Notable Alumni

Andy Warhol (BFA 1949)

Andy Warhol graduated with a degree in Pictorial Design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949. More than twenty years after his death, he remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his one prescient observation that “everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.
Read more: warholfoundation.org

Philip Pearlstein (BFA 1949)

Upon graduation from Pittsburgh’s Taylor Allderdice High School in 1942, Philip Pearlstein enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology, but the draft limited his attendance to one year. After discharge from the army in 1946 he returned to CIT, where he studied with Robert Lepper, Balcomb Green and Samuel Rosenberg, and received his BFA degree in 1949. He is a preeminent figure painter who led a revival in realist art. A distinguished Professor emeritus from Brooklyn College, Pearlstein has paintings in over 70 public art museum collections around the world. In 1982, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and in 2008, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy in New York, and the Scholastic Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award. He is represented by the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York.
Read more: philippearlstein.com

Raymond Saunders (BFA 1960)

Born in 1934 in Pittsburgh, Saunders is known for his multimedia paintings which often have sociopolitical undertones, and which incorporate assemblage, drawing, collage and found text. He has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1952, including exhibits in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Singapore, Korea, Japan, and China as well as throughout the USA. In 2011, Saunders joined numerous notable artists in the Hammer Museum’s, Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1966-1980 in Los Angeles. Saunders studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Barnes Foundation, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and California College of the Arts (CCA). He is Professor Emeritus at Cal State East Bay in Hayward and is CCA in Oakland, California.
Read more: davidzwirner.com

Mel Bochner (BFA 1962)

Mel Bochner grew up in Pittsburgh and is recognized a leading figure in the development of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Emerging at a time when painting was increasingly discussed as outmoded, Bochner belonged to a new generation of artists who looked at ways of breaking with Abstract Expressionism and traditional compositional devices. His pioneering introduction of the use of language in the visual led Harvard University art historian Benjamin Buchloh to describe his 1966 Working Drawings as ‘probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.’ Bochner came of age during the second half of the 1960s, a moment of radical change both in society at large as well as in art. While painting slowly lost its preeminent position in modern art, language moved from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Bochner has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and of language, the way we construct and understand them, and the way they relate to one another to make us more attentive to the unspoken codes that underpin our engagement with the world. Bochner designed and created The Kraus Campo at Carnegie Mellon with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. The public project was commissioned by and named after art alumna Jill Gansman Kraus and her husband Peter Kraus and inaugurated in 2004.
(Parts of this biography are excerpted from Mel Bochner: If the Color Changes by Achim Borchardt-Hume).
Read more:
melbochner.net
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Nancy Hagin (BFA 1962)

Nancy Hagin is an award-winning contemporary realist American printmaker and painter who, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon, completed her MFA at Yale University in 1964. Since then, she has taught art at institutions such as Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, University of the Arts, Philadelphia and currently at Fashion Institute of Technology between spending summers working in a barn near Hudson, New York. In 1992, Hagin was elected a full Academician of the National Academy of Design in New York. Her art has been nationally exhibited and is included in major museum and corporate collections. Her work is represented by Alpha Gallery in Boston.
Read more: alphagallery.com

Jonathan Borofsky (BFA 1964)

in Boston, Jonathan Borofsky is an American sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in Ogunquit, Maine, primarily producing public art. After CMU, he studied at France’s Ecole de Fontainebleau and earned an MFA from Yale University. In 2006, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon. “Walking to the Sky,” donated by art alumna Jill Gansman Kraus and her husband Peter Kraus, was permanently installed on the CMU campus in 2006. It is based on a story that the artist’s father used to tell him when he was a child about a friendly giant who lived in the sky. From the early 70’s, Borofsky’s central concern was to diminish the boundaries between life and art. From 1973 he made use of dreams, combining drawings, paintings, sculptures, projected images, and prints in multi-media installations. Borofsky taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York, 1969-1977, and at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, 1977-1980. His projects have been exhibited and installed in museums and public spaces around the world.
Read more: borofsky.com
For a 2002 interview with Borofsky, visit:
cmu.edu/magazine

