Kutztown University 86th Annual Art Education Conference

In this hands-on workshop, participants will explore the intuitive and emotional power of materials through open-ended prompts rooted in play. Liz Hamilton Quay, artist and professor of Textiles & Material Studies, will share how she transforms everyday materials into layered, evocative works of soft sculpture. Drawing from her own studio practice, which is deeply influenced by motherhood and emotional tension, Quay invites educators to experiment with material transformation through stitching, layering, destruction, and juxtaposition to unlock personal and conceptual meaning. The session offers time and space for educators to create freely, embrace risk, and follow process-based inquiry. Participants will leave with tactile and conceptual strategies they can adapt to their studio practice and the classroom.

Liz Hamilton Quay is the Assistant Professor of Textile and Materials Studies at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. She followed her passion for the manipulation of fabric to earn her MFA at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in Fibers and Materials Studies. Her journey began at Kutztown University, where she proudly received her bachelor's degree in Art Education and a BFA in Craft, concentrating in Fibers. Her creative approach is based on her natural curiosity for materials and a joy for making. Through a variety of techniques ranging from traditional fibers to digital formats such as video, she creates work that explores innate visceral feelings. Her work has been featured in venues such as, the WestBeth Gallery NYC, the Ceres Gallery|NYC, The Culture Lab LIC NYC, Fibre Arts Australia, Surface Design Association publications, Fiber Art Now publications, and the Peter's Valley School of Art.

Sharadin Studio 121

Discover how to upcycle used juice and broth cartons into unique drypoint printing plates in this fun, eco-friendly workshop. Tetra Pak's laminated surface makes an ideal base for drypoint techniques-no harsh chemicals needed. You'll scratch, score, and peel to create expressive image plates, then print using hand pressure and/or pasta machine as a press. We'll use Akua soy-based inks (easy to clean with soap and water) and explore simple ways to add color, including Chine-colle for layered, textured effects. This workshop is ideal for K-12 art educators looking to introduce sustainable, low-cost printmaking techniques into the classroom while engaging students in hands-on creative exploration.

Vicki Meloney is an award-winning graphic designer and Professor at Kutztown University. She received her MFA from Temple University and has worked in the Philadelphia area more than a decade before becoming an inspiring educator. Prior to teaching, Vicki worked with clients as small as local non-profit organizations and as large as international global brands. Her specialties include image-making, concepting, and all forms of print media with a special emphasis on Design for the Greater Good. Vicki's passion for community-based design led her to co-founding Replace-the Hate and KUCD Designation. Vicki also owns and operates a freelance design business and enjoys traveling the world to experience different sights, sounds and flavors.

Elaine Cunfer is a professor in the Communication Design Department at the College of Visual and Performing Arts, where she draws on her extensive experience as a professional graphic designer, illustrator, and information graphics specialist. With a robust background in graphic design and illustration, she teaches a diverse array of courses in these fields. Her work has been showcased in esteemed national design publications, including Print Magazine and the Society of Newspaper Design Annuals. Outside her teaching, Elaine is also an accomplished artist, with interests in jewelry design and printmaking. She holds an MFA in Visual Design from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and a degree in Communication Design from Kutztown University.

Sharadin Studio 103

Art therapists, Emily Goldstein Nolan and Julia Mumpton, define an Art Hive as a place where everyone is an artist who can share talents with and learn from others. It is a place where everyone is welcomed and included and celebrates the strenghts of the individual and community. Art Hives encourage social change. Through mindfulness practices, journaling, and discussion, we will reflect on questions related to Placemaking and community-building such as, Is there a place that makes you feel grounded or safe? What textures, smells, sounds, or sights remind you of belonging? How do you know when you don't feel like you belong? What changes when you do? Responses will become the basis of images for collages using photo transfer techniques. Participants will receive resources including instructions, reading lists, and ideas for how to adapt the projects for K-12 classrooms for community settings with diverse students.

Kristin Baxter began teaching part-time at KU in the Art Education Program, in the spring 2025. In her full-time role, she is the Communit-Building Center Director for Ripple Community, Inc. (RCI), the only drop-in community center in Allentown open to everyone. At RCI, Kristin is responsible for collaborating with 50+ community organizations, universities, and hospitals to provide services and creative activities to 75-90 adults daily. RCI primarily serves people experiencing homelessness or housing instability, people living with significant histories of trauma and mental illness, and the working poor. Prior to her work at RCI, Kristin was an Associate Professor of Art and the Director of the Art Education Program at Moravian University. She earned an Ed.D. in Art Education from Teachers College Columbia University; MA in Art History and Museum Education from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, through a joint program with the Cleveland Museum of Art; BA in Liberal Arts from New York University.

