Photos courtesy of the Mount Holyoke Department of Studio Art.
Above, left to right, new Art Studio faculty Marianna Dixon Williams, Xuân Pham and Vick Quezada.
By Lenox Johnson ’24
Copy Chief & Arts & Entertainment Editor
This semester, the Mount Holyoke Department of Art Studio onboarded Visiting Lecturers in Art Studio Vick Quezada and Xuân Pham and Assistant Professor of Art Studio Marianna Dixon Williams. Bolstered by the soft opening of Media Lab, each of the new faculty members offers a distinctive perspective to the College’s rapidly-evolving interdisciplinary dialogue.
Upon their welcome to the College in 2020, Associate Professor of Art and Chair of Art Studio Lisa Iglesias aimed to nurture the seeds of collaboration in the art department. While centering collective conversation around principles of equity, transparency, “playful rigor” and experimentation, their holistic approach prioritizes partnership within the liberal arts environment. The synthesis of Quezada, Pham and Dixon Williams into the community this academic year signifies a period of content expansion and increased interdisciplinary partnership within the Mount Holyoke Department of Art Studio.
“These three professors are really bringing to the community a commitment to interdisciplinarity and collaboration. These three individuals are prolific and creative and imaginative and innovative,” Iglesias said. “They diversify our faculty body. They bring new books, new experiences and new perspectives into the art studio community and therefore to the campus community as a whole. We feel very lucky to be welcoming them [to] campus.”
Quezada, who grew up in El Paso, Texas, channels their Latinx-Mestizx, first-generation college student and transgender nonbinary identities into their work, the Mount Holyoke Department of Art Studio shared on their Instagram. This fall, Yale University named Quezeda a Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration Mellon Artist & Practitioner Fellow. In their art, they seek to “create counter-narratives that are brown, two spirit and queer [and] that go beyond settler myths, binaries and borders,” they shared in coversation with the Mellon Foundation. “It is my top priority to create an environment in which students’ academic accomplishments and content mastery are prioritized, but also where social and conceptual thought is incorporated into visual intelligence. I push students to experiment with a wide range of materials and take calculated risks in their artwork,” Quezada said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. “I’m a huge proponent of interdisciplinary learning, where students work across disciplines linking their practices and integrate them into original works. Ultimately, a key goal of mine is to empower students and transform them into socially aware citizens and leaders.”
Pham, an interdisciplinary artist whose work touches on ideas of memory, racialized melancholia, colonialism, autobiographical issues, migration and immigration works through varied mediums including collaborative performance, textile and traditional visual. According to the Mount Holyoke Department of Art Studio, her work “centers the relationship between trauma, migration and race, investigating how the political and psychological impact of trauma and grief transpires within the Asian American communities and how it informs the formation of subjectivity and of racial identity, especially in representations of race in the United States.”
Dixon Williams, who assumed the position of assistant professor of art studio this semester, works with sound, video, computer science and fabrication in their work, according to the Mount Holyoke website. In an interview with the College, they described teaching as “an act of service and an act of constant investigation.” Dixon Williams’ role is integral to the expansion of interdisciplinary cultural production, and opens the door to collaboration between art studio and external majors like architectural studies and music. A key player in these continued exo-major relationships has been the launch of the MHC Media Lab, the soft-opening of which Williams was an integral actor in.
The Media Lab, according to Associate Professor of Music, Project Manager of Arts & Technology Thomas Ciufo, “enhances existing course work in several departments, makes possible many new courses and provides students a space to work and collaborate at the intersection of emerging technologies and innovative creative practices.” The resource, which includes a primary teaching and lab space with 16 high-end computer workstations and iPads; a work room, interaction design and VR space; and a small-group digital media production suite for advanced audio, video editing and multimedia production work, has been woven into multidisciplinary curriculum.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing the different connections and relationships that … our new faculty especially, but our studio faculty as a whole create with students, faculty, staff and community members,” Iglesias said. “Art studio is very looking much looking forward to continuing cross-listed classes with other departments.”
The reconfiguration of the Department of Art Studio faculty and its on-site resources have been a welcome addition to the College’s humanities disciplines. Maeve Kydd ’24, an art studio major who has taken to the lab in their “Expanded Print Media” course with Assistant Professor of Art Studio Amanda Maciuba, views the expansion as a step in the right direction. “It’s nice that the department is expanding access to digital media as the industry is growing,” Kydd said. “In class, we’ve used the Media Lab to design files for our mural, which has offered opportunity to rethink mediums like printmaking. We’re able to learn skills that are applicable to real life outside of the school.”
Iglesias hopes the changes within the department contribute to the fabric of the College. “We are reflecting and illuminating a constellation of information where history and culture collide and intersect where arts and science might intersect — where someone’s unique life experience might reveal a host of histories and narratives that propel that identity,” Iglesias said. “The students, the staff, the faculty [and] the community are interested in this very holistic way of creating knowledge and reflecting on our shared knowledge. I think the mixture of faculty that we have in art studio really [speaks] to that.”