Guest Artists and Special Events

Upcoming guest artists at the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts residencies:

Lily Yeh - appearing at the Fall 2010 Port Townsend Residency

Lily Yeh is an internationally celebrated artist whose work has taken her to communities throughout the world. As founder, executive director and lead artist of the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia from 1968 to 2004, she helped create a national model of community building through the arts. Under her leadership of 18 years, the summer park building project developed into an organization with 20 full and part-time employees, hundreds of volunteers, and a $1.3 million budget. The Village became a multi-faceted community building organization with activities such as after-school and weekend programs, greening land transformation, housing renovation, theater, and economic development initiatives. The center has worked on local, national, and international projects, and is a leading model of community revitalizations throughout the country. During her tenure at the Village, Yeh developed a unique methodology for using the arts as a tool for community building and she continues to carry that work forward. In 2004, Yeh pursued her work internationally, founding Barefoot Artists, Inc., to bring the transformative power of art to impoverished communities around the globe through participatory, multifaceted projects that foster community empowerment, improve the physical environment, promote economic development and preserve indigenous art and culture. She received her MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania, is an accomplished painter and also taught art for thirty years at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia.  Photo Credit: Duan Xiao Lin

Neil Marcus - appearing at the Fall 2010 Port Townsend Residency
Appearing in collaboration with Goddard faculty member Petra Kuppers, Neil presents the participatory performance score, Journey to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. In this session, the artists and participants co-create a ritual experience based on a score, drawing upon embodied memory, experimental community art, personal investment, nourishment and comfort, and practice-as-research. Neil is an icon in US disability culture. In the 1980s and 90s, he performed his stage show Storm Reading over 300 times all over the US, the UK and Canada. Parts of it were on Maria Shriver's Sunday Today Show. Neil has also written and performed other plays in the SF Bay Area, and is a frequent guest in Butoh and Contact Improv Festivals.  His poetry has found its way to many people, on the back of fridge  magnets, policy statements for NGOs, university reading lists, and  many people's private stash of important things to know about life.  Neil is still recognized in the street for his role in an episode of ER.  Mainly, though, Neil engages in his own street theatre show, singing, clowning and performing in the everyday.  

Christine Toth - appearing as guest alum artist at the Fall 2010 Port Townsend Residency

Christine Toth is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Portland, Oregon, and an ’07 graduate of Goddard’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program. Intrigued by the power of narrative and poetry to shape our consciousness, writing and the realm of literature inform much of her visual work. There is not one story, but many stories, many poems to describe each of us. She is drawn to the elusive task of uncovering the source of experience that generates language, locating what takes shape before words are formed. A writer and a visual artist, Christine works in a variety of media, including oil and encaustic paints, digital photography, and installation.   Photo Credit: Christine Toth

Recent guest artists at the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts residencies:

Karin Bolender - Guest Alum Artist

Karin Bolender’s life/art practice revolves around relationships between rural landscapes (all the faunal, floral, and mineral forms that inhabit them) and human acts of metaphor, memory, and imagination. Grounded equally in poetics and performance-art traditions, Karin’s work explores the seams between our human selves and other beings, in particular other species.  Many of her past projects involve collaborative journeys through the rural American South with two American Spotted she-Asses, Aliass and Passenger. These journeys include Little Pilgrim of Carcassonne, The Dead-Car Crossing, She-Haw Transhumance and “Can We Sleep in Your Barn Tonight?” MYSTERY TOUR.  Her ongoing performance series known as The Dive Rodeo playfully subverts the breakneck speeds and dominance-over-livestock paradigms of traditional rodeo events in search of slower and more contemplative ways of being and knowing other creatures.  Recently, Karin has assembled her life/art enterprise and agricultural esoterica inside the workings of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), headquartered on a small, evolving farmstead in Carnesville, Georgia.  Karin holds an MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College (2007). She’s taught at the University of Georgia, James Madison University and Gainesville State College. Her essay,“’What You Gonna Do About Yer Ass’ (or, an answer to Sun Ra via journeys in incarnated poetics and interdisciplinary-art practice),” was recently published in the Cambridge Scholars Press collection, Collision: Interarts Practice and Research.

