Faculty Artist Wins the Guggenheim Fellowship

Two acrylic paintings on linen by Melissa Thorne
'Grove,' installation view of site-specific wall painting with individual acrylic paintings on linen, 18 x 46 feet, by Melissa Thorne from the 2019 exhibition “Aftereffect” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. (Photos by Wes Magyar)

ALBANY, N.Y. (April 27, 2021) — Sarah Cohen, professor and chair of Art & Art History, notes that it is rare for a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to be awarded to an assistant professor — “but, Melissa Thorne is a rare artist indeed.”

Thorne, who teaches Studio Art and is the department’s Area Head of Painting and Drawing, was announced on April 8 as a recipient of one of the 184 2021 fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A painter whose practice includes multiple formats, from paintings on canvas and paper, to large-scale site-specific wall drawings in ink and watercolor, she has been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions across America.

“Melissa Thorne is an extraordinarily promising artist whose considerations of audience, place and history, combined with her scrupulous and inventive exploitation of the painting medium, yield works rich with visual interest and suggestive meaning,” said Cohen, who noted Thorne’s inclusion in an important 2019 group show at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, “Aftereffects,” based upon contemporary artists’ responses to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Melissa Thorne, in a light blue shirt
Melissa Thorne (Photo by Heather Phelps-Lipton)

“I was surprised and thrilled to receive the news; and very excited for the opportunity to complete the work that the fellowship will support,” Thorne said. The Guggenheim grant will support her current project: a large-scale site-specific painting installation, which uses pattern and color sampled from the landscape and vernacular architecture of the Catskill Mountains.

In addition to Denver, Thorne’s work has been shown at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery in Houston, the Galerie Rolf Ricke and Galerie Schmidt Maczollek — both in Cologne, Germany — and the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles, among many others. She has received artist residencies at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico, Glassell Core Program in Houston, Tex., and the Bemis Center in Nebraska.

Prior to joining the UAlbany faculty, she lived and worked for 15 years in Los Angeles and taught at CalArts, the University of Southern California, Otis College of Art and Design, Scripps College and the University of California, Riverside.

In analyzing the elements of Thorne’s success at a still relatively early stage of her career, Cohen said, “although Thorne’s adoption of pattern as an artistic strategy might make her work seem abstract at first sight, when one learns how she develops her designs through study of material context and natural form, the work gains many layers of added resonance.”