Kristen Letts Kovak
Kristen Letts Kovak earned her MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010. Her artwork questions the relationship between how we see and how we identify objects. She attempts to interrupt the process of naming in order to reveal our perception before it is processed through the visual cortex. “The results are part Wunderkammer, part artifact, and part academic still life.”
She has been teaching painting and drawing for the past fifteen years and been a visiting artist and critic at the University of Michigan Art Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art, University of Pittsburgh, Rocky Mountain College of Art, and DePaul University. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the country.
Most recently, she has had solo exhibitions at Ohio University, Penn State, Baum School of Art, MICA: Decker Gallery, and the Arts Club of Washington. Her work was also featured in a five-museum touring exhibition including the Wildling Art Museum in Los Olivos, CA and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
She is based in Pittsburgh, PA and teaches at Carnegie Mellon and Seton Hill Universities.
Recent Work:
Renee Hamilton
Renee Hamilton, who resides in Newark, Delaware earned her MFA in Studio Art at MICA in 2010. She currently teaches at the Delaware Art Museum and at the Coatesville Area Senior High School in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including Texas, Washington D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York. Her recent work involves dismantling objects and resituating them as materials that question our perception and relationship with matter and the objects we create from it. The works are then situated not as static objects but as pauses that will be reformed over time. “My material forms are intended to stand as temporary notations of forms in space that disrupt what is known while invoking what lies beyond.”
Recent Work:
Kristin Kest
Kristin Kest has been an illustrator for 20 years and has created the interior and cover artwork for many books, magazines, calendars, and more for scores of publishing companies, mostly in the children’s science book genre. Although she has great affection for her scientific and botanical work, Kest has recently branched out into the fantasy and fiction genre which she sees as a logical step in her evolution as an illustrative artist. This move has been a result of her feminist studies; Kest sees the F+SF genre as a logical platform for challenging social norms within the visual field of communication. Kest also teaches Illustration and Drawing classes at her alma mater, York College of Pennsylvania. She earned her MFA at Maryland Institute, College of Art, and lectures at conferences and symposia on the importance of storytelling in illustration.
Recent Work:
MFA in Studio Art 