ThinkTank3 Fellows Chosen

Fifteen $1000 have been awarded this year. Candidates and final fellows represent exemplary junior faculty from across the nation. Our four jurors looked for the following strengths:

• candidate’s strengths and potential as an artist and/or scholar
• candidate’s knowledge of the fundamentals and/or the history of art and design;
• accomplishments to date as a foundations teacher;
• potential as an full-time college teacher;
• potential as a an eventual leader in the field of higher education.

The jurors also sought geographical distribution, a range of experience and a range of artistic disciplines (from Photo to Ceramics to Sculpture, etc.)

ThinkTank3 Fellows

Kjellgren Alkire teaches Foundations in the Maricopa Community College system and facilitates the BFA capstone course at Arizona State University. His various blends of printmaking, installation and performance interrogate and celebrate both evangelical preaching traditions and the mythology of the American West. He encourages his students towards intentional alignment of media, content, and form.

Carrie Anne Baade (pronounced baa`da as in Badda Bing) is an Assistant Professor of Painting/Drawing & Foundations at Florida State University. Historical materials and techniques inform her courses and her paintings, with leanings toward Pop Surrealism and the “New Old Masters.” She received a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters in Painting from the University of Delaware.

Mariah Doren is currently teaching the Graduate Teaching Practicum at SUNY Purchase and Advanced Photography at Teachers College, Columbia University while pursuing an EdDCT (Doctorate in Art Education, College Teaching) at that same institution. Her current work is a collaborative project with printmaker, Johanna Paas that investigates a shared interest in the tension between order that is innate and that which is imposed. The work seeks to apply the sensibility of the conceptual inquiry to the process of collaboration itself, resulting in layered, mixed media, overlapping images.

Thaddeus Erdahl makes figurative ceramic work that references the anomalies of human communication. He is interested in progressive approaches to education.

Tom Ferrero is currently a 3D design instructor in the Fine Arts department at Indiana University. He is a metal sculptor and jewelry artist whose work references the genres of science fiction and fantasy art. As a teacher, he emphasizes design theory and craftsmanship and wishes to integrate these concepts into his 2D design and drawing classes through the development of new syllabi.

Magda Gluszek is a 2008 MFA candidate at the University of Florida ceramics program. Her figurative sculptures investigate the psychological state of female adolescence and the internal conflict between natural and cultural influences. As a teacher, she is interested in developing engaging projects for introductory 3-D design courses.

Shannan Lee Hayes is a MFA candidate and Foundations: Idea and Form Instructor at Stony Brook University. Her current sculptural and video works investigate the poetics of identity, space and language, with a particular interest in the phenomenology of emotion and perception. Shannan asks her students to consider, What about process, material, and the formal elements of design best support your idea? and, Where do you locate your viewer?

Dawn Hunter is currently an Assistant Professor and the Foundations Coordinator at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Her current work analyzes the historical propaganda found within fashion photography and its ability to cultivate a contemporary pop body image through consumerism. She is particularly interested in having students create suites of projects that have an evolutionary link within the processes of discovery, perception, interpretation,
deconstruction, and re-construction.

Jason Lee is currently the Foundations Coordinator at West Virginia University. For the last 3 years Lee has been continually evolving his expansive multiple project focusing on the creation of a modular environment. While at WVU, Lee has focused his teaching efforts on creating a cohesive foundations experience for incoming art students.

Mary Magsamen received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and she is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. She and her husband, Stephan Hillerbrand, make collaborative performance based videos and photographs. Their work has been included in exhibitions and video screenings nationally and internationally.

Sara Pedigo is an Assistant Professor in the Foundations Program at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. Sara’s current work focuses on isolated moments that speak to the experience of memory and loss. This is an attempt to find visual representations for the experience of losing a mother. As a teacher, she engages students by forging connections between artistic practice and students’ everyday lives.

Gary Setzer is an Assistant Professor and the Division Chair of Foundations at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His work frequently celebrates the humor and poetry of language’s inconsistencies and can incorporate performance, installation and video as tools to plot different functions of representation. Always interested in blurring the disciplines, Setzer is also an active experimental musician. He is currently re-imagining the first year program at the University of Arizona.

Caleb Taylor is currently completing his MFA in Painting at Montana State University-Bozeman. His work investigates the possibilities of physical action and intuition through abstractions of internal anatomy. As a teacher, he directs his students to define a personal vocabulary through the development of observation skills, conceptual problem-solving, and historical awareness.

Brent Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Art at West Virginia State University, where he teaches Drawing and Graphic Design. His work combines old knowledge as in quotes or belief systems to a changed landscape. He uses this to gather a greater understanding of his heritage and how that relates his place within his own social confines of history and the environment. As an instructor he tries to marry the technical aspects of foundations and place it within a contemporary context and theory.

Angela Harden Wilson graduated with a MFA degree in Photography from the University of Arizona in May 2007. She is currently an instructor for The Showcase School of Photography in Atlanta, Georgia. Her artwork displays issues of domesticity and female identity in American culture. As a teacher Angela is interested in continuing to develop new approaches to teaching technical skill while simultaneously inspiring creativity.

ThinkTank3 Alternate Fellowships

Emily Keown currently works as an instructor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA.
She has spent the past 3 years teaching at Virginia Tech and at Radford University in the foundation arts program. She teaches with as many tools as she can get her hands on, helping students ask the question “What makes art?” Much like in her studio practice, she is always trying something new.

Chuck Carbia is an adjunct professor at Florida State University and Chipola College. Chuck's paintings deal with meditative process and humility. Chuck has also been a part of many performance groups. The performances involve pushing the spectacle of costume and music while allowing the viewer to remain closely connected through familiar character representation or popular songs. As a teacher, Chuck strives to make his students more aware of their potential in the contemporary art world through projects that investigate their personal beliefs.

Lori Kent is an assistant professor of Visual Studies at Kutztown University. She received a doctoral degree in the College Teaching of Art/Art Education from Columbia University’s Teachers College in 2001. The study of Critical and Creative Thinking at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, (MA 1992) and work in numerous museums began her research in critical theory + pedagogy. Her current artwork is focused on public art in New Orleans–– community building, memory, and place.

Trish Limbaugh is currently a faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts at Frostburg State University (Maryland). Her areas of teaching emphasis are two- and three-dimensional design and art appreciation. In addition, she coordinates a first-year learning community for freshman BFA students that focuses on experiential education. As a ceramist, Trish explores the abstracted forms of nature