Guest Artists

Kim Abeles is an interdisciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She has gained acclaim as an activist artist, as her work typically addresses a variety of social, political, and environmental issues. She often experiments with different mediums and can include repurposed materials, as well as, technology in her drawings, sculptures, and installations. Kim worked with Marlborough students during the 2016 - 2017 school year in a variety of art classes and assisted them in developing mixed media pieces based on specific prompts. Images of student work were also woven together creating one large installation piece that was displayed in the Seaver Gallery.

Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist who regularly works for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time Magazine.

Over the past 15 years, Addario has covered every major conflict and humanitarian crises of her generation, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo. She recently released a New York Times Best selling memoir, "It's What I Do," which chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist coming of age in the post-9/11 world.

Addario has been the recipient of numerous international awards throughout her career, including a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize for International reporting with the New York Times, the Excellence in International Reporting Award from the International Center for Journalists, a Gaudium award from The Breukelen Institute, and the el Mundo Journalism award in Barcelona, Spain.

Addario presented her work to students, focused on conflicts and human rights issues, especially the role of women in traditional societies, and talked about her experiences in Libya and Afghanistan

Christina Agapakis is a biologist, writer, and artist interested in microbes and the future of biotechnology. Currently she is the creative director at Ginkgo Bioworks, an organism design company that is bringing biology to industrial engineering. She collaborated with engineers, designers, artists and social scientists to explore the unexpected connections between microbiology, technology, art and popular culture. She presented her collaborative project, Selfmade, which was part of the "Growing Your Own" exhibit at the Dublin Science Gallery.

Fiber Artist Lisa Anne Auerbach exhibited in our gallery and lectured about her creative process.

Claire Anna Baker is an installation artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She often creates expansive drawings or painted work based on observation of a mixed media sculpture that she first assembles in her studio. During the 2014 - 2015 school year, Claire worked with Marlborough Drawing and Painting students and assisted them in creating such an installation in our Seaver Gallery. She then coached the students in producing their own artwork, first using walnut oil, and then with special inks applied to large fabric scrolls.

Juan Bastos is an internationally-exhibited portrait artist. With 30 years of experience, he has executed several hundred oil paintings and pastel drawings across three continents, including portraits of former Marlborough Head-of-Schools that hand in our board room. During his visit to Marlborough, Bastos demonstrated a live-sitting pastel portraiture to drawing and painting students.

Professionally, Sacha Baumann excels in executive administration and operations management for creative industries. She is an expert at leveraging social and professional networking to maximize visibility and teaching others to do the same. As an artist, Sacha extracts found images, primarily from magazines and books, and places them in a new context, manipulating tone and intention, creating a new reality. At Marlborough Baumann lectured about her work.

"When I turn the pages of a magazine or book and come across images or compositions which strike me as especially arresting, my impulse is to extract the elements and place them in a new context. I want to manipulate the tone and intention, creating a new reality. This is how each artwork begins.

Once the first piece is found, I give myself restrictions as to how to appropriate it into something new. This is in part a nod to my Industrial Design training and work, in which I concentrate on problem solving for the specific needs of clients. Restrictions become opportunities for new creations.

The results of my process are collaged pieces which focus on women's sexuality, typography, and texture. The original pieces which make up my appropriations do not entirely disappear in the new compositions, but when successful their meanings and emotional tone shift into a complete new image, sometimes whimsical, sometimes serious."

- Sacha Baumann

Bob Burridge is a painter, teacher, international art juror, author, and motivational speaker. Burridge exhibited in Seaver Gallery and conducted a master workshop on abstract landscapes.

"I still paint feverously. My technique is to paint fast, furiously, spontaneously and not cerebrally.The fast-drying and quick results I get with acrylics allows me to do this. This technique actually made me realize first hand, the more you paint, the better painter you become. However, I have been accused of using too many colors and too much paint!" - Bob Burridge

Drawer and painter Jennifer Celio lectured about her work and led a painting project.

Los Angeles sculptor and fiber artist Krysten Cunningham exhibited in our gallery and discussed her woven work process with art students.

Drawer and educator Justin Dahlberg shared his work with Marlborough students.

