Each academic year, the endowed Dorothy Liskey Wampler Distinguished Art Professorship brings to campus a varied program of distinguished visiting artists, scholars, and critics.

Nominated by SADAH faculty members, four distinguished artists and scholars will visit campus during the 2023-2024 academic year. This year's Wampler Professors are Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Siona Wilson, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, and Professor délé jẹ́gẹ́dẹ́.

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.
Fall 2023 Dorothy Liskey Wampler Distinguished Art Professorship and Cultural Connections Artist-In-Residence

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. is an American printer, book artist, and papermaker best known for social and political commentary, particularly in printed posters. Kennedy creates prints, posters, and postcards from handset wood and metal type, oil-based inks, and eco-friendly and affordable chipboard. His posters feature proverbs, sayings, and quotes Kennedy locates or clients provide. One critic noted that Kennedy was “...unafraid of asking uncomfortable questions about race and artistic pretension.”

The Library of Congress has in its collection nearly 250 of his letterpress prints, posters, and ephemera created between 2003 and 2020. Further distinctions include an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, winning a Joyce Award, main stage speaker at the American Institute of Graphic Arts design conference, and a 2015 United States Artists Glasgow Fellow in Crafts.

Exhibition: Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. Exhibition
News: Letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. visits campus

Dr. Siona Wilson
Spring 2024 Dorothy Liskey Wampler Distinguished Art Professorship

Siona Wilson teaches art history at the College of Staten Island as well as the Graduate Center. Her research interests are grounded in issues of sexual difference, race and sexuality at the intersection of art and politics in the twentieth century. Author of Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minnesota, 2014), she has published on photography, experimental film, video, sound and performance art, in edited collections and journals, including Art History, October, Oxford Art Journal and Third Text. Her recent curatorial projects include I can’t breathe, at the Gallery of the College of Staten Island, featuring works in video and photography by Nona Faustine, Patricia Silva, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa and Kara Walker with a timeline of images documenting the activist group, Staten Islanders Against Racism and Police Brutality (SIARPB). She also co-curated Sexing Sound: Aural Archives and Feminist Scores (with Valerie Tevere and Catherine Karl) at the James Gallery, New York. Professor Wilson’s new research relates to documentary, gender and state violence in a diverse range of geographic sites, including Algeria, Britain, “Kurdistan,” Iraq and Vietnam, focusing on episodes from the 1930s to the present.

Exhibition: girls + eggs at the Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art

Elpitha Tsoutsounakis
Spring 2024 Dorothy Liskey Wampler Distinguished Art Professorship

Elpitha Tsoutsounakis (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Multi-disciplinary Design (MDD) program at the University of Utah. She served as Associate Director of the Design program from 2017-2020 and is a founding member of the faculty. Elpitha completed a Bachelor of Science in Architecture at the University of Utah and a Master of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

She teaches design studios, research methods, and visual strategy with an emphasis on community-engaged scholarship. Her design research practice with Ochre engages issues of design ethics, materiality, ecofeminism, and human/nonhuman entanglement.

Professor délé jẹ́gẹ́dẹ́
Spring 2024 Dorothy Liskey Wampler Distinguished Art Professorship

As an art historian, my work attempts to disrupt the canonical imbalance in the historicization of texts by privileging the African and African-American perspective. As a painter, I employ a variety of media to inveigh against economic and social constructs that perpetuate the subaltern condition of the underclass. As a cartoonist, I drench acerbic issues in palatable coats for public consumption, and often at the expense of the powerful. As a teacher, I relish motivating my students to be respectful of the essence of divergency even as they seek to contribute to knowledge. My work attempts to rupture the boundaries that are installed in the way that we construct and affirm selfhood.