The Nancy G. Unobskey '60 Visiting Artist Series
Modern and Contemporary Art
The Unobskey Visiting Artist Series brings internationally recognized artists to Goucher’s campus and provides students with meaningful and significant access to the fellows via exhibitions, studio visits, and lectures.
Spring 2025
Helina Metaferia
Spring 2025 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Artist lecture:
April 3, 2025, 7 p.m. | Merrick Lecture Hall
Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work integrates archives, somatic studies, and dialogical practices, creating overlooked narratives that amplify BIPOC/femme bodies. Metaferia received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include RISD Art Museum (2022-2023); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021–2022); New York University's The Gallatin Galleries, New York, NY (2021); Michigan State University's Scene Metrospace Gallery, East Lansing, MI (2019); and Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2017). Metaferia's work was included in the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates (2023), the Tennessee Triennial through the Frist Art Museum and Fisk University Art Gallery (2023). Her work is in the permanent collection of institutions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates; Kadist, San Francisco, CA and Paris, France; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY.
Previous Visiting Artists
Jiha Moon
Spring 2024 Unobskey Visiting Artist in Modern and Contemporary Art
Artist lecture:
April 4, 2024, 7 p.m. | Merrick Lecture Hall
Jiha Moon (b. 1973) is from DaeGu, Korea, and lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Moon's gestural paintings, mixed media, ceramic sculpture, and installation explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She says, “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” She is taking cues from the history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, fruit stickers and labels of products from all over the place. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify yet stay in a familiar zone.
Her works have been acquired by Asia Society, New York, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, GA; Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA; the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; the Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN, and Rhodes College, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Memphis, TN; and James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY. She has been included in group shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MI; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA; Asia Society, New York, NY; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC. She is recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation’s painter and sculptor’s award for 2011. Her mid-career survey exhibition, Double Welcome: Most everyone’s mad here, organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum, toured more than 10 museum venues around the country until 2018.
Derrick Adams - REFRAMING FUTURES II: SUPPORTING ARTISTS THROUGH ALTERNATIVE MEANS
Spring 2023 Unobskey Visiting Artist in Modern and Contemporary Art
Exhibit dates:
April 27 to June 3, 2023
Opening reception:
April 27, 2023, 6 - 8 p.m. | Silber Art gallery
Artist lecture:
May 4, 2023, 7 p.m. | Merrick Lecture Hall
Photo credit: portrait of Derrick Adams by photographer Steve Benisty
Featuring works by artists from the Last Resort Artist Retreat, Jabari Jefferson, Murjoni Merriweather, Jamaal Peterman, McKinley Wallace II, and Kyle Yearwood.
Derrick Adams is a Baltimore-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose critically admired work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations. His multidisciplinary practice engages how individuals’ ideals, aspirations, and personae become attached to specific objects, colors, textures, symbols, and ideologies. His work probes the influence of popular culture on the formation of self-image, and the relationship between man and monument as they coexist and embody one another.
Kim Rice
Spring 2022 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Artist lecture:
April 14, 2022, 7 p.m. | Merrick Lecture Hall
Kim Rice creates large-scale works using common materials. Her installations are a meditation on institutional racism and the policies that continue to affect American society today. Kim earned her B.F.A. in Sculpture and M.F.A. in Printmaking from the University of Oklahoma. Her work has been shown throughout the country including the Alexandria Museum of Art, the Fred Jones Museum of Art, the Northern Illinois Art Museum, the Delaware Museum of Art, the Peale Museum and Prospect 4 Satellite in New Orleans. She has received multiple awards including the McNeese Grant for Socially Engaged Practice. She is based in Baltimore, MD.
Mark Dion - Rediscovering Goucher's Lost Museum
Spring 2021 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Exhibit dates:
September 23 - December 15, 2021 | Silber Gallery
Virtual lecture: March 11, 2021, 7 p.m.
Mark Dion was born in 1961 in New Bedford, MA. He initially studied from 1981-82 at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford in Connecticut, which awarded him a B.F.A. in 1986 and an honorary doctorate in 2002. From 1983-84, he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and then the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program from 1984-85. He is an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University in the U.K. (2014), and he has an honorary doctor of humane letters (Ph.D.) from the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia (2015).
