Melissa Vogley Woods is announced as the studio art department Fall 2023 Columbus Creative in Residence. This role, now in its fourth year connects a Columbus-based creative with our junior and senior majors for the fall semester. The Thursday evening meetings offer studio art majors opportunities for professional practice training, networking with Columbus creatives and thinking about how to be in the world as a creative.
“Melissa is an amazing example of an artist who is engaged in so many different aspects of community and practice,” says professor Sheilah ReStack, chair of the studio art department. “We are so lucky to have Melissa’s energy, enthusiasm, skill and understanding of the Columbus creative scene as part of what our students will learn from this coming fall semester. This program continues to grow and evolve, and serves an important role as a place to understand the creative potential in the world for the students careers and selves.”
Vogley Woods is an artist-curator born and residing in Columbus, Ohio. Her work spans sculpture, craft, printmaking, painting, performative video, and social practice. Vogley Woods has been nominated for the National USA Fellowship and has received two Ohio Art Council Individual Artist Grants and a Greater Columbus Artist Grant. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally in such institutions as the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus Museum of Art, Raskolnikov Galerie e.V., Dresden, Germany, Museum of Sisters Aslamazyan in the Armenian Republic, CICA Museum Gimpo-si, Korea, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and right here at the Denison Museum. Vogley Woods has also worked as adjunct and visiting faculty at Denison over the past five plus years, and is beloved by students, faculty and staff.
Vogley Woods actively participates in Columbus as a community arts worker with recent community projects, including “Lobby,” a series of three-person exhibitions taking place inside Planned Parenthood Surgical Center, “Tracers” a series of feminist events and exhibitions that included public panels, public workshops, rock concerts and “Room to Let” exhibition series held in donated houses that exhibited by 73 artists over three years of programming. Vogley Woods works in a low-relief sculpture created using an ancient pigmented plaster process called Scagliola. Her current body of work explores ancient remedies as a heritage that traces forward through a lens of women and queer still-life painting.
Vogley Woods states, “Art is about more than self-expression- it is a discourse, a community, and a way of life. As the Columbus Creative in Residence this Fall, I am excited to participate in the student’s cultivation of a dynamic, fruitful, and connected artistic practice that will shape their creative lives and the world around them. As we hang out hope on the next generation, it is our job to pave the way for them, helping open doors and minds. To me, that is what this residency is all about.”
