Teiger Mentor in the Arts

A painting of 9 brightly colored, rainbow cats stacked three in a row, set against a tile floor and bright, colorful background.

Catherine Haggarty, Cat Transfiguration (2023), acrylic on canvas, 33" x 22". image / provided

The Teiger Mentor in the Arts Program brings internationally acclaimed artists to Cornell to make ongoing visits to studio and seminar classes and conduct individual critiques with M.F.A. students. The program aspires to give undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to make connections with and learn from a diverse range of leading professional artists.

The Teiger Mentor in the Arts Program was created with a gift from David Teiger '51, a graduate of the School of Hotel Administration. Teiger passed away in December 2014.

 

Catherine Haggarty

Spring 2024 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Catherine Haggarty, born in 1984, is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Haggarty's paintings and curatorial work have been reviewed by and featured in Bomb Magazine, Artnet, Hyperallergic, Art Forum, Two Coats of Paint, Brooklyn Magazine, The New York Times, Art Maaze Magazine, Art Spiel, Pep Talks for Artists, Sound and Vision Podcast, and The Observer.

Haggarty has been a visiting artist and critic at Western Connecticut State University M.F.A. (2023), Contemporary Arts Memphis (2023), Vassar College (2023), Rutgers M.F.A. (2022), The University of Albany M.F.A. (2022), Maryland Institute College of Art (2022), The University of Connecticut M.F.A. (2022, 2023), RISD B.F.A. (2022), Pratt Institute B.F.A. (2022), The University of Oregon (2021), Boston University M.F.A. (2021), SUNY Purchase M.F.A. (2020), Hunter College M.F.A. (2020), Denison University (2020), Brooklyn College M.F.A. (2019), and, in 2018, Haggarty was the Anderson Endowed Lecturer at Penn State University.

Solo & Two Person exhibitions include Untitled Miami, Lorin Gallery (Los Angeles), Geary Contemporary (New York City), Massey Klein Gallery (New York City), This Friday Next Friday (Brooklyn), Bloomsburg University (Pennsylvania), and Look and Listen in Marseille, France. Select group exhibitions include The PIT (Los Angeles), Badr El Jundi (Madrid), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami), Andrew Rafcaz Gallery (Chicago), Hesse Flatow (New York City), Mrs. Gallery (Maspeth, New York) and McBride Contemporain (Montreal).

Haggarty earned her M.F.A. from Mason Gross, Rutgers University in 2011. She is the Founder, Owner, and Executive Director of The Canopy Program, which is a one-year mentorship program within the New York City Crit Club which Haggarty cofounded in 2017. In addition, she is an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute.

Haggarty will deliver an artist talk on March 14, 2024, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

EJ Hauser

Fall 2023 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

EJ Hauser (they/she) is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn and Ulster County, New York, and is represented by Derek Eller Gallery in New York City and Haverkampf & Leistenschneider in Berlin.

Hauser's paintings are both graphic and open to interpretation, teetering between iconography and something familiar but abstract. This imagery shifts between omnivorous references both ancient and current — the paintings are mysterious talismans, employing buzzing pallets and marks that dance. Stuttering lines form a visual code like musical notes, which coalesce with atmospheric layers to create ineffable messages.

Hauser's source library draws from the natural world, imagery that is cross-pollinated with the formal qualities found in craftwork like rugs, fabrics, wallpapers, and mosaics, as well as digital visual characteristics, which they interpret through drawing and then transliterate onto canvas. Each piece is composed of multiple layers of color. 

In 2023, Hauser had their second solo show with Haverkampf & Leistenschneider as well as solo shows with Parrasch Heinjen in Los Angeles and at Anton Kern's WINDOW in New York City. Their work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions in New York, including Cheim & Read, Sperone Westwater, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and The Journal Gallery. Hauser's work has been featured in The New YorkerThe New York TimesFriezeThe Brooklyn RailBOMB Magazine, and Turps Banana, among others.

Hauser delivered an artist talk on November 30, 2023, at 5:15 p.m. in the Klarman Hall Auditorium, KG70. 