Sharadin Studio 205

"We live within the world of stories, and use stories to shape those worlds" (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998).

In this hands-on workshop, participants will create mini book structures using a range of materials to share their personal and professional narratives illuminating their lived experience at the intersection of teaching and creative practice. Building on one's personal narrative, formats for amplifying student stories into curriculum will be explored. Participants will experience the process of making and creating mini book structures within a folded accordion book, weaving connections between their artistic process and curricular creation as their layered book structure unfolds through folding, stitching, and binding.

Dr. Amy Pfeiler-Wunder serves as the new associate dean for the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Kutztown University. She served as a professor of art education, teaching for 15 years in the Department of Art Education, Kutztown University. Her love and joy for teaching included courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs in art education and doctoral courses in transformational teaching and learning in the Department of Secondary Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Teaching and Learning: Art from the University of Iowa and has over 25 years of experience in PreK-Higher Education art education settings. As an educator/researcher/artist her projects are often collaborative, navigating the intersection of narrative inquiry, action research, and cross-pollination of disciplines with keen attention to the impact of professional identity and positionality on the views of learners and curriculum creation. She presents her research at regional, national, and international conferences and publishes in books and peer-reviewed journals. She is active in the National Art Education Association (NAEA), honored to serve as President-Elect, NAEA Board of Directors.

Sharadin Studio 113

Create and play with natural materials and historically rich techniques with a contemporary twist! This workshop will offer participants a hands-on opportunity to create a wet felted fabric collage that leans into the beauty of the natural world. Through the process of felting-pressure, hot water, soap, and agitation-you will discover a new take on layering and image making. In my own felted work, I reference my garden, a poetic work of art, that helps me redifine and recreate myself almost daily. It inspires me to create visual imagery using natural fibers and colors through wet felting, which captures the essence of my garden. This workshop will feature a place to focus onprocess-based design activities including wet felt making, collage, and hand embroidery. Additional stations will be provided to experiment with scraps of felted fabric, tapestry fabrics, yarns, beads, and more. Come ready with thoughts and feelings of your connectedness to our natural world.

Kris Tuerk Philly born and raised, came to Kutztown in 1979 to study art at Kutztown State College. Textiles is a long running tradition in her family which began with embroidery samplers by her grandmother and great aunt, then expanded to knitting, quilting, and crocheting by her mother. These matriarchal familial experiences resonate in her work today. Sculpting and painting with live plants in her garden has fed her artistic journey both as a process-based artist and craftsperson for over 40 years. Her restorative niche was finding and making time to create during a long 30-year journey within the hectic and rewarding world of teaching. This love for gardening naturally combined with her love for textiles to create hand-dyed fabrics, yarns and wool, all generated with the plants from her garden. In addition to her studio practice, Kris taught Alternative Education for 10 years and Middle School Art for 20 years in the Kutztown Area School District--all while raising two sons as a single mother. Now deservedly retired, her new drive is to live aesthetically by sensation and emotion and to participate rather than interfere with nature. KU Alum-BS Art Ed-84, BFA Textiles-94, MEd Art Ed-2019; PAEA Outstanding Middle Level Art Educator 2012; PAEA Outstanding Visual Arts Community - 2024(6th consecutive year); Proprietor - Kristen Tuerk Creative Arts Institute and Custom Picture Frame Shop - 1984 - Present.

Sharadin Studio 114

Engage in a reflective, process-centered approach to artmaking grounded in mindfulness, intuitive mark-making, and somatic awareness. Through meditative and presence-based approaches that emphasize creative journey, participating educators are invited to slow downand tune in to build confidence and clarity for themselves and their students. Guided drawing, symbolic journaling, and reflective dialogue are among the adaptable strategies utilized to achieve presence, calm, and insight throughout the duration of the workshop. Participants create layered meditative artworks and receive digital workbook prompts available for both personal and classroom adaptation at the conclusion of the session. All levels of experience are welcome and encouraged to join. 

Rhonda Tomel is a metaphysical artist-educator with nearly two decades of teaching experience across various educational settings. She guides individuals of all ability levels toward greater mindfulness and creative confidence through process-based artmaking. Her approach emphasizes self-affirmation, helping participants develop sustainable creative habits that support personal and professional growth. Her methods focus on forward movement and inner awareness, offering accessible approaches that cultivate empowered, independent creators across a variety of media that range from traditional two-dimensional modalities, three-dimensional design, craft media, digital media, and beyond. With a deep interest in how identity shapes creative experience, Rhonda applies an intersectional lens that affirms commonality across race, gender, class, ability, and belief. Her workshops co-create safe, engaging, and transformative spaces for reflection, self-expression, and renewal.

