Vermont College of Fine Arts
36 College Street
Montpelier, VT 05602
MFA in Visual Art at VCFA summer residency
The first low-residency program in visual art in the country, the MFA in Visual Art at Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) welcomes visitors to our July 23–August 1, 2015 residency in Montpelier, VT.
Student exhibitions
July 28–31
Graduating student exhibition opening: Monday, July 27, 7pm
VCFA Gallery
36 College Street
Montpelier, VT 05602
Hours: 9am–6pm daily
Artist-in-residence lecture with Salome Chasnoff
“Art, Social Practice, and Community Health”
Noble Lounge
Saturday, July 25, 9am
Over the past 25 years, filmmaker and installation artist Salome Chasnoff has collaborated with a wide range of underrepresented communities including homeless HIV-affected youth in Chicago, hospital workers in rural Malawi, people with disabilities, older sex workers, and women in the prison system. Her social practice embraces and interrogates the indivisibility of the making of media and the making of relationships. Looking through the lens of community health, this presentation will also consider a broader question: Can social practice art lead to authentic community-based solutions, or is it merely a feel-good distraction from apparently insoluble social problems?
Salome Chasnoff is a Chicago-based filmmaker, installation artist, and educator. Her work has been seen across the U.S. and internationally in film festivals, galleries, and museums. Chasnoff has an MA in Theatre and Performance and a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She teaches in Film/Video/New Media/Animation and Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
MFA in Visual Art symposium
Guest speakers Christa Donner and Stephen Andrews
College Hall Chapel
Wednesday, July 29, 9am
Access to medical care is a lived reality for artists as much as it is for all people. Not all artists make artwork about health or access to care; nevertheless, it is something that conditions our experience as cultural producers. For that reason, the various strategies that artists do use to address health and healthcare access offers us insights about the ways artists develop their agency in moving from the personal to the social and the political.
For our Visual Art summer residency symposium, the MFA in Visual Art faculty have invited three artists who have engaged these ideas in different ways through their art making and research. From documenting struggles for health justice, to using art to create awareness and collective agency around health access, to personal reflections of remembrance and solidarity with those impacted by health struggles, each of our guests explores the relationship between art-making and health-making through a range of media, including video, drawing, murals, social practice, and painting.
Christa Donner reimagines the architecture of the human body through her ink and collage works on paper, small-press publications, and large-scale wall drawings. In 2012, Donner founded Cultural ReProducers, a creative platform supporting cultural workers raising children. Donner’s work has been exhibited internationally, including projects for The Worldly House at dOCUMENTA 13 (Kassel, Germany); BankArt NYK (Yokohama, Japan); Chiaki Kamikawa Contemporary Art (Paphos, Cyprus); the Museum Bellerive (Zurich, Switzerland); the Centro Columbo Americano (Medellin, Colombia); and throughout the United States.
Stephen Andrews is a Toronto-based painter. Over the past 25 years, he has exhibited his work in Canada, the US, Brazil, Scotland, France and Japan. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Belkin Art Gallery, the Schwartz Collection, and Harvard, as well as in many private collections. His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media including drawing, animation and recently painting.
All are free and open to the public. For more information on our low-residency MFA in Visual Art program, see our page here or contact an admissions counselor to schedule a visit directly here.
