A Letter from Art Chair Paul Ramírez Jonas

Fall 2022 

I want to welcome all students, faculty, and staff to this very new academic year. Last year was a reset year with our return to in-person classes. We regained our sea legs. All the while, in the background, the department was preparing for big changes that are happening now.

Thanks to the dedicated (and, arduous) work of our search committees, staff, and supporting faculty, we welcome four new full-time faculty to the art department: Jen de los Reyes, Associate Professor and AAP Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity; Professor Keith Obadike; and Assistant Professors, Oasa DuVerney and Oscar Cornejo.

We also welcome our new visiting critics. Dionis Ortiz will teach drawing, and Grace Troxell will teach painting classes this fall. Paulina Velázquez Solís will teach digital media/time-based art through spring.

Emilio Rojas has been named Teiger Mentor in the Arts for the fall semester. In addition to regular studio visits and leading graduate seminar with our M.F.A.s this fall, they will also teach undergraduate-level performance classes, both this semester and next.

Milo Tantillo recently joined our stellar office staff who support the art department every day.

They are all new. Please, say hi to them, introduce yourself, wave at them, make sure they realize that the main stairway in Tjaden Hall does not take you all the way to the fourth floor, bake them cupcakes, and show them how to get to the Green Dragon. And, since Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Leeza Meksin and I are only beginning our second year, half of the faculty this year are all new.

Adding to the ever-refreshing chaos of change, the year ahead will be an exercise in musical chairs. Renovations in the Foundry will begin in November and, when complete, the building will reopen as a great, well-equipped space for our graduate students and sculpture studios. In the meantime, sculpture classes have moved to the annex, M.F.A.s will use the studios on the fourth floor of Tjaden Hall, and some of the fourth-year B.F.A. students will have space in Sibley Hall. But wait, there is more…over winter break, some of our faculty will move into new faculty studios downtown, and our fourth-year B.F.A.s will return to the new Tjaden Hall studios. There will be a lot of moving and some squeezing, but it will pass. When the music stops, everyone should have a better space for making art.

Still to come, the university has approved Image Text, our prospective low-residency M.F.A. program. We anticipate approval from the New York State Department of Education by the end of the year. Please stay tuned, the news is promised to be exciting.

With so many changes, it may be easy to miss the larger point that 18 faculty who represent different ways of being artists in the world are here now. Each offers a diversity of methods and techniques. They consider and address a diversity of audiences in different exhibition spaces, public spaces, and communities; deploy a multiplicity of formal languages; are informed by a wide range of cultural and historical contexts. There is no one way to be an artist, and our faculty embodies this.

Yours,

Paul Ramírez Jonas
Professor, Chair
Department of Art