Convergence

Featuring photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, screenprinting, and digital video, this show captures a diverse range of each professor’s art-making practice. Organized by the students, for the students, Convergence is an exhibition that beautifully expresses what it means to be a practicing artist. Each artist brings a different perspective to the exhibit, giving the students an opportunity to experience the wide-ranging art-making practices of their professors.

Participating artists:

Sophie Barbasch, Katie Bell, Claudia Bitrán, Angela Ferraiolo, Katie Garth, E.E. Ikeler, Vera Iliatova, Dawn Kasper, John O’Connor, Clifford Owens, Sarah Peters, Joel Sternfeld, Momoyo Torimitsu, Marion Wilson

Exhibition organized by Avery Moore ’23 and the Senior Studio class.

 Sophie Barbasch is a New York based photographer. She earned her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Art and Art History from Brown University. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil and a NYSCA / NYFA Fellowship in photography. In 2022, Penumbra Foundation presented her first NYC solo show and accompanying monograph. Selected residencies include Light Work, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, MASS MoCA, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, NARS, and Saltonstall Foundation. Selected publications include Artsy, Hyperallergic, Der Grief, The Heavy Collective, Topic Stories, Capricious Magazine, and Slate France. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and is held in the collections of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American History. 

Katie Bell is an artist originally from Rockford, Illinois (b. 1985). She received her BA from Knox College (Galesburg, IL) in 2008 where she studied fine art and race and gender studies. She graduated in 2011 from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) with an MFA in Painting. Bell has shown her work at a variety of venues including Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), Spencer Brownstone Gallery (NYC), Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago), and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA). Her work has been written about in BOMB Magazine, Whitewall, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Sculpture Magazine, and Art in America. In 2011 she was an artist in residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Space Program based in Brooklyn, NY. She was awarded a fellowship in painting by the New York Foundation for the Arts and in 2016 the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship. Bell lives and works in New York, NY.

Claudia Bitrán (U.S.A.-Chile 1986) works primarily through painting and video. Bitran holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013), a BFA from the Universidad Catolica de Chile (2009).  

She has exhibited individually at Signs and Symbols Gallery, NY (2022), Cristin Tierney Gallery in NY(2022), Walter Storms Galerie in Munich (2020-2021),  Spring Break Art Show in NY (2020), Muhlenberg College Gallery (2018-2019) and Practice Gallery in PA (2018), the Brooklyn Bridge Park in NY (2018), at Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico (2017), and at Museo de Artes Visuales in Santiago Chile (2016). Bitran has participated in Group Exhibitions and Screenings at Cristin Tierney Gallery (2020), Postmasters Gallery (2020), Essex Flowers (2020), Cindy Rucker Gallery in NY (2019), Echo Park Film Center LA (2019), Tribeca Film Center in NY (2018), Saha Hadid IMAX Theater New York (2017), Taipei Contemporary Art Center Taiwan (2017), The Parlour Bushwick Brooklyn (2016), Project 722 Brooklyn (2015), Museum of Contemporary Arts Quinta Normal Santiago (2011), at Matucana 100 Art spaceSantiago (2011), among others.

Bitrán has held residencies at Wassaic Project (2023), Pioneer Works (2021), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2014), Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (2016), Smack Mellon Studio Program (2017), Outpost Projects (2018), Pioneer Works (2020-2021).  Grants and Awards include: Forndart Nacional Linea Artes Visuales, Santiago Chile, The New York Trust Van Lier Fellowship, Hammersley Grant, Emergency Grant for Artists Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging Filmmakers, 1st Prize Britney Spears Dance Challenge, 1st Prize UFO McDonald’s Painting Competition, 1st honorable mention at Bienal de Artes Mediales, Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, and teaches in the Painting Departments at Pratt Institute and Sarah Lawrence College, and is a guest critic at SIA in Beijing.

Angela Ferraiolo is a visual artist working with adaptive systems, self-organization, and morphogenesis. She was recently artist-in-residence at the Intelligent Engineering Lab, Soka University,Hachioji, Tokyo. Professionally she has worked for RKO (New York), H20 Studios (Vancouver), Westwood Studios (Las Vegas), and Electronic Arts (Redwood City). Her media work has been screened internationally including Nabi Art Center (Seoul), SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles), ISEA (Vancouver, Hong Kong), xCoAx (Madrid, Milan), Art Machines 2 (HKG), EVA (London), Courtisane Film Festival (Ghent), New York Film Festival (New York), Australian Experimental Film Festival (Melbourne), and the International Conference of Generative Art (Rome, Venice, Florence). She joined the visual arts program at Sarah Lawrence in 2015.

