Alumni Return to Gordon to Mentor Art Students

The Art Department and the Barrington Center Art Gallery are introducing the Alumni-Undergraduate Artist Mentorship Program in hopes to further engage Gordon’s current art students with a rewarding artistic opportunity. Through this program, students will be able to delve into their own artistic creations outside of the classroom and collaborate with an accomplished graduate of Gordon’s art program. Art majors were encouraged to apply for the unique opportunity to work alongside alumni artists from Gordon. Those accepted into the program have been paired with alumni artists in order to collaborate on an exhibit in the main galleries in the Art Center. The finished projects will be displayed in the gallery from Jan. 14 to Feb. 10.

The alumni artists who will be mentoring fellow current art students includes Peter Morse ‘10, the building manager of the Barrington Center for the Arts. Morse just completed a low residency M.F.A from the University of Hartford. He is known to work with black and white photography and is deeply interested in candid portraiture and how this theme may fit into his mentoring group’s work. Alumni artist, Claire Bennett-Roll ‘09, will also be mentoring students.  Bennett-Roll completed her Post-Baccalaureate program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2014 and finished her MFA at Boston University this past May. She works with recycled salvage materials and creates abstract sculpture and large-scale architectural installation art. Bennett-Roll is interested in engaging with her mentor group on the theme of “the connection of architectural formats and structures with the human form.” Marika Whitaker-Bennett ‘06, the third and final alumni artist participating in the program, is known for her figurative and abstract painting. She is currently working on completing her M.F.A in a low-residency program at the Art Institute of Chicago . Whitaker-Bennett is interested in the themes of “motherhood,” “the feminine archetype in Christianity,” and “text as image/image as text.”

The current Gordon Art majors who will be working alongside these alumni-artists include: Leslie Bynum, Katherine Russell, Tiffany Gong, Rachel Pacitti, Damon Kilgore, Jaewon Park, Justin Kedl, Ashley Miller and Sophie Linnell. The subjects of the final projects of each of the artist-mentor pairings are still yet to be determined.