A00217 - Margaret Rose Vendryes, Amherst College Class of 1984, Tulane University M.A., Princeton University Ph.D., Amherst College Arts Professor

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Contact

Amherst Name

• Margaret Rose Cohen

Family

Amherst Relatives

• Leslie G. Cohen (Les) '76

Personal

About Me

• You can remove a girl from the island, but the island remains within. I was born in Kingston, Jamaica to ambitious parents for whom life in the United States of America was worth everything. My mother was fast on a manual typewriter; my father fell into the lower ranks of food manufacturing. They bought a house, and made a home, in Queens, NYC. Shortly before grade school, I entered the U.S.A. with a green card that was my lifeline to Jamaica until they took the green card away when I became an American citizen. By 1965, our family had grown to nine members. I am the third child of seven, one of six daughters; the product of a Roman Catholic education peppered with short episodes of NYC public school when tuition couldn�t be made. All of my siblings are awesomely talented. While attending Amherst College, I completed a few studio courses where I began working with color, which I continue to find so seductive and pregnant with artifice. I had a family by then and turned to art history to remain connected to art makers while making a living. Artists don�t often make a decent living making art at least not the brown-skinned female kind. Details of my professional persona are recorded here on my CV. I hold a doctorate in art history and have taught facets of it for over a decade. I know that my relationship with making �art� appears to fall quite neatly into those written about since at least Vasari. I began drawing as a child copying mostly figures and faces from magazines. My sisters can attest to how fabulous my homemade paper dolls were. I was neither encouraged nor discouraged to take my art seriously. At the beginning of my college career, I was a theater major� costume design. That learning period, although short-lived, resonates in my current work. Over the years, I never stopped painting and accumulating �stuff� to use in statements about the human condition from where I stand. Popular culture and private memories combine, at times unconsciously, to inform my work. The growth of my ongoing practice was literally weighed with every location change I have made in my adult life� twenty-five of them to date. It may sound wrong, but I am not a nomad. In 2007, I began to make use of not only the stuff, but also the energy that drove me to acquire and keep it.

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Professional

Employment Information

Former

• Curator and Director

  York College Art Gallery

  Start:

  05/2021

  End:

  03/2022
• Chair, Department of Performing & Fine Arts

  CUNY: York College

  Start:

  05/2021

  End:

  03/2022
• Professor

  CUNY: York College

  Start:

  11/2013

  End:

  03/2022
• Artist/Historian/Curator

  Self Employed

  Start:

  02/2009

  End:

  04/2022
• Associate Professor

  CUNY: College of Staten Island

  Start:

  09/2002

  End:

  11/2007
• Assistant Professor

  Princeton University

  Start:

  01/2000

  End:

  09/2002
• Ind. Scholar

  Self Employed

  Start:

  01/2000

  End:

  02/2009
• Visit Asst Prof

  Amherst College

  Start:

  07/1999

  End:

  06/2000
• Asst Archivist

  Tulane University

  Start:

  01/1991

  End:

  01/1992

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Amherst

Reunion Class

• 1984

Graduation Year

• 1984

Major(s)

• Fine Arts

Other Academic

Secondary Schools

• Andrew Jackson High School

Higher Ed

• Princeton University

  Field of Study:

  Art History

  Degree:

  Doctor of Philosophy

  Year:

  1999
• Tulane University

  Field of Study:

  Art History

  Degree:

  Master of Arts

  Year:

  1899

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Amherst

Fraternity

• Independent (no fraternity affil)

Post-Graduate

Publications/ Creative Works

• Margaret has a show coming up at Calabar Gallery in Harlem that opens on May 29th, 2021 The show will be on view there for one month. Her painting "Guro Ntozake" has been traveling with the exhibition "i found god in myself", a 40th-anniversary celebration of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls., and can be viewed at the City Without Walls Gallery in Newark, N.J., Oct. 12 through Nov. 12. 11/3/2017
• "33 1/3 Pushing the Needle: Selections from the African Diva Project"
• Featured in an article in Artwork Archive
• Author - 'The Art of Ellis Wilson' 2008 Co-Author - 'Barthe: A Life in Sculpture'

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