Spring 2011
Ken Johnson
Ken Johnson was born in Montclair, New Jersey. He attended Brown University and the State University of New York at Albany. Johnson is a writer for the arts pages of The New York Times, where he covers gallery and museum exhibits. His journalism career has included writing on contemporary art for several art magazines, newspapers and publications. He was the art critic for the Boston Globe from 2006-2007. Johnson is also an educator, having taught courses in painting, drawing, electronic arts, art history, and art criticism at various universities in upstate New York. He currently teaches a writing seminar in the School of Visual Arts in art criticism and writing. Johnson lives in New York City.
Eleanor Heartney
Eleanor Heartney's books include: Art and Today, 2008; After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, 2007; Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, 2004 and Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order, 2006 and Postmodernism, 2001. She was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2008. Heartney, is contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress. Since 2003, she has been Co-President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. She was also a recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992. Heartney is a past Visiting Art Critic with Montclair State University’s MFA Program and will return next semester as the MFA Visiting Critic for the 2011 academic year.
Jill Conner
Jill Conner received an M.A. in Art History and Criticism, from SUNY-Stony Brook. Conner is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, International Association of Art Critics, and the College Art Association. She is the New York Editor for Whitehot Magazine, a contributor to Art in America, Afterimage, ArtUS, and Sculpture Magazine. Conner has worked with Contemporary Magazine in London, the Brooklyn Rail, ArtUS, and Whitewall.
Elisabeth Condon
After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees for painting at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Elisabeth Condon migrated to New York. Since 2003 Condon divides her time between Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and Tampa, FL. The recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and Florida Individual Artist Grant, Condon’s artist residencies include Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, Red Gate in Beijing, Note Bene in Cadaques and Fountainhead in Miami. Her recent solo exhibitions and projects include Da Feng Gallery, Beijing, Grantpirrie, Sydney, the Albany Museum of Art, GA, Dorsch Gallery, Miami and Lesley Heller Workspace, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the US Embassy, Beijing, and the Girls Club Collection, Fort Lauderdale, FL. Condon’s itinerant mode inspires her to reconsider landscape through the simultaneous perspectives of Chinese scrolls. She combines sketches and images of her travels to Asia, Australia and the United States to create spaces for imaginary wandering
Liselot van der Heijden
Liselot van der Heijden produces installations, videos, objects and photographs. Recurring themes in van der Heijden's works are control and power of the gaze and 'Nature' as a cultural/political idea and anthropomorphic projection. Over the past decade, van der Heijden has exhibited at various institutions throughout the US and Europe. Her work was shown at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Musée d'art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg and Centre Contemporain d'Istres in France, Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, ZKM Zentrum fur Medien Technologie in Karlsruhe, Germany. In the US venues include Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA, the Bates Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine, Quotidian Gallery, San Francisco and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. In New York City she has shown works at the New Museum, the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, LMAK Projects, Luxe Gallery, Schroeder Romero, Exit Art, Artist Space, White Box, Momenta Art and the Dumbo Arts Festival, among other venues. Van der Heijden received a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and numerous residencies from the Experimental Television Center. She has a BFA from the Cooper Union and a MFA from Hunter College. Van der Heijden has lectured on her work in several venues such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Montserrat College of Art. From 1999 till 2005 she was a faculty member at the Cooper Union and Pratt Institute. Van der Heiden currently lives and works in New York City and Haarlem (NL).
Stephen Westfall
Stephen Westfall is Co-chair of Painting at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Westfall received a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe and has been widely reviewed, most recently in Time Out New York, New York Times, Art in America, New Criterion, Partisan Review, and L'Express. His writing has been published in Art in America, Arts Magazine, Flash Art, and other magazines. Westfall is represented by Lennon Weinberg Gallery, New York; Galerie Lock, St. Gallen (Switzerland); Galerie Paal, Munich; Galerie Zürcher, Paris. His work is held in collections of Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (Denmark); Albertina Museum, Vienna; Baltimore Museum of Art; Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Utica; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. He is a recipient of Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists; two awards from American Academy of Arts and Letters; three fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts; and two fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts. Westfall was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University.
John F. Simon
John F. Simon, Jr. was born in Louisiana. He has exhibited at several venues including the Gering & Lopez Gallery, the Galeria Javier Lopez in Madrid and has had a retrospective at Collezione Maramotti in Bologna, Italy. He has received commissions and awards from the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Aldrich Museum for Contemporary Art. His work is found in prominent museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. Simon currently lives and works in Orange County, New York
Simon Pope
Artist Simon Pope lives and works in London, UK. He represented Wales at their inaugural exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Fine Art (2003). Recent work includes the film Memory Marathon (2010), the solo-exhibition A Common Third at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London and Carved From Memory at Spacex, Exeter. He is author of the book London Walking (2000) and as a member of I/O/D he produced the Webby Award-winning new media artwork, The Web Stalker (1997). Pope's presentation will reflect on examples of his recent work in relation to walking, their various social modalities and conventions of landscape representation.