Faculty
Patricia Olson, Institute director and associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at St. Catherine University, has practiced painting and design for over 30 years and is a founding member of Women's Art Resources of Minnesota (WARM). She recently held the position of Sister Mona Riley Endowed Professor in the Humanities (2008–2011), when she painted The Catherine Portrait, a series of 40 portraits of individuals in the St. Catherine community, aesthetically investigating the relationship of the individual to the collective. The Mysteries, Olson's narrative sequence of paintings depicting her inner journey to the center of the self, is based on the ancient Roman frescoes at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. She received a Visual Arts Travel and Study Grant to visit Pompeii from the Jerome, Dayton-Hudson and General Mills foundations. The Mysteries have been presented at venues including "Ritual, Reception, Response: The Villa of the Mysteries Revisited" at the University of Michigan; "Three Portraits of the Artist as a Woman" at Walker Art Center; St. John's University in Collegeville; and Concordia College in Moorhead. Her work can be seen at Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis.
Elizabeth Erickson, Institute founder and professor emerita of Minneapolis College of Art and Design, is also a founding member of WARM. She has worked as a painter, poet and educator since 1970. Erickson's work is included in many corporate and public collections, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, General Mills and 3M. She has received grants from the Bush, Ragdale, and Mellon foundations and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Erickson participated in Global Focus, sponsored by the National Women's Museum of Art of Washington, D.C., in Beijing, China in 1995; in Art and Healing, an exhibition in conjunction with the Nobel Conference on immunology at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minn., in 1992; and in a solo exhibition, Praising Creation, at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis. She taught in the Fine Arts Department at MCAD from 1983 to 2012 and founded the Women's Art Institute in 1999, serving as its director until 2012.
2013 Visiting Artist Jane Gilmor, For the past thirty years, Jane Gilmor's art practice has been concerned with social issues, found situations, and psychological narrative. From the 1976 All-American Glamour Kitty Pageant, to her 70s and 80s photo tableaux of cat-masked Isadora Duncans in the ruins of Greece and the bowling alleys and laundromats of Iowa, to her twenty years of community-based public work in shelters and hospitals -- her search is for some unspoken connection in these random collisions of objects, images, and voices. Gilmor is an intermedia artist and Professor Emerita of Art at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She holds a BS from Iowa State University, as well as an MAT and MFA from the University of Iowa. She has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past 35 years and has been awarded NEA Artist's Fellowships, a McKnight Interdisciplinary Fellowship, and residency fellowships in Ireland, Italy, and London, among others. In 2004 she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Portugal. Her most recent solo exhibitions were at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, and Long Island University in Brooklyn. She completed a year-long community-based project and major installation, Un(Seen) Work, funded by an NEA grant to Grinnell College in 2010.
Guest artists, critics and art historians
- Harriet Bart creates evocative content through the theater of installation, the narrative power of objects and the intimacy of artists' books. Her work is exhibited internationally.
- Hazel Belvo is a professor emerita at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her current project is a series of paintings called Resurrection: Feminist Perspective.
- Gabrielle Civil has premiered over 25 original performance works nationally and internationally over the past decade. Her book In & Out of Place: Making Black Feminist Performance Art in Mexico has a fall 2012 release date. She teaches English, Women's Studies, and Critical Studies in Race and Ethnicity at St. Catherine University. The aim of all her work is to open up space.
- Linda Gammell is a photographer and college instructor in media and photography. She has a deep interest in social issues, including land practices, food, gender and feminism.
- Amy K. Hamlin teaches art history as an assistant professor at St. Catherine University. In her research and the classroom, she examines the varied representation of women in contemporary art and visual culture.
- Shana Kaplow, an assistant professor at St. Cloud State University, is a painter and video artist whose work explores the tension between interconnectedness and individualism. Her work has been screened in Walker Art Center's Women with Vision film festival.
- Joyce Lyon, a professor at the University of Minnesota, is interested in pilgrimage as it relates both to journey — physical, intellectual, spiritual — and to the process of translating experience into art. Her work is in collections nationally and she exhibits with Groveland Gallery and Form+Content in Minneapolis.
- Diane Mullin is a senior curator at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Her curatorial and scholarly work is focused on 20th century and contemporary art.
- Nancy Robinson's meticulously rendered, surreal paintings have won many grants, honors and awards. She has exhibited her work regionally and nationally, including a solo show in 2009 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
- Michal Sagar is head of the Visual Arts Department at Breck School in Minneapolis. Her drawings, paintings and encaustic works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. The Boston Center for the Arts recently featured her work in The Future of the Past: Encaustic Art in the 21st Century.
- Sandra Menefee Taylor is an installation and book artist whose work has been commissioned by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Grinnell College and St. Catherine University.
- Krista Kelley Walsh is a multidisciplinary artist who has been awarded numerous Jerome Foundation Fellowships for installation, performance and experimental media. She has taught art for 35 years and currently does private consulting and teaches "Concepts in Contemporary Art" at the University of Minnesota.
