AIB MFA in Visual Arts Faculty

Anthony Apesos
Kamrooz Aram
Jan Avgikos
Fia Backström
Hannah Barrett
Judith Barry
Deborah Davidson
John Kramer
Michael Newman
Oscar Palacio
Cesare Pietroiusti
Constanze Ruhm
Sunanda K. Sanyal
Julia Scher
Barry Schwabsky
Ben Sloat
Laurel Sparks
Stuart Steck
Oliver Wasow
Deb Todd Wheeler

Past Visiting Artist Faculty

Faculty Artwork Gallery

Anthony Apesos | website
Anthony Apesos is a painter who studied at Vassar College (BA), Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Certificate) and the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College (MFA). Selected one-person shows: Andrea Marquit Fine Arts, Boston; F.A.N. Gallery, Philadelphia; More Gallery, Philadelphia; Villanova University Art Gallery; Michael Dunev Gallery, San Francisco. Selected group shows: Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; Amos Eno Gallery, New York; Artists' Choice Museum, New York; Philadelphia Sketch Club, Art Alliance, Philadelphia. He was a critic for the New Art Examiner. Apesos was Chair of the Fine Arts department at the Art Institute and was the founding director of the AIB MFA program in Visual Arts. He is currently Professor in the Fine Arts Department at AIB.  Awards include Kress Traveling Fellowship from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia; grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts.

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Kamrooz Aram, Visiting Artist Faculty Spring 2011 | website
Kamrooz Aram's work explores themes relating to systems of belief, including nationalist, religious and artistic ideologies.  He uses iconography as well as abstraction to present the viewer with imagery that challenges reductive and binaristic ways of seeing some of the social, cultural and political issues of today.  Kamrooz Aram was born in Shiraz, Iran.  He received a BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art and an MFA from Columbia University.  He has been included in numerous exhibitions internationally, including the Prague Biennial in 2003, Greater New York 2005, the Busan Biennial 2006 and his solo exhibitions include MassMoCA in 2006 and LA><ART in 2010. 

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Jan Avgikos
Jan Avgikos is an art critic and historian who is based in New York City. She is a Contributing Editor with Artforum International magazine, where she regularly publishes reviews. She is widely published and her writings appear internationally in magazines, museum catalogues, and anthologies of critical writing. Recent and forthcoming texts include a monograph on Katy Grannan (Aperture Books) and an essay on Roni Horn for Dia's ongoing series of collected lectures from the Robert Lehman series. Recent and forthcoming catalogue essays include Lili Dujourie (for the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels) and Matts Leiderstam (for the Magasin in Stockholm). She is a recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather, awarded by the College Art Association for distinction in arts criticism, and was a Mellon Fellow in graduate studies in art history at Columbia University. Ms. Avgikos is an adjunct member of the faculty for the graduate visual arts program at Columbia University, as well as the graduate visual arts program at NYU. She is also a professor at the School for the Visual Arts in Manhattan. In addition, she lectures regularly for the Dia Foundation for contemporary arts and at Sotheby's in their graduate American Art program.

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Fia Backström, Visiting Artist Faculty Fall 2011
Fia Backström's work takes on a diagnostic and propositional engagement with the symbolic and real construction of social agency. Backström's employment of display mechanisms provokes interrelations between pedagogical methods, modes of corporate address and political rhetoric. Her practice frequently includes peers, visitors and institutional staff alike, and spans a wide range of media such as text, typography, photography, broadsides, objects, performances and environments. Backström represents Sweden at the Venice biennial 2011. Her work has been staged at numerous international galleries and institutions including the Whitney Biennial; White Columns; Murray Guy Gallery, New York; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Depo, Istanbul; and the United Nations Plaza in Berlin. Her writings and interviews has been published in publications such as ArtForum, Art on Paper, North Drive Press and Pacemaker.

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Hannah Barrett | website
Hannah Barrett is a figurative painter who has exhibited and taught extensively throughout New England. Recent exhibitions include Body of Work at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. 2010 and “Tales from the House of Gibson” at the Gibson House Museum, Boston and Clothes make the Man at Childs Gallery, Boston in 2010. Barrett was an Artadia award recipient in 2007. Barrett has taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence among numerous other schools. Hannah Barrett’s work is in the permanent collection of the DeCordova Museum and the Boston Public Library, and can be seen in the Drawing Center Viewing Program, and at Hannahbarrett.net. Barrett is represented by the Howard Yezerski Gallery and the Childs Gallery in Boston.

