Axe ’Em, Jacks!
Neal Cox
Neal Cox earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking at Brigham Young University and his Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Cox is particularly interested in the investigation of work that exists as both two-dimensional and three-dimensional. He works in multiple media, including:
- drawing
- photography
- digital and time-based media
- painting
- book arts
- and printmaking.
Amanda Breitbach
Amanda Breitbach earned her bachelor's degrees in photography and French from Montana State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
A photographer whose research focuses on relationships between people and land and the intersection of art and science, Breitbach is proud of her project focused on conflicts between wildlife and oil development on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Breitbach grew up on a family farm and ranch in eastern Montana. She served as an agroforestry volunteer with the United States Peace Corps in West Africa for two years and has worked as a newspaper photographer/reporter and a freelance writer and photographer.
Her work has been exhibited at:
- Duluth Art Institute
- Lied Art Gallery at Creighton University
- Rozsa Gallery at Michigan Technical University
- Great Plains Art Museum and Eisentrager-Howard Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska
- New England School of Photography in Boston, Massachusetts
- BLUEorange Contemporary Art Gallery in Houston
- Cole Art Center in Nacogdoches
- Art Center of Waco in Waco
- Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado
- Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, Kansas
- The Arts at CIIS in San Francisco, California
- Rourke Gallery in Moorhead, Minnesota
- McCarthy Gallery at Valley City State University in Valley City, North Dakota
- Waterworks Gallery in Miles City, Montana
- and Emerson Cultural Center in Bozeman, Montana.
Lindsey Creel
Lindsey Creel received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in fashion from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her Master of Fine Arts from SFA.
Creel considers art and design two branches of the same tree and does not discriminate when it comes to art media. An example of this is her body of work involving visually expressing the therapeutic properties found in gardening through nonobjective drawings and outdoor installations.
In addition to her work in the fine arts, Creel spent a decade patternmaking and drafting in the apparel industry. In 2015, Creel was a featured designer on Season 14 of Lifetime TV's "Project Runway," and in 2016 she was a guest speaker at TEDX Youth in Austin.
Eden Collins
Eden Collins received her undergraduate degree in studio art from Hope College in Holland, Michigan and her Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Prior to joining SFA's School of Art in 2019, she taught 3D design and introduction to visual art as an adjunct faculty member at UTSA.
Her multidisciplinary work ranges from miniature to installation-scale and explores the construction of identity as it pertains to society and the self.
Dr. Maggie Leysath
With more than two decades in the teaching field, Dr. Maggie Leysath has taught in secondary public and private schools as well as the university level.
Leadership from the classroom is the focus of her career and a central interest is how the arts impact education and can be incorporated more completely to better expand education for all learners.
Leysath believes the arts offer the proving ground for such ideas as arts integration, educational constructivism and community based educational practices. She employs these practices in the classroom and her research to provide space for innovation and creativity in the educational opportunities available to students of all ages.
Dr. David Lewis
Dr. David Alan Lewis earned his PhD at Indiana University. At SFA, he teaches courses in European and American art history and art theory, with a particular focus on 19th- and 20th-century painting, printmaking and photography.
Dr. Lewis served as art department chair and was the first director of SFA's SFA School of Art, overseeing the planning and much of the renovation of the Cole Art Center. He is the recipient of several competitive grants, including awards from the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation, the Kirkland Endowment and the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation.
He was instrumental in establishing an international exchange program between SFA's School of Art and LABA Firenze, a fine arts academy in Firenze, Italy. Dr. Lewis has organized sessions for SFA's series of IMAGE & TEXT symposia, served as editor of the LaNana Creek Press and curated numerous exhibitions and presented lectures at museums and conferences in the United States, United Kingdom and Italy.
Among his publications are the monographs "Erle Loran: A Modern Artist of the American West" and "John Heliker: Drawing on the New Deal."
Dr. Lewis has published articles on British Vorticists Wyndham Lewis and Dorothy Shakespear Pound and American modernists Leonard Baskin, Rico Lebrun, Michael [Corinne] West, among others.
His writings on contemporary artists Frank Dituri, Piero Fenci, Mauro Manetti and Vladimir Martinov have been translated variously into Italian, Russian or Spanish. Dr. Lewis contributed articles to the catalog of "Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism", located in the Georgia Museum of Art at The University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.
Peter Andrew
Peter Andrew attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. He earned his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts.
Dedicated to helping motivated studetns set and reach their individual professional design goals, Andrew assists in directing SFA's School of Art graphic design program and serves as faculty co-advisor to SFA's American Institute of Graphic Arts and American Advertising Federation student chapters.
