Visiting artists
Each year the Skidmore Summer Studio Art Program brings renowned artists from diverse disciplines to lecture on their work, engage with students in the studio, and meet in informal gatherings. Distinguished visiting artists including Terry Adkins, Arlene Shechet, Rochelle Feinstein, Polly Apfelbaum and Jessica Stockholder have infused the studios with their creative energies and shared their work with faculty and students. Recent visiting artists have included Jessica Vaughn, Jane Fine, Jamie Diamond, Emilie Clarke, and Paula Wilson.
2020 Visiting Artist
Jason Rohlf
JASON ROHLF makes vibrant and textured acrylic and collage paintings. Layers are painted over and over again; the final result hints at a hidden history as traces of previous layers are revealed as texture. City streets, digital media, and maps have been important influences of Rohlf鈥檚 work. Projects include a collaboration with Oehme Graphics where he created the 鈥淔ield Guides Print Project鈥� that included a suite of unique monotypes and solar plate editions, and most recently a screenprinted edition for Folioleaf. His current project, 鈥楾he Shop Rag Project鈥� was featured in August 2018 at the gallery.
Originally from Milwaukee, Rohlf moved to Brooklyn in 1999. He has exhibited his work across the United States, created a public installation for the MTA, and lectured at Pratt Institute, Bowling Green University, and Lawrence University among others. He is the recipient of the Sam and Adelle Golden Foundation for the Arts Artist in Residency.
More of his work can be seen on
Past Visiting Artists
Jenny Kemp
Jenny Kemp鈥檚 interest in abstraction lies in its ability to satisfy her desire to create images that serve to represent unseen phenomenon. Those results end up dense, intricate, and often abstruse. She paints in acrylic and in gouache, building space and light through the placement of intricate, shifting parallel and concentric lines. Using this stripe motif, she adopts references to mid-20th century abstraction such as op art and minimalism.
Jenny also produces small stop-motion animations, in which she examines 鈥渢he elements of invention and surprise that result from working cyclically between painting and animation鈥� I create biologically-inspired imagery that is built through lines and planes of subtly shifting hue intensities, generating form through a slow additive process that parallels growth in nature.鈥�
More of her work can be seen at
Sharon Bates
Sharon Bates invents fantastic, imaginary assemblages and site-specific installations, mostly composed of real objects that she has collected and inventoried for years. She arranges many of these collections into 鈥渢axonomies鈥�, families of similar things, that appear to have some obscure, historical utility. Bates often reconfigures previously assembled pieces for different settings, creating new works and renaming them. In addition to her sculptural work, she has produced a large body of black and white drawings she has organized in groups of 鈥渁nimals, vegetables and minerals鈥�. Sharon will be on campus this summer to work alongside Patrick Casey in the Skidmore Print Shop to create her first artist print.
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Courtney Mattison '08
Courtney Mattison is an internationally recognized artist and ocean advocate working to inspire policymakers and the public to conserve our changing seas. She hand-sculpts intricately detailed ceramic sculptural works inspired by the fragile beauty of ocean ecosystems鈥攑rimarily coral reefs鈥攁nd the human-caused threats they face. Courtney鈥檚 delicate and often large-scale ceramic sculptural works have been exhibited at prominent science and art venues including the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Tang Museum, the Nova Southeastern University Oceanographic Center and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in an effort to promote awareness for the protection of our blue planet.
To learn more about Courtney Mattison, .
Deborah Zlotsky
Deborah Zlotsky creates interrelationships through cycles of accumulation, rupture and repair. She writes, 鈥淓ach painting materializes out of a friction between intention and coincidence, much like the daily processing required to be in the world.鈥� In a catalog essay, writer Carmen Machado described Zlotsky鈥檚 work as 鈥渁 convergence: of Renaissance images and pop art, of the past and present, of science fiction and reality, of physicality and illusion.鈥� Zlotsky is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and Robischon Gallery in Denver. She has received a NYFA fellowship, residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and her work is in many public and private collections. She teaches at RIS
To learn more about Deborah Zlotsky, .
Sana Musasam
Sana Musasama received her B.A. from in 1973 and her M.F.A. from 1988. Musasama began traveling as a way to recover identity and cultural place. Clay was a geographical catalyst that brought her first to West Africa. She studied Mende pottery in Sierra Leone (1974鈥�75) and ventured later to Japan, China, South America and Cambodia. She has continued her quest, expanding her interests to tribal adornment practices in various indigenous cultures. She is challenged by the concerns surrounding the safety of women, specifically the rituals involving rites of passage, female chastity and the 鈥減urification鈥� of the female body.
Musasama鈥檚 travels have transformed her approach to clay. Realizing that clay is universal, she believes that there is no dichotomy between her life and her work. Her trekking has taught her valuable lessons in observation, and her mission speaks of a global citizen who walks through the artwork, heart first. Musasama鈥檚 work is informed by history, women鈥檚 studies, culture, and her travel journal.
To learn more about Sana Musasama, .
information.
Jessica Vaughn
Jessica Vaughn is a Chicago-born interdisciplinary artist who uses sculpture, photography and installation to discuss belonging and dispossession in urban spaces. To learn more about Jessica Vaughn, .
Jamie Diamond
Jamie Diamond's art is grounded in photography, video and performance and revolves around modes of exchange, intimacy and perception. Through collaboration with strangers, she uses recognizable photographic genres to explore family identity, physical connections and social interactions. Visit for more information.
Borinquen Gallo
Borinquen Gallo's art reconfigures ordinary materials into unexpected combinations, the irreproducible and the commercial, the original and the copy, the permanent and the consumable or even the disposable. Her goal is to elucidate an unexpected beauty from the transformation of mundane materials and to displace the familiar or the mediocre, giving way to the surprising. Visit for more information.