Wells Chandler

Spring 2023 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Wells Chandler (he/him) is a Bronx-based artist who explores ecology, community, gender, and queer iconography through the mediums of crochet, embroidery, drawing, and cake.  Informed by queer and feminist craft histories, folk art, and psychedlic thinkers from the 1970s, Chandler pares back and distills form until it functions iconographically. Installed as a whole, his crocheted environments are evocative of cave paintings, Egyptian tombs, Buddhist shrines, and, more recently, the natural world. He received his M.F.A. from Yale University where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques.  From 2016–17 he was a recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. Recent solo exhibitions include  Soloway (Brooklyn, New York), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago, Illinois), Diablo Rosso (Panama City, Panama), and Galerie Eric Mouchet (Paris, France).  His work has been reviewed by Roxane Gay, Art Forum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, TimeOut, Modern Painters, Maake Magazine, Two Coats of Paint, and AEQAI. Chandler is a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Purchase and a Soloway gallery member.

Chandler delivered an artist talk on March 23, 2023, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Emilio Rojas

Fall 2022 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth.

His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as institutions such as The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, and The Botin Foundation. From 2019-2022 Rojas was a Visiting Artist in Residency in the Theater and Performance Department at Bard College in New York. He is also currently visiting faculty in the M.F.A. programs at Parsons the New School and the low-res M.F.A. programs at PNCA in Portland, Oregon, and University of the Arts, in Philadelphia.  

Rojas delivered an artist talk on October 3, 2022, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Emily Jacir

Spring 2022 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

As poetic as it is political and biographical, Emily Jacir's work investigates translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. Her work spans a range of strategies including film, photography, sculpture, interventions, archiving, performance, video, writing, and sound. Her works have been widely exhibited, and she has been honored for her achievements with several awards including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) for her work Material for a film; a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2008); the Alpert Award (2011) from the Herb Alpert Foundation; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2015).

Jacir has had recent solo exhibitions at Alberto Peola (2021); IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Dublin (2016–17); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat il Funun, Amman (2014–15); Beirut Art Center (2010); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York City (2009); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2008); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2004); OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich, Linz, Austria (2003– 04). Her work has been in major international group exhibitions and collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); Venice Biennale (2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013); Sharjah Biennial (2011); 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2010); 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006); Sharjah Biennial 7 (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003). 

Jacir has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and deeply invested in creating alternative spaces of knowledge production internationally. She is one of the founders and was a full-time professor at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah from 2007 to 2017 (when the academy closed its doors) and she served on its academic board from (2006–2012). Jacir led the first year of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut and created the curriculum and programming (2011–2012), she also served on its curricular committee from 2010 to 2011. Between 1999 and 2002, Jacir curated several Arab and Palestinian Film programs in NYC with Alwan for the Arts while also teaching several workshops at Birzeit University. She conceived of and co-curated the first Palestine International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002. In 2007, Jacir curated a selection of shorts; Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 -1982) which went on tour internationally. Jacir formed a school, Live Free or Die, at the Firestation in Dublin in the summer of 2019. In conjunction with her survey show Europa at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Dublin in 2016–17, she organized a two-week workshop titled To Be Determined (for Jean) for her students in Ramallah alongside Irish participants. She was the curator for the Young Artist of the Year Award 2018 at the A. M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah that she titled We Shall Be Monsters. She is the founder and executive director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Jacir delivered an artist talk on March 7, 2022, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Miatta Kawinzi

Fall 2021 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Miatta Kawinzi is a Kenyan-Liberian-American multidisciplinary artist raised in the U.S. South and based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores hybridity within the African Diaspora and the re-imagining of the self, identity, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Kawinzi's recent work employs sculptural sound and video installation, still and moving images, the voice and body, language, and site-responsive sculpture to explore questions around alternative temporalities and the liberatory and regenerative potential of softness. Her work has been presented at CUE Art Foundation, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PopRally, BRIC, Maysles Cinema, and the Museum of the Moving Image, among other spaces. She has completed artist residencies internationally in spaces including the LMCC Paris Residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, the African Interactive Art Residency coordinated by POV Spark in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture, NYC, DC, and Venice, Italy, the Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Bemis Center, Omaha, NE. Kawinzi has received awards including the 2021–⁠22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, the 2021 New York Artadia Award, and the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant administered by Queer|Art. She has previously taught at Hampshire College and the University of Richmond. She received a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from Hunter College.

