Visiting Artists & Scholars
Jordan Karney Chaim, PhD, National Scholar
Public Presentation: "Community Service: Curating Contemporary Art in the 21st Century"
Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 5 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Recorded Talk: https://vimeo.com/1072203965/7a7e6ef2be?share=copy
Dr. Jordan Karney Chaim is a contemporary art historian and Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Her research and writing has focused on the intersections of art and community, focusing on emerging artists and institutional histories in the United States. Her most recent work can be found in East of Borneo, Hyperallergic and HereIn Journal.
Dr. Jordan Karney Chaim's public presentation, "Community Service: Curating Contemporary Art in the 21st Century", will be an overview of her career path, curatorial practice/values, discussion of some recent projects, and Q + A.
Rachel Gloria Adams, National Artist
CAB Art Gallery Exhibition Dates: February 20 - March 26, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 20 from 5:30 - 7 p.m.
Public Artist Talk: Thursday, February 20, 2025 at 5 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Link to recorded Artist Talk: https://echo360.org/media/3fc765da-9485-42b2-ada4-c45a7dda86ec/public
Rachel Gloria Adams is a multidisciplinary artist living in Portland, ME. Adams has developed a vibrant, graphic pattern-based visual language filled with references to the natural world that posses an heirloom quality. Her work takes form by way of quilting, painting, design and large scale murals.
"Bloom for Yesterday" is a collection of 10 quilts that highlight moments of tenderness within the Adams family. A combination of paint and quilting are patched together to capture these seemingly small moments that reflect the happiness, pride and depth of motherhood. These moments are depicted in an illustrative style that distills the essence of its subjects. Subtle clues of the subjects identity are exposed whether it be the strong emphasis on hair to allude to the blackness of the subjects or patterning within their clothing. In many ways each piece serves as self portraiture as they are moments that have evoked an emotional response from the artist.
Adams comes from a lineage of quilters and creatives. The practice of quilting allows Adams to work from home within the chaos of raising two daughters. Her girls, Zoe and Norah are able to experience these moments and witness the process of translating life into art through their mothers lens. Adams has created heirlooms that memorialize these specific points in time for the Adams and provide a tangible means of holding onto these moments.
The quilts themselves breakdown art institution norms by bringing together painting and craft. These objects give the viewer the sensation of warmth, comfort and home.
"Bloom For Yesterday" in essence is a love letter to Adams younger self. As products of divorce and troubled youths, both Rachel and Ryan are dedicated to providing a life for their girls that is full of adventure, creativity and love. In many ways they are able to experience things for the first time alongside their girls and in return their own inner child is able to blossom in ways they didn’t know they were capable of. On a broader scale the work serves as a reminder of Black joy. As a Black family living in Maine it is not often Black families are represented enjoying the Maine landscape. These moments provide a narrative of joy despite the hardships people of color endure.
For full press release: https://linktr.ee/cabartgallery
Nicole Dextras, International Artist
Public Artist Talk: October 9 at 6 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Nicole Dextras is an award-winning environmental artist working in a multitude of media, having created art installations in Spain, Mongolia, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Dawson City-Yukon, Seattle-WA, Portland- OR, Albuquerque-NM and Fullerton-CA. She is a graduate of the Emily Carr University of Art in Vancouver, Canada, where she was a sessional teacher from 2003 to 2013. Her art practice is rooted in the environmental art movement, where our fragile existence is presented through transformative installations that mark the nature of time. Dextras has exhibited her work in Canada, the USA and in Asia. She has staged public interventions with models wearing her Weedrobes in Paris, Fullerton CA, New York and Montreal.
Cristin Millett, National Artist
Public Artist Talk: Thursday, April 18, 2024 at 5 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Cristin Millett is a multi-disciplinary artist and embedded Faculty Researcher in the Arts + Design Research Incubator and a Professor of Art in the School of Visual Arts at Penn State University.
Straddling traditional disciplinary boundaries, Cristin Millett’s investigations of medicine and its history are integral to her artistic process. As a transdisciplinary artist, her work examines the intersection of art and science, specifically sculptural processes and reproductive futures. Her sculptural objects and installations prompt a contemporary cultural critique of societal issues surrounding reproduction and gender identity. Her artwork has been widely exhibited, including at the Villa Strozzi, Florence; the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; the Exploratorium, San Francisco; and the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia. Millett was a Fulbright Senior Scholar and Resident at SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia.
Kit MacNeil and Henry Gepfer, National Artists
Public Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 28, 2024, 5:30 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Kit MacNeil and Henry Gepfer are two queer visual artists using their bodies as exploratory tools to find new avenues to envision printmaking. Oscillating between tragic and comic, this direct mode of performative work allows them to point directly to the tangible and intangible gendered expectations thrust upon them.
Meredith Connelly, Regional Artist
CAB Art Gallery Exhibition Dates: January 18 - February 21, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 18, 2024 from 5:30 - 7 p.m.
Public Artist Talk: Thursday, January 18, 2024, 5 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Meredith Connelly is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, best known for her grand-scale installations that emphasize the interplay of light, science, and technology. Connelly’s illuminated, site-specific displays – complete with interactive elements – connect and submerge viewers into glowing, otherworldly environments. Developed from and influenced by the organic qualities of nature, Connelly’s structures are formed using manufactured materials that are able to accurately capture the elaborate detail of the natural world, while also supporting environmental sustainability. Having worked with lighting and technology as a material for over a decade, Connelly has built a practice that has not only captured national attention but has engaged hundreds of thousands of participants in the evocative and inclusive power of public art.