"I draw and paint moments that embody solitude--not loneliness or unwanted isolation--but the possibility of a unique and personal event that sticks in the memory and is worthy of visual preservation. The images are intimate, like quiet flashbacks. They are soft and often monochromatic vignettes that depict familiar, fleeting, ordinary moments filled with extraordinary possibility." - Justin Dahlberg

Joyce Dallal is a Los Angeles-based artist who works with themes on political, social and environmental issues. During her Marlborough residency, Joyce fabricated a 10-foot-tall sculpture of a baby made of wire mesh and encouraged the Marlborough community to “feed the baby” with discarded toys and objects made of un-recyclable plastics and environmentally-unfriendly materials. She then assisted students in creating their own collages made with bits and pieces of their old broken toys.

Jen Galpin is a realist painter and master printer. Her work is often a response to language, allowing her process to evolve naturally in an associative and non-linear manner. This process allows her to uncover the meaning and importance of imagery through the art making experience and leaves the story open ended for the viewer to arrive at their own meaning. Galpin taught Marlborough students the lithographic photo transfer process.

A plein-air watercolorist and avid world traveler, Gayle Garner Roski has explored some of the most remote parts of the globe, always with paints and sketchbook in hand. She dives the uncharted waters off New Guinea and has climbed to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

She has created several series of paintings from objects found in her travels around the world: calligraphy brushes from Beijing, Italian pottery from Tuscany and Umbria, and a snuff bottle from China. Garner Roski discussed how to create travel sketchbooks and journals, sharing a slide presentation of her extensive watercolor work.

Born and raised in Japan, installation artist Mineko Grimmer now makes her home in Los Angeles where she creates “sound-producing-kinetic-sculptures.” Relying on natural materials for her work, such as melting ice, Mineko creates meditative environments meant to be experienced with all our senses.

Painter, educator, and lecturer Shane Guffogg exhibited in our gallery and discussed his process for painting over-sized canvases with drawing and painting students.

Performance artist and sculptor Fatima Hoang lectured about his work.

An interdisciplinary artist, Bettina Hubby’s practice is wide-ranging, encompassing curatorial, public engagement and project-based work, alongside more traditional media such as collage, drawing, photography and sculpture. With ideas that engages diverse communities and often exist in settings that challenge the conventions of exhibition spaces, Hubby’s work celebrates collaboration and resists easy categorization. At Marlborough, Hubby lectured about her collages.

Mary Reid Kelley combines painting, performance, and her distinctive wordplay-rich poetry in polemical, graphically stylized videos. Made in collaboration with her partner Patrick Kelley, these videos have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, the ICA Boston, and SITE Santa Fe. European solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bremen, Museum M, Leuven, and Neuer Kunstverein Wien. Their video work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, La Reppublica, Vogue, The New Yorker, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, ARTnews, and Art in America. Mary and Patrick live and work in upstate New York.

Kelley exhibited work in our gallery based on observations of pop-culture with emphasis on satire and clever puns.

Printmaker Gina Kelly lectured on her specialty of creating gig posters for musicians and bands.

Soo Kim is a Korean-American artist, born in South Korea and now residing in Los Angeles, where she is on the faculty at Otis College of Art and Design. During her Marlborough residency, Kim worked with the Photography students on large photo images introducing them to the techniques of cutting and layering images in order to create new and unexpected interpretations of their work.

Artist and educator Michael Massenburg aims to investigate the language and imagery to explore the issues of class, race and culture in their relationship through rituals. He assembles constructions of objects and images in an attempt to engage the subjects through representational, psychological and spiritual perspectives. Massenburg presented slides and discussed his paintings, collage work, and numerous public art commissions with Marlborough students.

Web-friendly director, filmmaker, programmer and inventor Vincent Morisset is considered a pioneer in interactive music videos and digital artwork and is, perhaps, best known for his interactive videos for the musical group, Arcade Fire. Though his studio is based in Montreal, Canada, his alternative projects have been showcased in many countries around the world. Vincent is always looking for new ways to tell stories and assisted Marlborough Film and Video students in creating and communicating their own stories during the 2013 - 2014 school year.

