J o h n M cN a ma r a
J o h n M cN a ma r a University Ar t Galler y Depar tment of Ar t School of the Ar ts California State University, Stanislaus
300 copies printed
John McNamara November 20–December 22, 2017 University Art Gallery School of the Arts California State University, Stanislaus One University Circle Turlock, CA 95382
This exhibition and catalog have been funded by: Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus
Copyright © 2017 California State University, Stanislaus All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.
Catalog Design: Brad Peatross, School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus Cover image: Surveillance, oil, paper, panel, 40” x 30”, 2017 ISBN: 978-1-940753-32-4
Con te n ts
Director’s Foreword.....................................................................................................................................................................................................5 Artist’s Statement...........................................................................................................................................................................................................7 Essay: John McNamara.................................................................................................................................................................................................8 Images................................................................................................................................................................................................................................10 Resume..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................28 Acknowledgments .....................................................................................................................................................................................................32
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D i r e c to r ’s Fo r ewo r d
This exhibition presents an occasion to view the wonderful works of John McNamara. Painting from the Bay Area has always held a great place in my heart and has given me some of my most inspirational experiences in art. Today it is a great pleasure to see a painter with such talent and understanding of their medium and what it can mean and convey in today’s ever-changing art world. I would like to thank John McNamara for the opportunity to exhibit his work; David Olivant for recommending that John be invited to exhibit with us; DeWitt Cheng for writing the perceptive catalog essay; the College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the catalog design; and Claremont Print & Copy for printing the catalog. We are also grateful and extend our warmest appreciation to the Instructionally Related Activities Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue.
Dean De Cocker
Gallery Director California State University, Stanislaus
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A r t is t ’s St a te m e nt
I’ve investigated the relationship between painting and photography for the past thirty-one years, making paintings that engage photography as an often hidden, sometimes overt painted element. Since the photography exists literally beneath the painted surface, there is for me a strange conceptual ambiguity relational to the frozen moment of a person, place, or thing that lie underneath the interpretive nature of the painting process. I am intrigued by the “time machine” aspect of collage, and the way paint interacts with it. The content of my work focuses on conceptions of transcendence, moments in popular culture, and sharable life realities. I consider my paintings to be open investigative narratives. My hope is to provoke a sense of curiosity within the viewer, similar to the curiosity and surprise I feel when making a painting. I strive to make a painting that has visual and conceptual engagement. —John McNamara
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J o h n M cN a ma r a By DeWitt Cheng “Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary “In this empire the art of cartography had reached such a perfection that a map of a single county covered a whole city, and a map of the empire that of a whole county. Finally, a point was reached when these colossal maps were no longer considered satisfactory, and the institutions of the cartographers made a map of the empire, which was as large as the empire itself and coincided with it point for point. Later generations, who were less prone to practice the art of cartography, came to realize that this vast map was useless and through some neglect abandoned it to the forces of sun and winters. In the deserts of the western regions [of the empire], home to beasts and beggars, there remained dispersed ruins of the map, but otherwise there were no remains of the practice of geography in the whole land. —Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science It’s hard to imagine now, but only two generations ago, abstraction and figuration were locked in mortal combat. (The accusations of treachery that greeted Philip Guston’s 1970s abandonment of abstraction for his late, figurative style should be required reading for impassioned art revolutionaries.) Esthetic fashions come and go, but some, if not all, of the best art has always sought to capture the world of appearances and to