Dr. Timothy McCall, PhD, National Scholar
Public Lecture: Thursday, March 30, 2023 in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Timothy McCall is Associate Professor of Art History in the History Department at Villanova University. Tim’s research centers on Italian Renaissance art, and on visual intersections of power and gender (particularly masculinity) more broadly, in addition to histories of fashion and material culture. Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Masculinity in Early Renaissance Italy was published by Penn State University Press in 2022, and his next book, Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinities in the Courts of Renaissance Italy, is forthcoming in 2023 with Reaktion Books. McCall co-edited the volume Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe in 2013, and his journal articles include those in Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, and I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. With Catherine Kovesi, Tim is currently co-editing the six-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Luxury.
Website: Timothy McCall, PhD
Amy Youngs & Ken Rinaldo, National Artists
Participatory Performance and Sculpture Project: Wednesday, February 23, 2022 from 2 – 4 p.m. in Friday Annex Room 152
Public Artist Talk: Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. in the Cultural Arts Building Room 2033.
Amy Youngs & Ken Rinaldo are faculty at the Ohio State University Department of Art and Artists exploring Bio & Eco Art, Interactive systems, time-based media and digital culture.
Amy M. Youngs creates eco art, interactive sculptures, and digital media works that explore interdependencies between technology, plants and animals. Her research involves entanglements with the non-human, constructing ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines. She has created installations that amplify the sounds of living worms, indoor ecosystems powered by a rocking chair, an interactive museum for live insects, and an augmented reality tour of real nature.
Emeritus Professor Rinaldo headed the Art and Technology area in the Department of Art for 22 years in tandem with Professor Amy Youngs. Rinaldo is internationally recognized for interactive robotic art installations, bio-art, and 3D animations developing hybrid ecologies with animals, algorithms, plants, and bacterial cultures. His art/science practice serves as a platform for hacking complex social, biological, and machine symbionts.
Steed Taylor, Regional Artist 
Public Artist Talk: Monday March 28, 2022 from 6 p.m. -7:30 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building, Room 2033
Born near Fayetteville, North Carolina and educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BA in English and Studio Art concentrating in intaglio etching), and American University in Washington, DC (MBA in Marketing) and the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Steed Taylor's art practice includes public artwork as well as work for gallery settings.
Taylor's art has been shown around the country including the Bronx Museum, the Mint Museum, the San Bernardino County Museum, and the Neuberger Museum of Art's 2001 Biennial Exhibition of Public Art. Besides extensive showings in the New York metropolitan area, his solo shows include The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Ambrosino Gallery in Miami, Florida and Il Ponte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy.
Recent commissions for his public artwork include the cities of Chicago, IL, Washington, DC, Arlington, VA and New Orleans, LA, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Duke University, Riverside Park in New York City, Florida State University and Columbus College of Art & Design. Recent lectures include the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His art has been discussed in publications as varied as Art In America to Playboy Magazine.
An activist for many years, he has worked with a wide variety of both arts and AIDS organizations including the Whitman-Walker Clinic, Artists Board of Artists Space, Brio Awards Panelist for the Bronx Council on the Arts, Board of Directors for Visual AIDS 1995-1998 and 2010 to present, Co-Chair of the 21st Century Committee for the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture 1999-2005, Board of Directors of Cannabis Cares from 1999 to present and Curator for HIV Law Project Silent Auction 2010 and 2012.
Kathryn Baczeski, Regional Artist
CAB Art Gallery Exhibition Dates: October 1- November 11, 2022
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 27, 2022 from 5:30 - 7 p.m.
Public Artist Talk: Thursday, October 27, at 5 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
Kathryn Agnes Baczeski is a visual artist from Southbury Connecticut. She received her BFA in Sculpture with a concentration in Ceramics from the University of Connecticut in 2009. She earned her MFA from Indiana University - Bloomington in 2016. Baczeski is currently a resident an instructor of art living and working in Cedar Rapids Iowa.
Ella Weber, National Artist
Public Zoom Artist Talk: Spring 2022
Ella Weber is a basement based artist working across image, text, comedy and video. Searching for love, laughter and a well-balanced lunch inside a transactional world, Weber slices meat in a grocery store deli. Through the labor of an 8-hour shift, her work explores identity within a performance-based consumer culture, asking “Is good, good enough?” Across the counter, Weber blurs lines between art and life, performance and reality, employee and customer.
Trained in printmaking, Weber received an MFA with distinction from the University of Kansas in 2015. Since then she has attended residencies at MASS MoCA, The NARS Foundation, Rogers Art Loft, PrattMWP, Ox-Bow School of Art, The Wassaic Project, and Anderson Ranch to name a few. She is the recipient of a 2019 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council and voted best new media artist at the Omaha Entertainment Art Awards. The artist has exhibited widely in recent group exhibitions at IPCNY (New York, NY), Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), and The NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY). Recent solo shows include exhibitions at Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute (Utica, NY), The Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), and Rogers Art Gallery (Las Vegas, NV).