Q20 celebrates the inventive diversity of practices among professional faculty artists at Wellesley College. The 2020 edition of this quinquennial showcase at the Davis Museum features works across media, including photography, painting, collage, sculpture, book-arts, printmaking, installation, video, sound, and trans-medial making. The ten artists included are Jenny O. Johnson, Claudia Joskowicz, Phyllis McGibbon, Kelsey Miller, Elizabeth Mooney, Andrew Mowbray, David Teng Olsen, Daniela Rivera, Katherine Ruffin, and William Van Beckum.
Jenny Olivia Johnson (b.1978 Santa Monica, CA), Associate Professor of Music, debuts DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance), an installation with interactive lighting, video, and audio from The After Time, a 90-minute opera for three voices, electronics, and chamber ensemble that she composed over a nineteen-year period. http://www.jennyoliviajohnson.com/
Claudia Joskowicz (b.1968 Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia), Assistant Professor of Art, presents Los rastreadores (2014), a 23-minute two-channel digital HD video (with color and sound) that references John Ford’s 1956 classic western film The Searchers to craft an experimental non-linear narrative about a Bolivian narco-kingpin.
Phyllis McGibbon (b.1961 Madison, WI), Elizabeth Christy Kopf Professor of Art, repurposes a vintage map case sourced from the Science Center to present a selection of collage and print works drawn from her current sabbatical work.
Kelsey Miller (b.1985 Antigua, West Indies), Visiting Lecturer in Art, is guided by everyday cycles—the rapid pace of news and weather, the slow build of archives and scientific data—toward an iterative practice of recording, scanning, altering, accumulating, and distributing that manifests in prints and large-scale installations. http://www.kelseynmiller.com/
Elizabeth Mooney (b.1977 Weymouth, MA), Visiting Lecturer in Art, makes painting and sculpture concerned with the contemporary landscape—and the ways that technology, travel, and speed impact our experience. Her research considers traditions of beauty in relation to the representation, perception, and interaction with the landscapes of the Anthropocene. http://elizabethmooney.com/
Andrew Mowbray (b.1971 Boston, MA), Lecturer in Art and Director of 3D Arts, works across concept and medium to blur boundaries between art, architecture, design, and craft. From quilts made of Tyvek Home Wrap to variations on the globally ubiquitous form of the milk crate, Mowbray’s practice is informed by utilitarian modernist ideas, and the structures of modularity and pattern. https://andrewmowbray.com/home.html
David Teng Olsen (b.1977 Seattle, WA), Associate Professor of Art, presents Survival Robot (2020), a monumental sculptural installation that explores themes of autonomy, collectivity, apocalyptic disaster, and immortality along the East/West axis. Conceived as a self-powering survival exoskeleton that mines its own cryptocurrency, it is constructed from wood, plastic and metal, and filled with ASIC blockchain mining machines. https://www.davidtengolsen.com/
Daniela Rivera (b.1973 Santiago, Chile), Associate Professor of Art, presents Without Trace/ Sin Evidencia, 2019, a monumental wall constructed of soap, that establishes a dialogue between the political history of the artist’s home country, Chile, with personal histories of trauma, and the formal strategies of male dominated Western art movements. http://www.danielarivera.com/
Katherine Ruffin (b.1972 Huntsville, AL), Director of the Book Studies Program and Lecturer in Art, works in hand-set letterpress and here presents two broadside projects predicated on historical precedents. For The Seven Lamps of Architecture (2019), she takes cues from John Ruskin’s 1849 publication of the same name, while The New Game of 13 Virtues (2017) recasts the terms of a late eighteenth century board game that moves players through the “seven ages of man.”
William Van Beckum (b.1988 Unionville, CT), Visiting Lecturer in Art, presents two projects united by his interest in landscape photography as both a fine art and a social practice. Borrowing photographs from social media and historically significant landscape photographers, like Ansel Adams, he creates new compositions that reference the varying roles that photography has occupied in the past three centuries. https://williamvanbeckum.com/
Q20 is organized by Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis Museum, and Mark Beeman, Manager of Exhibitions and Collections Preparation, with major support from Wellesley College Friends of Art at the Davis and the Erna Bottigheimer Sands (Class of 1929) Art Fund.