examine it in some transcendent light, sub specie aeternitatis: to show flux and eternity fused. John McNamara makes surrealist photo collages and then slowly covers with them with a layer of oil paint, mixing not only figuration and abstraction, but also raising questions about representation in the way that many photographers of constructed realities are also doing. McNamara is a painter, however, who has explored the creation of presence, or “sense of place” in painting for his entire career. A Bostonian trained at Massachusetts College of Art, he initially painted turbulent Abstract Expressionist fields inset with stylized, totemic figures and rectangular apertures: sketches or photographs suggestive of windows or electronic displays. The free-association imagery (Marilyn, animal skulls, feet, lips, Einstein, daguerreotypes, Cary Grant) was evocative, but ambiguous, defying narrative, or, rather, suggesting multiple narratives, with an implied reality lying beneath the welters of brush strokes (“I have always loved the tiny mark.”). In 1982, the Boston Phoenix critic Kenneth Baker (now art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle) praised the works’ implied “presence of reality,” or “the impression of inexhaustibility that defines reality.” McNamara’s “meandering composition[s] ... present you with more than anyone’s memory can hold in the way of physical structure and color interaction.” In 1986, The Christian Science Monitor ’s Theodore Wolff admired the paintings’ “highly personal and provocative fusion of geometric and organic forms, their ability to objectify primal experience, and their knack of maintaining a dynamic, contrapuntal relationship between the products of impulse and those of calculation.” Prestigious art fellowships (AVA, NEA) followed, as did articles in art magazines (Art News, Artforum, Art in America) and purchases by major art museums (Metropolitan Museum; List Visual Art Center, M.I.T.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In 1993, McNamara moved to the Bay Area, teaching first at San Francisco Art Institute and later the University of California at Berkeley, where his courses in drawing, painting, and Visual Studies, along with his mentoring of graduate student instructors, continue, both popular and academically well-regarded. In 1989, McNamara felt the need for creative change: “the paintings I was making had less and less meaning for me.” After a five-month hiatus from painting, he decided to “make narratives” by incorporating photographic and other found imagery— “life’s realities”—into his paintings. The commandeering of pre-existing “low” vernacular material for “high” art derives from
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Cubist and Dadaist collage, developing with Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s hybrid 2D/3D artworks and Pop Art’s mass media image appropriations. McNamara continues this rich tradition by assembling printed images from magazines and other sources. Instead of presenting the works as is, however, or re-photographing them (or composing them in the computer), McNamara repaints the images in oils, preserving the source material in idealized, unchanging form, atop the original material. His unorthodox practice is analogous to, say, decorating mummy cases with encaustic portraits of upwardly mobile dead Egyptians, or making a 1:1 scale map of the topography underfoot, as in Borges’ story quoted above. McNamara, fascinated with combining photographic frozen moments from different eras and areas, and preserving them in the amber of art, writes: “For me, collage is a time machine of sorts. The painted skin on top jettisons the photo document into the world of painting; but these people, places and things still speak from underneath the painted skin.” The artist thus practices a kind of Photorealist painting—he particularly admires the complex urban landscapes of Richard Estes—crossed with conceptual performance and ritual, the painting being the end product of his focused attention, even compulsion. “Total fixation activity—I admire that tremendously,” he says, of the paintings of Beat painter/collagist Jess Collins. Some of McNamara’s eye-popping, obsessive-compulsive covers or coverlets include Wise Ass, a panoramic landscape reminiscent of Dali in its succulent palette and unfettered fantasy; Encroachment, a merger of two images of high-altitude maintenance workers in New York City and Dallas; The Suitors, depicting a Gothic Revival mansion and its upstart neighbor, a postmodernist work in progress; Unreal, a montage of children, wounded soldiers and movie spectators with the epic quality of nineteenth-century history painting, but without its canned sentiments; and White on Color, a large painting combining scores of images dealing with various types of “space” that have been edited with white paint and then preserved and muted by an overall glazing of white-tinted wax, resulting in a kind of artifact already dimmed and obscured by time. Social satire, surrealist fantasy and elegy vie with formal concerns in these works, but however ambiguous or enigmatic the narrative implications, the images are always compelling to viewers open to their eccentric seductions. With their surreal juxtapositions and cinematic jump cuts, they are, in the words of Gerrit Henry (Art in America), “ridiculous and sublime, all at once”—like real life.
