2009-2010
Deborah Dancy
Deborah Dancy
www.deborahdancy.com
Deborah Dancy is an African-American visual artist who has been teaching at the University of Connecticut since 1981. She has an MS in Printmaking and an MFA in Painting from Illinois State University. Her professional career has been marked by significant honors and awards, including: a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; Connecticut Commission of the Arts Artist Grant; New England Foundation for the Arts/NEA Individual Artist Grant; Nexus Press Artist Book Project Award; Visual Studies Artist Book Project Residency Grant; The American Antiquarian Society’s William Randolph Hearst Fellowship; Women’s Studio Workshop Residency Grant; and a YADDO Fellow. She has had more than a dozen solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries, such as: Wright State University; Purdue University; Liz Harris Gallery; the Housatonic Museum; Sears-Peyton Gallery; G.R.N’Namdi Gallery; ARC Gallery; and The College of Saint Rose. Inclusion in group exhibitions across the country have been at: the University of Rhode Island; Hobart and William Smith Colleges; the Spencer Museum; Mobius; the Mead Art Museum; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; the Bruce Museum and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Her work may be found in numerous permanent collections including: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Birmingham Museum of Art; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; the Spencer Museum of Art; the Hunter Museum of American Art; Vanderbilt University; Grinnell College; Oberlin College; the Allen Memorial Art Museum; General Electric Company; Chemical Bank; and the United States Embassy in Cameroon. She is represented by the Sears-Peyton Gallery, the G.R.N’Namdi Gallery and Charles Young Fine Prints and Drawings.
Phil Young
Phil Young
Phil Young is a Native American visual artist and art professor at Hartwick College in New York. Young, an artist of Cherokee, Irish and Scottish descent, draws upon his native worldview and emotionally painful history in an attempt “to weave broken threads of his family’s history back together.” His work reflects both his search for cultural identity and his personal struggle to cut through the myths that surround and distort the lives and histories of native peoples. Young was born in 1947 in an area of rural Oklahoma known in 1838 as Indian Territory. He was the first child in his family to attend college and graduated cum laude in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. His MFA is from American University. His widely exhibited paintings, drawings and mixed media installations affirm the necessity of “on/site for insight.” Recently the disabling effects of multiple sclerosis have entered his “mixedbloodbodyscape.” He is a recipient of residencies at the Millay Colony, the Kohler Foundation, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in Painting and Sculpture and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture. He has exhibited at the Heard Museum, The William Benton Museum of Art, the Atlanta History Center, Art-in-General and the Swiss Institute. His work has been reproduced in On the Beaten Track & The Lure of the Local. (L. Lippard).
Erika Van Natta
Erika Van Natta
Erika Van Natta was born in Massachusetts in 1973. She received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York where she began developing video-art pieces that earned her the school’s Chairmen’s Merit Award and a Special Fine Arts Developmental Grant. Her video work continued through a MFA program at Yale, completed in 2003. Yale awarded her the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship. Her piece For Lucien has been screened in more than a dozen galleries on both coasts of the United States. Recently she was selected for Radius, Emerging Artists from Connecticut and Southeastern New York, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and The Ridgefield Guild of Artists. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums in New York, Philadelphia and New Haven.