Visiting Artists

Marianne Fairbanks

Monday September 22
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Marianne Fairbanks is a visual artist, designer, and Associate Professor of Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including The Museum of Art and Design, NY, USA Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen Denmark, RAM Gallery, Oslo, Norway and The Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft, Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work spans the fields of art, design, and social practice, seeking to chart new material and conceptual territories, to innovate solution-based design, and to foster fresh modes of cultural production.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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David Buckley Borden

Wednesday, September 24
6:00 - 7:00 PM
Osher Hall

David Buckley Borden is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Using an accessible, often humorous, combination of art and design, David’s place-based projects highlight both pressing environmental issues and everyday phenomena. Informed by design research and community outreach, David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific landscape installations in the forest to data-driven cartography in the gallery. David is currently a Senior Advisor of Creative Practice and Innovation at the Center for the Future of Forests and Society at Oregon State University and an Associate Research Professor within the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Oregon where he regularly collaborates with research scientists to champion a cultural ecology of interdisciplinary environmental-communication.

Made possible by the Envision Resilience Public Art Studio, funded by MECA&D Sculpture Department.

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LJ Roberts

Wednesday, October 1
5:00 - 6:00 PM
Osher Hall

LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages, and mixed-media sculptures. Their work illuminates oft-erased and unacknowledged queer and trans histories, narratives, people, and places. Roberts creates conceptual and geographical maps and amplifies non-linear stories of queer culture and kinships that traverse the past, present, and future through material deviance and re-imaging craft practices. The artist has a particular interest in how queer and trans people encounter freedom, fear, possibilities, and perils while traveling on the road and living nomadically. Roberts has been active in HIV/AIDS activism for over 20 years and produced numerous collaborative projects that address the ongoing AIDS pandemic.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Pap Souleye Fall

Friday, October 3
6:00 PM - Performance
ICA at MECA&D

Pap Souleye Fall is a Senegalese-American artist who explores the transmedia potential between mediums, including sculpture, installation, performance, cosplay, digital media, and comics. Their work is produced within the context of the African Diaspora. Being of two worlds, Fall delights in the ability to construct their own reality between the polarities of two widespread cultures. Using common, found, and repurposed materials their multidisciplinary practice explores themes of speculative fiction, challenges the pretext of masculinity, Africanisms, and Afro-futurism.

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Pap Souleye Fall will perform DATADATAPASSIVEDATADATADEADLIVEDATA Friday, October 3, 2025, 6:00 pm, in The ICA at MECA&D in conjunction with the ICA at MECA&D's exhibition opening, otherwise, on view October 3 - December 13, 2025

Storytelling has long been a way for people to make sense of the world and find agency in the face of significant adversity. In otherwise, exhibiting artists utilize elements of fiction in their work, transforming real-life issues into something otherworldly and innovative. Some artists in the exhibition draw inspiration from specific sources such as science fiction, oral traditions, and mythologies, while others craft intricate narratives inspired by real-world histories. Collectively, the artists in otherwise explore the potential of fictional storytelling to reimagine and reclaim historical and contemporary oppressions, paving the way for bold new futures.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Ayana V. Jackson

Monday, October 6
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Ayana V. Jackson (b. 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey; lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and Johannesburg, South Africa) uses archival impulses to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography. By using her lens to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture, Jackson questions photography’s authenticity and role in perpetuating socially relevant and stratified identities.

Jackson’s practice maps the ethical considerations and relationships between the photographer, subject, and viewer, in turn exploring themes around race, gender and reproduction. Her work examines myths of the Black diaspora and re-stages colonial archival images as a means to liberate the Black body. The various titles of her series nod to the stories she is reimagining. Jackson often casts herself in the role of historical figures to guide their narrative and directly access the impact of photography and its relationship to the human body.

Jackson’s work is collected by major local and international institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, New York), The Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey), J. P. Morgan Chase Art Collection (New York, New York), Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, New Jersey), The National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, Illinois) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle, Washington). Jackson was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow for Photography and the recipient of the 2018 Smithsonian Fellowship.

In 2022, Jackson founded Still Art, an artist residency program focused on emerging Southern African contemporary artists of all disciplines in Johannesburg. From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya, her first major institutional exhibition at the National Museum of African Art - Smithsonian Institution opened in April 2023.

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Ayana V. Jackson joins the Visiting Artist series in conjunction with the ICA at MECA&D's exhibition, otherwise, on view October 3 - December 13, 2025.

