The Studio Art MFA program at American University presents visiting artists throughout the academic year. View past visiting artists by semester:

• Spring 2024
• Fall 2023
• Spring 2023
• Fall 2022
• Spring 2022
• Fall 2021
• Spring 2021
• Fall 2020: Queer Threads
• Additional Past Artists

Elisa Harkins
January 17

Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ is an exuberant, electropop performance animated with Native languages and fashion. It features the artist performing original music she has composed and written, with lyrics in English, Cherokee, and Muscogee (Creek). Deeply informed by Harkins' knowledge of Indigenous music, the performance also reflects the influences of electropop, techno, disco, and other contemporary, popular musical genres. Merging these influences into an energy-filled, pop concert, Harkins asserts the continued vibrancy of Native culture and traditions. The performance will be followed by a talkback session with the artist

Elisa Harkins: Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ is presented through a partnership between MoCA Arlington and American University's Studio Art MFA Program and takes place in conjunction with Assembly 2024: Horizon Scanning, MoCA Arlington's 2024 national biennial exhibition. The exhibition features thirteen artists and one artist collective hailing from 14 states whose work offers strategies to navigate and reimagine the future. Harkins' work is included in the exhibition, which is currently on view at MoCA Arlington through January 26, 2025.

Elisa Harkins (b.1978, Tahlequah, OK, Cherokee / Muscogee) is an artist, singer, electronic music composer, and curator. Her work is concerned with the body, language revitalization, and Indigenous music. She has exhibited and performed at Crystal Bridges (Bentonville, AK), The Getty (Los Angeles, CA), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Spoleto Festival (Charleston, CA), and REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) among other venues. Harkins has received awards from Creative Capital, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Harpo Foundation, and the Mid-America Arts Alliance. In addition to her artistic practice, she serves as a visiting lecturer at various institutions, fostering dialogue around Indigenous music and arts. Harkins is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Nation and lives and works on the Muscogee Reservation.

Melissa Joseph
February 6, 6:00 p.m.
Katzen Arts Center 201

Melissa Joseph is a New York based artist. Her work considers themes of memory, family history, and the politics of how we occupy spaces. She intentionally alludes to the labors of women as well as experiences as a second generation American and the unique juxtapositions of diasporic life. Her work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Delaware Contemporary, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA Arlington, ICA San Francisco, and List Gallery at Swarthmore College. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, Art Forum, Artnet, Artnews, New American Paintings, WNYC, Le Monde, Vogue, CNN, Whitewall, Family Style, and participated in residencies including Artpace, Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, The Textile Arts Center, BRIC, Fountainhead, the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, the Museum of Arts and Design and upcoming at Greenwich House Pottery. She is the recipient of the 2025 UOVO Prize and a regular contributor to BOMB Magazine.
 

Linnea Poole February 20, 6:00 p.m.
Katzen Arts Center 201

Linnea Poole is a Community Educator and Art Practitioner from Baltimore, MD. Linnea’s interdisciplinary art practice includes large scale fiber installations and autoethnographic writings that proposes open discussions surrounding topics on Black women, mourning, and healing.

Poole is also a Professor and has lectured at various colleges such as the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Morgan State University, and Coppin State University as well as held leadership positions at various youth arts programs across Baltimore City. Their work has been exhibited at prominent institutions such as the James E. Lewis Museum, Horowitz Gallery at Howard Community College, The Black Artist Research Space, Brentwood Artist Exchange and at the Live! Casino and Hotel. Linnea has also presented her research at many higher ed art conferences across the U.S. sharing her knowledge and study on the importance of the development for art students in the first year experience classroom and beyond. Additionally, Poole has received media coverage from outlets like CBS News and publications such as BmoreArt.

Most recently, the artist’s article “If We Speak, Do You Listen; If You Hear, Will You Respond?” was published by the Teacher’s College at Columbia University in October 2023.
 

Julie Wills
March 27, 6:00, 6:00,
Katzen Arts Center 246

Julie Wills is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture and installation, drawing, text, and intersections between these media. Found materials, especially those drawn from the building trades, are central to her creative practice. She is recipient of an Individual Artist Award (2019) and a Creativity Grant (2023) from the Maryland State Arts Council; the SSG & AC Edwards Fellowship at Virginia Center for Creative Arts; and has been awarded numerous artist residencies including Marble House Project, Cill Rialaig (Ireland), Arteles (Finland), Jentel, PLAYA and The Hambidge Center. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Plain Sight in Washington, DC in partnership with the Embassy of Sweden and the European Union National Institutes for Culture; Bloomsburg University; Gettysburg College; Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, and at numerous other venues.

Wills is the founder and director of the former China Hutch Projects, a domestic project space for contemporary art located inside her home, and the forthcoming BREAKFRONT, an exhibition space inside her studio. Wills is based in Baltimore and is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. See more of her work on her website or on Instagram.
 

