EDM, Studio Art, Art Education and Art History Faculty:


Molly Emma Aitken
Asociate Professor and chair of the Art Department

Molly Emma Aitken is Assistant Professor of Asian Art. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2001 with a concentration on the art of South Asia. She has curated traveling exhibitions on South Asian jewelry and contemporary folk quilts, and has published numerous articles on Mughal and Rajput painting. Her book publications include When Gold Blossoms: Indian Jewelry from the Susan L. Beningson Collection (Philip Wilson, 2004) and The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (Yale University Press, 2010). Aitken has explored feminist approaches to South Asian art, questions of interpretation, contextual studies, problems of Occidental conceptual taxonomies in non-western studies and the possibilities for formal analysis and connoisseurship in contemporary art history.

Colin Chase
Professor

Colin Chase is a sculptor who uses a variety of materials and devices to encourage contemplation. Ideas, forms, textures, synergistically juxtaposed and nestled in incongruent combinations which challenge formal spatial logic, as well as quick intellectual responses. He is represented by June Kelly Gallery in New York. His work has been included in one person and group exhibitions in several galleries including Jamaica Arts Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Neuberger Museum of Art. He is a former resident of the Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum and Longwood Studios. He received public commissions from the Queens Hospital and the Malcolm X Memorial.

Joshua I. Cohen
Assistant Professor

Joshua I. Cohen (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2014) is an art historian specializing in 20th-century Francophone West Africa, Southern Africa, and connections to Europe and the US. His writing has appeared in The Art Bulletin, African Arts, The Journal of Black Studies, and The Burlington Magazine. He teaches courses in African and global modernisms; the Harlem Renaissance; histories of portraiture; and postcolonialism and contemporary art. He also regularly teaches Art 10000, Introduction to the Visual Arts of the World.

Marit Dewhurst
Associate Professor

Marit Dewhurst is the Director of Art Education and Visiting Assistant Professor in Art Education. She received her doctorate in education from Harvard University in 2009 where she worked on the intersection of activist art-making and social justice education. She has worked as an educator and program coordinator in multiple settings both nationally and abroad including community centers, museums, juvenile detention centers, and international development projects. Most recently, she founded and coordinated The Museum of Modern Art’s free studio arts programs for teens. Publications include chapters in several books on the use of art in social justice education and articles in The Journal of Art Education and The Journal of Research Practice. In addition, she has co-curated an exhibition on traditional art and HIV/AIDS education with partners at The Michigan State University Museum. Her research and teaching interests include social justice education, community-based art, youth empowerment, and the role of the arts in community development both locally and abroad.

Carl Fudge
Assistant Professor

Carl fudge’s work incorporates printmaking, painting, and recently sculpture. His work has been exhibited extensively, both nationally and Internationally. Museum show venues include The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Seattle Museum, The Denver Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Royal Academy, London, The Seiji Togo Museum of Art, Shinjuku, Japan, The Whanki Museum, Seoul, South Korea and The Daejeon Municipal Museum of Art, Daejeon, South Korea among others.

He is represented in New York by Ronald Feldman Gallery and by Gallerie Takako Richard in Paris, France.

Leopold Fuentes
Assistant Professor

Leo Fuentes’s artwork involves diverse materials on wood and other alternative painting surfaces. The content of his work investigates the ironically counterproductive aspects of technology as it alters and deforms the earth. He holds an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. He also studied at California State University, Los Angeles and Academia San Carlos/UNAM, Mexico City. His exhibitions include The Betty Rymer Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Mary Leigh Block Gallery, Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago, Reese Bullen Gallery, Arcata, CA, The Prague Art Institute, Prague, Czech Republic, Museo Michoacan, Morelia, Mexico, Kobe Municipal Gallery, Kobe, Japan, Mercer Gallery, NY, National Academy Museum, NY, Burchfield Art Center, Buffalo, NY, and Albany State Museum, NY.

Ellen Handy
Associate Professor

Ellen Handy is a historian, curator and critic of photography and modern art. She teachers courses in the history of photography, art of the United States, art criticism, and research methods in art history. Previously, she was Executive Curator of Visual Collections at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, Senior Research Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a regular columnist for Arts Magazine. She received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and her BA from Barnard College of Columbia University. Her research interest include landscape and urban imagery in photography and other mediums, intersections of art and science in 19th century photography, women and photography, connoisseurship in photography, printed ephemera, and early modernism in visual and literary culture in the United States.

Abby Kornfeld
Assistant Professor

Abby Kornfeld specializes in medieval art and architecture. She holds a joint appointment with the program of Jewish Studies in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2013. Her work focuses on the intersections between Jewish, Christian, and Islamic art across the medieval Mediterranean. Her forthcoming book resituates three Hebrew illuminated manuscripts within the broader context of medieval art in late fourteenth century Spain. Her research has won the support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Wexner Foundation. In addition, she curated an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles on the eventful and often tumultuous lives of medieval manuscripts after the rise of the printing presses.

Craig Houser
Lecturer

Craig Houser has a B.A. in art history from Carleton College, an M.A. from Hunter College, and an M.Phil. from the CUNY Grad Center. His scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary art in relationship to issues related to gender and sexuality, as well as institutional and social politics. He also has substantial experience working in museums as a curator and educator. He was a curatorial fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and an assistant curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In addition, he was also an editor for College Art Association, which publishes The Art Bulletin and Art Journal. Houser’s publications include Rachel Whiteread: Vienna Holocaust Memorial, in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (University of California Press) and The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing: A History of CAA Publications, in The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: The College Art Association and the Visual Arts since 1911 (Rutgers University Press).

Anna Indych-López
Professor

Professor Indych-López received her Ph.D. in Art History in 2003 from The Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. She specializes in the modern art of Latin America, specifically Mexico, Mexican Muralism, and the reception of Mexican modernity in the United States in the 1930s. Her work focuses on institutional critique, cross-cultural perceptions, reception analysis, and post-colonial theory. Her first book, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, is forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press in their new series “Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas.” She teaches graduate courses on Euro-American modernism, the modern art of Latin America, the contemporary art of Latin America, and the modern art of Mexico.

Lise Kjaer
Lecturer

Lise Kjaer received her Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2008. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in twentieth century and contemporary art, art history survey and MFA seminars. Her area of research includes issues of identity in modern and contemporary art, and global art history. Kjaer’s dissertation Awakening the Spiritual: James Turrell and Quakerism considered the artist’s light installations in view of his renewed interest in Quakerism, Quaker tenets, history and tradition. Current research involves an anthology (co-edited with Dr. Will Wroth) on the scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s influence on twentieth century art, tracing the impact of the writer and curator’s publications, exhibitions and scholarly involvement with South Asian art on twentieth century American, Asian and European art and art history. Kjaer has previously received an MFA with Distinction from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland in 1992. She has exhibited internationally in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland and the United States, and been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Bamse Kragh-Jacobsen’s Award, and been a fellow of NIFCA, a Nordic artist in residency program in Helsinki, Finland; The Danish Art Council’s Residency at Hirsholmen; TSKW, The Studios of Key West; The Danish Visual Artists’ Berlin Residency Program; and Jeckels Hotel AiR, Denmark. Along with her scholarly work in art history, Kjaer continues her art practice exhibiting sculptures and installation pieces that are often time-based, ephemeral and participatory inviting the viewer to become a part of the work

Sylvia Netzer
Professor

Sylvia Netzer has had several recent one-person exhibitions: Disturbing, 2003, Appetites, 2004, and Hopeful Monsters, 2007. She has participated in many group shows, including the Fat Attitudes show at Columbia University, the encaustic exhibition at William Paterson College, and the auction for the Watermill Center for Arts and Humanities. She had a residency at the Glen Gerry Brick factory in York, Pennsylvania in 2006, and in 2007 she co-curated an exhibition, Women Touch: Ceramics at A.I.R. Gallery. She also curated several shows at Gallery 128 on the Lower East Side and at A.I.R. Gallery and was included in “One True Thing” at the A.I.R. and Putney School, Vermont, curated by Dena Muller. She was twice-nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany grant, 2005 and 2007, and for the annual exhibition of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2006. She teaches courses in all areas of ceramics, on the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Harriet Senie
Professor

Harriet F. Senie is director of the MA program in museum studies and teaches the required museum studies seminars in that area. She is the author of The ‘Tilted Arc’ Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (2002), Contemporary Public Sculpture (1992), and co-editor of Critical Issues in Public Art (1992; 1998), as well as numerous articles and essays on public art, memorials, and audience response. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Transforming American Memorials: From Symbolic Cemetery to a Light in the Sky: Vietnam to 9/11.

Tom Thayer
Associate Professor

Tom Thayer teaches in the Painting/ Drawing and Foundations area, and in the Studio MFA Program. Thayer utilizes a wide spectrum of mediums in his artistic practice, including animated videos, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, performance, collaborative work- shops, and experiments in empirical education. Often, these modes are presented together, in an immersive experience. His work has been exhibited at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Sculpture Center, The Kitchen, International Project Space, Birmingham, UK, ARTSPACE, New Haven, CT, MoMA PS1, White Columns, The Living Theater, Issue Project Room, Printed Matter, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, BBC Radio 3, and other national and international venues. He is represented by Derek Eller Gallery, New York and, as the collaborative team Miko + Thayer, by Eleven Rivington Gallery, New York.