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 Greene Block + Studios 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.
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.
Golaleh Yazdani is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She received her bachelor of fine arts from the University of Art in Tehran, Iran, and her master of fine arts at Maine College of Art.
Yazdani has exhibited in Iran and the United States in venues such as Mana Art Center, Boston University Art Galleries, SPACE, Able Baker Contemporary, and New System Exhibitions, among others.
Mixed media is Yazdani’s language. She incorporates video, sculpture, stop motion animation, and performance in her work. Growing up in a conservative society with a dictatorial climate is a major influence on Yazdani’s studio practice. Her work references the suppression forced upon her family, friends, and classmates and explores the traces of trauma and grief as the natural consequence of a broken community under such political and cultural conditions.
Colby College Faculty/Staff Resident
Maggie Libby (they/them) is an artist and worker, rooted in a Maine-based studio practice. They explore the relationships between external and internal geographies; women’s bodies, images, life stories; our relationship to local ground; spaces between artwork and viewer. They are passionate about creating inclusive women’s histories and learning how to listen deeply. Their primary practice is drawing, a legacy from the atelier training of the New York Studio School. They also need to slide color across a surface, create transgressive interactions, invite participation, try unfamiliar mediums, and grow things from seed.
They received the William and Marguerite Zorach Fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Art, a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and a Maine Arts Commission project grant for a guerilla installation of Where Are the Women? project at the Colby libraries. In addition to teaching a January Program Introduction to Figure Painting and participating in faculty shows while Visual Resources curator for the Art Department, their two Colby Museum of Art solo shows were the Regarding the Self (pregnancy series) and 2012’s Hidden Histories: a project by Maggie Libby, which recreated the history of women at Colby through images, altered books, biographies, storyboards, and memorial walls, using source material from the college archives. As Curator of Digital Discovery and Engagement at Colby’s Special Collections and Archives, they have a deep store of institutional knowledge on the college’s visual histories as well as silences in the college archives. They steward several oral history projects to expand representation in the archives. Some of their muses include Audre Lorde, Nyssa Chow, Nancy Spero, Betye Saar, Emily Nelligan, Lois Dodd, and Louise Bourgeois