 Katie Garth is a print-based artist in Philadelphia. Her interdisciplinary work explores tedium as a coping mechanism for uncertainty, and often reflects her interests in language and independent publication. Garth received her MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post and PRINT. 

Vera Iliatova (b. 1975) immigrated as a teen to the United States from St. Petersburg, Russia; she now lives and works in Brooklyn. Iliatova received her an MFA in Painting from Yale University and her BA from Brandeis University. She has been awarded residencies including the Skowhegan School of Art, Skowhegan, ME; and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Brooklyn, NY. Iliatova’s work was recently included in exhibitions at the Katonah Museum, Katonah, NY; and at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA. Her work has been featured in various publications including Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, and Hyperallergic.

E.E. Ikeler (b.1986) received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2016. They’ve had solo exhibitions at Hemphill Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson, NY), Mulherin (Toronto, Canada), and Kent Place (Summit, NJ). They’ve also exhibited at Pazo Fine Art (Kensington, Maryland), Essex Flowers, EFA Project Space, Abrons Art Center (NYC, New York) and Yve Yang Gallery in Boston, MA. They are the recipient of a Leroy Neiman Foundation Summer Fellowship at Ox-bow School of Art in 2016; a Yale FLAGS Award, a Helen Watson Winternitz Award and a Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Research Fellowship (all Yale University, 2015). They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

Dawn Kasper is an interdisciplinary artist working across genres of performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, video and sound. Her work is born from fascinations with trauma recovery, healing anxiety, existentialism, subjects of vulnerability, desire, and the construction of meaning. BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University. MFA, University of California, Los Angeles. Select solo and group exhibitions: Portikus (Frankfurt), 57th Venice Biennale (Italy), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland), Tang Museum, Skidmore College (New York), Granoff Center for the Arts (Providence), ADN Collection (Italy), CCS Bard College (New York), Issue Project Room (New York) David Lewis (New York), American Academy in Rome (Italy), 2012 Whitney Biennial (New York), Tramway (Scotland), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Pacific Standard Time Public and Performance Art (Los Angeles), Public Art Fund, (Miami), Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst (Zurich). Kasper is represented by David Lewis (New York) and has work included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, (New York) ADN Collection (Italy), and Aïshti Foundation (Beirut). She has been visiting faculty and guest critic at Temple University Tyler School of Art and Architecture (Philadelphia), Yale University (New Haven), Städelschule (Frankfurt), Brown University (Providence), Rhode Island School of Design (Providence), Parsons (New York), California Institute of the Arts (Valencia), Otis College (Los Angeles) and SLC since 2020.

John J. O’Connor was born in Westfield, MA and received an MFA in painting and an MS in Art History and Criticism from Pratt Institute in 2000.  He has received residencies, fellowships, and awards from The MacDowell Colony, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grants in Painting and Drawing, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio residency.  O’Connor’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including: The Lab (Ireland), Martin Asbaek Gallery (Denmark), Neue Berliner Raume (Germany), Rodolphe Janssen Gallery (Brussels), the Louhu District Art Museum (Shenzhen, China), TW Fine Art (Australia); and in the US at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, Arkansas Arts Center, Weatherspoon Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, White Columns, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baltimore, the Queens Museum, and the Tang Museum. His exhibitions have been reviewed in Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Artforum, the Village Voice, Art Papers, the Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America. He has presented his work in discussion with Fred Tomaselli at The New Museum, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Weatherspoon Museum, Hood Museum, Southern Methodist University, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. A catalogue spanning ten years of O’Connor’s work was published by Pierogi Gallery with essays by Robert Storr, John Yau, and Rick Moody. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Clifford Owens is an interdisciplinary artist. He makes photographs, performance art, drawings, videos, and texts. His art has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Owens’s solo museum exhibitions include Anthology at MoMA PS1, Better the Rebel You Know at the former Cornerhouse in Manchester, England, and Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His group exhibitions include Freestyle, Greater New York 2005, and Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century. Owens’s performance-based projects have been widely presented in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Owens has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other fellowships and awards. 

BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MFA, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Postgraduate, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Fellowships: Guggenheim Fellowship, William H. Johnson Prize, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, Art Matters, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ralph Bunche Graduate Fellowship, others. Solo exhibitions: MoMA PS1 (Queens, New York), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (Houston, Texas), Cornerhouse (Manchester, England). Group exhibitions: Walker Arts Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, Museum of Modern Art, others. Projects and performances: Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Performa05, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, others. Collections: Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, private collections. Publication: Anthology, edited by Christopher Y. Lew; includes contributions by Kellie Jones, Huey Copeland, and John P. Bowles. Reviews and interviews: The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Bomb, The Drama Review, New York Magazine. Published writing: The New York Times, PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art, Artforum, exhibition catalogues. Artist in residence: Artpace International Artist in Residence (San Antonio, Texas), MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, New Hampshire) Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (Brooklyn, NY), Studio Museum in Harlem Artist in Residence (New York, NY), others. Owens has been a critic at Columbia University and Yale University, and visiting artist faculty at Cooper Union, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Sarah Peters lives and works in Queens, NY. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and BFA from The University of Pennsylvania and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She is a recipient of awards and residencies including the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, John Michael Kohler Artist Residency, WI; New York Foundation for the Arts; The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and The Sharpe-Wallentas Studio Program. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Fahrenheit Madrid, Spain (2022); Zidoun Bossuyt, Luxembourg (2020); NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, New York, NY (2019); Howards Gallery, Athens, GA (2019); Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, VT (2019); Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY (2018); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY (2017); Eleven Rivington, New York, NY (2015); 4 AM, New York, NY (2015); Bodyrite (with Mira Dancy) at Asya Geisberg, New York, NY (2014); and John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY (2013). Group exhibitions include High Contrast, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Samaritans, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York, NY (2019); No Patience for Monuments, Perrotin Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2019) Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018); Distortions, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY (2018); and Rodin and the Contemporary Figurative Tradition, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2017), among others. Her work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Joel Sternfeld BA, Dartmouth College. Photographer/artist with exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships and a Prix de Rome. Author of American Prospects, On This Site, Stranger Passing, and 10 other books.

Born in Japan, Momoyo Torimitsu has lived and worked in New York City since 1996, when she arrived for the P.S.1 International Studio Program, the grant from Asian Cultural Council. Torimitsu uses a variety of forms to create her work, including kinetic sculpture, time-based installation, inflatable sculptures, video, photographs, performances using the sculptural work, and site-specific projects. 

Torimitsu’s work is inspired by the hypocritical imagery of corporate culture and media stereotypes of cuteness and happiness, reexamined through the lenses of irony and humor. Her best-known projects are a series of life-size realistic crawling businessman robots that symbolize “corporate soldiers.” Torimitsu has performed with them on the streets of business centers around the world. In addition, she has created videos and installations with the sculptures and has created a swarm of miniature businessmen robots who tangle with each other on a global diorama to represent a global business deathmatch. 

Viewers of these works realize that Torimitsu’s exaggerations expose a cultural truth and experience a natural tension between the desire to laugh and a feeling of unsettlement that forces them to reevaluate their own roles in the acceptance of these social norms.

Torimitsu’s has been showing her works internationally includes those at Hawai’i Triennale (2022),  frei_raum Q21 exhibition space/MuseumsQuartier Wien, Austria (2019), ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2019), Manifesta11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016), Shenzhen Biannual of Urbanism\Architecture 2009, Shenzhen China (2009), ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany(2007), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Japan(2007), Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2004) De Apple, Amsterdam Netherland(2000), Tate Gallery, London, UK(1999)

Marion Wilson’s art investigates landscape to foster a connection to self and place. Through paintings, photographs and installations she interrogates our relations to nature at a time when extreme climate change threatens ecosystems, livelihoods, and communities. Wilson builds partnerships with botanists, architects, and urban communities reflecting collective skillsets. Wilson founded MLAB and MossLab (a mobile eco/art lab in a student renovated RV - driving from Syracuse to Miami examining moss species) and 601 Tully – the renovation of an abandoned 1900 residence into a neighborhood art center in upstate NY.; and most recently Wilson re-furbished a houseboat in Vineyard Haven, MA called at 100 Lagoon Pond Road as both her art studio and a public platform working collectively towards restoring lagoon health. 

Wilson has exhibited with New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC; Frederieke Taylor, Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University, and PULSE and SCOPE Miami/Art Basel; as well as numerous commissions for public artworks, most recently Mural Arts Project in Philadelphia.