Art Advisory Committee
Stone Quarry Hill Art Park’s Art Advisory Committee is a group of independent artists and scholars whose wide-ranging expertise informs our artistic programming and advances our commitment to equitable and inclusive organizational practices.
(from left to right)
Fırat Erdim is an artist and educator. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Spartanburg Art Museum (SC), Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen, Denmark), Adds Donna and Roy Boyd Gallery (Chicago), Elmhurst Art Museum (IL), Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (MI), the Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia, the American Academy in Rome, The Windor (Madrid, Spain), 49A and Maquis Projects (İzmir, Turkey), in addition to the Olson-Larsen Galleries, Constance Gallery at Graceland University, and Yellow Door Gallery in Iowa.
Fırat has contributed to architectural projects at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, D’AquinoMonaco, and Diane Lewis Architects, in New York. From 2012 to 2013, he was the co-founder and co-director of Flash Atölye, an experimental project space for art and architecture, situated inside a “pasaj” in İzmir. His work has been supported by residencies and fellowships at Headlands Center for the Arts (CA, USA), Heima (Seyðisfjörður, Iceland), I-Park (CT, USA), Babayan Culture House (Cappadocia, Turkey), Vermont Studio Center, the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest (KY, USA); as well as by the Daniel J. Huberty Faculty Fellowship, Foreign Travel Grants and Research Grants from the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities at Iowa State University. Awards include the 2016 Santo Foundation Award for Individual Artists, and the 2014 Founders Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome.
Fırat holds a Bachelor of Architecture Degree from the Cooper Union (2001), and a Master of Architecture Degree from the University of Virginia (2007). As an educator, he has taught courses in architecture and drawing at the University of Virginia, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Marwen Foundation, in the USA; İzmir University of Economics, in Turkey; and the IE School of Architecture and Design, in Spain. He is currently an Associate Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University.
Stephanie J. Williams is a tinkerer and doodler. Her work primarily navigates hierarchies of taste, unpacking how “official” histories are constructed in order to understand contemporary social coding and the world around us. She received her MFA in Sculpture from RISD, has shown in Fictions, part of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s F-show exhibitions, as well as with Washington Project for the Arts, Grizzly Grizzly, |’sindikit |, Tephra ICA and the Walters Museum as a Sondheim Finalist, with residencies at Sculpture Space, Williams College as an Arthur Levitt Artist-in-Residence, Yaddo, VCCA, ACRE, Elsewhere, Wassaic, School 33 and Vermont Studio Center. Recent projects include a Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellowship, Seamless: Craft-based Objects and Performance at Rutgers (Camden) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum Women Filmmakers Festival. She currently teaches stop motion for Maryland Institute College of Art.
Lily Siegel is the Executive Director of Hamiltonian Artists, a profession development fellowship program for visual artists and gallery located in Washington D.C. Before joining Hamiltonian, she was Executive Director and Curator at Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (formerly Greater Reston Arts Center), Reston, Virginia, and has held curatorial positions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Siegel earned her MA in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego.