Notable Tyler Alumni

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Notable Tyler Alumni

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    Printmaking

    Polly Apfelbaum (BFA '78)

    • Polly Apfelbaum (BFA '78) is a multimedia artist whose bold, colorful work blends and hybridizes traditions of painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, craft and installation to engage in a dialogue with architecture and site. 

      "Apfelbaum's work is both painting and sculpture and perhaps photography and fashion and formless material well. It is all these things wildly so and wildly not so." –Lane Relyea, art historian

      Apfelbaum has mounted nearly 60 solo exhibitions and has participated in hundreds of group shows around the...

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    Art History

    Antawan I. Byrd (BA '09)

    • Antawan I. Byrd (BA '09) was named associate curator of photography and media at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 and earned his PhD in modern and contemporary art history at Northwestern University in 2022, researching his dissertation on how artists in Africa and the African diaspora combine sound and visual technologies to address mid-20th century politics.

      He co-curated Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art and [Re]Générations: Une exploration des archives des Rencontres de Bamako, which...

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    Sculpture

    Barbara Chase-Riboud (BFA '56)

    • Barbara Chase-Riboud (BFA '56) is an internationally-acclaimed visual artist and author, known for integrating mediums and materials in uniquely expressive ways. Her abstract bronze, knotted and braided silk and wool fiber sculptures dedicated to Malcolm X, described by the artist as "steles," are likened to contemporary interpretations of those of ancient civilizations that were constructed to honor important people and events.

      “[The Malcom X series] is pure abstraction, pure beauty—that’s the only thing I’m really interested in. Most activism sacrifices...

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    Graphic & Interactive Design

    Bill Covaleski (BFA '85)

    • Bill Covaleski (BFA '85) is the brewmaster and co-founder of Victory Brewing Company—an award-winning and critically-acclaimed brewery that distributes across the United States and internationally. Victory beers have won medals at both The Great American Beer Festival and The Great British Beer Festival and its Prima Pils has twice been chosen by The New York Times’ culinary staff as the “World's Best Pilsner.”

      Covaleski worked as a professional graphic designer for five years after graduating from Tyler, while honing his home-brewing skills—what he called “...

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    Printmaking

    Allan Edmunds (BFA '71, MFA '75)

    • Allan Edmunds (BFA '71, MFA '75) is an award-winning visual artist, art educator and founder of Brandywine Workshop and Archives—a non-profit visual arts organization that serves as a center for the advancement of fine art printmaking and provides training, collaboration, mentorship and support for artists of all ages and backgrounds, especially artists of color. The Brandywine Workshop is internationally recognized for excellence in printmaking as well as fostering the inclusion and record of diverse artists in the practice of printmaking through its archives, exhibitions...

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    Painting

    Anoka Faruqee (MFA '97)

    • Anoka Faruqee (MFA '97) is a painter, curator and Associate Dean at Yale University. Known for colorful moiré paintings inspired by Persian and Indian miniatures, 1960's psychedelia and modernist abstraction, her work features overlapping patterns that are hypnotic in their simultaneous simplicity and complexity.  

      “Serving as more than just optical games, [Faruqee's] paintings show the artist embracing the fallibility of materiality—be it the unpredictability of her medium or the inevitability of human error. It is the oscillation between the handmade and...

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    Art Education

    Elsa Honig Fine (MEd '67)

    • Elsa Honig Fine (MEd '67) is an artist, art historian and founder and publisher of Woman’s Art Journal (1980–2016)—a publication that documents women artists who were celebrated during their lifetimes but are now lost to art history; looks at the art of the past through a feminist lens; documents the life and art of contemporary artists; and reviews the ever-expanding number of books on women and issues related to women in the visual arts.

      Honig Fine is the author of The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity (1973, cover detail pictured above),...

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    Glass

    Doreen Garner (BFA '10)

    • Doreen Garner (BFA '10) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose sculptural and installation work focus on the frequently-suppressed history of the exploitation of black bodies—who were used as trial-and-error subjects in operations and tests by the medical industry from the 19th century to present day. 

