Alumni
This page highlights the achievements of selected alumni.
Patricia Cronin '88 M.F.A.
Patricia Cronin is a conceptual artist who manipulates and reinvigorates traditional art historical forms to address contemporary issues of sexuality, gender and class. Her work focuses on power and powerlessness, absence and presence, and history. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and Italy and has been critically acclaimed in numerous publications including: The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and Art in America. She is currently an associate professor of art at Brooklyn College. Cronin is the recipient of many awards and grants, among them a 2001 Grand Arts Artist Grant, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the 2006–2007 John Armstrong Chaloner/Jacob H. Lazarus- Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, The New York Foundation for the Arts artist grant's 2007 Deutsche Bank Fellow, the 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a 2009 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and the 2009 Anonymous Was a Woman Award.
Shelley Jordon '86 M.F.A.
Shelley Jordon is a Brooklyn-born artist who explores the intersection between interior and exterior worlds and connections between past and present experiences. She was the 2010 Visual Arts Fellow for the pilot program of the American Academy in Jerusalem and a recipient of a 2010 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Fellowship Award, a Fulbright-Hayes Group Travel Research Grant to Yemen and Tunisia, a 2010 OSU Center for the Humanities Fellowship Award, and an Oregon Artist’s Fellowship Award in Painting. Her artwork has been exhibited in numerous venues nationally and internationally, including the Frye Museum in Seattle; the Oregon Jewish Museum; the Portland Art Museum; the Museo Cultural de Santa Fe; the Tacoma Art Museum; the Contemporary Art Center of Thessaloniki, Greece; Mabaada (the Lab), Jerusalem; and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. Her award-winning hand-painted animations have been screened at venues in Sydney; Jerusalem; Los Angeles; Sardinia, Italy; and Hamburg, Germany, where she won "Best Art and Animation" Award at the Radar/Hamburg Film Festival. She received her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her M.F.A. from Brooklyn College. Jordon, a professor of art at Oregon State University, has particpated in artist residencies at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the American Academy in Rome.
Eugenie Tung '04 M.F.A.
Born in Hong Kong in 1977, Tung immigrated to the United States in 1995 at the age of 17. Shortly before earning her B.F.A. in June 2001, she was awarded the Research and Creative Opportunity Grants for Undergraduates from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash. Returning to an urban setting, after living in rural and suburban U.S. cities for seven years, Tung began her studies at Brooklyn College in 2002, where she earned a M.F.A. in 2004 and became one of 10 recipients for the Joan Mitchell Foundation 2004 MFA Grant. Since 2000, her artwork has been shown in New York City; Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Wisconsin, Vermont, New Jersey Massachusetts, Germany, and in the January 2003 issue of New American Paintings. In 2007, Eugenie’s work was shown at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum for a group show, the Photograph as Canvas, curated by Stephen Maine. In the same year, she was also awarded the 2007 National Academy Abbey Mural Fellowship, and completed her first public art project, 16 Windows, at the New Lots Avenue Station on the Canarsie line, commissioned by the New York MTA Arts for Transit Program Permanent Art projects. Since then, Eugenie has been selected as a finalists for 2 other major public art projects for the Jacksonville International Airport in Florida and the Ansonia Technical High School in Connecticut. Recently, Eugenie served as a panelist for the MTA Arts for Transit Permanent Art project.
Nari Ward '92 M.F.A.
Nari Ward was born in 1963 in St. Andrews, Jamaica. His dramatic sculptural installations are composed of systematically collected material from his urban neighborhood. By revealing the numerous emotions inherent within found everyday objects, Ward's works examine issues surrounding race, poverty and consumer culture.
Ward has an extensive exhibition history having participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world. Recent solo exhibitions include Episodes at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2002); Rites of Way at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2002); The Refinery X: A small twist of fate at the Palazzo delle Papesse-Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy (2006); Nari Ward: 2005–2010 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas (2010); and LIVESupport at Lehmann Maupin Gallery (2010). Recent group exhibitions include Documenta XI, Kassel (2003); the Whitney Biennial (2006); Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); 30 Seconds off an inch at the Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2010); Transparancey, Art for Renewable Energy at MACRO, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2010). In April 2011, he opened Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum at MASS MoCA.
Ward has received commissions from the United Nations and the World Health Organization, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. Nari Ward currently lives and works in New York.
