ON EDGE : a collage invitational
Todd Bartel / Karim Hamid / Philip Kuznicki / Michael Oatman / Jeff Quinn / Rodger Stevens / Werner Sun / Melissa Zarem
On view: September 13 - October 31
Reception: Saturday, Sept. 13, 4-6 pm
Todd Bartel
Todd Bartel received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 concluding his studies at RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome. In 1990, he was a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.) and the Liquitex Art Materials Award. He earned an MFA in Painting from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993. Bartel’s work assumes the forms of painting, drawing, and sculpture in a collage and assemblage format. His work investigates the interconnected histories of collage and landscape and the roles of nature and natural resources in Western culture. Bartel was awarded a Connecticut Council on the Arts Fellowship Grant in 2000 in support of the continuation of his related series entitled, Terra Reverentia and Garden Studies. Bartel has taught drawing, painting, and sculpture at Brown University, Manhattanville College and Carnegie Mellon University, Vermont College MFA in Visual Art, New Hampshire Art Institute MFA in Visual Art among others. He has been a guest critic at Rhode Island School of Design, a visiting critic at Vermont College (since 1999) and New Hampshire Art Institute since 2014. Bartel has lectured at Alfred University, Western Connecticut State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Montclair State University, Chatham College among others. His work has been exhibited nationally in venues that include Palo Alto Art Center (Palo Alto, CA), Katonah Museum (Katonah, NY), Brockton Art Museum (Brockton, MA), The Rhode Island Foundation (Providence, RI), Zieher Smith (New York, NY), Mills Gallery (Boston, MA), Iona College (New Rochelle, NY). He is the founder and Gallery Director at the Cambridge School of Weston’s Thompson Gallery, a gallery dedicated to thematic inquiry, including such exhibition series as Sublime Climate, Collage at 100, Kiss the Ground, Nowhere Everywhere, With Eyes Open, and About Vulnerability. A seasoned teacher since 1986, Bartel currently teaches drawing, painting, collage, assemblage, conceptual art, and installation art at The Cambridge School of Weston, Weston, MA.
Karim Hamid
Karim B Hamid lives and works in Colorado. He graduated in 1990 from Brighton University, United Kingdom where he obtained his MFA, follow by studying at the Royal Academy of Art London, United Kingdom and went on to obtain his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994. Karim’s work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions and over 15 solo shows in the UK, USA and Switzerland. His work has been written about in Art Forum, the San Francisco Chronicle, and, NY Arts Magazine. His work is in the public collections of, ESMAO Museum Los Angeles, Coleccion Solo Museum Madrid, Pritzker Family Collection New York, as well as private collections worldwide.
Johanna Goodman
Based in New York City, Johanna Goodman is an internationally exhibited artist whose principal medium is collage. In addition to her art practice she is a widely published illustrator.
Goodman was awarded the New York State Council for the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship grant in the category of Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts. Her work has also garnered gold medals from The Society of Illustrators and awards from American Illustration and Communication Arts.
Clients include: Facebook, Airbnb, Netflix, Pirelli, Adidas, Ferragamo, Universal Music Group Japan, West Elm, Valextra, Doordash, truTV, Renaissance hotels, Celebrity Cruises, Habitat Skateboards, The Museum of Natural History, The Brooklyn Museum, The New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Random House, Time, Ms., The New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Smithsonian, National Geographic, Harvard Chan School of Medicine, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Le Monde, D/La Repubblica, Grazia, UCLA, USC, Wharton Business School, Emory, and Wired Magazine among many others.
Goodman and her work have been featured in profiles in numerous publications including 3x3 Magazine, The Observer / Guardian in the UK, Marie Claire Maison and Le Courier International in France, Fahrenheit Magazine in Mexico, Tempo Travel in Turkey, and Metal Magazine in Spain, Frankie Magazine in Australia, and Uppercase Magazine in the US. Her work has also been featured on design websites such as Vice, WePresent by WeTransfer, Adobe Create, Trendland, The Creative Review, This is Colossal, Inspiration Grid, and in Europe on The Green Box, Fubiz, Ignant, Picame and Osso.
Her work has also been included in several books about Art, Collage and Illustration including Collage by Women (Pomopress Editions, 2019), The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art (Gestalten, 2016), he Age of Collage 3: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art, (Gestalten, 2020), Every Body (Little, Brown & Co, 2020), and Rolling Stone, The Illustrated Portraits (Rizzoli, 2020).
Philip Kuznicki
Philip Kuznicki was born in Dunkirk, NY, where he spent much of his childhood before moving to California in the late 1970’s. On the west coast, Kuznicki worked as a gallery assistant and fabricator, assisting with work by ceramicist Ulysses Pagliari, architects Zaha Hadid and Michael Graves and many others at the then Phillippe Bonnafont Gallery, while establishing his own body of work. He was also involved in fine paper and binding services and was responsible for the original concept and creation of editioned boxes and portfolios of Davis Gilhooly’s ceramics and prints. In the mid-1990’s, Philip moved to North Carolina, where he was director of Riverdog Gallery, before settling in Buffalo, NY, in 1999. Kuznicki’s source material for his collage work has traveled with him all over the country, often taking precedence over what one may consider more neccessary baggage. These include estate sale finds, medical and dental journals, instructional books and much more.