Kawinzi delivered an artist talk on September 30, 2021, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Candice Lin

Spring 2021 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts) works in Altadena, California. She is an assistant professor of art at UCLA and lives and works in Los Angeles. Lin eceived her B.A. in visual arts and art semiotics from Brown University, in 2001, and M.F.A. in new genres from San Francisco Art Institute, in 2004. Her practice utilizes installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at the Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, California; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada; Ludlow 38, New York City; Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles, as well as the exhibition cycle A Hard White Body at Bétonsalon, Paris; Portikus, Frankfurt; and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. Group shows include the 2020 Ashkal Alwan Home Works 8 Forum, 2019 Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale, 2018 Taipei Biennale; the 2018 Athens Biennale; Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and New Museum, New York City.

Lin delivered a virtual artist talk on February 22, 2021, at 5:15 p.m.

Jessi Reaves

Fall 2020 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Jessi Reaves was born in 1986 in Portland, Oregon, and earned her B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 2009. Her practice centers on sculptures that also operate as furniture, rupturing traditional binaries of the functional and the aesthetic. Reaves' most recent solo exhibitions include Going out in Style, Herald St, London, United Kingdom (2019) and Jessi Reaves II, Bridget Donahue, New York, NY (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Slant Step Forward, Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA (2019); Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2018); Ginny Casey and Jessi Reaves, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, PA (2017); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2017).

Reaves delivered a virtual artist talk on September 28, 2020, at 1:15 p.m.

Josh Tonsfeldt

Spring 2020 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Josh Tonsfeldt was born in 1979 in Independence, Missouri, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2007 and a B.A. from Purchase College in 2004. Since then, his work has been shown widely in the U.S. and Europe, most recently at international institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the DeCordova Museum, Boston; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Gamec in Bergamo, Italy; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto. His work is in the collection of public and private institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Thoma Foundation, the Parrish Museum, and the Perez Museum in Miami.

Tonsfeldt delivered a talk on February 3, 2020, at 5:30 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Wendy White

Fall 2019 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

A painter and sculptor, White employs language and aesthetics often related to male-dominated areas, from professional sports and muscle car culture to Abstract Expressionism. The artist uses iconic branding, gestural mark making, and materials such as denim; she highlights topics of masculinity while producing metaphors that address our current social and political moment.

White's work has been included in a number of group shows both in the U.S. and internationally including venues in Miami, Atlanta, Berlin, and Tokyo. White received a New York Foundation for the Arts painting fellowship in 2012 and a George Segal painting grant in 2008. Her work was featured in Phaidon's anthology Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting in 2011. White will have a solo exhibition at Museum Goch, Germany, in April 2020.

White delivered a talk on September 30, 2019, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Chitra Ganesh

Spring 2019 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Chitra Ganesh's practice is based in drawing and brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her installation, animation, prints, and drawings take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms.

Ganesh has had solo presentations at MoMA PS1, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Göteborgs Konsthall, the Rubin Museum, and The Kitchen in New York City. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts in 2012, a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant in 2017, and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts for 2017–18, among others. Ganesh received her B.A. from Brown University and M.F.A. from Columbia University.

Ganesh delivered an artist talk on February 19, 2019, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Paul Pfeiffer

Fall 2018 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Paul Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to examine how images shape our perception of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube, cable television, and other sources, he uses these as an occasion to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions.

Pfeiffer was a featured artist in the PBS series Art:21 – Art In The Twenty-First Century, and the recipient of a number of awards, most notably an Alpert Award for Visual Arts from CalArts in 2009, a United States Artist Fellowship in 2015, and the inaugural Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum in 2000. Pfeiffer's work has been seen in numerous national and international group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, PS1's Greater New York, the Sydney Biennial, and the 2001 Venice Biennale of Art. Pfeiffer earned a B.F.A. in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Hunter College.

Pfeiffer delivered an artist talk on September 24, 2018, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Sam Lewitt

Spring 2018 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Sam Lewitt is a New York City–based artist who creates site-responsive artworks with industrial materials and infrastructural conditions that he selects for their specific physical qualities, as well as their relationship to their original contexts and typical applications.