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High Stakes, oil, paper, panel, 40” x 48”, 2003
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Real Light, oil, paper, panel, 40” x 48” , 2001
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5.18.16, oil, paper, panel, 60” x 40”, 2016 12
Anthroland, oil, paper, panel, 48” x 40” , 1998
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Anticipation is Greater than Realization, oil, paper, panel, 42” x 60” , 2015
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Apex, oil, paper, panel, 60” x 44”, 2015–16 15
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Bridges and Plumbing, oil, paper, panel, 48” x 60” x 2”, 2013–14
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Compressed, oil, paper, wax, panel, 40” x 60”, 2017
Faceoff, oil, paper, wax, panel, 30” x 40”, 2016–17
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Flux, oil, paper, panel, 12” x 32”, 2013
Rigor of Facade, oil, paper, panel, 36” x 80”, 2005
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Larry’s Place, oil, paper, panel, 48” x 60”, 2006
Let’s Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer, oil, paper, panel, 48” x 40”, 1999
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The Moment, oil, paper, panel, 48” x 40”, 2015
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The Century, oil, paper, wax, panel, 40” x 30”, 2017 23
The Showoff and the Introvert,oil, paper, wax, panel, 48” x 40”, 2015
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Transcendence, oil, paper, panel, 44” x 35”, 1997
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Where Is Matthew Barrall?, oil, paper, wax, panel, 30” x 40”, 2017
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Seduced Again, oil, paper, panel, 45” x 80”, 2005
John McNamara
www.macpainter.com Education 1977 1971
Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, M.F.A. Painting Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, B.F.A. Painting
Awards: 1985 Fellow, The MacDowell Colony 1982 Awards in the Visual Arts Fellowship 2(funded by Equitable Life and the Rockefeller Foundation) Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem NC 1981 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship 1980, 1983, 1986,1989 Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Grant One Person Exhibitions 2017 University Art Gallery, Cal State Stanislaus, Turlock, CA 2013 The Painting Center, NY, NY 2012 Gallery Bergelli, Larkspur, CA 2008 Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA – “Ten Moments from the Twentieth Century” 2/20 – 5/15 - 2008 2002 Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA Ebert Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2001 / 02 Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA 1999 Addison Street Windows, Public Art Venue, Berkeley, CA 1995 Miller / Block Gallery, Boston, MA 1992 Nina Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA 1990 Nina Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA 1989 Stavaridis Gallery, Boston, MA 1988 Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, NY 1987 Stavaridis Gallery, Boston, MA Honolulu Academy of Fine Art, Honolulu, Hawaii 1986 Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, NY 1985 Stavaridis Gallery, Boston, MA Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, NY Mary Wright Gallery, Dallas, TX 1984 Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, NY Stavaridis Gallery, Boston, MA 1983 Stavaridis Gallery, Boston, MA 1982 The Exhibition Space at 112 Greene Street, New York, NY Cutler / Stavaridis Gallery, Boston, MA 1981 Cutler / Stavaridis Gallery, Boston, MA 1980 Cutler / Stavaridis Gallery, Boston, MA 1971 Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA 1969 Hundred Souls Gallery, Plymouth, MA Selected Group Exhibitions 2017 2016
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“Happy Paintings To Bring Mirth” Compound Gallery, Oakland, CA “Polychrome Stew” Work by John McNamara and Bob Stang, Compound Gallery, Oakland CA
2015 “Livin’ Large: Works From The 1980’s” Tucson Museum of Art, 4/24 – 7/12 2014 “Unique Surfaces, A Collage” Gary Francis Gallery, Alameda, 2013 “Urban Grit” Gary Francis Gallery, 2013 / 14 “In Our Hands” Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb, Croatia 2013 “Open Loop: The Life of an Art Object Before, During, and After” Worth Ryder Gallery, University of CA., Berkeley 2012 “Natural/Constructed” The Painting Center, NY, NY 2010 Small Works Show The Painting Center, NY, NY 2008 / 09 “Decades of Abstraction:” Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii 1994–2013 “U.C.B.” Faculty Show, Worth Ryder Gallery, University of CA, Berkeley 2004 / 05 “New Faces: New Vision” Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA 2002 / 03 “Painting in Boston: 1950 – 2000” DeCordova