This Fall I was honored to find out I had been selected for the MICA McMillan/Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting. I work with graduate and undergraduate students bi-monthly as a visiting critic in student studios as well as giving 2 public lectures. McMillan/Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting was established in 2006 for an annual visiting female artist faculty in painting, whose work explores perspectives from diverse cultures. Amy Sherald, Baltimore artist and resident, who is doing Michelle Obama’s portrait for the National Portrait Gallery collection, shares the McMillan/Stewart position with me this academic year.
Kira Nam Greene’s work explores female sexuality, desire and control through figure and food still-life paintings, surrounded by complex patterns. Imbuing the feminist legacies of Pattern and Decoration Movement with transnational, multicultural motifs, Greene creates colorful paintings that are unique combinations of realism and abstraction, employing diverse media such as oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor and colored pencil. Combining Pop Art tropes and transnationalism, she also examines the politics of food through the depiction of brand name food products, or junk food. Recently, Greene started a figurative painting series spurred by the 2016 Presidential Election, Women’s March, #metoo movement and ensuing crisis of conscience, this new body of work aspires to present the power of collective action by women.