The Fine Arts Program is pleased to announce that Tomoe Tsutsumi (’10) has been accepted to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture for its 2010 Summer Program. She was selected to join the 2010 Summer Residency from a pool of over 2000 applicants. Tomoe follows Kyuong Eun Kang (’09) who attended last year’s program.

Skowhegan is an intensive program for emerging visual artists established in 1946. A gifted and diverse group of artists who have demonstrated a commitment to art making and inquiry come together each summer to create the most stimulating and rigorous environment possible for a concentrated period of artistic creation, interaction and growth.

Tomoe was born in Tokyo in 1982. She received her B.F.A. in Fine Art from Colorado State University, where she studied painting. At Parsons, she diversified her practice and began to make video, performance, and soft sculpture. For her MFA Thesis she is creating a performance featuring her classmates, who wear a series of embroidered t-shirts that she designed to represent her personal connections with her community. Tomoe works with “irregular” t-shirts, treating their technical imperfections as signs of individuality. In the videotaped performance, students wear the t-shirts and stand together in a circle, literally sewing themselves to one another. Tomoe’s work culminates with acts of reciprocal gift giving, in which her classmates exchange the t-shirts for personal objects of theirs that represent their relationship with her.

Tomoe says, “I still can’t believe that I got in to Skowhegan!” She is very excited at prospect of attending this prestigious program. She hopes to create another collaborative performance with the students and faculty she will be meeting in Maine this summer. On behalf of the Fine Arts Program, and the School of Art, Media and Technology, we congratulate Tomoe on this outstanding achievement!