Museum / Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA 2002 “Selections from the Permanent Collection” Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA 2000 / 01 “Abstract Expressionism – Figural Expressionism” Common Ground, DeCordova Museum / Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA 2000 “Visual Memories: Selected Paintings and Drawings” Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 1996 “A Gift of Vision – William A. and Susan Small Collection, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ “James Breslin Memorial Exhibition” Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA 1995 “Current Acquisitions” Smith College of Art, North Hampton, MA 1994 “Treasures in Our Midst” Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA 1993 “Works in Progress” Walter McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, S.F., CA “Healing Arts” Somar Gallery, San Francisco, CA 871 Fine Art Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Crossing the Line: Abstraction / Figuration” Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA 1992 “In the Spirit of Landscape” Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA “Big Ideas” Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ 1990 “Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture” Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA “Invitational Small Painting Exhibition” Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA 1989 / 90 “New England Impressions: The Art of Printmaking” Fitchburg Museum of Art, Fitchburg, MA Travels to: Galerie Kunst Im Turm, West Germany “Resonant Abstraction” Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA 1988 “American Painters and Sculptors” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY 1987 Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, NY 1986 “Boston Collects” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA “25th Anniversary Exhibition” Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA “Expressionism in Boston” DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA 1985 “Contemporary Art of the Commonwealth” Offices of Congressman Edward J. Markey, Washington, DC 1984 / 83 “Brockton Museum Triennial Exhibit” Brockton Museum, Brockton, MA “Awards in the Visual Arts Exhibition Tour” Mint Museum, Charlotte, SC Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL DeCordova Museum, Boston, MA 1984 “Selections from the A.V.A. 2 Show” Equitable Life Insurance Society Gallery, New York, NY 1983 “Boston Now” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA 1982 “New England Painters” Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH 1981 “Epic Abstractionists” Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA “Boston Now” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA 1980 “Brockton Museum Triennial Exhibit” Brockton, MA 1978 “Fresh Images” Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 1977 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA New York University, New York, NY 1970 “Upcoming Young American Artists” The Arts and Science Center, Nashua, NH “Salon 70” Warde-Nasse Gallrey, Boston, MA Selected References: Margaret Regan
“Livin Large: Paintings from the Power Charged 80”s, The Tucson Weekly, May 28, 2015,
Alice Losk Allara, Pamela
“The Artsicle Blog” June 26, 2012 NY,NY http://www.artsicle.com/blog/serenity-despite-the-heat-at-natural constructed-spaces-i “Artists of the Eighties” Dialogue, Feb. 1989, No. 84 “The Scope of Boston Art is Much Broader Than it Would Appear” Art News, Nov. 1981, 80,9: 126-131
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Baker, Kenneth Banks, Gail Bauld, Harold Belz, Carl Bonetti, David Chawky Frenn Cheng, DeWitt Collier’s Magazine Collier’s Magazine Couture, Michael Croke, Katie DeWitt Cheng Henry, Gerrit Jeppson, Gabriella Joselit, David Marquis Publications McClaran, Stephen McFadden, Sara McGill, Douglass Mitchell, Charles Morse, Marcia Nemser, Rebbeca Narrett, Eugene Parks, Addison Poirrier, Maurice Saulnier, Bonnie Stapen, Nancy Swan, Christopher Taylor, Robert
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“Abstracting Reality” The Boston Phoenix, March 23, 1982 “Local Color at the I.C.A.” The Boston Phoenix, May 26, 1981 “Seeing is Believing: John McNamara’s Maximum Spaces” The Boston Phoenix, April 21, 1981 “Six Boston Artists Who are about to Make it Big” Boston Magazine, May, 1983 “The Collectors” Boston Magazine, Sept. 1987 “John McNamara” Arts Magazine, Nov., 1982 57, 3:13 “Painting in Boston” pgs. 184, 103, 217, 231 “The Boston Phoenix May 5, 1989 “John McNamara” Art News, Feb. 1988 “Boston” Art News, Summer 1988 The Boston Phoenix Dec. 24, 1987 “An Artist Capable of Surprise” Boston Musica Viva News, Sept.1985 “100 Boston Painters” Schifferbooks.com 2012 “Ten Moments in the Twentieth Century” Paintings by John McNamara