About the Artists

Deborah Dancy

Deborah Dancy is a painter whose abstract work describes odd invented spaces and stacked structures. Subtle tonalities and fragmented lines become descriptive markers in work that suggests familiar yet ambiguous spaces. Dancy works in a variety of mediums, large-scale oil paintings, mixed media on paper, photography, printmaking, and artists’ books.

She has received a number of honors and awards: John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Connecticut Commission of the Arts Artist Grant, New England Foundation for the Arts/NEA Individual Artist Grant, Nexus Press Artist Book Project Award, Visual Studies Artist Book Project Residency Grant, The American Antiquarian Society’s William Randolph Hearst Fellowship, YADDO Fellow, and Women’s Studio Workshop Residency Grants. She has exhibited in galleries and museums such as: N’Namdi Contemporary Miami, Sears-Peyton Gallery, K. Imperial Fine Art, The Fuller Museum, The Spencer Museum, and The DeCordova Museum. Her work is included in numerous collections: The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Montgomery Museum of Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, and The Detroit Museum of Art.

Ray DiCapua

Ray DiCapua is an artist who works mainly in the medium of drawing and recently has included various digital photographic processes to explore and make imagery. He sees drawing as a practice of investigating and interrogating the interpretive lenses through which we construct meaning. He is a recipient of awards, grants and fellowships, including the Vindolanda Roman Fort/Chesterholm Museum, Northumberland, UK, the Millay Artist Colony, Collaborative Artist Residency and two residencies at the McDowell Colony. Recent exhibitions include the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angles, Calif.; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Wash.; Museum of Southwest Texas, Corpus Christi, Tex., Kansas State University and Richmond Center for the Visual Arts, Western Michigan University.

Janet L. Pritchard

Janet L. Pritchard photographs landscape as the intersection of nature and culture. In her current project, Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories, she photographs the Connecticut River landscape as a complex set of interconnected systems where present bumps up against past in telling ways. Her earlier book, More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story views the world’s first national park through the lenses of nature, culture, and history, was published in 2022.

She has received a number of honors and awards: John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Fellowships; National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar, Newberry Library; The American Antiquarian Society’s Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship; Artist-in-Residence fellowships at Ucross Foundation, Jentel Foundation, Millay Foundation, Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, and the Vindolanda Trust; and UConn Research Excellence Program and School of Fine Arts Research Grant awards, and Humanities Institute Fellowship. Her exhibition venues include Philadelphia Museum of Art; RISD Museum; Fruitlands Museum; New Bedford Art Museum; International Center for Photography; Martha Schneider Gallery; Photographic Resource Center, Boston; Fraction Magazine; FlakPhoto; Lenscratch; and the National Trust for Historic Preservation traveling exhibition America’s Uncommon Places.

Judith Thorpe

Judith Thorpe’s creative work, The Passions, considers the representation of the female body, exploring the tension between idealized and real. The work explores historical representations of the female body in precedents such as Greek and Roman statuary and religious icons. Her recent series, Breathing The Everyday, is a visual haiku reflecting on the everyday and ordinary.

Thorpe’s creative work has been exhibited at venues such as the International Fine Art Fair, New York; New Britain Museum of American Art; New Bedford Art Museum; Real Art Ways; FlatFile Galleries and Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago; The American Center, New Delhi, India; Nexus Contemporary Art Center and the Atlanta Gallery of Photography, Atlanta; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem; Jane H. Baum Gallery, New York, Graham Gallery, Albuquerque, and Ginny Williams Gallery, Denver. Artist residencies include the Millay Colony for the Arts, Banff Centre for the Arts, collaborative Artist Residency: Like A Whisper, Northumberland, UK, and Vermont Studio Center.

Acknowledgments

Our work has been funded in part by grants from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut. We would also like to thank Barbara and Andrew Birley most sincerely, in addition to the Vindolanda Trust, all of whom have warmly embraced a different way of working with history. We look forward to future collaborations.