Lisa Occhipinti is an author and artist working with scupture, photography, and book structures. She presented her work to Marlborough students, taught Japanese stab binding to the Photographic Books class and led a hands-on workshop in upcycling discarded library books by transforming them into sculptures.

"The symbiosis between image and word, a waltz where one begets the next, is undeniably part of my penchant for books, yet also is the fuel of my practice. Concerned with our individual identities as the world becomes more homogenized, I am interested in encapsulated moments, singular stories and sequences of information that italicize the humanity of the individual and draw attention to simultaneously subjective and universal experiences." - Lisa Occhipinti

Fine art photographer and UCLA educator Catherine Opie exhibited portraiture work in Seaver Gallery.

Ron Pokrassois a master printmaker whose printmaking workshops and artist residencies have taken him all over the world. Though favorite themes of figures and landscapes are often visible in his work, Ron is very much about the process of making art and allows his pieces to unfold and develop as he works. During the 2015 - 2016 school year, Ron ran several printmaking workshops for Marlborough students in the Photography and the Drawing and Painting classes and also conducted a special workshop just for our alumnae. Ron’s home and studio are located in Santa Fe, NM.

Ceramic artist Porntip Sangvanich hosted studio visits and gave demonstrations of her glazing and design techniques.

A Los Angeles-native, Devon Tsuno is a painter and educator. His recent abstract paintings, socially practice projects, artist books and print installations focus on the LA Watershed, water use, and native vs. non-native vegetation. His long-term interest in bodies of water in the LA area has been central to his collaborations with the Department of Cultural Affairs, Big City Forum, the Theodore Payne Foundation, the grantLOVE Project, and Occidental College.

Since 2003, Devon has worked as the founder/director of Concrete Walls, an artist run curatorial project that focuses on building community by facilitating collaborations, educational projects, and group exhibitions throughout Southern California.

At Marlborough, Tsuno led students through a painting project.

J. Michael Walker is a painter, writer and cultural activist. He presented and discussed his work to Marlborough Photo and Digital Arts students.

"I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, when legalized segregation was in its clawing-in-the-dirt death throes, and into a culture standing on the wrong side of history. Creating art was my way to break free of the restrictions I experienced – social and class issues, cultural values, authoritarianism, a broken home – and as a consequence I never took, or took kindly to, structured or instructional art classes, because they felt like more impediments to the self-expression that was practically killing me to be released - so I remained largely self-taught.

"It was Mexico that saved me. An out-of-the-blue invitation to spend two weeks in the Sierra Tarahumara of northern Mexico, illustrating the first textbook in the native dialect, came when I was at the end of my tether. Integrating myself into families and communities of mestizos and Tarahumaras provided perspective and understanding, and filled holes in my heart. And when I moved to Los Angeles to forge some kind of an art career, Mexico essentially “explained” the city to me, its cultural roots churning beneath LA’s asphalt.

"My work is essentially a diary of my experiences and observations; an attempt to answer the questions that still plague me, and compensate for the wrongs I've witnessed; and a never-good-enough offering of gratitude for the beauty and wonder I've been blessed to behold." - J. Michael Walker

Educator and former AP Art History Curriculum Coordinator Lu Wenneker presented slides and discussed the historical origins of paint pigments.

Jody Zellen is a multi-faceted Los Angeles-based artist whose art includes digital and video art, drawing and painting, and installation works. Her art has been featured in festivals and exhibitions worldwide and she is best known for her interactive installations, app designs, and public art. During the 2012 - 2013 school year, Jody collaborated with the Photo, Drawing and Painting, and Digital Arts students at Marlborough and assisted each in creating a series of mixed media compositions or flash animations that followed her interest in the urban environment.

Bari Ziperstein is a conceptual artist who works in a variety of media from fine art objects to large public sculptures. Using a collage aesthetic, Bari worked with Marlborough students in the Architecture, Sculpture, Photography, and Digital Arts classes assisting them in creating individual and group artwork. These included a large tape installation in Seaver Gallery based on historical plans of Marlborough, life-size cardboard figures derived from photos found in Marlborough’s archives, along with digital and photographic thaumatropes. The themes for the artwork ranged from historical exploration to contemporary mixed media installments.