Philip’s work is part of the art collections at US Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; UCLA Library, Los Angeles; Stanford University Library, Palo Alto, CA; and many other personal collections.
Michael Oatman
Michael Oatman is an artist and curator living in Troy, NY, where he teaches in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For 30 years his large-scale collages and installations have been shown internationally. Calling his practice ‘the poetic interpretation of documents,’ he has critically re-presented private and institutional holdings of material culture. As the first artist invited to interpret the personal archives of the astronaut, Oatman exhibited “My Father, Neil Armstrong, My Mother, The Moon,” at Purdue University’s Museum in 2018. His works are held by MASSMoCA, The Tang Museum, MoMA, and numerous private and public collections. Oatman received the Nancy Graves Prize in 2003.
Jeff Quinn
Jeff Quinn graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986 with a BFA in Painting and has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He has been commissioned for many private and public environments, including painting the installation for American artist Robert Gober's retrospective at MoMA. A keen eye toward collaboration, Jeff has worked with a broad array of artists and designers, including David Weeks, David Rockwell and Vladmir Kagan. In 2012 Quinn created a 3000 square foot installation for Ralph Pucci during New York City Design Week and in 2017 painted two gigantic murals for Art Basel Miami Beach.
Jeff Quinn lives and works in New York.
Rodger Stevens
Rodger Stevens is an American artist and sculptor whose principal medium is wire. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Rodger studied at the Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is now an internationally exhibited artist with work in numerous private and institutional collections. His work, while abstract in nature, is firmly rooted in a deep personal narrative and draws heavily upon literature, language, mathematics, human physiology and day to day experience. His hand-crafted sculptural works and wearable pieces embody carefully wrought stories and ideas that are articulated through composition and form. His attention to line and narrative have lead to a body of works that operates like a language of glyphs: aesthetically rich in appearance, and conceptually rewarding upon closer inspection.
Commissions include: The Whitney Museum of Art, The American Folk Art Museum, PS1, Tiffany & Co., Barneys, Sothebys, Starbucks, Nike, West Elm, The Katonah Museum, The Bristol Museum, David Rockwell, West Elm, Jonathan Adler, The New Yorker, Todd Oldham, The W Hotel, Mumm's Champagne, Yohji Yamamoto, The New York Children's Museum of Art, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stuart Weitzman, Persol, The Hangaram Museum of Art in Seoul, The American Greetings Company, Steelcase, Lindstrom Rugs, BDDW, The Future Perfect, David Weeks Lighting.
Werner Sun
Werner Sun is a visual artist with a background in physics, who lives and works in Ithaca, NY. He uses repetitive manual processes to slowly transform digital images into sculptural objects that evoke the gradual accumulation of knowledge in science. Werner’s work has been featured at Garrison Art Center, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Aon (New York, NY), Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), and the Islip Art Museum. He has been commissioned to create kinetic sculptures for Cornell University’s Mann Library and the Cornell Botanic Gardens. His essays and images have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Interalia Magazine, and Stone Canoe. He is the 2019 recipient of the Aon-CUE Artist Empowerment Award from the CUE Art Foundation, and a 2017 recipient of a Strategic Opportunity Stipend from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, NY. Werner’s work has been described as “stimulating and altogether engrossing,” (Ithaca Times), serving as “a reminder that art can be a reflection of the intricacies of physics, and that both belong to the universe at large” (Hyperallergic).
Melissa Zarem
Melissa Zarem grew up with artistic roots in two very different cities, New York City and Savannah, Georgia. She earned a BFA from Cornell University and subsequently relocated to Ithaca in 2006. Zarem has been represented by both Corners Gallery (Ithaca, NY) and Exhibit A, (Corning, NY). She became a featured artist at Ithaca College (2013), Aqua Art Miami (2014), and at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Cornell University (2015) where her work was acquired for their permanent collection. Her work has been exhibited at the Abrons Art Center (New York, NY), the Arnot Museum (Elmira, NY), Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center (Auburn, NY), Novado Gallery (Jersey City, NJ), and SUNY Corning Community College (Corning, NY). Zarem has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts (2016), the Vermont Studio Center (2023), Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County (2016 and 2023) and the Legacy Foundation (2024). Spring Loaded, a book of her black and white drawings was published by EYE Gallery (2016), and her work will be published in the upcoming spring issue of Stone Canoe Literary Journal. Zarem’s recent projects have been in collaboration with other artists, including a pandemic-related project called No Words: a Postcard-Based Conversation Between Two Artists with Elise Nicol. The latter was exhibited at Cornell University’s School of Architecture Art and Planning in Close Work, Distanced: Pandemic Collaborations.