East Bay Express, Feb. 20, 2008 February 2012 April 2012 “Two New Exhibits to open at Fuller” Brockton Enterprise, Dec. 9, 1989 ‘Folly” Interview with John McNamara July 2006 Essay for 2012 Catalog/Gallery Bergelli “John McNamara” Art in America, Summer 1984 “John McNamara and Roger Kizik” Art New England, Jan. 1980 1,2: 6 “Epic Abstractionists: John McNamara and Rick Harlow” Art New England, Dec. 1981 “Who’s Who in American Art, 1984 – 2010 “John McNamara: Specchio e Figura” HAA Docents’ Newsletter, May 2009 “Report from Boston” Art in America, May 1983 New York Times, May 29, 1985 “Art Space” Dallas Fort Worth Letter, Summer 1985 “Two Artist’s Redefine the Word “Abstraction” Honolulu Star Bulletin, August, 9, 1987 Art Listings, Galleries, The Boston Phoenix, Section 3, July 20, 1990 “John McNamara” Art New England, Jan. 1991 “John McNamara” Art New England, Dec. 1990 “Art and Culture” Art New Engaland Oct. 1989 “John McNamara, Stavaridis Gallery” New Art Examiner, Jan. 1988 Art Deal, May, 1995 “John McNamara” Art News, Sept. 1986 “John McNamara’s Cathedrals” New Boston Review, June/July 1979 “A Landscape Artist Moves to Cyberspace – John McNamara” Boston Globe, May 4, 1995 “John McNamara” Art News, Nov. 1990 “From Epic to Expression” Boston Sunday Globe, Sept. 30, 1990 “Passion Power, Expressive Abstraction Show at Fuller” The Boston Herald, Jan. 5 1990 “Art in Boston: An Overview” Art News, Summer 1987 “John McNamara” Art New England, May 1981 Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 1983 Boston Globe, Jan 10, 1988 “The Best Shows of 1981” Boston Sunday Globe, Dec. 27, 1981 “Heroic Works: Disaster and Nature in Three Shows” Boston Globe, April 5, 1981 “Big is Beautiful” Boston Globe, Jan. 15, 1981 “Images at Brandeis: Vital, Engrossing” Boston Sunday Globe, Nov. 26, 1978
Temin, Christine Weinreb, Brea Wolff, Theodore
“Thoughtful Amalgam of Several Styles” Boston Globe, Dec. 21, 1989 “Perspectives, John McNamara” Boston Globe, May 4, 1989 “McNamara Cuts Loose in New York” Boston Globe, March 15, 1984 “Lives in the Arts” Boston Globe, Jan. 4, 1984 “Best Shows of 1981” Boston Globe, Dec. 26, 1981 “McNamara’s Shimmering Bands” Boston Globe, March 31, 198 Art Practice Faculty Show, Caliber Magazine, November 2012 “Young Talent on the Trail of Greatness” The Christian Science Monitor, April 14, 1986 “New York Artists Speak to Each Other- On Canvas” The Christian Science Monitor, April 23, 1984 “The Home Forum” The Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 1983 “Where have all the Painterly Painters Gone?” The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 21, 1982
Public Collections Boston Public Library, Boston, MA Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater, MA Clark University, Worcester, MA Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, MA DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA Federal Reserve Bank, Boston, MA Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA Hale and Dore, Boston, MA Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii J.B. Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY Joan Sonnabend Collection List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Smith College of Art Museum, North Hampton, MA Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA Academic Bio 1975–1993 1982/83, 1988–1992 1985/86 1992–1993 1993–Present
Visiting Instructor/Professor, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA Visiting Professor, Boston Museum of Fine Arts School Montserrat College of Art, Boston, MA Visiting Instructor, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA Continuing Lecturer, Art Practice Dept., University of California, Berkeley
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Ackn owle dge m en ts
California State University, Stanislaus
Dr. Ellen Junn, President
Dr. Kimberly Greer, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs
Dr. James A. Tuedio, Dean, College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Department of Art
Dr. Carmen Robbin, Chair, Professor
Dean De Cocker, Professor
Martin Azevedo, Assistant Professor
Jacob Been, Lecturer
James Deitz, Lecturer
Daniel Edwards, Associate Professor
Jessica Gomula-Kruzic, Professor
Chad Hunter, Lecturer
David Olivant, Professor
Ellen Roehne, Lecturer
Dr. Staci Scheiwiller, Associate Professor
Susan Stephenson, Assistant Professor
Jake Weigel, Assistant Professor
Meg Broderick, Administrative Support Assistant II
Andrew Cain, Instructional Technician I
Jon Kithcart, Equipment Technician II
University Art Gallery
Dean De Cocker, Director
Nikki Boudreau, Gallery Assistant
Special Thanks
I’d like to extend my thanks to the art department for thinking of me for this show.
It was a total surprise on my end, and one that I appreciate very much.
—John McNamara
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