A prolific artist with an active exhibition and workshop schedule, his past works include art and creative direction in advertising and publishing, illustration and design software training for the print industry. Illustration and mural clients include: Methodist Hospitals in Houston and Fort Worth, United States Army hospitals in Fort Belvoir, Virgina, Fort Irwin, California and Fort Bliss and the Naranjo Museum of Natural History in Lufkin.
Andrew is an artist member of the New York Society of Illustrators, where he's hosted a solo exhibit in the Members Gallery and shows in the illustration annuals.
He is a color scholar and studied with Wolf Kahn and Sy Sillman, Josef Alber's assistant at Yale, among other notable colorists. He is a Fulbright Fellow and artist resident at:
- Ossabaw Art Foundation in Georgia
- Rock Gardens Art Schoo in Maine
- MacDowell Art Colony in New Hampshire
- Millay Art Colony in New York
- and Barnstone Studio School in Pennsylvania.
He serves as an outreach artist and consultant for the artists' materials industry including brands Liquitex, Winsor & Newton, Lefranc Bourgeois, Reeves, Conté and d”Arches.
Shaun Roberts
Shaun Roberts received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing at SFA and his Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing at the University of Washington. Upon graduating from the University of Washington, Roberts was awarded the Joan Mitchel Foundation Grant for graduating MFA students, of which only 50 are awarded nationally.
Using allegorical and mythological motifs incorporated with drama and pathos, Roberts explores timeless narratives in his paintings. He is not interested in the whims of the time but looks to cultures and canonized beauties of the past. Like a Renaissance painter or Hellenistic sculptor, he works in a mythological landscape and develops archetypal images. Roberts explores sentimentality and sensuality in his paintings, intending to create a cathartic moment between the viewer and subject, whether it be love, death or an eternal sunset.
Roberts has been in several group and solo exhibitions spanning over 20 states, including:
- First Street Gallery in New York City
- Southern Mississippi Museum of Art in Hattiesburg, Mississippi
- Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky
- Art Museum of South-East Texas in Beaumont
- and Kirk Hopper Fine Art in Dallas
Lauren Selden
Lauren Selden earned her Master of Fine Arts at Arizona State University, studying metalworking, jewelry and sculpture.
Accomplishments include solo, invitational and juried exhibitions in national and international venues. Her artwork has been published in "Metalsmith Magazine", as well as "500 Metal Vessels" and "500 Wedding Rings", both published by Lark Books. Selden's outdoor sculptures have been on public display in various cities across the country, and two of her sculptures were acquired by the San Marcos Arts Commission permanent sculpture collection.
She has given workshops and lectures at conferences, universities, junior colleges and art centers across the United States as well as in Brazil, Germany, France, Iceland and Mexico. In 2018, she spent time at the Baer Art Center Residency in Hofsós, Iceland and had the honor to be a featured artist in the 2do Festival de Arte Nueve in Chihuahua, Mexico. In June 2022, Selden completed a grant-funded project at Fiskars AiR residency in Fiskars, Finland.
She loves to teach how to work with fire and tools and wants to help students feel confident to develop their own studio for their life-long journey of making art.
Candace Hicks
Candace Hicks earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Austin college, studying drawing, painting and French. She earned her Master of Fine Art degree in printmaking at Texas Christian University.
Hicks collects coincidences from the books she reads, gathers them in her artists' books and uses them in her installations.
With the exhibition "Read Me" at Lawndale Art Center, she opened the book form into a room-sized interactive installation in which viewers pieced together a puzzle of narrative to find the correct solution.
- "The Locked Room" at Living Arts in Tulsa, Oklahoma focused on a specific genre of literature, the “locked room” mystery, and visitors were tasked with the challenge to find the means of metaphorically escaping the gallery.
- "Egress" at Pump Project in Austin explored literary connections and coincidences through sculpture and text.
- For "Many Mini Murder Scenes" at Women and Their Work in Austin, Hicks reproduced tableaux plucked from crime fiction and offered viewers the experience of playing a detective searching for clues.
Her work consists of artists' books, video, performance, printmaking and drawing. Books from her "Common Threads" series are in more than 80 collections around the world, including:
- Boston Athenaeum
- Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
- Grolier Club
- Harvard
- Hungarian Multicultural Center
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Museum of Modern Art
- Museum of Applied Arts
- Vienna
- University of California, Los Angeles Biomedical Library
- Stanford
- and Yale.
Contact the School of Art
Call: 936.468.4804
Visit: Art Building, Room 101
art@sfasu.edu
Faculty Directory
Mailing Address:
P.O. Box 13001, SFA Station
Nacogdoches, Texas 75962