Joyce Kozloff (BFA 1964)

Joyce Kozloff fuses a love for widespread artistic traditions with an activist temperament. A key participant in the 70’s feminist art movement in Los Angeles and New York, she became a founding member of the Heresies publishing collective and an originating figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement. During the 1980s, she concentrated on public commissions, many in transportation centers (including the floor of the National Airport in Washington, DC), executed in tile or mosaic, completing sixteen between 1979 and 2003. In the 90’s, maps became the foundation for her private work that addressed a range of issues, particularly the role of cartography in human knowledge and as an imposition of imperial will. Recent works, including those produced in the School of Art’s Digital Art Studio, have synthesized patterns and mapping in ways that are graphically satisfying and intellectually questioning. Kozloff’s work is featured in nearly every survey of late 20th century art of women artists.
In 2002, she was elected into the National Academy of Design. In 2005, she received an Alumni Award from Carnegie Mellon followed by a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art in 2009.
Read more: joycekozloff.net

Diane Samuels (BFA 1970, MFA 1976)

Diane Samuels is a visual artist with studio and public art practices. She is also co-founder of City of Asylum Pittsburgh that provides sanctuary to writers in exile. Her exhibitions include those at: the Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh; the Leo Baeck Institute and the Center for Book Arts, New York; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut; the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati; the Municipal Museum of Art in Gyor, Hungary; the Synagogue Center in Trnava, Slovakia; the Bernheimer Realschule in Buttenhausen, Germany; and the Czech Museum of Fine Arts. In 2013 she was recipient of a Rockefeller Bellagio Residency in Italy and an American Academy in Jerusalem Fellowship. Samuels holds both BFA and MFA degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, a diploma from the Institute in Arts Administration at Harvard University and has received honorary doctorates from Seton Hill University and Chatham University.
Read more: dianesamuels.net

Deborah Kass (BFA 1974)

Deborah Kass’ work is a critical commentary on the intersection of social power relations, personal identity, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world. In addition to her years at Carnegie Mellon University, she studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Art Students League of New York. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Jewish Museum (New York); Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Cincinnati Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute; Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums; and Weatherspoon Museum, among others, as well as numerous public and private collections. In 2012 Kass’ work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh with an accompanying catalogue published by Rizzoli. She is a Senior Critic in the Yale University M.F.A. Painting Program. Kass is represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York.
Read more: museumofnonvisibleart.com
deborahkass.com

Renee Stout (BFA 1980)

Renee Stout grew up in Pittsburgh. Five years after graduating from CMU, she moved to Washington, D.C. and began to explore the roots of her African American heritage. She looks to the belief systems of African peoples and their descendants throughout the African Diaspora, as well as to the world and her immediate environment, for the inspiration to create works that encourage self-examination, self-empowerment and self-healing. The lives of Stout’s imaginary characters unfold in a variety of media, including painting, mixed-media sculpture, photography and installation. The recipient of awards from the Joan Mitchell, Pollock-Krasner and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundations, Stout has exhibited across the country and internationally in England, Russia and the Netherlands. Her work is included in major museum collections including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2014, she received an Alumni Achievement Award. Hemphill in Washington, D.C. represents her work.
Read more: reneestout.com
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Jamie Adams (BFA 1983)

Jamie Adams was born and raised in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. After graduating from CMU, he earned an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His work is represented in the permanent public collections of Museu Brasileiro da Escultura (São Paulo, Brazil), Museum of Modern Art Library (New York), MOMA (Wales), Los Angeles County Museum of Art Research Library, the Pennsylvania Capitol Building (Senate, House of Representatives, Governor’s office) and Carnegie Mellon University among others. His work has been cited in publications such as Art in America, Bulletin du Musée Ingres (Montauban, France), and the book Fragonard, Regards croisés, co-authored by Musée du Louvre curators Dimitri Salmon and Jean-Pierre Cuzin. Adams is represented by David Klein Gallery (Birmingham, MI), Zolla Lieberman Gallery (Chicago), Hespe Gallery (San Francisco), Philip Slein Gallery (St. Louis), and Lamensch-Douglas Fine Art (Lyon, France). He resides in St. Louis, Missouri.
http://jamieadamsart.com