      “Yet Garner doesn’t limit her purview to the past, and stresses that such routine dehumanizations endure in our contemporary moment.” 
      – Hyperallergic

      ...
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    Painting

    Trenton Doyle Hancock (MFA '00)

    • Trenton Doyle Hancock (MFA '00) creates prints, videos, drawings, sculptures, individual performances and collaged felt paintings. His use of color, language and pattern meld into energetic and subversive narratives that employ a personal mythology, the art historical canon and pop culture. 

      “That’s how Hancock’s art rolls: Its visual rhythms pulse with energy as cartoon-style characters run amok…drawing all into a discussion of violence and suffering, love and redemption, race and class, art and life—in ways insightful and inspiring, playful and...

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    Painting

    John Hatfield (MFA '89)

    • John Hatfield (MFA '89) serves on the Tyler School of Art and Architecture's faculty as Professor of Practice and Director of the Arts Management track in the Art History program. He has over 30 years’ experience with art organizations including as Executive Director of Socrates Sculpture Park, NY and Executive Director of Silver Arts Projects in New York. Previously, Hatfield spent 17 years in various capacities at the New Museum, New York. As the museum's deputy director, he oversaw multiple departments, contributed to strategic planning and new...

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    Painting

    Edgar Heap of Birds (MFA '79)

    • Edgar Heap of Birds (MFA '79) is a visionary multimedia artist, educator, activist and member of the Cheyenne tribe whose works range from drawings and paintings to monumental outdoor sculpture. He is best known for his signature bold, handwritten style that often incorporates sharp, painted messages.

      “If Conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s employed language as material, Heap of Birds wields words like weapons.”
      – Art...

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    Graphic & Interactive Design

    Jessica Hische (BFA '06)

    • Jessica Hische (BFA '06) is an award-winning illustrator, lettering artist and graphic designer who has created custom work for established brands, classic books, postage stamps and more. She’s been listed as a Forbes 30 Under 30 twice, which chronicles the boldest entrepreneurs in the United States and Canada, as well as named a Print Magazine New Visual Artist (20 under 30), an ADC Young Gun and a “Person to Watch” by GD USA. She is the author/illustrator of the New York Times bestselling children's books Tomorrow I'll Be Kind...

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    Sculpture and Ceramics

    Martha Jackson Jarvis (BFA '75)

    • Martha Jackson Jarvis (BFA '75) creates sculptures, public art and installations that engage issues of identity and symbols of belief that confront contemporary life yet are firmly rooted in historical traditions and culture.

      “Each installation tempers its urban setting, contrasting the architectural with the ethereal, physicality with myth... Thematically, Jackson Jarvis’s work, regardless of its venue, is reflective of…energy, spontaneity, light, death and life.”
      – ...

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    City & Regional Planning

    Melissa Kim (MS '10)

    • Melissa Kim (MS '10) is Senior Program Officer for Capacity Building on the Knowledge Management and Strategy team of Local Initiatives Support Corporation's (LISC)—a community development financial institution and community development intermediary. In this position, Melissa advances racial justice and encourages shared learning across LISC. She believes that solutions to complex urban challenges are most effective when they are anti-disciplinary, imaginative, pragmatic, reflective and co-created with communities. 

      “For me, a community developer, I am...

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    Painting

    Simmie Knox (BFA ‘70, MFA ‘72)

    • Simmie Knox’s (BFA ‘70, MFA ‘72) prolific career as a portrait artist includes becoming the first African American artist to receive a presidential portrait commission for the official White House portraits of President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Primarily working with oil on linen, Knox has received public and private commissions by and for many prominent figures—high-ranking government officials like U.S. Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall and the late Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg; respected civic leaders; educational institutions; business professionals;...

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    Art History

    Joan Marter (BA '68)

    • Joan Marter (BA '68) is an academic, art critic, author and distinguished professor emerita of contemporary painting and sculpture in the department of art history at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

      With nearly 50 years of professional experience, Marter has written and edited numerous books and catalogues, including the five-volume Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, which earned an Outstanding Reference Source Award from the American Library Association. 

      “[The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art] will be an...

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    Photography

    Kim Mitchell (BFA '79)

    • Kim Mitchell (BFA '79) is a decorated leader in the art world and partner at Brunswick Arts—a firm that promotes and manages the reputation and interests of arts, cultural and charitable organizations—where she helps lead strategic advisory work for organizations across the visual, performing and literary arts. She has worked with top cultural clients in North America, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Design Museum; The Frick Collection; and more.

