MFA Guest Artist Lecture Series: Fall 2023
All Visiting Artist Lectures will take place at 11:00 a.m. in Room 144
Visual & Performing Arts Center
Westside Campus: 43 Lake Avenue Extension, Danbury, CT
Glenn Goldberg
Monday, September 18, 2023
Glenn Goldberg is a painter and musician who lives and works in NYC. Born in the Bronx, he studied at the New York Studio School and earned his BA and MFA degrees from Queens College, CUNY. He has taught at Cooper Union, New York Studio School, and Queens College, where he is currently MFA Chair of Graduate Studio Art. He has also been a panelist and visiting artist for MFA painting programs at Yale, Columbia, Boston University, American University, Hunter College, and others. A recipient of many awards, he has received grants from the Edward Albee Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Glenn’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, LA Times, New Yorker, and Chicago Tribune, among others. In an interview in Hyperallergic, Jennifer Samet described Goldberg’s painting to be “about this meeting point of the ordinary and the other, regularity and refinement. . . He likes the hobbyist nature of tinkering with objects – but his work, and ideas, are ethereal.”
Goldberg’s work has been shown extensively throughout the U.S., with solo exhibits in NYC at Willard Gallery, Betty Cuningham Gallery, Jason McCoy Gallery, and others. In 2018, he and Amber Scoon held a two-person, collaborative exhibition at the WCSU gallery, which coincided with the publication of their book, “?”, by Atropos Press. His works are in private and museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art, High Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, LA.
Will Hutnick
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Will Hutnick is an artist and curator based in Wassaic, NY. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute in 2011 and his BA from Providence College in 2007. He is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting, and a recipient of grants from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation in 2017 and Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2016.
Will’s work has been in solo exhibitions at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Standard Space, Providence College Galleries, One River School, The Java Project, and St. Thomas Aquinas College. Group exhibitions include: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Hollis Taggart, Heaven Gallery, and Geary Contemporary.
Will has been awarded numerous artist-in-residencies, including Yaddo, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, and others. He has also been a curator-in-residence at Benaco Arte and at Trestle Projects, and has curated exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Pratt Institute, and Wassaic Project, among others.
From 2015 - 2020, Hutnick was one of the Co-Directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Brooklyn. He is currently the Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project, a nonprofit organization that uses art and art education to foster positive social change.
Magge Gagliardi
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Magge Gagliardi is an award-winning illustrator, designer, and commercial artist from Connecticut. She has a BFA in Illustration from Paier College of Art and a MFA in Illustration from the University of Hartford. She is an instructor of Digital Illustration at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. She is also a committee member for the Change in the Air Foundation Festival in New Haven.
Magge’s work has been in many publications, including Yankee Brew News, 3x3 Magazine, Collective Arts Brewing 1st - 4th Edition Zines, Connecticut Magazine, Hartford Magazine, New Haven Living Magazine, The Sacramento News Review, Ink Magazine, The Hartford Courant, The New Haven Advocate, The New London Day, and Tarnished Magazine.
Magge’s client list of breweries across the U.S. includes Austin Street Brewery, Portland, ME; Elm City Social, New Haven, CT; Housatonic River Brewing, New Milford, CT; and Fifty Fifty Brewing Company, Truckee, CA, among others.
Magge’s work was recognized in 2021 by USA Today’s Top 10 Beer Labels. She is the recipient of many awards, recently from Creative Quarterly 53, 54 & 55; 3x3 Magazine Annual No.15 & 16; Connecticut Art Directors Awards Gold and Silver; and Society of Illustrators, Los Angeles, Illustration West 56 & 58.
Hangama Amiri
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Hangama Amiri is an Afghan-Canadian artist who lives in New Haven, CT, where she earned her MFA from Yale University in 2020. She received her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale’s School of Art and Sciences in 2015-2016.
Hangama combines painting and printmaking with textiles, sewing together stories based on memories of her homeland. “I’m pinning and sewing my identity”, she recently said. In 1996, when she was seven years old, she and her family fled Kabul. Moving through numerous countries over several years, they immigrated to Canada in 2005 when Hangama was a teenager. Her works examine notions of home; how gender, social norms, and geopolitical conflicts impact the daily lives of women in Afghanistan and the diaspora.
Amiri’s 2023 exhibitions include: “A Homage to Home” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (reviewed in the New York Times), and “Thinking Historically in the Present” at Sharjah Biennial 15, United Arab Emirates. Since 2020, her work has been shown nationally and internationally, in solo exhibits in Denver, NYC, Toronto, London, and Rome. In 2024, her work will be exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, a traveling show from the Aldrich with a published catalog