Ajay Kurian - Polyphemus
Spring 2020 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Exhibit dates:
April 3 - June, 7, 2020 | Silber Gallery
Artist lecture:
April 22, 2020, 7 p.m. | Kraushaar Auditorium
Ajay Kurian is a Baltimore-born, New York-based, conceptual artist working in sculpture, painting, and installation. Kurian’s exhibition, installed to resemble a clandestine beer hall meeting, depicts cycloptic figures that possess power and status, populating a table in an ambiguous, social grouping. Atop easy postures and snappy outfits, their heads are each made up of a watchful, rotating eye and an illuminated smile. Above, a disembodied set of mechanized eyes monitors the scene, part security camera, part dystopian nightmare. Within this space all are observed, and all are observing. There is a symbiotic relationship between the platform and participants in which those who have gotten through the gates become gatekeepers—this club polices itself.
Gina Beavers
Fall 2019 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Artist lecture:
October 18, 2019, 7 p.m. | Kraushaar Auditorium
Drawing on images taken from Instagram, YouTube, image databases, and other online sources, Gina Beavers creates thick, tactile paintings that capture, in visceral ways, the curated and often superficial nature of our digital lives.
Laylah Ali - The Acephalous Series
Spring 2019 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Exhibit dates:
January 29 - March 16, 2019 | Silber Gallery
Opening reception: February 5, 2019, 6 - 9 p.m.
Artist lecture:
March 14, 2019, 7:30 p.m. | Kraushaar Auditorium
The contemporary visual artist explores power dynamics and interpersonal conflict through compositions that position culturally and sexually ambiguous figures in precarious, loaded, and unexpectedly humorous situations.
Whitfield Lovell
Spring 2018 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Artist lecture:
March 29, 2018, 6:30 p.m. | Merrick Lecture Hall
Whitfield Lovell is internationally renowned for his installations that incorporate masterful Conte crayon portraits of anonymous African Americans from between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. Using vintage photography as his source, Lovell often pairs his subjects with found objects, evoking personal memories, ancestral connections, and the collective American past. In 2007, Lovell was awarded with a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant.
Works by Whitfield Lovell are featured in major museum collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, DC; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, and many others.
He will talk about his work, his practice and his experiences as an artist. He will also lay groundwork of the African American experience from reconstruction through the civil rights era. Lovell creates installations informed by contemporary art practices, folk art, vernacular art, and the physical conditions of marginalized communities. His work references the history of African American community along with being current with culture and ultimately the larger culture of America.
Ann Hamilton
Spring 2017 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Artist lecture:
March 30, 2017, 6:30 p.m. | Kraushaar Auditorium
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale installations. Her multi-media environments are a collaboration between the architectural site of her installation, sound, our experience in space, and the inventiveness of the viewer/interlocutor. Her work invites viewers to imagine the histories and stories inherent in a location. Storytelling is embedded in the objects and the spaces she uses, as well as a result of the cumulative effect of her installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Often using sound, found objects, and the spoken and written word, as well as photography and video, her objects and environments invite the audience to embark on sensory and metaphorical explorations of time, language and memory.
Linda Montano
Spring 2016 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Artist lecture:
April 14, 2016, 7 p.m. | Haebler Memorial Chapel
Linda Montano is a performance artist and her work since the mid 1960's has been critical in the development of video by, for, and about making art in order to heal, understand and celebrate this short life journey. Attempting to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, Montano continues to actively explore her unresolved questions through shared experience, role adoption, and intricate life altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. Her artwork is starkly autobiographical and often concerned with personal and spiritual transformation.
Montano’s influence is wide ranging — she has been featured at museums including The New Museum in New York, MoMA, MOCA San Francisco, and ICA in London. Montano created 14 Years of Living Art: 1984-1998, A 7 Chakra Experience and Another 21 Years of Living Art 1998-2019: A Free Online School for Performance Experimentation. She has placed over 60 of her videos free on YouTube.
David Page
Spring 2015 Unobskey Visiting Artist
Artist lecture:
April 16, 2015, 2 p.m. | Merrick Lecture Hall
David Page is an artist who tries to explain intersecting notions around labour, power imbalances, threat, risk and everyday brutality. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Page earned a National Diploma in Fine Arts from the Cape Tecnikon in 1986 and received an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2002.
Solo shows include Security Theatre at the Creative Alliance (Baltimore), God and Lunchmeat at Old Dominion University and “Staan Nader, Staan Terug!” (come closer, get away!) at Stevenson University. He was awarded the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize for Visual Arts in 2019, received the Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award in 1996, 2007, 2009, 2012, and 2014, won the Trawick Prize in 2004 and the University of Maryland’s Art for Peace Award in 2001, which included the commission of a small sculptural object which was presented to Nelson Mandela upon his visit to the university.