Sharadin Studio 106

This is a workshop to jolt your system, break free from literal image-making, and have fun! Painting can be more than a polite image, and in this workshop, participants are invited to an expressive oil-painting session inspired by Surrealism's automatic practices, mixed-media layering, bold approaches to color, and surprising textures. To begin, intuitive exercises will unlock subconscious impulses and retrain our ways of seeing. Then participants will be guided through abstraction and back towards new-found realism, bridging a process that contains thoughtful, observant rendering while also retaining energy and spontaneity, feeling confident and evocative, containing emotional resonance, and embracing radiant color. Artists to be discussed are: Amy Sillman, Bram van Velde, Christina Quarles, Farley Aguilar, Francesco Clemente, Henri Matisse, Iva Gueorguieva, Jade Fadojutimi, Joan Snyder, Julie Speed, Louis Fratino, Miriam Cahn, Rachel Jones, Richard Diebenkorn, Sandro Chia, Edouard Vuillard.

Michael Covello is an internationally exhibiting interdisciplinary contemporary artist. Covello studied at Cornell University and the University of South Florida. Covello has been twice nominated by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for awards and exhibitions and is the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Hillsborough County, a merit grant from the Vermont Studio Center, a Work and Families Fellowship from Wassaic Projects, and a Mid-Atlantic Creative Fellowship at Millay Arts. In 2022-2023, Covello was a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an artist-in-residence at Yaddo. Recent exhibitions include Drawing Discourse: Exhibition of Contemporary Drawing at UNC Asheville and Covello has exhibited at other venues such as the Florida Biennial at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art. His award-winning animations have been screened internationally.

Sharadin Studio 206

The human form holds deep expressive power, capable of conveying emotion, presence, and story. In this figure drawing workshop, we'll explore that power through reductive drawing techniques - removing material to reveal light and form. Using toned and experimental surfaces, participants will work with mixed media and tools like erasers and cloth to "carve" the figure from shadow.

With two in-person nude models, we'll explore both gestural and sustained poses, focusing on light, proportion, and the flow state of observational drawing. This workshop is a chance to reconnect with the figure, refresh your technical skills, and experiment with process and materials in a supportive, creative space.

Jayne Struble received her MFA from Columbus College of Art & Design in 2014 and BFA from Kutztown University in 2011. Struble is a drawing focused artist whose work incorporates sculpture and video into a site-specific work that investigates the way visual artifacts, such as video or images, are tangible yet vulnerable signifiers for our memories. Her work has been exhibited across the United States from the Cultural Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio to the Charles A. Hartman Gallery in Portland, Oregon and 4Most Gallery in Gainseville, Florida. Struble has attended multiple artist residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, Signal Fire Arts, and The Jentel Foundation. In Philadelphia, Struble is a member of Grizzly Grizzly, an artist-run exhibition space devoted to providing artists with a space which exists outside of commodification to take risks with their work. Currently, Struble resides outside Philadelphia and is an Assistant Professor at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania.

Sharadin Studio 124

Bringing form to life in the process of making art uses a mode of thinking that integrates our felt experience and aesthetic vocabulary with the movement of our analytical mind.  In this workshop we will use clay, writing and drawing to explore various ways of developing ideas and transforming not just the materials themselves, but also the way we perceive and understand the world.  Centering our studio practice around our recurring themes and inspirations, we will use strategies of inquiry into the unknown to open the door to unexpected results and original creative output.  Building a repertoire of techniques is only the starting point in one’s life as an artist; building behaviors of self-reflection and attentive dialogue with the clay and with each other helps us consciously use the metaphors of our studio process as we think through making.

Gwendolyn Yoppolo A passionate educator, writer, and researcher as well as a studio artist, Gwendolyn Yoppolo is currently serving as Associate Professor of Ceramics at Kutztown University.  She has earned an MFA in Ceramics from Penn State University, an MA in Education from Columbia University, and a BA in Sociology from Haverford College.  She creates vessels that engage with us physically, allude to intangible aspects of existence, and challenge us to rethink the ways we nourish ourselves and others.  Her writing can be found in Studio Potter, Pottery Making Illustrated, and Passion and Pedagogy.  She exhibits artwork and performs lectures and workshops across the nation, most recently at Peters Valley School of Craft and Alfred University's Summer School.  Her work is in many collections such as the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, the Archie Bray Foundation, and the Rosenfield Collection.

Sharadin Studio 108

Student teachers present their strongest, field-tested lessons - sharing what worked, what inspired their students, and how these ideas can be adapted for different art rooms. Whether you're preparing for student teaching or simply looking for fresh strategies, you'll leave with practical, creative lessons you can use right away.

Sharadin Lecture Hall 120