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Judith Barry
Judith Barry is an artist and writer whose work crosses a number of disciplines: performance, installation, sculpture, architecture, photography and new media. She has exhibited internationally at such venues as the Berlin Biennale, Venice Biennale of Art/Architecture, Sao Paolo Biennale, Nagoya Biennale, Carnegie International, Whitney Biennale, and the Sydney Biennale, among others. In 2000 she won the Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts, and in 2001 she was awarded "Best Pavilion" at the Cairo Biennale.  She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. Public Fantasy, a collection of Barry’s essays, was published by the ICA in London (1991). Recent publications include Projections: mise en abyme (1997), the catalogue for The Study for the Mirror and Garden in Granada, Spain (2003) and Body without Limits, Salamanca, Spain (2009).  She has taught and lectured extensively in the USA, Japan and Europe. Recent full-time teaching positions include ACT at MIT, Boston (2002-2003) and the Merz Akademie,Stuttgart, Germany (2003–2004).  Her work is included in the collection of MoMA, NYC, Whitney Museum, NYC, Generali Foundation, Vienna, MCA, San Diego, Pompidou Center, Paris, Le Caixa, Barcelona, FNAC, Paris, Goetz collection, Munich, Frac Lorraine, Metz, CIFO, Miami among many others world-wide. A survey of her work is traveling in Europe, most recently Berardo Museum, Lisbon, Portugal in 2010. The first installment of her project Cairo stories premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in March 2011.

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Deborah Davidson | website
Deborah Davidson received her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University and her B.A. from Binghamton University.  She currently teaches Visual Books at the Art Institute of Boston and is also part of the core faculty in the MFA program there.  She was the curator at the New Center for Arts and Culture, Boston for six years. She exhibits widely, including shows at the Fredrick Meir garden and Sculpture Park, part of Artprize, William Scott Gallery, Plum Gallery, Jane Deering Gallery, Tufts University Art Gallery, Art Complex, Montserrat College of Art.  She was the featured artist in the 2005 issue of Agni, the BU literary magazine. Deborah's work is in many private and public collections, including Yale University, Wellesley College, Boston Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Deborah's independent curatorial projects include an exhibit at Gallery 360 at Northeastern University entitled What is Contained: The Book As Subject And Object.  She has had solo exhibitions at the Danforth Museum of Art and the Kingston Gallery, and recently was an Artist in Residence at Northeastern University.

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John Kramer
John Kramer is an artist and graphic designer. His most recent solo exhibition, Interesting and Dull Shapes, at the University Hall Gallery at The Art Institute of Boston, featured photographs, monotypes, and installation related to the Forest Hills Cemetery. He has also shown digital photography, video, installation work, and monotypes at HallSpace Gallery (Boston), DNA Gallery (Provincetown), film/video festivals (Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), and the ICA Boston. His art and design backgrounds overlap with his interest in the performing arts, for which he has done sets, props, and costumes. He currently runs his own graphic design business, and is on the faculty of The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University's Master of Fine Arts program.

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Michael Newman
Michael Newman is Associate Professor in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College in the University of London. He holds degrees in Literature and Art History, and a doctorate in Philosophy from the Katholeike Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He has written extensively on contemporary art, including essays on James Coleman, Alfred Jensen, Hanne Darboven, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Giuseppe Penone, John Stezaker, Fiona Tan and Dara Birnbum. An essay on drawing was included in The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act (Tate and The Drawing Center, 2003). He has curated several exhibitions, including Tacita Dean at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2000), on whom his essays have been published by Tate Britain (2001) and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2003). He has published the following monographic books: Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) (Afterall and MIT, 2006), Jeff Wall: Works and Writings (Poligrafa, 2007), and Price, Seth (JRP Ringier, 2010). He co-edited the volume of essays Re-Writing Conceptual Art (Reaktion Books, 1999). In philosophy he has published essays on Kant, Nietzsche, Derrida, Levinas, and Blanchot. He is currently working on books on appropriation, and on the trace in drawing and philosophy.

