Art Department Opportunities and Special Projects

Fall 2023 - Charlotte Richardson-Deppe

Mending Rifts: Soft Sculpture as Social Practice

Mending makes us care more about what we hold dear. As collaborative artist-in-residence at Montgomery College, Charlotte Richardson-Deppe will explore themes of social and environmental justice via sewing and mending practices. She will guide art students in the creation of an interactive soft sculpture installation and multiple-person garments that will result in a performance or happening. Charlotte will also host mending workshops in which students can bring a worn clothing item to repair in way that is both functional and artistic, contributing to a library of creatively mended garments. As they work with found textiles, including their own discarded clothing, students will examine themes of care, sustainability, and consumerism. The final installation will take place in the Sarah Silberman Gallery, Art Building, Montgomery College Rockville Campus. 

Artist website: Charlotte Richardson-Deppe

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Fall 2022 - Big Ink

The Big Ink traveling woodblock printing group will work with select classes to print large scale woodblock prints in the Sarah Silberman Art Gallery.

Artist website: Big Ink

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Spring 2022 - Ada Pinkston: LandMarked/Reverb 

Artist Ada Pinkston will guide students in a large scale, site-specific project that poses the question, “What would a monument that reflects the students of Montgomery College look like?” Students will learn about the significance of public monuments, reflect upon their own perspective on public memory, and consider both the inclusivity and exclusivity of the construction of history. The artist envisions this project as part of a movement that considers how to re-create a more equitable public space that is inclusive of all histories. 

Artist website: adapinkston.com 

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Fall 2021 - Natan Diacon-Furtado: Our Patterns

Trained as a cultural anthropologist and public interest designer, Natan Diacon-Furtado is drawn to projects that remain a part of his life long after bringing him into new experiences and communities. As a globally southern person of color, growing up between the modernist city of Brasília and the living traditions of East Tennessee, Natan was raised with an expansive sense of race, identity, culture and community, and the continuous self-translation work required to exist within and between these worlds. Emerging from this site of translation, his work engages in forms of visual code-switching to collaboratively make space through pattern. Uniting communities of all sizes in the creation and re-creation of shared cultures, this work taps into a globally southern heritage of pattern making as a language, art and craft. 

The artist’s recent experiments and evolutions in this collaborative practice include asynchronously creating a digital quilt of community patterns with 100+ students at Ball State University (featured in the upcoming issue of the international design magazine CLOG), and beta-testing a self-specific sculptural system with the support of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Natan Diacon-Furtado’s three-week AiR project, Our Patterns, Montgomery College, unites students from six 2D Design Studio classes to create a virtual community "quilt" of patterns, a project that fosters discovery and understanding of each student's patterns of exploration, working, creativity, family tradition, and more.

Artist website: diaconfurado.com

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Spring 2021 - Tara Tamaribuchi: Intersecting Public Art Today with Architecture History

Artist in Residence Tara Tamaribuchi will spend three weeks working collaboratively with students in History of Architecture classes. Student design teams will plan and design public art proposals in response to specific historical and contemporary architectural sites from around the world, offering a 21st perspective on sites that they have researched and considered within their historical context. Studying the intersections between culture, community, and public spaces, students will also propose strategies for public engagement around their site-specific public art.

Artist website: taratamaribuchi.com

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Fall 2019 - Stephanie Mercedes: Run, Hide, Fight

Stephanie Mercedes uses weapons confiscated and deactivated by the D.C. police, melts down the metal, and transforms it into musical installations and instruments. The intention of her work is to take the materiality of violence and turn it into its opposite: art. During her residency, Mercedes guided art students in a collaborative project in which she melted bullet casings to make traditional school bells. Each bell size correlates to the number fatalities from school shootings in the US per year. For example, the year 2012, in which 38 school shooting fatalities occurred, is represented by a bell made from 38 bullets. Participating students cast bells that collectively represent the history of school shootings in the United States from 1994 to 2017. This project was intended to give students a voice on the current crisis of school shootings in this country. Throughout the process, students were asked to answer the question: When do you feel safe?

Media Coverage: 

• Montgomery College's Unique Art Exhibit Turns Bullet Casings into Bellsnew window
• Video: Montgomery College Rockville Art Exhibit Highlights School Shooting Fearsnew window

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Spring 2019: Carron Little

As an artist and curator, Carron Little’s practice focuses on interactive performance and public engagement in neighborhoods and cities. Her projects combine poetry, sculpture, performance, and audience interaction. Little recently returned from a working on a two-year project for the City of Lucerne in Switzerland that culminated in the production of four interactive performances for the 2018 Woerdz Festival, an international festival focused on the spoken word. Little is Director of the public performance series Out of Site Chicago, and has taught in the Performance Department at the Art Institute of Chicago, in addition to creating artist projects with Chicago Public Schools. 

As part of her residency, Little installed sculptures from her “Neighborhood Magic” series. She created these sculptures in response to people that she met and interviewed in the Chicago neighborhood of Beverly Hills during a public engagement project. During her residency at Montgomery College, Little collaborated with students on a project focused on public engagement and interactive performance, and the students presented their collaborative work during ArtWalk, an annual outdoor art event.