Storytelling has long been a way for people to make sense of the world and find agency in the face of significant adversity. In otherwise, exhibiting artists utilize elements of fiction in their work, transforming real-life issues into something otherworldly and innovative. Some artists in the exhibition draw inspiration from specific sources such as science fiction, oral traditions, and mythologies, while others craft intricate narratives inspired by real-world histories. Collectively, the artists in otherwise explore the potential of fictional storytelling to reimagine and reclaim historical and contemporary oppressions, paving the way for bold new futures.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Vivian Beer

Monday, October 20
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Vivian Beer is a furniture designer/maker/sculptor based in New England. Her sleek, abstracted metal and concrete furniture combines the aesthetic sensibilities of contemporary design, craft, and sculpture to create furniture that alter expectations of and interface with the domestic landscape. Her Infrastructure, Streamliner, Anchored Candy and upcoming aeronautic series are physical manifestations of the cultural and industrial history of her materials even as they serve as intellectual bridges for their users, bringing them to a new way of conceiving the built world through a luxurious deployment of the senses.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Joe Donaldson

Monday, October 27
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Joe Donaldson is a New York City-based creative leader with over 15 years of experience specializing in design & animation. Currently the Head of Design & Creative Director at BUCK, as well as Adjunct Faculty at SVA.Donaldson has found themself intrinsically linked to the world of design, animation, & technology. Regardless of form, they strive to make the ubiquitous feel unique & find simple solutions for complex problems.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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Lihua Lei

Monday, November 3
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Lihua Lei, grew up the daughter of rice farmers in rural Taiwan, crafting her first art pieces (her own toys) from the muddy earth beneath her. Her childhood was marked by polio and growing up a disabled woman, Lei says she was constantly grappling with bodily beauty standards–wondering if she fell short of femininity, and whether she could ever “fit in.” These questions endured as Lei emerged as an artist. With a background in art therapy, and a strong belief that she could connect to others’ suffering with her work, Lei came to Maine in 1998 for a summer residency at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture.

Funded through a generous gift from Dr. Edward M. Friedman '08 and Carole J. Friedman, in honor of Sculpture Professor Emeritus Gary Ambrose.

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Alisha B. Wormsley

Monday, November 10
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Alisha B. Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Wormsley’s work is dedicated to the expansion and creation of time and space and the rematriation of Black/Indigenous Matriarch. Alisha is a mother, and founder of Sibyls Shrine, an arts collective and residency program for Black artists who M/other. Sibyls Shrine and her project, There Are Black People In The Future, both focus on the redistribution of resources and reimagination and rematriation of Black and Indigenous futures. Wormsley is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. A 2023 Creative Time Commissioned Public Artist with Suzanne Kite, for their project Cosmologyscape, integrating media, public space, and public interaction, invitations for rest and dreaming rooted in practices of Afro-Futurism and Indigenous Protocol. Her newest film in process, Children of NAN: A Survival Guide, a film that presents tutorials and survival skills for future Black femmes, while exploring their relationship to ritual, craft, and the natural world won a 2023 Anonymous Was a Woman and New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Environmental Art Grants Recipient and Sundance Interdisciplinary Grantee. Wormsley is an Assistant Professor of Art in the area of Social Practice at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Alisha B. Wormsley joins the Visiting Artist series in conjunction with the ICA at MECA&D's exhibition, otherwise, on view October 3 - December 13, 2025.

Storytelling has long been a way for people to make sense of the world and find agency in the face of significant adversity. In otherwise, exhibiting artists utilize elements of fiction in their work, transforming real-life issues into something otherworldly and innovative. Some artists in the exhibition draw inspiration from specific sources such as science fiction, oral traditions, and mythologies, while others craft intricate narratives inspired by real-world histories. Collectively, the artists in otherwise explore the potential of fictional storytelling to reimagine and reclaim historical and contemporary oppressions, paving the way for bold new futures.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

Learn More

Sara Clugage

Monday, November 17
12:00 - 1:00 PM
Osher Hall

Sara Clugage’s art practice focuses on economic and political issues in craft and food. She is Editor-in-Chief of Dilettante Army, an online magazine for visual culture and critical theory, and a 2024-2025 culinary resident at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. Sara has most recently been core faculty for the MA in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College and her most recent publication is the 2021 monograph from the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, New Recipes: Cooking, Craft, & Performance. She is currently working on a book about Jell-O, animacy, & abstraction.

Funded by the generous support of the TD Charitable Foundation.

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