Lewitt's sculptural installations were recently exhibited in a solo exhibition titled FILLER at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, and together with the work of a number artists who also contributed to the Corderie Dell'Arsenale at the 2017 Venice Biennale of Art. Additional solo exhibitions have been held at the Swiss Institute in New York City in 2016 and Kunsthalle Basel in 2016; and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco in 2015. Beyond the 2017 Venice Biennale, Lewitt's recent group exhibitions include A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in 2016, Nature after Nature at Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany in 2014, and the Whitney Biennial in 2012. His writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Collapse, CURA, Kunstforum International, October, and Texte zur Kunst.

Lewitt delivered a public lecture on February 12, 2018, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

Dana Hoey

Fall 2017 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Hoey is a New York City–based photographer working in the terrain of feminism since 1996. Hoey's most recent work returns to her earlier proposition that women should be more aggressive as she prompts: "Given the popular phrase 'toxic masculinity,' is it time to consider harnessing fragility and victimhood for power? How will we top from below?" — and welcomes responses.

Hoey has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and internationally. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit; Raising Cattle gallery in Montreal; Petzel Gallery in New York City; Sutton Gallery in Victoria, Australia; University Art Musem in Albany, New York; Art Paris Art Fair in Paris, France; and Analix Forever in Geneva, Switzerland. Hoey's work is held in public collections at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among others. Hoey received a B.F.A. in philosophy from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in photography from the Yale School of Art and is represented by Petzel Gallery in New York City.

Hoey delivered a public lecture on September 11, 2017, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

 

Sean Landers

Spring 2017 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Sean Landers is best known for using his personal experience as public subject matter, and for utilizing diverse styles and media in a performative manner. His newest body of work continues to define and clarify themes he has pursued over his three decades–long career. His paintings uniquely articulate the experience of life as an artist and what it means to make something that will last beyond the lifetime of its maker.

Landers has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally. In addition to solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis and Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland, Landers has been included in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; New Museum, New York City; The High Line, New York City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Denver Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Seattle Art Museum; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Tate Modern, London; among many others.

Born in Palmer, Massachusetts, Landers lives and works in New York City. He received an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art and a B.F.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art. He is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York City; China Art Objects, Los Angeles; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; greengrassi, London; and Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

Landers delivered a public lecture on March 6, 2017, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

Craig Kalpakjian

Fall 2016 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

From his early sculpture and installations through his seminal computer-generated images and videos, Craig Kalpakjian has consistently addressed issues of technology, surveillance, architecture, and social control. Recent abstract works continue his explorations of spatial visualization. Using non-standard types of perspective, these large-scale inkjet prints present illusions of dimensionality that trouble the distinctions between inside and outside, artifice and reality.

Kalpakjian has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and Europe including a recent show at Kai Matsumiya Gallery in New York City. His work has been included in Artists' Choice: An Expanded Field of Photography at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Vertigo at Joe Sheftel Gallery in New York City; The Optical Unconscious at The Gebert Institute in Switzerland; Drone-the Automated Image in Montreal; After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Entertainment at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York City; and The Evryali Score at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City.

Work by Kalpakjian is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and has been featured in Blind Spot magazine. He also regularly performs in the band Das Audit.

Kalpakjian delivered a public lecture on September 19, 2016, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

Sam Durant

Spring 2016 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose work engages a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism.

Durant studied at the Massachusetts College of Art and the California Institute of the Arts. He has exhibited extensively and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf; S.M.A.K, Ghent; and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. His work has also been included in the Panamá, Sydney, Venice, and Whitney Biennales. Durant was a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Boss Prize and has received a United States Artists Broad Fellowship and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant. In 2006, he compiled and edited a comprehensive monograph of Black Panther artist Emory Douglas's work and recently curated an exhibition titled Black Panther: the Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the New Museum in New York City.