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Oscar Palacio | website
Oscar Palacio is a Columbian-born, Boston-based photographer. He received his MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art + Design in 1998 and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami in 1992. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover. His work has been exhibited at Smith College Museum of Art, Julie Saul Gallery, Bonni Benrubi Gallery, Howard Yezerski Gallery, and Elias Fine Art among others. His work has been reviewed in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, Tema Celeste, ArtNexus, and Art on Paper. In 2004 and 2005, he was Edward E. Elson artist-in-residence at the Addison Gallery of American Art where he had his first solo museum exhibition, Unfamiliar Territory, in the fall of 2005. He is an adjunct professor in Studio Foundation at the Massachusetts College of Art + Design. Recent exhibitions include Are We There Yet? at G.A.S.P. in Boston and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. In August 2008, he was artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse University.

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Cesare Pietroiusti
Cesare Pietroiusti was the Coordinator of the Oreste projects, 1997–2001 and cofounder of Nomads & Residents, New York, 2000. Currently, he is a professor at the Laboratorio di Arti Visive, IUAV University, Venice and a member of the Advisory Board and co-curator of the CSAV, Fondazione Ratti, Como.  Recent solo exhibitions include “Paradoxycal Economies”, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Artworks that Ideas can Buy, Wilkinson Gallery, London and Regali e regole. Prendere, dare, sbirciare nel museo with Stefano Arienti, MAMbo, Bologna. Recent group exhibitions include the 28th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, 2nd International Biennale, Athens, Performa 07, NYC, and the 3rd Tirana Biennial, Tirana.

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Constanze Ruhm | website
Constanze Ruhm is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna and Berlin. Her films and installations have been exhibited internationally at the Busan Biennale, Korea, 3rd Berlin Biennale, and the Venice Biennale among many other venues. In 2004, she had a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle, Bern. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Engholm Gallery and Generali Foundation, Vienna; and 57 Berlinale, Berlin. She has also curated a number of exhibitions and film screening programs for Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; Secession Vienna; Center for Art and Media Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany to mention just a few. She has been a Professor for Film and Video at Merz Academy Stuttgart and currently is Professor for Art and Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

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Sunanda K. Sanyal
Originally from India, Sunanda K. Sanyal is an art historian, with an MFA in Visual Arts (painting and installation) from UCSD (1990); an MFA in Art History from Ohio University (1993); and a PhD in Art History from Emory University (2000). He is interested in politics of representation and identity; representation and otherness; contemporary artists from former colonies in global discourses; art pedagogy in nineteenth-century Europe and their colonies. Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Studies at AIB, Sanyal has chaired panels on contemporary artists of color at various conferences, including the College Art Association, the African Studies Association, and the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. In 2008, he produced and directed a documentary film (58 mins) entitled A Homecoming Spectacle, which explores the visual culture of Durga Pujo, an annual religio-cultural festival held in Kolkata, India. Some of Sanyal's publications in art history and criticism include: Medi(t)ations of a Decentered Self: the Art of Jayanta Roy (catalog essay), Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India, 2010; Modernism and Cultural Politics in East Africa: Cecil Todd's Drawings of the Uganda Martyrs, African Arts, spring 2006; Kabiito Richard's Paintings: A Local Reinvention in a Global Perspective, African Arts, summer 2004; The Local and Beyond: Francis Nnaggenda's Sculptural Innovations, NKA, spring/summer, 2003; Transgressing Borders, Shaping an Art History: Rose Kirumira and Makerere's Legacy (In Tobias Doering ed. African Art, Visual Culture and the Museum: Sights/Sites of Creativity and Conflict.)

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Julia Scher
Julia Scher is a video, photo, and installation artist who often works with surveillance. Surveillance as art began for her with an investigation into the sets, sounds, and systems of the image of closed circuit television. She began to include cameras with the paintings in pieces such as Hardly Feel It Going In, 1985. She began to conceptualize this as landscape under control: dangerous and seductive. Increasingly, she saw surveillance as implanted in social space. The "eyes" of camera systems demand space and their inhabitants "open up" for electronic observation and consumption. Scher reminds us of the fact that we are often unaware of the dangers constituted by the increasingly omnipresent surveillance systems, constantly monitoring us in the public space and in our private rooms. Security By Julia, started in 1988, combines interactive surveillance apparatuses with fake guards, where ordinary people play the role of artist-on-alert. Her work has been widely exhibited in Europe, Asia, and North America. Her books include Tell Me When You’re Ready, PFM Publishers, 2002 and Julia Scher: Always There, Lukas and Sternberg Publishers, 2002. For more information, visit her online profile through MIT's Visual Arts Program.