Erika Hess April 10, 6:00 p.m. | Katzen Arts Center 201

Erika b Hess is a painter, The Sydelle Sonkin and Herb Segull Artistic Director of Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution, and creator of the art podcast I Like Your Work. Hess’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in New York City, Brooklyn, Detroit, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia and London. Recent group exhibitions include First Street Gallery, New York City, NY; Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; MASH Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH; and Bomb Factory, London, England.

Hess has been featured in a range of publications, such as Art New England, ArtScope, AllSHEMakes, Bostonia, and Visionary Art Magazine, among others. She has curated and juried numerous exhibitions, publications, and awards, including those for Cambridge Art Association (Cambridge, MA), Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA), Riffe Gallery (Columbus, OH), AllSheMakes, Arts to Hearts, Create Magazine, Women’s United Art, and Friend of the Artist. Hess has also participated on panels at SCOPE Artfair (Miami), Cleveland Institute of Art, and Boston University. Additionally, she frequently delivers lectures at various colleges and universities, including Wellesley College, Pratt, Massachusetts College of Art & Design, The University of Montana, Missouri State University, Eastern Michigan University, and several others.

Hess maintains an active studio practice in Columbus, OH, and in Long Island City in New York, where she keeps a selected inventory of work. She is represented by Contemporary Art Matters in Columbus, OH. Hess received her BFA from Wright State University and her MFA from Boston University.

Photo Credit: Erika Hess, The Great Mother, 2024. Oil on canvas 48 x 60 in.

Rush Baker IV
November 7, 6 p.m.

Rush Baker IV (American, b. 1987, Washington, DC) embraces uncertainty in his painting practice, blending real and digital elements across diverse media. His method involves printing collaged images, layering them with plaster, concrete, paint, and resin to create textured works that reflect the urgency and chaos of the socio-political climate. Influenced by politics and Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist novels, particularly Parable of the Sower, Baker's work explores the tension between destruction and reconstruction, using abstraction as a strategy to alter preconceived ideas.

Baker’s energy is conveyed through chaotic interwoven layers, revealing compositions that address the promise of tomorrow while confronting the flaws of the present. His works challenge boundaries and invite viewers to see beyond the immediate.

Baker has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo shows at Future Gallery (Berlin), Scaramouche Gallery (New York City), HEMPHILL Artworks, and Honfleur Gallery (Washington, DC), among others. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, where he received the Jack Stewart Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting, and an MFA from Yale University, where he was awarded the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award. In 2023, he was a Trawick Prize finalist and an Artsy Foundations Prize finalist in 2024.

Currently, Baker is a 2024/2025 Grant Wood Art Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in Art at the University of Iowa. Baker is also a lecturer in the MFA Program at American University’s Department of Art in Washington, DC. His works are included in the collections of The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Phillips Collection, and The International African American Museum.

Image: Rush Baker IV, All Quiet II, 2024. Acrylic, resin, paper, plaster on canvas, 50 x 40 in.

Howie Lee Weiss
October 24, 6 p.m.

Known for stylized, precise, graphic imagery, Howie Lee Weiss’s artworks have been reviewed in such publications as Art in America, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Baltimore Sun. Weiss’s iconic drawings have been exhibited in galleries in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, DC. His artwork has also appeared in venues throughout Italy. In Japan, Weiss lectured with the Keisho Art Association in conjunction with an exhibit that featured his extensive, free-style sketchbook practice. Howie Lee Weiss is currently affiliated with Goya Contemporary Gallery and Gross McCleaf Gallery.

A professor for over 40 years and having influenced multitudes of students, Weiss currently oversees all aspects of the Senior Thesis Program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and coordinates studio programming and the Artist-at-Noon Lecture Series. Additionally, Weiss has taught all levels of drawing and painting at the college level. Twice, he has received the Trustee’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at MICA. He also had co-directed the MICA Summer Intensive Abroad program in Italy. At Princeton University and the AICA New York Studio Program, Weiss served as Visiting Professor. As a speaker and critic Weiss has visited several schools, including Vassar, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, University of Pennsylvania, Moore College of Art, University of Connecticut and the Corcoran College of Art. Weiss also taught drawing at Chautauqua Institute.

In addition to a focused and disciplined studio life, Weiss attends classical piano and opera concerts, and is married to a classical pianist. A Pennsylvania native who began to draw at the age of five, Howie Lee Weiss was raised in a working-class, northeastern coal-mining town in proximity to the sophisticated, elegant vacation resorts of the Pocono Mountains. Mr. Weiss earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art & Architecture and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

February James
October 3, 6 p.m.

