» Bryan Czibesz
» Michael Humphreys
» Anat Shiftan
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Bryan Czibesz
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» See professor Czibesz's Showcase
Bryan Czibesz is Assistant Professor of Art in the Ceramics program. Originally from Ohio, Bryan received a BA from Humboldt State University, an MFA from San Diego State University, and has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He has taught at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania, Rowan University in New Jersey, and was an Artist-in-Residence and instructor at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia from 2009 to 2011 before joining the faculty at SUNY New Paltz in Fall 2011.
Through an examination of digital processes in ceramic material practice, Czibesz's research is an exploration of the way technologies present themselves both as a prosthetic means of production and of understanding human physicality over time. His practice explores a range of materials and fabrication technologies—including hand building with clay, digital 3D printing, tinkering with microcontrollers—and the resultant sculptural configurations are juxtapositions of visceral with mechanical, biological with artificial, and austere with humorous, that often invoke the viewer as active witness/participant. Further, Czibesz is interested in how the juxtapositions of body and machine invoke binary dialogues between the intriguing and mundane, graceful and awkward, refined and ridiculous, and foreign and uncanny in the human experience.
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Michael Humphreys
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Michael Humphreys received his BFA from Erlham College of Richmond Indiana and his MFA in Sculpture from Bard College. Prior to joining the New Paltz Ceramics Program he and his wife owned his own pottery studio: Hudson Valley Pottery/Flux Gallery on the second floor of the Montgomery Row II building in Rhinebeck in April. Michael has been practicing pottery in the last 15 years.
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Anat Shiftan
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» See professor Shiftan's Showcase
Anat Shiftan is a Professor of Art in the Ceramics Program at State University of NY at New Paltz. Born and raised in Israel she received her BA in English Literature and Philosophy from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel and received her MFA in Ceramics from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Design in West Bloomfield, Michigan. She has taught at Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Israel and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at SUNY New Paltz in the fall of 2003. Prior to that she served as designer, production manager at the historic Pewabic Pottery in Detroit. Shiftan has twice received the Michigan Grant for Individual Artists twice and has exhibited her work extensively in both the United States and Israel. Since 2006 she is engaged in addition to her own studio practice in critical studies. She teaches seminars that focus on the cultural and critical background that creates the context for the creative practice in the field of ceramics, crafts and art today and has collaboratively organized: Contemporary Issues in Clay: A British Perspective (2006), Why Clay? (2008) and Beyond Hand Made (2008). All symposiums examine the current theoretical and social and economical trends that are the context in which creative practice in visual arts occurs today.
Shiftan’s own work in clay explores the subject of ambivalence in floral and zoological imagery and the representation of nature in art. Her printed images reflect on the dialectic relations between man and nature, focusing on the ambivalence reflected in the heroic yet destructive aspect of human intervention in nature, nature's response, and the glorification of both. In her ceramic work she explores sculpturally the traditions of Still Life paintings and botanical drawings. Her research also explores the history of ceramics technology and design exchange between east and west, and the representation of nature in ceramics. Recently she had a solo show at Greenwich House Pottery, NYC, and Vessels gallery in Boston.
