Friday, May 23 will be Montserrat's 33rd commencement exercise, which will be held at 11 a.m. at the Dane Street Congregational Church in Beverly, MA. President Stan Trecker and the Board of Trustees will confer about 80 BFA degrees and four-year professional Diplomas to the College's largest graduating class in its history. The Montserrat community has chosen Assistant Professor of Foundation Chuck Ott to be the faculty speaker and student Nell Tallos as the speaker for the class of 2003.
Rosenquist is a colleague and friend of such renowned artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, all of whom came into prominence in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. He became involved in the contemporary art scene through working in commercial advertising as a billboard painter, first in the Midwest and then in New York. He studied art at the Minneapolis School of Art and the University of Minnesota. Rosenquist has had one-person exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and many other major museums around the world. He is represented by Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and is included in the collections of nearly 100 museums in the U.S. and abroad, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. A major retrospective of his paintings, prints, and other works of art will open at the Menil Collection, an internationally esteemed art museum in Houston, TX, on May 16 (just prior to Montserrat's commencement ceremonies), and will travel to the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in the fall and then to the Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain in 2004. Rosenquist was a Presidential appointment to the National Council on the Arts from 1978 to 1984.
An artist whose work includes sculpture, performance, video, photography, and installation, Antoni will be the Commencement Speaker for this year's ceremonies. She is particularly well known for her use of a wide range of organic or eclectic materials to explore issues of endurance, the power of repetitive actions, and the presence of the artist's body in the creation of the work. Antoni received an MFA in sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in 1986 from Sarah Lawrence College. She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad at venues including Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; the Reina Sofia, Spain; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, both in New York. Her work was included in the 1993 Venice Biennial, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial, the 1997 Istanbul Biennial, and the 2000 Kwangju Biennial in Korea.
Faculty SpeakerChuck Ott, assistant professor of Foundation, has been teaching at Montserrat since the fall of 1998 and also teaches in the adult Community Education Program. He received an MFA in Painting from Montana State University and a BFA in Printmaking from Portland School of Art, now known as Maine College of Art. He has taught at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY.
Student SpeakerStudent Nell Tallos, a Graphic Design major, received Dean's Honors last semester. Her work, along with the work of 13 other Montserrat students, was chosen for the Boston Printmaker's Third Arches Student Print Show, which ran at Boston University's 808 Gallery in March and early April. She is from Narberth, PA.
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