Elizabeth Duffy
Assistant Professor of Art
eduffy@rwu.edu

Elizabeth Duffy teaches sculpture and drawing in the Visual Art Studies Program. She studied art at Rutgers College, The New York Studio School, Hunter and has a MFA from Brooklyn College.  She has taught at Dartmouth College, The Delaware College of Art and Design and Purchase College/SUNY.

She uses everyday materials to explore themes of transience and transformation, using techniques that are repetitive and labor-intensive.  Her work has been exhibited widely in such places as the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Islip Art Museum, Wave Hill, White Columns, and Holland Tunnel Gallery in New York, at Raw and Co. Gallery in Cleveland and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.   She has won awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her work is in the collections of Deutsche Bank, The Heard Museum, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center and Dartmouth College, and in numerous private collections.

In 2005 she began collaborating with Brian Miller and established the Loku Press.  Together they have published artists’ books and have exhibited their ongoing project “A Series of Minor Miracles.”

Murray McMillan
Assistant Professor of Art
mmcmillan@rwu.edu

Murray McMillan teaches digital media, photography, video and sculpture in the Visual Art Studies Program. He has received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, a MFA from The University of Texas at Austin and has taught at Biola University in Los Angeles and Webster University in St Louis.

He collaborates with Megan McMillan in video, photography and installation. They are represented by Qbox Gallery in Athens, Greece and have exhibited nationally and internationally including the National Museum of Art in La Paz, Bolivia and solo exhibitions at Grand Central Art Center in Los Angeles, White Flag Projects in St Louis, MO, and Sound Art Space in Laredo, TX. They are beneficiaries of several awards including grants from the Dallas Museum of Art and Purdue University. They are currently participating in the 2007 International Istanbul Biennial in Turkey.

Michael Rich
Associate Professor of Art
Visual Arts Studies Program Coordinator
mrich@rwu.edu

Michael Rich teaches painting and drawing in the Visual Art Studies Program.  He has received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and a MFA from The Savannah College of Art and Design.

Michael Rich exhibits nationally and internationally through Sotheby’s auction series, International Young Art, and regular gallery exhibits.  Rich’s work has recently been the subject of a retrospective exhibit at the Walton Art Center, Fayetteville Arkansas in 2007.  He is the 1996 recipient of the Basil H. Alkazzi Award (USA) and his work is featured in private and public collections nationally including, The Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA and the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH. 

Michael is represented in New York and Los Angeles at the George Billis Gallery, in San Francisco at Adler and Co. Gallery, as well as the Patricia Carega Gallery, New Hampshire and the Old Spouter Gallery, Nantucket.

Time spent around the waters of Nantucket Island and the hills of central Italy helped to shape a love and interest in landscape and natural rhythms of color that remain very much a focal point in his work today. A dedicated practitioner of yoga, Rich is influenced greatly by Eastern philosophy and art in an approach to nature and landscape as a wellspring for spiritual investigation and meditation.  In a recent essay entitled, Abstraction and Nature in the Paintings of Michael Rich, the noted critic, Donald Kuspit writes of Rich’s paintings:

“Rich’s abstract landscapes restore us to the prereflective --not to say prelapsarian--state of unity between object (nature) and subject (sensation and feeling) we experienced before we discovered our separateness from nature (or rather our difference within nature).  Thus their mystic import, and with that their sense of radical aliveness.”

Jeff Silverthorne
Associate Professor of Art
jsilverthorne@rwu.edu

Biography Missing

Anne Tait
Assistant Professor of Art
atait@rwu.edu

Anne Tait teaches printmaking and painting in the Visual Art Studies Program. She has a BA from Bowling Green State University in literature and art history, a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in printmaking and a MFA from the American University in Washington in painting.

Her work, from earlier oil paintings done in layers of oil glazes of translucent color on tondi (round paintings), expose a sinewy eccentric world of floating forms that push the picture plane in an intentionally disorientating setting, intending the purposeful subterfuge to be both mysterious and comedic. Her more recent work, prints, glass pieces and the accompanying images from the research the question her work ask look at death and the ways we that live contend with this question.

Tait’s earlier work addresses the establishment of self from conception to early self.  Her recent work frames these questions by considering the truncation of life and the ending of it.  Through her research on cemetery imagery and traditions of the 19th century, she addresses the culmination of earthly life.  “Between conception and death the window is open on our potential” Tait contends with this framework and the implications this asks from our life and her artwork’s efforts to ask this.

She has been supported in her work through grants from the Rhode Island Council for the Arts and also the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities.  She has also received awards for her efforts to preserve urban cemeteries in Providence.