McElheny

Sculptor, performance artist, writer and filmmaker Josiah McElheny has been appointed for this semester as Cornell’s first Teiger Mentor in the Arts.

McElheny, who is based in New York City, is known for his use of glass with other materials. He received a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Award” in 2006. His work was the subject of two major survey exhibitions in 2012 and 2013, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. He is widely published, including writing for Artforum and Cabinet magazines, and is a contributing editor at Bomb Magazine. Since 2001 he has been a senior critic in sculpture at the Yale School of Art.

McElheny will give a public lecture, “Modernisms,” Oct. 7 at 5:15 p.m. in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

The newly established Teiger Mentor in the Arts Program was created with a gift from David Teiger, Hotel ’51. A management consultant who lives in Bernardsville, N.J., Teiger is a contemporary art collector and patron of curatorial projects and exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe.

Provided

"Island Universe," an installation by Josiah McElheny, Cornell's inaugural Teiger Mentor in the Arts.

The Teiger Mentor in the Arts Program will bring a series of internationally acclaimed artists to Cornell over the next three years to make ongoing visits to studio and seminar classes and conduct individual critiques with MFA students. The program aspires to give undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to make connections with and learn from a diverse range of leading professional artists.

The program “fills a need that’s been felt for a long time,” said associate professor Iftikhar Dadi, art department chair. “Through this, our students are informed firsthand about artistic practice at the highest level. It will be a formative experience for students who will have intensive, intimate engagement with some of the world’s foremost artists. The art department is at the center, but the program also helps the college and the university at large by creating greater exposure for the visual arts.”

Mentor artists are selected by a four-member jury, composed of two members of the art department – Dadi and assistant professor Carl Ostendarp – and two external curators and art educators – Tom Eccles, executive director of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, and Yasmil Raymond, curator of the Dia Art Foundation.

Aaron Goldweber is communications director of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.