Lunder Institute Resident Fellows
Established in 2021, the Lunder Institute residential fellowships provide artists with spacious studios as well as opportunities for collaboration with Colby College faculty, students, staff, and the Waterville community. This new studio program, which is based at the Arts Collaborative at 18 Main Street in downtown Waterville, encompasses artists at all stages of their careers and working in a range of artistic disciplines and mediums. Resident fellows are provided with housing and a stipend; have access to Colby College campus facilities; and are in dialogue with local organizations and community members.
Julia Arredondo (she/they) is an artist entrepreneur who recently completed her master of fine arts at Columbia College Chicago. Originally from Corpus Christi, Texas, Arredondo is heavily influenced by the small, family-based businesses she grew up around. Formally trained in printmaking and specializing in artistic forms of independent publishing, she founded Vice Versa Press and Curandera Press. Her latest endeavor, QTVC Live!, a DIY shopping network for artists and underrepresented creatives, is currently in its second season of production in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art. Arredondo is a recent recipient of the Hyde Park Art Center’s Artist Run Chicago Fund grant. She believes that open dialogue around creative finances is a much-needed form of class representation in the arts.
E. Saffronia Downing (she/her) works with wild clay to create site-specific sculptures and installations. Foraging materials from local landscapes, Downing considers correspondences between makers and matter. She received her master of fine arts in ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, and her work has been featured in exhibitions at Bad Water (Knoxville, Tenn.), Resort (Baltimore, Md.), and The Franklin (Chicago). Downing currently teaches the course Knowledge Lab: Craft Ecologies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the co-creator of the digital publication Viral Ecologies.
Inefficiency expert, Adriane Herman orchestrates witnessed releases–like her non-monetized “Emotional Value Auction”–to harness the power of witnessing to facilitate letting go; highlight the generosity inherent in receiving; and occasion meaningful connections between strangers through publicly shared vulnerability. She received ecomaine’s 2018 eco-Excellence award for a series of installations entitled “Out of Sorts,” pressing pause on the recycling process and inviting contemplation of the impact of consumption and our cultural commitment to convenience and disposability. Thirteen consecutive Sunday mornings spent attending Evangelical services in suburban Kansas evolved into a collaboration called “The Freeing Throwers,” yielding print and GPS-triggered audio works on Kansas City municipal buses.
Herman has had solo exhibitions at Adam Baumgold Gallery (NY); Western Exhibitions (Chicago); Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art; Center for Maine Contemporary Art; Kiosk Gallery (Kansas City); and Rose Contemporary and SPEEDWELL Projects in Portland. Group exhibition sites include The Dalarnas Museum (Sweden); Portland Museum of Art; The Brooklyn Museum; Chapel Street Gallery at Yale University; Chosen Barren Land, Taiwan; and International Print Center New York. Herman’s work is held by collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; The Progressive Corporation; The Walker Art Center; The Ulrich Museum; and the Bates College Museum of Art.
She has lectured at over 50 institutions and explores content in context with students as Professor and Chair of Printmaking at Maine College of Art. Her work is included in: Printmaking at the Edge; A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking; and Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall. Herman holds a B.A. from Smith College, an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Level III certificate in the Wilton Method of Cake Decorating.
Veronica Perez is a multidisciplinary artist living in Maine. Utilizing hair as well as kitschy and other unconventional materials in her sculptural works, she creates intense personal moments by means of material hybridization and ideals of beauty. Material fragility echoes sentiments of a lost self and at the same time comments on contemporary Latinx and feminist issues. Recently, she has been working at the intersection of identity, vulnerability, protection, and power through the facade of dark absurdity using materials such as sugar, fake hair, chain-link fences, and fake sunflowers. In 2020 she was awarded the Ellis-Beauregard Fellowship in the Visual Arts, and in 2021 she was a resident at the Black Seed Studio in Portland, Maine, as a part of the Indigo Arts Alliance David C. Driskell Fellowship.
