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Congratulations to our 2012 Visual Arts Fellows!

Eight visual artists were recently awarded Fellowships and will be spending a month at the colony this summer.

Mark Joshua Epstein creates collages that are abstractions made from real-world references. He earned his BFA with a concentration in painting from Tufts University's School of the Museum of Fine Arts and his MFA with distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England.

His work has been exhibited in Newcastle and London, England, and at the TrueSilver Gallery in San Francisco; the Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University (NJ); the Kingston Gallery in Boston; and at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City (NE) among other galleries and art spaces. 

Mark has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Artist Residency, I-Park Artist Residency, and the Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture Artist Residency program in the Yukon, Canada. He has also served as a guest lecturer at Hunter College (NY), and at Northumbria University (UK). 

Gwen Hardie was born and educated in Scotland and has lived and worked in London and Berlin before settling in New York City in 2000. Two forthcoming solo shows include the Hebrides at An Lanntair and Taigh Chearsabhagh in 2012/2013.

Gwen will be represented in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2013 in Washington, DC and in “Territories Unknown” at the Castle Gallery, New Rochelle.

Gwen has shown with the Lennon Weinberg Gallery and Dinter Fine Art, and has been offered residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Her work has been reviewed in UK and US publications such as Art In America, The New York Times, The Glasgow Herald, The New Yorker, The Sunday Herald, Contemporary Visual Art, Time Out, The Scotsman and The Independent.

Private and public collections that have bought her work include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; British Council, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and the Gulbenkian Collection, Lisbon. 

Melanie Kozol is a painter whose work evokes a sense of the familiar, a place remembered or just imagined. She works mostly outdoors using watercolors, sketches and photographs as source material for oil painting.

She earned her BA from Connecticut College (New London, CT) and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (NY). She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME) and was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Her work has been widely exhibited in solo and group shows. She has served as an instructor at the 92nd St. Y School of the Arts since 1999 and has served as an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute (NY) since 2008.

Deanna Lee was born in Carmel, New York, to parents who emigrated from China and Taiwan, and she was raised in suburban Boston. She received degrees from Oberlin College and the Art Institute of Chicago, and studied at the Tyler School of Art in Rome. 

She has had solo shows at RHV Fine Art, Wave Hill, and PS122 in New York City, and her work was recently featured in two- and three-person shows at Lake George Arts Project and Blank Space Gallery in New York. Deanna’s work has been included in group shows at: Abrons Art Center, ArtBridge, Artists Space, The Drawing Center, Lower East Side Printshop, NURTUREart, Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, and ZieherSmith Gallery in New York City.

She has received an Abbey Mural Fellowship from The National Academy, a BRIC Media Fellowship, a Manhattan Graphics Center scholarship, an Asia Society travel grant, and two Chicago CAAP grants. Deanna was a 2004 artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts. http://deannaclee.net

Jim Mottis a Rochester-based painter and part-time environmental consultant. His work tends toward expressive, small-panel landscape painting, although there are occasional large canvases and departures into abstraction. He also hits the road periodically with his Itinerant Artist Project (IAP), staying with strangers, painting the surroundings wherever he ends up, and “exchanging art for hospitality across America.” The IAP has led to some interesting opportunities and experiences, and Jim's claim to fame is having traded art for a speeding ticket in Montana.

Jim earned his MFA in painting from the University of Michgan; a BS in environmental science from SUNY Brockport; and a BA in religion and visual studies from Dartmouth College. He is married to the writer Sonja Livingston.

Claudia Sbrissa received a BFA from York University, Toronto, Canada, a Bachelor’s in Education from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, and an MFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

She has shown extensively nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions and projects include: Gifting Abstraction, curated by Mariangeles Soto-Diaz, Soho20 Gallery, New York, NY; Text, curated by Susan Fleminger, 440 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; this place is a bunch of lines Salon Series: Claudia Sbrissa & Grace Durnford, Salon Ciel, New York, NY;  Marked Differences, curated by Roberta Waddell, Kentler Drawing Space, Brooklyn, NY; The Emerging Landscape, curated by Anna Di Stasi, the Society Contemporary, New York, NY; Utopia is Hard, Courthouse Gallery, Lake George Art Project, Lake George, NY 2009; Uncommon Threads, Walsh Gallery, Seton Hall University, NJ 2009; Exquisite Corpse, curated by Anonda Bell & Caren King, Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2009; Turning Still, Outdoor installation, Schuylkill Environmental Center, Philadelphia, PA, 2008.

Awards include residencies at Woman’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY, Contemporary Artist Center, North Adams, MA; I-Park in East Haddam, CT; Lower Eastside Printshop, NYC; and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME; as well as grants from Queen’s Council on the Arts, and The Canada Council on the Arts. She lives in New York City and teaches in the Fine Arts Department at St. John’s University. 

Roberto Silva-Ortiz is a painter, draftsman and printmaker. He studied drawing and painting at Escuela de Artes Visuales de Santurce in Puerto Rico. At 17 he received an apprenticeship with Rafael Trelles, one of Puerto Rico's most distinguished contemporary painters.

After two years of studies in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Puerto Rico, he was awarded a scholarship to study printmaking at the Academia de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana, Cuba. After his studies in Cuba, he continued his art work in the Canary Islands before moving to Barcelona, Spain.

His work has been exhibited in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Spain, Norway, Macedonia and the United States. Among other honors, Roberto was awarded the 2011-2012 Kahn Family Fellowship at the Ink Shop in Ithaca, NY where he now lives and works.

Elena Soterakisis a Brooklyn based artist. She received her MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts. This past fall past fall her work was included in the American Scenes exhibition at Arti di Amicitia in Amsterdam. 

She was also a winner of the WNYC’s Dialogue of Art contest where her painting, “Street Corner, Coney Island” was exhibited at the Jerome L. Greene Space. Elena has received awards from the Salmagundi Club for outstanding work and was a chosen participant of New York Foundation for the Art’s M.A.R.K. program.