Sharon Bridgforth

Sharon Bridgforth is the Lambda Award winning author of the bull-jean stories and love conjure/blues.  A two time Alpert Award Nominee in the Arts in Theatre, Bridgforth is the recipient of the 2008 Alpert/Hedgebrook Residency Prize.  Her work has been anthologized and produced widely, presented nationally and received support from such programs as Rockefeller Foundation’s Multi Arts Production Fund and the NEA/TCG Playwright in Residence Program.  Currently, she is touring a new work, delta dandi, a living cacophony of monologues, chants, choral tellings, blood memories dance and song. Bridgforth has broken ground in the creation and presentation of the performance/novel and advanced the articulation of the Jazz aesthetic in theatre. She is one of three artists featured in Dr. Joni Jones’ forthcoming book titled, Jazz Ase and The Power Of The Present Moment.  Working in community with art as a vehicle for social justice, Bridgforth has developed a method of facilitating creative writing, Finding Voice.  The method examines creative process and explores the page as a canvas, using identity-culture-memory-family-histories-dreams to articulate and examine the socio-political realities of our lives in a form that is part poetry, part oral history, part performance art. 

Meg McHutchison - Guest Alum Artist
Meg McHutchison is an interdisciplinary artist working with an integrative practice at the poetic intersections of text, performance, video and visual art. Meg's recent work includes exhibitions of monotypes and mixed media (November 2009), experimental video (Jan 2010/June 2009), broadside (Sept, 2009), and website (October-Dec 2009), as well as guest curating a weekend of performance,  and several performative outings with collaborators in a practice of embodied drawing known as redFred. Meg presented a solo show at the Tao Center in Portland, Oregon in February 2010. Meg's professional practice as a creative with Gigantic Planet suits her unique capacity to bridge mediums,  harmonizing video and multimedia with live program development and direction. Meg is media independent content generator and producer who applies an interdisciplinary practice to all aspects of her work. She has made substantive contributions to many vital, high profile projects over the last two decades including multiple projects for Cornish College of the Arts, and the University of Washington, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Oregon State University. Earlier work includes Teatro ZinZanni, the WOMAD USA Festival, and Bumbershoot Special Projects Programming. Meg is thrilled to be living in Portland with her beloved collaborator and husband, fellow Goddard Alum (2007), JC Schlechter, and the Bodhi cat. She is delighted to be tending the roses for the first time in her life. Meg completed her MFA through Goddard College in 2006. 

Beverly Naidus

Born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1953, to two New Yorkers, Beverly Naidus grew up in the Northeast. She received a BA from Carleton College and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.  Early recognition in the New York City art world offered her many opportunities to exhibit her interactive installations and digital art projects in diverse venues, including mainstream museums and city streets. Inspired by lived experience, topics in her artwork include environmental illness, global warming, unemployment, the alienation of consumer culture, nuclear nightmares, body hate, celebrating cultural identity, confronting racism and anti-Semitism, and envisioning utopia and global justice. Beverly Naidus has produced several artist's books including What Kinda Name is That? and One Size Does Not Fit All. Her art has been discussed in books by Paul Von Blum, Lucy R. Lippard, Suzi Gablik, Lisa Bloom and others, and has received critical recognition in many contemporary newspapers and journals. Her writing about art for social change has been published in two books (New Practices — New Pedagogies edited by Malcolm Miles and The Arts, Education and Social Change: Little Signs of Hope edited by Mary Clare Powell and Vivien Marcow Speiser), and in articles in Radical Teacher, the New Art Examiner, and the National Women's Studies Association Journal. Her book, Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame, was recently published by New Village Press. Her teaching career includes work as an artist/teacher in New York City museums, Carleton College, California State University Long Beach, Goddard College, Hampshire College, and the Institute for Social Ecology. She has guest lectured and led workshops all over North America and in Europe. Beverly co-created the Arts in Community program, with a focus on art for social change for the  University of Washington, Tacoma. She lives in the middle of the woods on Vashon Island with her husband and son.

Pauline Oliveros
"Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I finally know what harmony is....It's about the pleasure of making music." -- John Cage 1989.

