School Notes: School of Art
July/August 2012

Alumna speaks at Commencement

Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu ’00MFA was the featured speaker at the School of Art’s diploma ceremony this past May. Mutu, who currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, is an award-winning artist whose works have been exhibited in museums around the world. Her work has been described as “a visceral response to personal and social critiques of gender, culture, and mass media imagery. Exploring the female body as a site of engagement and provocation, her figures are lurking hybrids that possess an abject yet alluring beauty.” Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art; and Tate Modern in London.

New studio space at Norfolk

Programs at the Norfolk Summer School of Art took over the Art Barn this summer at the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate in Norfolk, Connecticut. The old estate stables had previously been converted to practice rooms for music and were partially used by art programs for gallery space, critique room, print shop, and drawing room. Now the barn houses group and individual studio space for the 26 students enrolled in the summer program. The 2012 summer school took place from May 19 to July 1.