Department of Art

Internationally renowned photographer John Dugdale creates poignant and stirringly intimate imagery using 19th century photographic processes and a 19th century aesthetic. At the age of 33, Dugdale lost his eyesight due to a stroke. While blindness ended his successful commercial photography career, he found himself free to explore his fine art, using friends and family members as studio assistants.

He unconventionally works with some of photography’s first techniques from the 19th century by employing large format cameras, creating cyanotype prints, platinum prints, and using the albumen process which dominated photography from the 1850s to the 1880s. His 19th century sensibility emphasizes the poetics of his work and the transcendence of time and place, seemingly transporting the viewer to a different era. The stirring and poignant imagery is largely composed from memory and as Dugdale himself says, “The mind is the essence of your sight. It’s really the mind that sees.”

Dugdale has exhibited in over 25 solo shows in galleries across the world and his work has been included in group shows at such museums as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Miami Art Museum, while his photographs are included in such collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Dugdale has been inducted into the Royal Photographic Society in Bath and he has spoken on BBC, NPR, and at various universities and other public and private engagements where he continues to discuss his 19th century aesthetic and questions pertaining to what it means “to see.”

Learn more about Dugdale and see more of his work at his website and on his Instagram page. Art students can also sign up for a one-on-one visit with Dugdale after the lecture.

A partnership between Risa Tochigi (aka Riiisa Boogie) and TC Weaver (aka Rezones), the studio of BoogieREZ blends "music, photography, illustration, painting, graphic design, dance, fashion design, sculpture and whatever else we can get our hands on."

According to their website bios, Rezones started as a graffiti artist in the early 1980s, which eventually brought him to graphic design before he transitioned to photography. Boogie—a Japanese-American illustrator, painter, maker, and muralist—creates detailed imagery using textile, nature, portraits, flowing abstractions, and uniquely creative characters.

To learn more about BoogieREZ, visit their website or check out their respective Instagram pages, @riiisaboogie and @rezones.

According to her website, Jaishri Abichandani immigrated to New York City from Bombay, India, in 1984, and earned her MFA from Goldsmiths College at the University of London. She founded the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) in New York in 1997, and in London in 2004. Lauded by the New York Times, Hyperallergic, and several other media outlets, Abichandani has exhibited her work across the world, including such venues as P.S.1/MoMA, the Queens Museum of Art, and Asia Society in New York; 798 Beijing Biennial and Guangzhou Triennial in China; IVAM in Valencia, Spain; and the House of World Cultures in Berlin.

Learn more about Abichandani at her website.

According to her website, Karen Ingram is an artist, designer, and educator whose unconventional career path has led her work to be presented in a variety of places—from apparel, construction scaffolding and books to microbes, surfboard fins, and Times Square. A recognized emerging leader in synthetic biology, Ingram co-authored 2015's “BioBuilder: Synthetic Biology in the Lab,” and is an emerging tech fellow at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design—also known as the d.school—at Stanford University, where she has been working to build synthetic biology teaching tools for K-12 and beyond. Ingram, who lives in Rockaway Beach, NY, currently teaches at Brooklyn’s Community Biotech lab Genspace, and is a professor for the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program in Interaction Design.

Learn more about Ingram at her website.