February James currently lives and works in Washington, DC, where she was born, after living in Los Angeles for fifteen years. She received her BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. James has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Berlin and Turin, Italy. Her work was included in Singular Views: 25 Artists at the Rubell Museum in Washington, DC, in 2024, following her inclusion in What’s Going On, the museum’s inaugural exhibition in 2022-2023. In 2021, James was invited by Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont to create a room size installation in Set It Off, an exhibition they organized for the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, NY. She has been featured in multiple other group shows, including Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, Face-to-Face at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, New York and BodyLand, curated by Lauren Taschen at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. She was invited to contribute watercolors to a feature in The New York Times Style Magazine in February 2021. James has been represented by Tilton Gallery since 2020.

Cynthia Daignault

April 11, 6:30 p.m.

Cynthia Daignault received her degree from Stanford University. She has presented solo exhibitions and projects at many major museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and White Columns. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Center for Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Daignault is a regularly published author, and editor of numerous publications. The first major monograph on her work, Light Atlas, was published in 2019, and a new paperback edition will be released in early 2024. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2016 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Award, a 2011 Rema Hort Foundation Award, and a 2010 MacDowell Artist Fellowship. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2024, she will present a new monumental commission at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. 

 

Jerrell Gibbs

March 21, 6:30 p.m.

Jerrell Gibbs (b. 1988; Baltimore, MD) opposes deceptive perceptions of Black men by questioning master narratives and their connection to a muted visual history. Gibbs’ paintings are acts of resistance, asserting power over visual stereotypes. He paints the Black male figure with adornments, such as flowers, and contextualizes them in moments of peace, rest, and solitude. These gestures function to dismantle the visual misrepresentation of violence, trauma, and pain. 

Gibbs is committed to creating paintings that are both authentic and truthful, and he reveals Black men as God-fearing, husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. His paintings highlight joy, beauty, and the mundane, all components within the vastness of Black life. The compositions, which are often taken from his family archive, focus on placement, size, proportion, as much as they do on mark-making and painterly gestures. His assertions of legacy highlight the performative nature of heritage and displaces an audience unaccustomed to more extensive and wide-ranging portrayals of Black life.  

Gibbs graduated with an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2020. His work is in the permanent collection of the Brandywine Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the CC Foundation, and the X Museum Beijing.

 

Sydney Vernon

February 22, 6:30 p.m.

Sydney Vernon (b. 1995, Prince George’s County, MD) superimposes personal family photographs and folklore with both real and imagined histories, quietly critiquing the global depiction of Black life and bodies. Combining elements of painting, drawing, and collage, Vernon’s multilayered works blend memory and history into new forms, at once imagining a poetic contextualization and a demand for recontextualization, coalescing symbols and ornaments with the spirit of her figures.

Kendall BusterFebruary 8, 6 p.m.

Innovative sculptor Kendall Buster is widely known for the unusual merger of art and science in her practice. Trained as a microbiologist, Buster creates sculptures that have been described as “biological architecture,” referencing the molecular world by recreating its shapes and forms on a monumental and microscopic scale. Buster earned a BFA degree from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. Additionally, she participated in the Independent Study Studio Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY.

This program is presented in conjunction with Buster’s two current solo exhibitions. See SOLSTICE at The Kreeger Museum through February 24, and SEED at the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art through February 25.

Abigail DeVilleNovember 30

Abigail DeVille was born to an Afro-Dominican mother who immigrated to Harlem in the early 1960s and an African American father who was raised in the Bronx, Abigail Deville holds close both Harlem and the Bronx in her life and in her work. She explores both earthly sites, such as an empty Harlem lot thought to be a seventeenth-century burial ground for free and enslaved Africans, and the cosmos as a site of expansive dreaming and potential for marginalized peoples. DeVille utilizes recognizable structures and symbols, such as scaffolding, spaceships, mannequins, and the United States flag, to traverse the local and the galactic while interrogating freedom as both a constitutional value and personal liberation. 

DeVille’s most recent solo exhibitions: In the fullness of time, the heart speaks truths too deep for utterance, but a star remembers; JTT NYC (2023); Original Night at Eric Firestone Gallery (2022-23); Bronx Heavens, Bronx Museum of the Arts (2022-23); Light of Freedom, organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy (2020-21), and traveled to the Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2021), the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2021-22), and Kenyon College (2023); The American Future, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland (2018-19); Lift Every Voice and Sing (amerikanskie gorki) at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2017-2018); Empire State Works in Progress (2017) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; No Space Hidden (Shelter) at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017-2018), and Only When It’s Dark Enough Can You See The Stars at The Contemporary, Baltimore (2016). DeVille was a 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award recipient, 2022 Nancy Graves Foundation Award grantee, 2018 United States Artists Fellow, 2017-2018 Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome, 2015 Obie Award for Design, 2015 Creative Capital grantee, 2014-15 fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, 2013-14 Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2012 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient. DeVille received her MFA from Yale University and BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. 

Steven CushnerNovember 14

Ronny QuevedoOctober 19

Asad RazaSeptember 28