Artist website: carronlittle.comnew window

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Fall 2018 - Allyson Packer: Sit In/Walk Out

During Allyson Packer’s residency, students learned about artists who use the aesthetics of protest in their work, chose historical protest movements to research, and learned about the movements’ aesthetic strategies. Using this research as inspiration, students completed a series of collaborative performance and installation projects. Their projects included making one-word picket signs to create collaborative poems and restaging famous photographs of protest using sculptures they made in class as props. The ephemeral work was documented using digital photography. This process culminated with an exhibition based on the idea of “occupation.” Taking a cue from protest movements that have temporarily occupied public spaces, students were encouraged to think of the exhibition as a duration of time when they are occupying the gallery.

Artist website: allysonpacker.com

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Fall 2017 - Alice Gadzinski

During this Artist in Residence Program, Alice Gadzinksi led art classes in a collaborative project on the theme of “The Supermarket,” in which students created artwork inspired by products and packaging from supermarkets.

In this collaborative project, students were encouraged to reflect on their own experience and what the idea of the supermarket or grocery store means to them personally. This project is based around conversations of shared public spaces, idiosyncrasies between those public spaces in a variety of communities, and visual literacy. It discusses a similar experience in different communities and how those relate both aesthetically and culturally. 

Two classes (Crafts and 3D Design Studio) worked closely with Alice over three weeks, building papier-mâché sculptures from found materials, then priming and painting them for installation in the gallery. Other ARTT classes worked on a shorter version of the project, in which they painted directly on primed supermarket packaging, creating package designs based on real or imagined products. For these classes, focusing mostly on the surface of the product as opposed to its construction will concentrate the overall concept of “The Supermarket” into a more specific discussion of branding, marketing methods, and visual literacy.

 Students’ props were displayed as an installation in the gallery creating a collaborative “store” with the “products” created.

Artist website: alicegadzinski.comnew window

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Spring 2017 - Corwin Levi

Artist in Residence Corwin Levi worked with ARTT classes on a collaborative student project titled “As Above, So Below.”

There were two parts to the collaborative student project:

CONSTELLATION DRAWINGS – Corwin lectured about constellations, discussing interpretations of the sky from different time periods and cultures. Then, students drew constellations in several forms on printed star charts. They could create a reinterpretation of existing constellations, new constellations, or abstract constellations. Corwin assembled the constellation drawings in an installation which mapped their location in the sky.

WAVE DRAWINGS – Corwin introduced students to Hokusai’ s The Great Wave. Students then redrew their own interpretation of The Great Wave. Classes collaborated to assemble their wave drawings into one large wave installation. 

Artist website:  corwinlevi.comnew window

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Spring 2016 - Raj Bunnag

In this Artist in Residence program, Raj Bunnag worked with students to create imagery and symbols that were printed on fabric flags.

During the first half of the residency, Raj Bunnag worked with printmaking classes to design and carve linoleum blocks for printing. During the second half of the residency, the printmaking area hosted ARTT classes to print flags using the carved blocks. Aligning with the World Woodcut class, the flags produced in this project reflected some visual influences of traditional prayer flags while integrating contemporary icons and images produced in collaboration between students and Bunnag.

The print flags were displayed in the Sarah Silberman Art Gallery during the residency and subsequently during the 2016 ArtWalk in Rockville and Germantown.

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Fall 2014 - Victor Ekpuk

The Artist In Residence program worked with the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art to bring Nigerian born Artist Victor Ekpuk to the Art Department to collaborate with students on both ephemeral and paper works. Smithsonian curator Deborah Stokes opened the residence with an overview of African Art. Victor held three workshops in which he familiarized students with his unique style of iconography and asked students to work individually on their own iconography. After short critiques from Victor, students collaborated on two paper murals and one chalk mural, which was painted over at the end of the residency. In December 2014, the work was hung in the first floor of the Rockville campus library.

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Fall 2013 - Katherine Mann

Katherine brought rolls of tracing paper and Yupo and started the collaboration with students by unrolling the paper on the drawing studio floor. Following Katherine’s style, students then created washes and “spills” with India ink and watercolor directly on the paper, allowing the paper to dry overnight. In the gallery, Katherine asked students to take a walk outside to find inspiration from natural forms. Back inside, students used ink to draw on top of the colored paper. Katherine visited the printmaking studio and worked with students to create wood blocks that were used to print student designs on the paper. Katherine then collaborated with students to transform the paper into wall hangings and sculpture. After three weeks, some finished pieces had more than 200 collaborators. The work now hangs in the Rockville campus library.

View the Finished Collaborative Worknew window
Artist website: katherinemann.netnew window

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Fall 2012 - Felicia Glidden

Felicia collaborated with students to make a sound, video, and sculpture installation. Students wrote down their dreams on rice paper and glued them to 12x4x4 empty steel cubes. Each day, students added more dreams and more cubes. The cubes were stacked in the center of the gallery, and each day the students transformed the arrangement of cubes to create a multiple of perspectives , onto which  Felicia projected video. In the corner of the room, Felicia constructed a sound booth and students recorded their dreams. Each day, Felicia looped the sound recordings together so that students could sit and listen to each other’s dreams. In the back of the gallery, Felicia installed her own work, Between Two Rivers, 2014.

Watch a Video of the Eventnew window
Artist website: feliciaglidden.comnew window