John Currin (BFA 1984)

John Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado. After graduating from CMU, he earned an M.F.A. in 1986 from Yale University. Inspired by Old Master portraits, pin-ups, pornography, and B-movies, Currin paints ideational yet challengingly perverse images of women, from lusty nymphs and dour matrons to more ethereal feminine prototypes. His paintings strike an unnerving balance between the beautiful and the grotesque. Currin has exhibited internationally at venues such as Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Serpentine Gallery, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; DHC/ART, Montreal; Frans Hals Museum, The Netherlands; and Museo Stefano Bardini, Florence. His work is represented in museum collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Collection, London; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. He currently lives and works in New York where he is represented by Gagosian.
Read more: gagosian.com

Katharine Kuharic (BFA 1984)

Katharine was born in South Bend, Indiana. After graduating from CMU, she moved to New York City where she studied with Louise Bourgeois and Robert Storr at the School of Visual Arts. Her contemporary allegorical paintings have addressed sexual desire, social and political mores, the excess of American culture, comfort, love, and death. She has exhibited internationally in Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Stockholm, London, and Amsterdam. She has had fourteen solo exhibitions, including seven in New York at P.P.O.W. Gallery, which represents her work. Kuharic has received grants from the Vogelstein and Penny McCall Foundations, Art Matters, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was named the Milton and Sally Avery Fellow for 2003 and 2004 at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy. After teaching at Yale, The New School, School of Visual Arts and Washington University, Professor Kuharic now holds the Kevin Kennedy Chair at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York where she was awarded The Class of 1962 Excellence in Teaching Award.
Read more: katharinekuharic.com

Rob Rogers (MFA 1984)

Ever since graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Rob Rogers’ cartoons have been vexing and entertaining his readers. He is the award-winning editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate, his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and Newsweek, among other publications. Rogers has also curated three national cartoon exhibitions, Too Hot to Handle: Creating Controversy through Political Cartoons (2003) and Drawn To The Summit: A G-20 Exhibition Of Political Cartoons (2009), both at The Andy Warhol Museum, and Bush Leaguers: Cartoonists Take on the White House (2007) at the American University Museum. In 2015, he curated Slinging Satire: Editorial Cartooning and the First Amendment at the ToonSeum in Pittsburgh where he is currently serving as board president. He is an active member (and past president) of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. In 1999 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His awards include numerous Golden Quills; the 1995 National Headliner Award; the Thomas Nast Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2000 and 2013, and the Berryman Award from the National Press Foundation in 2015. In 2009, Rogers celebrated 25 years as a Pittsburgh editorial cartoonist with the release of No Cartoon Left Behind: The Best of Rob Rogers, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. In 2015, he released a local cartoon collection called, Mayoral Ink: Cartooning Pittsburgh’s Mayors.
Read more: robrogers.com

Ryan McGinness (BFA 1994)

Ryan McGinness’ paintings, prints, sculptures, and installations borrow graphic elements of public signage and corporate logos, along with images from art history, to create a multi-faceted reflection on contemporary visual culture. Drawing from his upbringing in the surf and skate culture of Virginia Beach and his background in the design industry, McGinness communicates poetic concepts through a cold, graphic, and authoritative visual vocabulary. His work guides viewers to create personal interpretations rather than rending an absolute interpretation. His work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Cincinnati Art Museum; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; among many others. His work has been shown widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Read more: ryanmcginness.com

Paul Vanouse (MFA 1996)

