watkin

Thursday, September 28, 2023
Room 105, Wham Building at 7 pm

Artist Bio:  Mel Watkin has shown nationally with solo exhibitions at Franklin Furnace Archives, New York, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, Laumeier Sculpture Park,  St. Louis, and the Addison/Ripley Gallery, Washington, D.C. Recent group exhibitions include the American University Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan and Longue Vue House and Garden, New Orleans.  Her 2021-2023 exhibitions include “Revolving” at the Sheldon Art Galleries, Saint Louis, “Trees Bark” at the Kranzberg Foundation for the Arts, Saint Louis and “Art Along the Rivers” at the Saint Louis Art Museum. In addition, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago commissioned three map-based works and Southern Illinois Healthcare Cancer Institute commissioned eight small works on paper. Her work is in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Illinois State Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas-Lawrence, the Book Art Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Franklin Furnace Archives, among other venues. In 2010, Watkin created a permanent public artwork with Franz Meyer Glassworks of Munich, Germany for the “C” Concourse at Lambert St. Louis International Airport. Grant awards include a 2022 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2nd), a Critical Mass grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and a Pyramid Atlantic artist’s book award. She has completed a number of residencies including a recent residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming (2nd), the Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, Illinois, and Palazzo Rinaldi, Noepoli, Italy.

Judith Schaechter

Thursday, October 26, 2023
Room 105, Wham Building at 7 pm

Artist Bio:  Judith Schaechter lives and works in Philadelphia. Her work is collected internationally and is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert in London and the Hermitage, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 and her work was in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. 1n 2013, Judith was inducted to the College of Fellows of the American Craft Council. She received a lifetime achievement award from the Glass Art Society in 2022.  In 2020-21, Judith’s work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition organized by the Memorial Art Gallery of Rochester, NY, which traveled to the Toledo Museum and the Des Moines Art Center.

Tammie Rubin

Thursday November 16, 2023
Room 105, Wham Building at 7 pm

Artist Bio:  Tammie Rubin (b. Chicago, Il) is an artist whose sculptural practice considers the intrinsic power of objects as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics while investigating the tension between the readymade and the handcrafted. Using intricate motifs, Rubin delves into themes involving ritual, domestic and liturgical objects, mapping, migration, magical thinking, longing, and identity. Her installations open up dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations. Rubin received a BFA in both Ceramics and Art History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MFA in Ceramics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Rubin has exhibited widely, selections include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX., the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY., George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX., Mulvane Art Museum, KS., Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN., The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX., Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX., and C24 Gallery, New York, NY. She's represented by C24 Gallery, New York, NY., Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX., & Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY.
Rubin’s artwork has received reviews in online and print publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Glasstire, Austin American- Statesman, Austin Chronicle, Sightlines, fields, Conflict of Interest, Arts and Culture Texas, Ceramics: Art & Perception, and Ceramics Monthly. She founded Black Mountain Project along with fellow Austin-based artists Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen, and she is a member of ICOSA Collective, a non-profit cooperative gallery. Born and raised in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.

Meredith Tromble

Thursday, March 21, 2024
Room 105, Wham Building at 7 pm

Artist Bio:  Meredith Tromble is an intermedia artist and writer who makes drawings, installations, and performances. Her curiosity about imagination and knowing has sparked several projects with scientists, including the Vortex series of interactive artworks, drawings, and performances with geobiologist Dawn Sumner. She also collaborates with the Los Angeles-based company Donna Sternberg & Dancers. Tromble’s work has been widely presented at venues including the Mills Museum, Oakland; Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.; BioBAT Art Space, Brooklyn; Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, University of California, Davis; and Pratt Institute Manhattan Gallery. Her Dream Vortex was chosen as an Exemplar Project of interdisciplinary research by the Association for Arts in Research Universities and she has contributed as an artist to several research teams. Her blog “Art and Shadows,” on contemporary art illuminated by science, was honored with an Art Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation. Her most recent publication is a chapter on her Vortex series in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture: From Forces to Forms, eds. Ellen K. Levy and Charissa Terranova. Tromble co-edits the Bloomsbury book series “Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design” and is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies / Art & Technology at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is artist-in-residence at the University of California, Davis (UCD) Complexity Sciences Center and visiting artist/scholar at the UCD Feminist Research Institute.

Ruddy Roye 

Thursday, April 11, 2024
Room 105, Wham Building at 7 pm

Artist Bio:  Radcliffe Roye is a Brooklyn based documentary photographer specializing in editorial and environmental portraits and photo-journalism photography. A photographer with over twelve years of experience, Radcliffe is inspired by the raw and gritty lives of grass-roots people,especially those of his homeland of Jamaica. Radcliffe strives to tell the stories of their victories and ills by bringing their voices to matte fibre paper.

Recently, Radcliffe began experimenting with interpretative photography, preferring to allow the abstract content within the frame to dictate the voice and purpose of the image. His Elements series focuses on the bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery, that is trapped behind a diffused lens. With painterly abilities, Radcliffe uses this diffused methodology to subtly awake the subconscious and expose the isolated figure or vision painted within a rhetorical frame.

Jarom Vogel 

Friday, April 19, 2024

Artist Bio:  JAROM VOGEL received a BFA in illustration from Brigham Young University in 2015 and has since created artwork for clients including Apple, Disney, Facebook, Procreate, Spotify, Pepsi, Best Buy, Wells Fargo, Peugeot, Adobe, Nobrow, HarperCollins, Skillshare, and others. He has also illustrated 3 children's books and enjoys dabbling in code on the side. When he's not drawing, he enjoys beaches, fine iced creams, Peach Coke, and skiing. Jarom currently lives in the Portland area with his wife Natalie.