M.F.A. Slide Lecture Series:  Spring 2007

(All lectures will take place at 11:00 a.m. in viewing room 1 in the basement of White Hall on the Mid Town Campus except for the Weir Farm Lecture.)

Don Kimes
January 23, 2007

Artist-educator, Don Kimes will discuss a haunting body of work, which varies from realist landscape painting to large iconic metal pieces and intimate mixed media collages.  The variety of techniques and styles are unified by a consistent obsession with the process of nature and the passage of time.  Mr. Kimes’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Chautauqua Institution, the National Academy of Science, the New York Studio School, the Baltimore Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Kouros Gallery, the National Academy of Design and the Corcoran.  In both 2001 and 2003 he received the Medici Metal at the Florence Biennale.  He is scheduled for a major retrospective at the Fondo Del Sol Museum of Art in Washington, D.C.

Don Kimes has served as director of the prestigious Studio School, as Chairman of the Art Department at American University, as founder and director of the American University M.F.A. program in Italy, and as Artistic Director of the Visual Arts at the Chautauqua Institution.  Each of these institutions has received national and international recognition under his leadership.  In 2004, he received the American University award for “Outstanding Contributions to Academic Development.”

Cathleen Toelke
February 6, 2007

Cathleen Toelke began working as a full-time artist in 1980 and has been creating paintings known for their distinctive, sculptural figures, for over 20 years. Since 1983, her work has been awarded yearly in art annuals including the Communications Arts Illustration Annual, Graphics Design, Print’s Regional Design Annual, The Society of Illustrators, and American Illustration. Toelke was profiled in Print Magazine in 1989, Communication Arts in 1992, and American Artist’s Watercolor Magazine in 1998.  

Toelke is recognized for her editorial paintings on book covers, especially many exotic, emotionally charged ones for celebrated authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Oscar Hiluelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love), and Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate). A favorite project is a mural-sized oil painting for the lobby of The Millennium Hotel/The Premier in Times Square. Toelke has lectured nationwide. 

She currently lives and works in Rhinebeck, NY, north of Manhattan.                   

Paul Smith
February 20, 2007

Mr. Smith was educated at Bowdoin College and received a M.F.A. from Brooklyn College.  He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he received a Governors Fellowship.

Paul Smith has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, with work shown at G.W. Einstein Gallery and Lennon Weinberg Gallery in New York, The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, The New York State Museum, The Hudson River Museum, The Delaware Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, The Museum of Modern Art, Lund, Sweden, The National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, and most recently in New Delhi and Bombay.

His work has been widely reviewed and reproduced in books and catalogs, and he is the recipient of a Pollock/Krasner Foundation grant.  He is familiar to many artists through his insightful writing for “Art in America,” where he has been a critic since 1986.  Paul Smith is particularly interested in ways of seeing, and his lecture will focus on his own work with emphasis on use of perspective.

Daniel Dos Santos
February 27, 2007

Mr. Dos Santos attended the School of Visual Arts, New York from 1996-2000, where graduated in the top of his class with a B.F.A. in Illustration, and received a "Special Achievement" Award.

After graduating with some scholarship money in his pocket, he started painting portraits out of his parent’s basement. Eventually, he was able to rent a studio and found a gallery to represent his work.

He has worked for such clients as GE Engines/Boeing Aircraft, Scholastic Books, Ace Books, The Greenwich Workshop, Anthology Inc., Penguin Books, Bookspan, Tor books, Upper Deck, and Wizards of the Coast. Dan also teaches a painting class a few hours a week at the local college, and now hosts an intern as part of the "Careers in Arts" program.

He currently resides in the small town of Beacon Falls, Connecticut and keeps a studio in Shelton, overlooking the Housatonic River.

Brenda Garand                  
March 6, 2007         

Brenda Garand is a nationally recognized artist and active teacher who has shown extensively in this country and in Europe. She received her BFA from the University of New Hampshire in 1981 and her MFA in 1983 from Queens College. Among her grants are a Fulbright Grant to France, The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Grant to Bayeux, France, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Grant. She has had residences at the Ragdale Foundation, Yaddo, and Atelier Silex. Her more recent exhibitions include An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the National Academy Museum in New York City, the Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as A.V.C. Contemporary Arts Gallery, New York City, 55 Mercer Gallery, New York City, and The Andrews Gallery, College of William and Mary. Her work has been chosen for exhibition by the curators of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Since 1995 she has taught at Dartmouth College where she is Chair of the Studio Art Department.

Brenda Garand’s talent lies in her unique ability to suggest ephemeral frailty and unwavering strength in the same work of art. Her pieces are made from a combination of steel and fabric. The lines are clean and distinct, yet graceful and soft. "The work uses specific objects and abstract form as references to the physical and psychological aspects of the individual. Ideas of aggression and protection, what is hidden and revealed, frailty and strength are conveyed through linear and planar elements made out of wire, fabric, steel, and roofing paper. The work reflects upon the past and present and of lives that are hard, full, and moving," Garand says.

Joan Chiverton                              
March 27, 2007       
with Abe (right) and Tom Kidd

A native of New York City, Joan developed her illustrating style studying with Jack Potter, Robert Weaver, Milton Glaser, Bob Peak and her father, the WPA social realist, Albert Pels. Over the course of her career, Joan has been an illustrator, graphic designer and creative director in Albany, Schenectady and New York City. Her work has appeared in regional and national publications, as well as in ad campaigns and books. Clients include the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Mc Donald’s, the capital Rep Theatre, Entenmanns’s, The Animal Protective Foundation, Capital Region Magazine and Saratoga performing arts Center. Recently she was filmed sketching in Washington Square Park in an episode of Queer eye for the Straight Guy.  