Pauline Oliveros, composer, performer and humanitarian is an important pioneer in American Music. Acclaimed internationally, for four decades she has explored sound -- forging new ground for herself and others. Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly affects those who experience it and eludes many who try to write about it. Oliveros has been honored with awards, grants and concerts internationally. Whether performing at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., in an underground cavern, or in the studios of West German Radio, Oliveros' commitment to interaction with the moment is unchanged. She can make the sound of a sweeping siren into another instrument of the ensemble. Through Deep Listening Pieces and earlier Sonic Meditations Oliveros introduced the concept of incorporating all environmental sounds into musical performance. To make a pleasurable experience of this requires focused concentration, skilled musicianship and strong improvisational skills, which are the hallmarks of Oliveros' form. In performance Oliveros uses an accordion which has been re-tuned in two different systems of her just intonation in addition to electronics to alter the sound of the accordion and to explore the individual characteristics of each room. Pauline Oliveros has built a loyal following through her concerts, recordings, publications and musical compositions that she has written for soloists and ensembles in music, dance, theater and inter-arts companies. She has also provided leadership within the music community from her early years as the first Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (formerly the Tape Music Center at Mills), director of the Center for Music Experiment during her 14 year tenure as professor of music at the University of California at San Diego to acting in an advisory capacity for organizations such as The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts, and many private foundations. Founder of Deep Listening Institute, she also currently serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been vocal about representing the needs of individual artists, about the need for diversity and experimentation in the arts, and promoting cooperation and good will among people. Photo Credit: Pieter Kers

Tania Willard

Tania Willard is an artist, printmaker, curator and designer from the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation in the Interior of BC, who works with narrative and story in the arts, media and advocacy to share First Nations’ history and experiences in the struggle for social justice. Tania was editor of Redwire magazine, a National Aboriginal youth magazine, and is current editor of Brunt Magazine, a grunt gallery publication, covering contemporary arts.  She has exhibited widely across Canada, “creating art that honors my heritage and looks to the future. On this visual journey, I am following my path to create new, exciting contemporary work grounded in the history of this land that I am connected to.”  In a residency with Gallery Gachet, Tania collaborated to produce the hard-hitting and powerful exhibit “Crazymaking”.  This exhibit dealt with the impact of colonialism and its legacies for First Nations, including mental health and substance abuse issues. "I am interested in telling stories that are hidden and erased...stories that are full of the paradoxical push and pull between our worlds. My grandfather was of mixed blood, Secwepemc and European roots, he said he lived in two worlds. I wanted to express this tension; this sacrifice and survival that we as Native people navigate and that sometimes (or always in some ways) drives us crazy."

Recent special events at the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts residencies:

Discourse, Identity, and Practice in Tumultuous Times: A Collage of Conversations, a panel facilitated by Pamela Booker at the Spring 2009 Plainfield Residency

Our Spring 2009 residency theme responded to the tumultuous times we face, and took up questions around our creative practice, the building of discourse and issues of identity. Panel moderator, Pamela Booker, is a New York-based writer/educator and visual artist, who works across genres and disciplines in the creating of performance/dramatic texts, poetry, fiction, critical essays and conceptually-based multimedia driven productions. Recent publications include: The L Word & (Miss)ing Blackness (Spring 2007); Notes for a Performance Project: Adrian Piper, Jessye Norman & Immanuel Kant, Univ. Muenster/CAAR (Germany 2007); Staging black/female/body in the Age of Global Terror (2006). Current performance projects and plays include: Adrian Piper/Jessye Norman and the (German) Philosopher that Seduced Them! (Germany, 2006), Dust (2003, 2006), Seens from the Unexpectedness of Love (2005) and The Mall Land (2005). Pamela is an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program graduate and currently teaches in the Bachelors of Arts in Individualized Studies Program at Goddard College and at New York University. The panel included faculty members Erica Eaton and Peter Hocking and current MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program students. These are the questions we addressed: Given these times of change and tumult, how do we as artists choose to remain engaged in our practices? Will our art practices shift as a result of external change/conditions? What are relevant contributions artists can make? If sharing ideas and practices with others can help transform our own, what strategies can we employ to engender exchange -- collaborations, performative acts, interventions? Alternatively, do these times of political, social and economic change provide opportunities to dig more deeply into personal practices, in order to re-establish connection to internal core values that drive our work? What does this look like in practical terms? What sites of discourse can we create that embrace our own identities?