RVCC Art Exhibition to Highlight 40 Years of Work, Friendship for Two Faculty Members

Raritan Valley Community College’s Arts & Design department will present Journey Through Friendship and Art, an exhibition showcasing the work of Arts & Design faculty members Kathleen Schulz and the late Ann Tsubota, September 3-October 1, in the Art Gallery at the College’s Branchburg campus.

The show is being curated by RVCC Adjunct Professors Kathleen Schulz, Bill Macholdt, and Dot Paolo, and coordinated by Arts & Design Co-Chair, Associate Professor and RVCC Art Gallery Director, Darren McManus. The reception and artist’s talk will be held Friday, September 12, from 5-7 p.m. The event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

This retrospective will feature work that spans over 40 years, correlating with the time when the two RVCC professors became lifelong friends and colleagues. The show includes a selection of Kathleen Schulz’s drawing, printmaking, papermaking, photography, painting, watercolor, encaustics, and collage, and a curated body of Ann Tsubota’s masterful ceramic works.

Kathleen Schulz, an Adjunct Professor Emerita, officially retired from Raritan Valley Community College in June 2024. However, she continues to share her expertise with students at RVCC, where she has taught since 1984.

Schulz’s pieces in the show center on her love of landscape and the figure, rendered both realistically and abstractly. As a child, she spent many days wandering the fields and pastures of her grandparents’ farm, enjoying the solitude of this environment. Drawing and painting became a way to process her observations and experiences. Later, as a married woman and a parent, she continued her quest to learn and explore additional media and techniques such as printmaking and collage. The latter became an important artistic medium because the incoherence of this technique reflected the many roles she was now playing. Currently, Schulz is working in alternative photography, exploring the possible and unexpected results that this process produces. Despite the multiplicity of media and techniques, the importance of drawing is reflected in all of her works, regardless of the media.

Schulz received a BFA from SUNY at Buffalo and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts. She has taken 16 different workshops since 1987, including three in drawing and painting at the Vermont Studio Center, six at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking and Paper, and two at Dieu Donne (hand papermaking studio) in Brooklyn, NY. She has received a Vermont Studio Center Scholarship, a Dodge Foundation Grant, and was part of the Berlin/New Jersey Juried Arts and Cultural Exchange awarded by the Printmaking Council of New Jersey. Her work is in numerous collections in the United States and abroad, including Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, and Australia.

Ann Tsubota, who passed away in October 2024, was an artist/potter and a Professor in RVCC’s Arts & Design department from 1976 until her retirement in 2020. During that time, she served two stints as Chairperson of Arts & Design, from 1985-2002 and from 2008-2014.

Tsubota’s work in Journey Through Friendship and Art includes an eclectic collection of ceramics spanning her career from the mid-1970s through 2020. The work includes functional pieces, delicate sculptural works, and Raku-fired objects, all of which reflect Tsubota’s phenomenal artistic sensibility. The works are by turns whimsical, sometimes containing literary and/or poetic texts and references, sometimes inspired by her love of both contemporary art and historical Pop Art.

Tsubota received her MFA degree from Rutgers University Graduate School (Mason Gross School of the Arts) in 1974. She received a 1983-84 Craft Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts and exhibited her work as an invitee to the New Jersey Arts Annual Crafts exhibition at The State Museum in Trenton from September 1992 through January 1993. Tsubota also received numerous other awards during her career, including an Excellence in Teaching and Leadership Award from the National Institute of Staff and Organizational Development in 2003.

Gallery hours for the exhibition are Mondays, 3-8 p.m.; Tuesdays, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.; Wednesdays, 3-8 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Fridays, 1-4 p.m. For further information, contact the Arts & Design department, 908-218-8876.

RVCC is located at 118 Lamington Road in Branchburg, NJ. For additional information, visit https://www.raritanval.edu/arts or www.raritanval.edu and follow the RVCC Art Gallery Instagram feed at https://www.instagram.com/rvcc_art_gallery/

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