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Ben Sloat | website
Ben Sloat is a photographer and multi media artist. Recent solo shows include those at the ACC Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2009), Front Gallery, Oakland (2009), 126 Gallery, Galway, Ireland (2010), MMX, Berlin, Germany (2010), and the Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston (2010). His work has been reviewed in Circa (Ireland), The Taipei Times, The Oakland Tribune, The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Boston Phoenix. He was a 2009 Faculty Fulbright Scholar to Taiwan, working on a photo project documenting rural communities. His writings on photography have been published in Big, Red & Shiny, American Suburb X, Exposure Magazine, and Aperture Magazine.

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Laurel Sparks | website
Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who is represented by Howard Yezerski Gallery (Boston). Sparks’ work has been shown at Dodge Gallery (NYC), The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Decordova Museum (Lincoln, MA), CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Ramapo College, Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery, and Gallery at Green Street (Boston). Awards include a Berkshire Taconic Artist Grant, SMFA Alumni Traveling Scholarship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, and an Elaine de Kooning Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed by the Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix and Big Red & Shiny. Sparks holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA from Bard College. She currently teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University MFA Program.

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Stuart Steck
During the past decade, Stuart Steck has worked as both a curator and academic. Although he was originally trained in the field of decorative arts, his current interests focus on postwar art and critical theory. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at The Art Institute of Boston since 1998. In addition to serving on the faculty at AIB, he has also held teaching positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, Boston University, and Suffolk University. Most recently, Steck has published essays on Ellsworth Kelly and Sung Ho Kim, with whom he recently collaborated on an architectural project. He is also the producer of the Short Attention Span Digital Video Festival, which showcases the work of students from around the world. Over the years, Steck has received research grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Boston University Humanities Foundation. Steck received his BA in History from Cornell University and his PhD in Art History from Boston University. His dissertation was entitled Veiling the Subject: Ellsworth Kelly and the Discourses of Modernism.

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Oliver Wasow | website
Photographer Oliver Wasow was born in Madison Wisconsin in 1960. His work is currently represented by the Kathleen Cullen Gallery in New York City. He has had a number of one person exhibitions, including shows at the Janet Borden Gallery, Tom Solomon Gallery in Los Angeles, The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, and Galerie De Poche in Paris, France. His work has also been included in numerous national and international group shows, including such benchmark exhibitions as Image World at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC, and The Photography of Invention at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His photographs are included in a number of private collections and are also represented in various prominent public collections, including The Whitney Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Reviews of his work have been featured in most major art publications, including, among others, Art Forum, ArtNews, and The New York Times. He has been the recipient of various grants and awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 1999 and, in 2000, his second New York State Council on the Arts Grant.

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Deb Todd Wheeler | website
Deb Todd Wheeler is a Boston area artist who produces installations, sculptural objects, and various other media on themes of man’s interaction with the environment. From power generating interactive installations to cataloging prints of plastic as a possible new species of marine life, Wheeler’s work explores the aesthetic impact of human productivity in the natural world. In Art in America, Ann Wilson Lloyd wrote that Wheeler’s work has  “a surface cheeriness, but a subtext of futility.” This year she exhibited at the ICA at MeCA in the exhibit EXCHANGE, a solo exhibit at Miller Block Gallery, and was included in the Montserrat Biennial, “Salt of the Earth”, as well as the Megapolis Audio Art and Documentary Festival. Other recent solo exhibits include the Gallery at Green Street, and the Project Space at the John Michael Kohler Art Center. This year her work was chosen by both the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix as “Best Exhibitions of 2010”, and was awarded the Best Solo Exhibition and Best New Media of 2010 in the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research annual awards. She has received grants from the Artist Resource Trust, the LEF Contemporary Work Fund Artist grant in Inter-media, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Sculpture and Installation, among others.

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Past Visiting Artist Faculty

• Kamrooz Aram (Spring 2011)
• Barry Schwabsky (Fall 2010)
• Carol Squiers (Spring 2010)
• Cory Arcangel (Fall 2009)
• Andreas Fogarasi (Spring 2009)
• Adam McEwen (Fall and Spring 2008)
• Dike Blair (Fall 2007)
• Carrie Moyer (Spring 2007)

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