Exploring Artistic Perspectives: Highlights from the ACM Art Faculty Panel
Professors Cushman, Gernt, Ruller, and Dean Masarwa after the 2024 Art Faculty Forum.
The ACM Art Faculty Panel offered a unique opportunity to engage with the diverse artistic practices, perspectives, and personal narratives of the professors outside of a classroom setting. The panel’s objective was to allow faculty to present themselves as artists and historians. From painting to photography to history, the panelists revealed their creative processes and the deep connections they hold with their mediums and subject matter.
O’Neill Cushman, and professor since 2014, shared his passion for capturing the fleeting beauty of nature in modern impressionist painting. With roots in Washington, D.C., and a decade spent in France, Cushman’s artistic perspective is shaped by both cultural and environmental influences. His practice revolves around finding visual harmony and focusing on motifs that evoke a sense of fleetingness. Painting en plein air, Prof. Cushman embraces the ever-changing quality of natural light, focusing on the balance between patience and urgency. His work seeks to document the landscapes around his home while avoiding imposing his presence on the scene.
Matthew Gernt, who joined the school in 2022, brings a multidisciplinary approach to his art, merging drawing, painting, photography, and film. From Providence, Rhode Island, and a resident of Marseille since 2012, Prof. Gernt’s art also takes root in analyzing the feelings embedded within landscapes. His work, more recently, explores themes of immigration and displacement around the Mediterranean, using various mediums to document and experiment with these issues. Prof. Gernt’s art connects personal reflection and broader questions about human relationships with space. His thoughtful integration of media underscores how art can function as a means of storytelling.
William Ruller, who began teaching here in 2023, shared his emotionally charged work centered around mortality and decay. His upbringing in New York and his connection to the Rust Belt’s postindustrial landscape inspired him to capture the emptiness and fragility of spaces shaped by economic decline. His process involves breaking into abandoned buildings to photograph them, later reinterpreting these images through painting. This practice transforms spaces once filled with life into tributes to their past. After the loss of his father and family friends, Ruller’s work shifted to focus on themes of impermanence and mortality and loss.
Erin Yunes, an art historian who joined ACM-IAU in 2023, brought a different lens to the panel, reflecting on her work in arts administration and digital cultural heritage. Initially trained in journalism, Dr. Yunes transitioned into photography and later art history, where she focuses on contemporary art and more specifically on broadband equality, digital inclusivity, and equitable access to cultural heritage resources. Dr. Yunes approaches these difficult issues with cultural humility and attempts to deepen collaborative connections and relationships within communities. By exploring the technological structures and overarching polices that impact art creation and access, she raises questions about power dynamics and representation in the art world.
The ACM Art Faculty Panel was a showcase of the diversity of artistic practices and research within the faculty. Each panelist shared not only their craft but also the deeper motivations and questions driving their work. This event fostered a deeper appreciation for the professors’ unique perspectives and their roles as artists, researchers, and storytellers. I found this panel to be especially enlightening because of the blending of creative processes and the more realistic complexities of the art market.
