Andrea Dezsö, associate professor of art, holds an M.F.A. and a B.F.A. in visual communication from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art & Design in Budapest, Hungary. Professor Dezsö has been on the faculty at Parsons School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, City College of New York, and Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary; taught courses at Penland School of Craft, Paper & Book Intensive, The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, The Museum of Arts & Design, and the American Museum of Visionary Art; and has lectured extensively. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Print, Blab and Esopus.
Andrea Dezsö is a visual artist who works across a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, site-specific installation, artist's books, cut paper, embroidery, animation, and large-scale public art. Dezsö's work has been exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Arts & Design, the N.Y. Armory Show and Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City, Museum Bellerieve in Switzerland, Art Basel Miami Beach, Rice Gallery in Houston, Fujikawa Kirie Art Museum in Japan, the Cheongjou Biennale in South Korea, Musee des Miniatures & Decors de Cinema in France, Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco, and many others. Her work has been featured in ArtForum, ArtNews, The New York Times, Village Voice, Wall Street Journal, NPR, New York magazine, Print, Fiber Arts, Hand/Eye, and numerous books.
Community Garden, Dezsö's large scale public mosaic commissioned by the New York City MTA Arts for Transit for the Lehman College subway station, was awarded Best American Public Art in 2007. Her second New York City subway station commission, a 48-panel site-specific stainless steel work, will be installed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Dezsö's public art projects include painted murals for the Hungarian Ministry of Culture, billboards for Publikum in Serbia, and posters for the New York City MTA and the New York Botanical Garden.
Dezsö has received fellowships and awards from Kohler Arts & Industry, the National Endowment for the Arts, Tamarind Institute, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Center for Book Arts, Kamiyama, Japan Artist in Residence, Six Points Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ucross Foundation's Lois Nellie Gill Award for Female Visual Artist of Exceptional Merit. Dezsö's award-winning illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Harpers, Time, Newsweek, and have been commissioned by Sony Music, Candlewick, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Sterling, Harlequin, and Target.
Dezsö's site-specific solo exhibition "Ridgefield Haunted" opens at the Aldrich Museum on Halloween, 2011. Andrea Dezsö is represented by Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern in San Francisco.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
- Introduction to Painting on Paper, Board, Canvas, and Wall
Students will gain experience in the fundamentals of painting, including color, composition, materials and technical considerations. We will explore a range of painting surfaces, sizes, materials and artistic approaches. Assignments will include color mixing, landscape, self-portrait, figure painting, conceptual painting, narrative painting, and work inspired by street art and graffiti. Assigned readings, artist research, individual critique, group discussions, slide presentations and film screenings will round out the experience.
- Division III Concentrators in Visual Art
A critique and discussion-based seminar for Division III Visual Art concentrators, this class will focus on the process and progress of art making. Students will be encouraged to think about their work in the larger context of their disciplines, society, place and history. Students will articulate their ars poetica orally through presentations and in writing artists statements, bios, art resumes and work documentation. The practical side of building a sustainable art career will be discussed from finding inspiration and flow to the business of running an art studio, finding information, applying for grants, artist residences, securing resources, submitting work for competitions, and building a professional network. Readings will be assigned and a number of guest lecturers will be invited to the class.
- Drawing Studio 200: Experimental Drawing
Using a range of conventional and unconventional materials and artistic approaches students with a solid foundation in drawing will create experimental work with the aim of pushing boundaries and discovering new territory. Students will receive prompts to work in class and develop projects, will be expected to keep sketchbooks and work approximately 8 hours per week outside of class.
- Movable Artists Books Studio: Transformers & Shape Shifters
Learn to make books that pop up, transform, unfold, expand, books that become theaters, movable structures or interactive experiences: movable books. Treat form and content as an interdependent whole as you create your own movable artists books. With the emergence of e-books we can't help but ask ourselves whether there will remain a place for physical books in our future or if they will one day disappear altogether. In this studio we'll explore various 3D book forms and structures, which can't readily be translated into digital format. Historic and contemporary examples of movable books will guide our inquiry. If you have an interest in art, books, visual storytelling, paper engineering and love to make things with your hands this is a class for you.
- Studio 200: Data-Driven Drawing & Painting
Using a range of materials and artistic approaches students will create experimental drawings, paintings, collages and mixed media works that use data and information visualization as their departure point. Autobiographical data, info-graphics, data sets, the work of Mark Lombardi, Adolf Wlfli, John O'Connor, Ward Shelley, Danica Phelps, Lisa Strausfeld, books on information visualization by Manuel Lima, Edward Tufte, Nigel Holmes and others will inform our work. Every student will keep a sketchbook or visual journal in which they will develop ideas and document their artistic process. Prerequisite:Students should be in their second year Div II or in Div III in Art and must have taken college level studio art classes previous to this class.
- Studio 300: Advanced Studio Projects
Students will propose and develop a semester-long project or body of work in a media of their choice. While the work maybe representational or abstract, conceptual or not it is expected that each student draw her or his subject matter from personal experience and document their creative process in the development of their semester-long project.