Joan’s work has been included in annuals such as the One Show and the Art Directors Club. Among her awards are the One Show Golds, numerous gold Addys, Nori awards and the American Marketing Association mark of Excellence. Recently, Joan has been represented in the Member’s Open, You Must have been a beautiful Baby and the Air Force art Program shows at the Society of Illustrators in New York City, where she is a member of the board.

Her career has led to many new and exciting experiences, not the least of which was achieving the temporary and honorary rank of Colonel in the US Air Force. Recently, through the Air Force Art Program, she went on a mission documenting training and humanitarian maneuvers in Ohio and South Carolina.               

Stanley Lewis
April 10, 2007

Stanley Lewis, who has an impressive reputation among painters and is one of the most highly respected art educators in the country, has M.F.A. and B.F.A. degrees from Yale and a B.A. from Wesleyan.  He was the recipient of a Danforth Fellowship from 1963-67, and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2005.

He has been a teacher and/or visiting artist at Chautauqua Institute in New York, Smith College, Queens College, Vermont Studio Center, Swarthmore College, Dartmouth College, The New York Studio School, Bard College, Wesleyan University, Mount Holyoke, Yale University, Chicago of Art Institute, Vassar College, Haverford College and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  From 1990 to 2002, he was professor of painting and drawing at American University in Washington, D.C.  He exhibits widely on a national level, and is represented by Salander O’Reilly Gallery in New York, where he had a major exhibition in 2004.

"Stanley Lewis is a landscape painter with a sculptor’s sensibility whose work never lets you forget he was there.  The thick paint on his canvases; the cut, moved and pasted pieces of paper; which create various levels and channels that run through his compositions; the torn, carved, cut-and-torn-again surfaces of his drawings, which build to five and six layers thick; all remind us of the process and hard work of picture making…

It seems, in Lewis’s drawings, that the more they are beaten, revived, and beaten again, the freer and more alive they become.  The drawings are beautiful, but beauty feels unintentional, a by-product of the pursuit of truth.  Lewis, in his desire to open up to his own vision of the world, takes us on a journey through each work’s own suffering, death and resurrection.” Lance Esplund, Modern Painters Summer 2001

Jerry Pinkney
April 24, 2007

Jerry Pinkney is a native of Philadelphia, where he studied at the Philadelphia College of Art (now know as University of the Arts) receiving the Alumni Award in 1992. He has been illustrating children’s books since 1964, working on over 100 titles in over thirty years. He has been recognized for his accomplishments with the rare distinction of five Caldecott Honor Medals, Five Coretta Scott King Awards and three Coretta Scott King Honor Awards.

His work has been translated into eleven languages and published in 14 different countries. He has also been honored by the Society of Illustrators with four gold medals, four Silver medals and the Hamilton King Award. In 2003 he received the honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute of Boston. Furthermore, he has received seven awards for a body of work.

In addition to his publishing career, Mr. Pinkney has had over thirty one-man retrospectives at venues ranging from the Art Institute of Chicago to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. He also has exhibited widely in over one hundred group shows, nationally and internationally.

His clients include the U.S. Postal Service, National Park Service, National Geographic, the Bologna Book Fair in Bologna, Italy and the John F. Kennedy Space Center. In 2001 he was to illustrate and design the White House Christmas Program. In 2003, President Bush appointed him to the National Council for the Arts.

He has taught at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, the University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, and the University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.

His works have been featured in the New York Times, Arts Section, American Artist Magazine, The Horn Book Magazine, The CBS Sunday Morning Show and PBS Reading Rainbow Room Pinkney is also a trustee for the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and the Katonah Museum of Art. He lives with his wife author Gloria Jean, in Westchester County, New York.

Robert Berlind
Weir Farm Lecture, May 8, 2007

Robert Berlind was educated at Yale University, where he received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. in painting, and at Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in Art History.  He has been actively exhibiting an abstraction based, painterly realism for over 30 years, with individual and group shows at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York, the National Academy of Design, New York, the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, and the Davenport Museum of Art, Davenport, Iowa. His work is currently in a group Exhibition at the Palmer Museum of Art, State College, PA,

Writing in the New York Times, Roberta Smith comments, “The drama of his art emanates increasingly from the paint itself and from the play between depicted and real light and between depicted and real fluidity.  The sense of the artist’s hand, mind and eyes increases, evoking oddly, both Willem de Kooning and John Singer Sargent.  But Mr. Berlind anchors his increasingly bravura style in reality, where it is leavened by a palpable sense of nature’s power and inevitability.”

Mr. Berlind is the recipient of an award in painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  He is represented by Tibor de Nagy gallery in New York.

He is a frequent contributor to Art in America and has published other writings on art and artists (This lecture is made possible through the generous support of the Weir Farm Art Center and will be held at their site at 735 Nod Hill Road Wilton, CT 06897 - (203) 761-9945.)

For more information about the M.F.A. program, please contact Margaret Grimes, M.F.A. Coordinator at 203-837-8402 or Tony Zatzick, M.F.A. Assistant at 203-837-8881.