Paul Vanouse’s practice in emerging media forms is guided by radical interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism, addressing complex issues raised by varied new techno-sciences while using them as a medium. His artworks have included data collection devices that examine the ramifications of polling and categorization, genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of race and identity, and temporary organizations that playfully critique institutionalization and corporatization. These “Operational Fictions” are hybrid entities—simultaneously real things and fanciful representations–intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary electronic landscape. Vanouse’s works have won numerous grants and fellowships and have been exhibited in over 20 countries and across the USA at the Walker Art Center, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum, New Museum, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, the Louvre in Paris, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin, Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Centre de Cultura Contemporania in Barcelona, and TePapa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. Vanouse is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo where he also directs the Coalesce Center for Biological Art.
Read more: paulvanouse.com

Peter Coffin (MFA 2000)

Peter Coffin was born in Berkeley, California and studied at the University of California, Davis before earning an MFA at CMU. His work engages with pre-conceptions about cultural ideals to challenge established perception and interpretation. He has mounted over 30 solo museum and gallery exhibitions internationally at venues such as: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Center d’art Contemporain d’Ivry, France; The Barbican, London; Le Centre d’Art Contemporain de Fribourg, Switzerland; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Horticultural Society of New York; and Le Confort Moderne, Poitier. His work has been included in art biennials in Berlin, Belgrade, Liverpool, Moscow, New York, Trentino and Yokohama and in numerous museums such as: the Singapore Art Museum; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; El Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Los Angeles; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France; Saatchi Gallery, London; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; and Tate Britain, London among others. He lives and works in New York City.
Read more: petercoffinstudio.com

Carrie Schneider (BHA 2001)

Carrie Schneider was born in Chicago in 1979 and is currently a Brooklyn-based artist working in photography, film and video installation. After graduating from CMU, she earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has also attended: the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the Finnish Kuvataideakatemia (Academy of Fine Arts), Helsinki, as a Fulbright Fellow; and in 2016, the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her work has been shown widely at international arts institutions, including: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; The Kitchen, New York; Galería Alberto Sendrós, Buenos Aires; and the California Museum of Photography, Riverside. She has received awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and a 2015 Creative Capital Award. Her work is represented by Monique Meloche in Chicago.
Read more: carrieschneider.net

Shana Moulton (MFA 2004)

Shana Moulton is a media artist who explores contemporary anxieties through her filmic alter ego, Cynthia. Through evocative and oblique narratives in video and performance works, Moulton combines an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility. Born in 1976, Moulton studied at the University of California, Berkeley before her MFA degree at CMU. She has held residencies at the LMCC Workspace Program, Smack Mellon, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Harvestworks, De Ateliers in Amsterdam and The Sommerakademie in Berne. Moulton has exhibited or performed internationally at The New Museum, MoMA P.S.1, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, SFMOMA, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, MOCA Cleveland and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and abroad at Wiels Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels, The Migros Museum in Zurich, De Appel in Amsterdam, and Palais de Tokyo among others. Her work has been featured on Arte TV and Art21’s New York Close Up. Moulton lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at Kunstakademie in Muenster, Germany.
Read more: shanamoulton.info

Institute for New Feeling

Scott Andrew (MFA 2013), Agnes Bolt (MFA 2012) and Nina Sarnelle (MFA 2012)
The Institute for New Feeling (IfNf) is a research clinic committed to the development of new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new. IfNf is the inventor of its own authority, borrowing from the language of corporate branding and new age healing, as well as that of mainstream medicine, therapy, health and beauty. Its work takes the form of treatments, therapies, retreats and wellness products that acknowledge the contemporary digital age’s modes of production, consumption, and distribution of goods and services. IfNf’s physical existence is regularly shifting but its long-term plan is to open a permanent space/spa in Los Angeles. The Institute for New Feeling has recently exhibited at Recess, NY; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; Thank You For Coming and Eastside International, Los Angeles; Open Engagement Conference, Queens Museum of Art, NY; Spaces, Cleveland; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Threewalls, Chicago; and Ballroom Marfa, among other venues. IfNf has been featured on Clocktower Radio and KChung Radio and their work has been reviewed in Art in America, Huffington Post, Animal NY, Fader, Hyperallergic, ArtFCity, and ArtHopper.
Read more: institutefornewfeeling.com
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