Compulsory Measures

With a new startup company, Jorge Benitez designs and creates luxuriant one of kind weavings.    He is a native of Cuba who spent his formative years in Belgium and is fluent in French and Spanish. His work reflects an earlier career in advertising, an interest in the American “culture wars,” and his study of the links between words, images, and demagogic politics. After the events of September 11, 2001, he became increasingly interested in his own Spanish ancestry and the Iberian links to the Muslim world while simultaneously mistrusting the notion of identity. He currently participates in regional and international exhibitions and writes on subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to postmodernism. His work is represented in corporate collections and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  Recently retired, Professor Benitez taught drawing, art theory and the history of visual communications. In the Communication Arts Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Benitez holds an MFA and BFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University.   

Kristy Deetz is a Professor in the Art Discipline at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Her art has been exhibited from coast to coast and featured in Encaustic Art in the Twenty-First Century, Encaustic Art: The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art with Wax and Full-Range Color Painting for the Beginners.  She frequently serves as a visiting artist and has led many painting and drawing workshops at Haystack, Oxbow, Penland, Anderson Ranch, and Arrowmont.  With Reni Gower, she co-curated the 4-year traveling exhibition FABRICation.  Her awards include SECAC’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Graphis Design’s Silver Award, and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Founders Award for Excellence in Scholarship.   Recently she held an Erasmus Visiting Lectureship at the University of Kassel, Germany and attended a residency at The Burren College of Art in Ireland. Deetz holds an MFA from Ohio State University and a BFA from Bowling Green State University.

Al  Denyer’s  work  encompasses  the  areas  of  drawing,  painting,  printmaking  and installation.    Shown in solo exhibitions  throughout  the  United States,  and  numerous  national and  international  juried  and  invitational  exhibitions,  her  work  has  been  published  in INDA  11,  New  American  Paintings,  American  Art  Collector,  Western  Humanities Review  and ‘Leonardo,  The  International  Society  for  The  Arts,  Sciences  and Technology  Magazine.’  Her work is also included in the Artist Viewing Program at The Drawing  Center,  New  York  City.  In 2011, she was awarded the Utah Artist Fellowship Award.  Originally from England, Denyer  is  an  Associate  Professor  and  Area  Head  of  Painting  and  Drawing  at  the  University  of  Utah,  Salt  Lake  City.    She  holds  an  MFA from  Southern  Illinois University,  Carbondale,  and  a  BA  (Hons)  Degree  from Winchester  School  of  Art,  England.  

Joan Elliott has a process-oriented approach towards painting, working with both geometric patterning and landscape imagery. Inspired by recent travels to Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Uzbekistan, she has researched and documented a wide variety of geometric patterning onsite. In her Richmond, Virginia studio, she layers transcribed patterns and threadlike line work to build new arrangements, weaving densely graphic and radiant structures within her paintings. Joan has been an instructor at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Studio School for over 25 years. She has been awarded various distinctions, including the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund Grant as well as inclusion in the VMFA exhibition Un/Common Ground. Her work is represented by Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia and the Galerie de Bellefeuille in Montreal, Quebec, and is included in many corporate and private collections. She received her BFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Reni Gower received a 2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.  In 2017, she was awarded SECAC’s Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement.  In 2014, she received the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teacher of Art Award, as well as distinguished teaching awards from Virginia Commonwealth University and VCUarts.  Her art work is represented in many prestigious collections and has been exhibited at international and national venues for over 40 years.  In addition to her painting practice, she curates award winning traveling exhibitions that include FLASHPOINTS: Material / Intent / Fused, Geometric Aljamía: a Cultural Transliteration, and Pulped Under Pressure: The Art of Handmade Paper. After 37 years, Professor Emerita Gower retired from Virginia Commonwealth University in December 2018.  Gower is represented by Chroma Projects, Charlottesville, VA. 

At McDaniel College, Professor Steven Pearson is the Joan Develin Coley Chair in Creative Expression and the Arts, as well as the Chair of the Art & Art History Department and the Director of the Esther Prangley Rice Gallery.  In 2019, he received the Ira G. Zepp Distinguished Teaching Award.  He served honorably in the Navy. He received his BS in studio art from the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY and his MFA in painting from the Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA in Baltimore, MD. During his schooling, his work focused on narrative figuration. Later, he painted still-lives, investigating the formal and conceptual nature of everyday objects. While a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003, Pearson’s work became increasingly abstract. During a 2005 residency at the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois, his work became essentially nonobjective. Throughout all of these shifts, order and structure provided the connecting threads and echo his early experiences in the Navy. 

In her studio practice, Jennifer Printz gravitates towards meditative processes most recently focused on mixed media drawings made with a gentle and deliberate mark making.  She places importance on the artist’s touch as a means to create an intrinsic presence within her work. Printz’ art has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad and has been included in publications as diverse as Tricycle and The Carolina Quarterly.  She has been awarded artist residencies at locations such as the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France where she created much of the work for her solo exhibition “An Almost Unnoticed Quietus” at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum. Printz has been an active arts leader in a variety of professional organizations and currently is an Assistant Professor of drawing at Florida International University.  She holds a MFA from The University of Georgia and a BFA from East Tennessee State University.  

Tanja Softić works across the media of printmaking, drawing and book arts.   She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant, National Endowment for the Arts-Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship and Soros Foundation-Open Society Institute Exhibition Support Grant.  Her work is included in numerous collections in the United States and abroad, including the New York Public Library, Library of Congress Print Department and New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia.  She participated in 12th International Print Triennial in Cracow, Poland and won a First Prize at the the 5th Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints, Ino-cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan in 2002. She completed print projects at Flying Horse Press, Tamarind Institute, Anderson Ranch’s Patton Print Studio and East Tokyo Mokuhanga Studio.  She is a Professor of Art at the University of Richmond, where she teaches drawing, printmaking, book arts, and history of graphic arts.  She holds an MFA in printmaking from Old Dominion University and a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Sarajevo.