Durant delivered a public lecture on February 29, 2016, at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

Sharon Hayes

Fall 2015 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Sharon Hayes engages multiple mediums — video, performance, and installation — in an ongoing investigation into specific intersections between history, politics, and speech. These relationships are central to all of her work from the 2003 performance and video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20, and 29, a respeaking of each of the four audio tapes made by Patty Hearst and the SLA during the period of Hearst's kidnapping, to her current work Ricerche: three, a large-scale video investigation that steps off of Pier Paolo Pasolini's brilliant film, Comizi d'Amore.

Hayes's work is concerned with developing new representational strategies that examine and interrogate the present political moment as a moment that reaches simultaneously backward and forward; a present moment that is never wholly its own but rather one that is full of multiple past moments and the speculations of multiple futures. From this ground, Hayes often addresses political events or movements from the 1960s through the 1990s. Her focus on the particular sphere of the near-past is influenced by the potent imbrication of private and public urgencies that she experienced in her own foundational encounters with feminism and AIDS activism.

Hayes has had recent solo exhibitions at Andrea Rosen Gallery (New York City), Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid). Her work has been shown at the 2013 Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Guggenheim Museum (New York City), and numerous museums and venues in Europe and the Americas. Hayes is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2013), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007), among others.

Hayes delivered a public lecture on September 21, 2015, in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

Leslie Hewitt

Spring 2015 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

New York City–based Leslie Hewitt often works in the space between photography and sculpture. She combines still-life compositions made up of political, social, and personal materials and often presents them in sturdy wooden frames to add structure to the presentation. From that point, Hewitt says, "Mundane objects and structures open into complex systems of knowledge." This perceptual slippage is what attracts Hewitt to both "the illusions of film (still and moving photography) and the undeniable presence of physical objects (sculpture)."

Hewitt studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the recipient of the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands. A selection of recent and forthcoming exhibitions include MoMA; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Artists Space in Manhattan; Project Row Houses in Houston; and LA><ART in Los Angeles. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; and the American Academy in Berlin amongst others. Hewitt is the 2014 Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Fellow awarded by United States Artists.

Hewitt delivered a public lecture on February 5, 2015, in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

Alejandro Cesarco

Fall 2014 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Artist Alejandro Cesarco, a native of Uruguay, uses a variety of media and forms to address repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating.

Cesarco's work has been included in group exhibitions at the MoMA and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include Secondary Revision at Frac Île-de-France/Le Plateau in Paris (2013); A Portrait, A Story, And An Ending at Kunsthalle Zürich in Switzerland (2013); Alejandro Cesarco at MuMOK in Vienna (2012); Words Applied to Wounds at Murray Guy in New York City (2012); The Early Years at Tanya Leighton in Berlin (2012); A Common Ground in the Uruguayan Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennial (2011); and Present Memory at Tate Modern (2010). In 2011, Cesarco was the winner of the Baloise Art Prize at Art42 Basel.

Cesarco received an M.A. from New York University/International Center of Photography in 2000. He lives and works in New York City where he directs the nonprofit arts organization, Art Resources Transfer.

Cesarco delivered a public lecture on September 4, 2014, in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

Shannon Ebner

Spring 2014 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Shannon Ebner is a contemporary artist who works mainly in large format prints and at the intersection of language, sculpture, and photography. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ebner's work has been featured in solo exhibits at the Hammer Museum and MoMA PS1, as well as group exhibits, including Things Words and Consequences, at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art's Whitney Biennial; the Sixth Berlin Biennial in Germany; How Soon is Now, an exhibit at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow; the 54th Venice Biennale; and Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at MoMA, in New York City. In 2009, Ebner's book The Sun as Error was published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ebner received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. in photography from the Yale School of Art.

Ebner delivered a public lecture on February 3, 2014, in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

Josiah McElheny

Fall 2013 Teiger Mentor in the Arts

Sculptor, performance artist, writer, and filmmaker Josiah McElheny was Cornell's inaugural Teiger Mentor in the Arts.

McElheny is based in New York City and is best known for his use of glass with other materials. He received a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Award" in 2006. His work was the subject of two major survey exhibitions in 2012 and 2013, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. He is widely published, including writing for Artforum and Cabinet magazines, and is a contributing editor at Bomb Magazine. Since 2001 he has been a senior critic in sculpture at the Yale School of Art.

McElheny delivered a public lecture on October 17, 2013, in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

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