      ...
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    Ree Morton (MFA '70)

    • Ree Morton (MFA '70) exhibited during her lifetime at Artists Space, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; as well as Bykert and Droll/Kolbert Galleries. Morton died in a car accident in Chicago in 1977.

      "Like the papier-mâché school projects of children—toiled on for weeks, forgotten and then rediscovered in the family attic 30 years later—Morton’s works are ritualistic, delightful and literal in their influences."
      –...

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    Art Education

    Adrienne Neszmelyi-Romano (MEd '06)

    • Adrienne Neszmelyi-Romano (MEd '06) is both a practicing and exhibiting jewelry and metal artist, as well as the director of interpretation and innovation at the James A. Michener Art Museum—known for its collection of Pennsylvania Impressionism. She has more than 20 years of experience in the museum field, especially in areas like education, visitor engagement and digital and emerging technologies.

      In her role at the Michener, Neszmelyi-Romano leads the Museum's education department, developing and managing all K–12 onsite and offsite programs for schools and...

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    Ceramics, Glass and Painting

    Jennifer Packer (BFA '07)

    • Jennifer Packer (BFA '07) creates portraits, interior scenes and still lifes that are, as art historian Jessica Bell Brown describes, “emphatically mundane and radically tender.” Through a limited palette and simple brushstrokes, Packer’s paintings render fragments in detail while obscuring other elements, presenting a casual yet powerful intimacy.

      “Jennifer Packer’s [work] represents the summit of painterliness in the [2019 Whitney] Biennial.”
      – ARTnews

      ...
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    Albert Paley (MFA '69)

    • Albert Paley (MFA '69) is considered one of the most masterful and influential metal artists in the world. He is known for his massive public sculptures that have been commissioned around the United States and shown across the world. Early in his more than 40-year career, Paley reinvented traditional jewelry, like the pendant and brooch, by creating “wearable sculptures” that highlight the relationship of the piece to the body and its structure and movement.

      “[Paley’s larger abstract works are] simultaneously radical and classic, sensual and austere,...

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    Architecture

    David Riz (BArch '85)

    • David Riz (BArch '85) is a principal at Ballinger, a leading national firm in the areas of academic, research, healthcare and corporate planning and design. By promoting open and diverse collaborative exchanges among a range of stakeholders, Riz helps realize ethical and beautiful designs where people learn, work and live.

      Prior to this position, Riz was a partner at KieranTimberlake—a practice recognized for its environmental ethos, research expertise and innovative design. In his nearly 20 years at KieranTimberlake, he led many award-winning projects—several of which have been...

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    Architecture

    David Rupp (BArch '82)

    • David Rupp (BArch '82) is an accomplished architect who has developed a distinguished career in project management and construction management of complex high-design buildings over the course of his more than 35-year career.  

      One of his highest profile projects includes the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre Abu Dhabi—the centerpiece of Abu Dhabi’s much-publicized Saadiyat Cultural District and the culmination of the country’s 21st century global re-branding initiatives—where he served as project director with Turner Construction. 

      Rupp has received numerous awards...

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    Graphic & Interactive Design

    Paula Scher (BFA '70)

    • Paula Scher (BFA '70) is commonly referred to as a “titan of postmodern design,” as well as a “hall of famer” and “rock star” of the graphic design industry. Described as a “master conjurer of the instantly familiar,” by TED, Scher’s influential and iconic work has redefined institutions and reimagined urban landscapes all over...

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    Horticulture

    Holly Shimizu (AS '74)

    • Holly Shimizu (AS '74) is a nationally-recognized horticulturist, consultant and educator focused on plant conservation and sustainability, with a robust background in public gardens. 

      Among her diverse and respected 40-year career, she was the host of the PBS show Victory Garden as well as the founding partner of Sustainable Sites Initiative—a program designed to create certified, sustainable and resilient land development projects, from national parks and corporate campuses, to streetscapes, homes and more. She has served as the executive director of the...

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    Painting

    Lisa Sigal (BFA '85)

    • Lisa Sigal (BFA '85) is a practicing artist in painting and sculpture, whose work utilizes and expands upon notions of space and the built environment, investigating how art can challenge set ideas about property, containment and freedom. 

