Art pros meet with seniors for portfolio reviews

Seven artists, gallery professionals and curators visited PCA&D Monday to assist in the second annual portfolio review for the senior fine art and photography majors.

Arranged by Julia Staples, Adjunct Instructor in the Photography Department, as part of the students’ required Professional Practices Class, the event was designed to offer networking opportunities to the students along with practice in talking to professionals and showing their work.

“By bringing in a diverse range of professionals from the arts, from diverse locations, we will be creating new relationships for the students and the institution. This could lead to potential collaborations with PCA&D where we could establish an ongoing relationship for potential internships or future speakers and supporters of the College, ” said Staples.

The visiting artists were:

Saleem Ahmed

Saleem Ahmed is a visiting assistant professor of journalism in Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. He earned his BA in photojournalism at Temple University and his MFA in photography from the Hartford Art School. His creative practice incorporates elements of documentary storytelling, family history, writing, and bookmaking. Saleem developed Vista Oculta, a five year photography workshop geared towards teaching youth on the streets of La Paz, Bolivia. He has also worked as a Media Lab Instructor for WHYY, where he taught media literacy to high school and middle school students in the Philadelphia School District for three years.

Libby Modern

Libby Modern, owner and director of Modern Art Gallery in Lancaster City, has been working as an artist and a designer for many years. After graduating from Princeton University, Libby studied design and art direction at the Creative Circus in Atlanta, GA. She cut her teeth in the design world of San Francisco, then co-founded Half-Full, an award-winning design studio dedicated to providing creative communications strategies for non-profits. After 15 years of working with clients such as Greenpeace, The Jane Goodall Institute, and Defenders of Wildlife, all while painting on the side, Libby mixed them up, combined them and founded Modern Art.

“Through slightly disarming, curious, and unconventional surprises, we use creativity, lots of thinking, and humor to provide an entry point into positive change making. Our interactive projects, workshops, events and machines challenge complex systems of thought. The results provide participants an invitation and the means to live better, collectively, in our communities,” said Modern, who has partnered with Pennsylvania College of Art & Design on multiple projects, including the inaugural Creative Community Engagement program in October 2018.

Wit López

Wit López is a Brooklyn-born Philly-made performer, visual artist, and independent curator of African American and Boricua heritage. Their work uses absurdity and conjure to communicate how they engage with the world as a nonbinary trans, intersex, queer Black Latinx person with multiple disabilities and chronic illnesses, while also challenging oppression and colonization. They are the founder and director of Till Arts Project, a grassroots arts-services organization for LGBTQ artists in the Greater Philadelphia Area.

Amy G. Moorefield

Amy G. Moorefield is the Director of the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College. Moorefield has nearly two decades of experience in not-for-profit and academic museums. Her scope of work ranges from curatorial, collections management and exhibitions to fundraising, educational programming, marketing, publications and professional staff oversight. She has a bachelor’s degree in art history and museum studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and a master’s degree in museum studies from Johns Hopkins University. Moorefield has taught courses in museum curatorial practice and methodology and has published several exhibition essays as well as acted as an independent curator, juror and museum consultant.  Currently Moorefield serves on the City of Lancaster’s Public Art Board and is the Mid-Atlantic regional representative for Association for Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG).

Marci Nelligan

Marci Nelligan is a poet and arts administrator working as Program Coordinator, Council on the Arts PA/Millersville University. She is the author of The Ghost Manada (2016), Infinite Variations (Black Radish, 2011) and numerous chapbooks, and the co-editor of Intersections, an interdisciplinary book on Jane Jacobs. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boog City, Jacket, the Denver Quarterly, The New Orleans Review, How2, Fledgling Rag, and other journals. She lives in Lancaster, PA with her husband and two daughters, where she runs an arts-in-education partnership between Millersville University and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, which places trained teaching artists in meaningful residencies in a four-county area.

Nelligan said, “Imagine learning geometry by folding and stitching your own book, investigating biology by sketching the plants and wildlife of our local ecosystem in an artists’ nature journal. Imagine writing a puppet theater about the Battle of Gettysburg, exploring fractions by playing different time signatures on a drum you made. Imagine how deep and engaging learning could be, and you’re imagining the power of arts in education.”

Tina Plokarz

Tina Plokarz is a curator, arts administrator and writer living and working in Philadelphia. She has over five years of experience curating and implementing exhibitions, conferences and public art programs ranging from presentations of prints and drawings to large-scale site-specific commissions of visual and performance art. She recently curated “Anticipation” (2018), featuring visual and performance work by JAK, Jonas Dahlberg, and Abigail Levine.  She is interested in the intersection between visual and dramatic arts, challenging the human understanding of identity, participation and perception in the context of historical and cultural realities. She received a double major in Art History and Theater Studies from the Free University Berlin, Germany. Presently she is curatorial member at the art collective Vox Populi and manages their 30th Anniversary Exhibition for late Spring 2019.

Kate Garman

Kate Garman received her MFA from Tyler School of Art’s Fiber & Material Studies program and her BFA from Grand Valley State University’s Visual Studies program. Hailing from Michigan, Kate is now glad to be calling Philadelphia her home. While her expertise is within the fibers world, she loves to nerd out with fellow artists and enjoys helping others reach their potential. In her spare time she enjoys working creatively as part of the collaborative group MMAK and making her own clothes under the brand kg. She is the Graduate Admissions Counselor at Moore College of Art.

According to Julia Staples,  “For the students, benefits from participating could manifest as internship opportunities, future jobs or professional opportunities such as getting exhibitions or freelance work.”