Roster of Guest Artists, Critics, and Art Historians

Kerry Morgan considers herself first and foremost an arts advocate. She is the director of gallery and exhibition programs at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) where she also serves as the project director for two artist fellowships on behalf of the Jerome and McKnight Foundations. From this position, she has a broad and deep knowledge of the regional art scene. Kerry holds a BA from Smith College and earned an MA and PhD in art history from the University of Kansas. In 2016 she was honored as a Changemaker by the Minnesota Women’s Press for her collaborative efforts in bringing the Guerrilla Girls to the Twin Cities. She believes that “Art has the role and opportunity to make people pause, to bring people together who maybe don’t think the same ways. Art can be that meeting ground.”

Jovan C. Speller is a multidisciplinary artist whose work interprets historic narratives through contemporary discourse in her visual, textural and performative work. Her practice is centered around elevating, complicating and inventing stories that explore ancestry, identity, and spatial memory. She is a recipient of a 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a 2018 Next Step Fund Grant, and a 2016 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship. Speller holds a BFA in photography from Columbia College, Chicago, and studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Hend Al-Mansour left a cardiology career and earned an MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and an MA in art history from University of St. Thomas. She is among the 100 most powerful Arab women in the online magazine Arabian Business. She has shown and lectured regionally, nationally and internationally.

Katayoun Amjadi is an Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist, educator and independent curator. In her artworks, she considers the social systems that continually construct the binaries which shape our perceptions of Self and Other, such as religion, gender, politics and nationalist ideologies. She holds an MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from the University of Minnesota and currently teaches visual art at Normandale Community College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has received several grants

Leslie Barlow is an oil painter whose current work employs the figure and the personal to explore race and identity, representation, multiculturalism, and otherness. She has exhibited her work both locally and nationally, and currently teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Harriet Bart creates evocative content through the theater of installation, the narrative power of objects, and the intimacy of artist’s books. Her work was honored with a retrospective exhibition and monograph at the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota in 2020, as well as a concurrent show at Minneapolis Institute of Arts of her artist’s books and works on paper.

Hazel Belvo is a professor emerita at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a mentor at the Grand Marais Art Colony. A book of her life and art, Hazel Belvo: A Matriarch of Art has been recently published by Afton Press.

Gabrielle Civil has premiered 50 original performance art works around the world. Her performance memoirs Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), ( ghost gestures ) (2021) and the déja vu (2022). Named a 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging artist, she teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Justine DiFiore is a painter based in Minneapolis where she lives and works as an artist and a nursing assistant. She attended Oberlin College where she received a BA in Studio Art. Her current practice involves an exploration of the human body with a specific interest in creating work that challenges dominant narratives of the female form. 

Elizabeth Erickson, Institute founder and professor emerita of Minneapolis College of Art and Design, has been a painter, poet and educator for more than 40 years, and she holds an MFA from MCAD. Her career highlights include participation in Global Focus in Beijing in 1995, and in Art and Healing at the Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in 1992.

Carolyn Halliday has been showing her work nationally and internationally for nearly two decades. She is a recipient of Textile Center’s Spun Gold Award 2020, honoring artists and advocates for a lifetime of dedication to fiber art and the Textile Center.

Amy K. Hamlin is an associate professor of art history at St. Catherine University. In her research and classrooms, she considers the politics of representation and intersectionality in contemporary art and visual culture. She is also engaged in experimental pedagogies, art history as a social practice, and advocacy for the arts & humanities.

Shana Kaplow is a visual artist whose ink-on-paper installations play with notions of psychology, absence, global systems and furniture. She was recently an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.

Joyce Lyon creates drawings and artist’s books which are a meditation on the passage of time, the revelatory qualities of light, on history and our vulnerability/ responsibilities to the land and each other. She is Professor Emerita, University of Minnesota.

Diane Mullin is Senior Curator at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarly and curatorial work focuses on modern and contemporary art, including gender issues in 1970s body work and changing notions of subjectivity.

Erica Spitzer Rasmussen creates handmade paper garments and small editions of hand-bound books.  Her current work explores family stories and issues of identity. She is a professor at Metropolitan State University and exhibits internationally. 

Michal Sagar is the Visual Arts Department Head at Breck School in Minneapolis. She has worked in paint, encaustic, and sculpture, bringing a sense of the essential mark into these materials. In her most recent work, she draws together remnants of history—artistic, social, and personal—edging toward a new vision of untamed wildness.

Sandra Menefee Taylor is an installation and book artist who creates commissioned projects and public art regarding the land, the body and healing. Her work has been shown regionally and nationally, and she has been described by critic Lucy Lippard as a “visual philosopher.”

Visiting and guest artists, critics and art historians are subject to change.