      “In contemporary abstract painting, references to architecture are commonplace—but to housing, not so much. For many years, Lisa Sigal’s paintings have ruminated on buildings and their discontents: the dodgy promise of stability, the tradeoff between security and confinement. With her…show, Utopia Free [2017], she pushes...

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    Laurie Simmons (BFA '71)

    • Laurie Simmons (BFA '71) is a renowned photographer and filmmaker. Her staged domestic scenes, featuring dolls, miniature objects and costumed people, permeate a dreamlike quality while interrogating, among many subjects, stereotypes of American culture, nostalgia, female objectification and media constructions of gender roles. 

      “Laurie Simmons has proven herself to be the ultimate avatar artist for our age… [Her] unique and disturbing photographic art eerily plays with the hyper-reality of our present day and near future, in which gender fluidity, virtual...

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    Architecture

    William R. Smith, AIA (BArch '79)

    • William R. Smith, AIA (BArch '79) is Senior Vice President of Shopoff Realty Investments managing the design and construction of the new 20-story Las Vegas Hotel/Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Dream is a 530-room luxury hotel with restaurants, bars, a nightclub, ballroom, pool and casino. Shopoff Realty Investments is a national manager of opportunistic and value-add real estate investments located in Irvine, CA. 

      Prior to his work at Shopoff, Smith served as Senior Vice President of Global Construction at Las Vegas Sands where he managed construction projects globally...

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    Painting

    William Villalongo (MFA '01)

    • William Villalongo (MFA '01) is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, installation artist and curator, as well as an associate professor at The Cooper Union School of Art. Working out of the notion of Blackness as a verb, he reframes familiar images, events and themes in our cultural landscape while exploring dualities like male/female and visibility/invisibility, intentionally appropriating from areas like ancient mythologies and contemporary politics. 

      "Most of all, Villalongo suggests that it’s history that shapes the black body... This historical...

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    Painting, Drawing, Sculpture

    Angela Washko (BFA '09)

    • As a politically-engaged feminist media artist working in a variety of forms, Angela Washko is committed to telling complex and unconventional stories about the media we consume from unusual perspectives. Washko's practice spans interventions in mainstream media, performance art, digital works, video and video games.

      "[An] ingenious reconstruction of complex social encounters..."
      – The New Yorker on The Game: The Game

      In...

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    Hannah Wilke (BFA and BSEd '62)

    • Hannah Wilke (BFA and BSEd '62) was a legendary artist and feminist icon who worked in sculpture, drawing, assemblage, photography, performance and installation. She is considered the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery in her art—a signature element of her work.

      “Controversial and wholly original, Hannah Wilke sought a formal language for women’s creativity, challenging the parameters of both art and feminism in the process. [She] changed the art world’s view on a woman’s body…”
      –...

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    Painting

    Lisa Yuskavage (BFA '84)

    • Lisa Yuskavage (BFA '84) is a painter known for her highly original approach to figurative painting that has challenged the genre through its use of bold, eccentric, exhibitionist and introspective characters who are both subject and object. 

      “Since her arrival on the art scene some twenty-five years ago, Lisa Yuskavage has made a name for herself with paintings that use classical techniques to depict unabashedly taboo subjects. Her creations—awash in radiant, hallucinatory colors and featuring hedonistic heroines unlike anything else in art today—are...

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    Architecture

    Mario Zacharjasz, AIA (BArch '85)

    • Mario Zacharjasz, AIA, (BArch '85) is co-founder and principal of PZS Architects, LLC, located in Philadelphia. Throughout his career, Zacharjasz has been a champion of causes that reflect both his passion for architecture and his drive to make an impact in the communities and organizations that are important to him.

      With a focus on educational and institutional clients, PZS Architects has made their mark throughout the region over the last 25 years. PZS worked as Associate Architects with MGA Partners, Architects on...

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    Moe Brooker (BFA '70, MFA '72)

    • Moe Brooker (BFA '70, MFA '72) was an internationally celebrated abstract painter with strong Philadelphia roots, best known for his joyous interpretation of African American life on canvas. His style evolved over time into abstract line and block work, featuring bright color patterns inspired by graffiti on buildings and deep, earnest emotion. He also incorporated energy, music, and language into his process, all of which were formative pillars in his life outside of the studio. 

      “The point about abstraction is you develop your own language. Language...

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