Each year, our artist-in-residence program brings to campus a nationally recognized artist who produces work and teaches a special seminar. The program honors Frances Niederer, a beloved art historian who taught for many years at Hollins.
2025 Artist-in-Residence
Rita Koehler, an American lens-based, multimedia artist, investigates how political, economic, and religious structures are used to control others in defense of misogyny, racism, and bigotry. She scrutinizes contemporary American social structures to investigate what constitutes an intelligible life – one that is speakable, has meaning, and is valued. The philosophy of her work is based on the premise that existence is relational and that to exist means to exist in communion.
For her series Glitch Mommy: Forty Days and Forty Nights, on view now in the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Koehler follows the fragments of adoption disruption into a world of fairytale where little lost beings are conjured from a difficult period and lyrical gestures of staining and fluid mark-making bring about the discovery of fantastical landscapes in order to construct a new narrative of origin, mother, and matriarch.
Koehler earned her B.A. in psychology and theology from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., her M.F.A. in visual studies from Lesley University College of Art and Design, Cambridge, Mass., and completed a Certificate Program in curatorial studies through the University of Chicago. Past residencies include New Edition and The Center Program at Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago; The Wild Residency – Artist in Residence – Venice, Italy; National Performance Network Residency through 516 Arts in Albuquerque; and Flash Powder Projects in Highlands, N.C. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and her work Rite of Ordinary: Interior Indiana is in the permanent collection of the Kinsey Institute. Her poetry, as part of a collaborative limited-edition book, is included in the RISD Library Special collections.
Recent Artists-in-Residence
2024: Ying Li
Ying Li is an American painter and art educator, born in Beijing, China, and immigrated to the United States in 1983. Li’s work is represented by Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, New York; Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia; Alice Gauvin Gallery in Portland, Maine; and Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden in Dallas, Texas. Li works in the zone where abstraction and representation meet. She uses high volumes of oil paint, bold colors, and calligraphic lines to depict beauty, complexity, and ephemerality in nature. Her training in Chinese painting and calligraphy has helped her to form a brushwork that is both free and disciplined. Working from a deep engagement with the material and visual possibilities of painting, her goal is to convey a visceral connection with place and environment.
2023: Andrea Sulzer
Andrea Sulzer draws, prints, paints, and mixes these disciplines in an intuitive and free-associative process. Her work often lives on the edge between object and image, statement and question, figure and abstraction. Sulzer has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in New York, Colorado, Maine, London, Glasgow, and Munich. She has had solo museum exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, and University of Maine Museum of Art. She also has recently completed a number of large-scale public art projects for Maine schools through the Maine Percent for Art program. Her work is included in numerous collections: The Portland Museum of Art, Bates College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Colby College Museum of Art, The University of Maine Museum of Art, Fidelity Corporation, Syzygy, and numerous private collections in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany.
2022: Rita Maas
Rita Maas is a visual artist whose work is grounded in photography and blends the disciplines of drawing and printmaking to playfully construct conceptual based imagery. Working within predetermined systems, she embraces elements of chance and disorder, allowing her materials and processes to speak for themselves. The work often takes on reductive forms as she explores the gap between representational and abstract depiction. How we read, filter, and retain information while examining the space where slippage and illegibility occur are persistent themes of her practice. Born in New York, Maas received her B.F.A. in photographic studies from the School of Visual Arts. She later earned her M.F.A. in visual arts at Lesley University College of Art and Design. Maas has acted as visiting professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and served as visiting artist and adjunct professor at College of Staten Island, CUNY.
2021: Eleanor Ray
Eleanor Ray makes small-scale paintings of encounters with specific places, including well-known or art-historically significant sites, and others more anonymous. As John Yau described her work, “The unoccupied interior or landscape becomes a sacred space, a place of solitude and reflection. The windows remind us that there is an exterior and interior world, and that we always occupy both.” Ray received her B.A. in English and art and the history of art from Amherst College, and her M.F.A. in painting from the New York Studio School. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Howard’s, Athens, Georgia; and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York.
2020: Jeff Schmuki
Linking environmental issues to a diverse array of creative operations and tactics, Jeff Schmuki demonstrates the fragile connection between the natural world and personal action. By offering simple, positive changes that can be enacted long after the artist has moved on, citizens become agents of change. His installations, interventions, and collaborations combine activism, research, and science to foster discussion and generate action on ecological literacy. Schmuki is the cofounder of a decade long partnership with artist Wendy DesChene titled “PlantBot Genetics” and is an associate professor of art at Georgia Southern University. His work has transpired at the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Central Booking, in New York, New York; Clayarch Museum, Gimhae, South Korea; Goethe Institute, Cairo, Egypt; and the American Academy in Rome as well as CRETA Rome in Rome, Italy, among others.
2019: Diane Edison
One of the country’s most prominent professors of studio art Diane Edison’s work has appeared nationally in New York, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, and internationally in Russia and Chad. Edison, who creates her work using color pencil on black paper, focuses on portraiture with an emphasis on the autobiographical. Her images are thematically narrative in presentation and psychological in nature. New York City’s Forum Gallery, DC Moore Gallery, and Tatischef Gallery; the Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia; and Clark Atlanta University in Georgia are among the U.S. venues where her art has been exhibited or collected.
2018: Zanele Muholi
Photographer, filmmaker, and visual activist Zanele Muholi advocates for the LGBTI community and explores black lesbian and gay politics in contemporary South Africa. Her self-appointed mission is “to re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in SA and beyond.” Her portraits challenge the stigma surrounding gays and lesbians in South Africa, debunk the common rhetoric that homosexuality is un-African, and address the preponderance of hate crimes against homosexuals in her native country.
2017: Susan Lichtman
Susan Lichtman is a figurative painter of domestic spaces. For 30 years she has used her home and family as a source for compositions based on observation and imagination. Her oil and gouache paintings have been exhibited widely, most recently at Swarthmore College, PA; Smith College, MA; and Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia. She has earned awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Tiffany Foundation, and from Brandeis University, where she holds the Charles Bloom Chair in the Arts of Design.
2016: Tip Toland
Tip Toland is a full-time studio artist and a part-time instructor in the Seattle area. Her work is represented in both private and public collections, including Yellowstone Art Museum, Archie Bray Foundation, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Kohler Art Center, Nelson Atkins Museum, The Museum of Art and Design, the Crocker Museum, the St. Petersburg Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
2015: Lisa Bulawsky
Lisa Bulawsky examines ideas of private life and civic space, which she explores in works on paper, installations, and ephemeral public projects. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, International Print Center in New York, Dalarnas Museum in Sweden, and Opole Contemporary Art Gallery in Poland all exhibit her work.
2014: Ben Grasso
Ben Grasso’s large-scale paintings depict familiar objects such as houses and trees that have exploded and are floating in space. His paintings evoke images that are “coming undone and revealing how [they] might be put together again” (Artforum magazine).
2013: Dan Estabrook
Dan Estabrook makes contemporary art using a variety of 19th-century photographic techniques. He balances his interests in photography with forays into sculpture, painting, drawing, and other works on paper.
2012: Beverly Rayner
Cameras have always fascinated Beverly Rayner. She creates mixed-media constructions around photographic imagery, often in a sculptural way, using all kinds of photographic materials, either her own or found.