Gallery 120

Inver Hills Art Department Faculty

Wendy Olson received her BFA in drawing and painting from UW-River Falls, and her MFA in ceramics from Kent State University. She lives in rural Western Wisconsin with her husband and two sons. She has taught at Inver Hills Community College for twenty years in ceramics and drawing. Wendy exhibits her work actively and is represented by four galleries both regionally and nationally.
 
 The content of Wendy Olson’s work is a visual journal of her life. This new body of work is influenced by the idea of layers in her life. This transfers to Olson’s work in layers of shape, images, narrative, and of meaning. With these layers come ideas of duality: Past and present, forces of good and evil, and duality as it exists in people and in life. The effort to transcend what she has experienced is always present; the effort to connect the commonplace with the universal and the universal back with the commonplace.  Wendy combines drawing and painting bright colored figurative images on functional pottery and sculpture as a form of storytelling, using characters, scenes, and events from her daily life, often in a humorous way.

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Rob James Kolomyski is an artist and educator based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Most recently his work has been selected for inclusion in the 2021 Drawing Discourse juried exhibition at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. His work has also been showcased at the Rosalux gallery in Minneapolis, MN, the Manifest gallery in Cincinnati, OH, the First Street Gallery in Chelsea, New York, The Painting Center in Chelsea, New York, The Brownsville Museum of Fine Arts in Brownsville, Texas, and the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei, Taiwan.  

As an educator, Rob holds a K-12 teaching certification and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from Michigan State University. He has taught all levels of college, including graduates, for institutions ranging from the community college to Tier-1 research institutions. Currently, he is a tenured professor at Inver Hills Community College in St. Paul Minnesota where he teaches beginning to advanced drawing and painting.  

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Paul Wegner joined the faculty at Inver Hills in 2005.  Prior to 2005 Paul taught at Napa Valley College and Solano Community College.  He completed his M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute and his B.A. at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN. 

Paul’s work is been inspired by personal experience with places and people. His favorite thing about working in photography is the camera gives a person an excuse to go to places they might not have gone and talk to people that would not have been approached. He has been the recipient Minnesota State Arts Board Grant and Metropolitan Regional Arts Board grants. 

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Erika Ritzel received her BFA from Webster University in St. Louis and her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. A majority of her photographic work deals with space, family, memory, nostalgia, and loss.

She received a grant in 2002 from the Illinois Humanities Council to complete a project on the flood of 1993, which destroyed her father’s hometown; a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in 2008, 2013, and 2018. Her work has been exhibited at the Palm Springs Art Museum in California, the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, the Minnesota Center for Photography, the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, the Medium Festival of Photography in California, the Carlisle Photo Festival in England, and at the GuatePhoto Festival in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

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Joel Froehle received a B.A. in Studio Art and Biology from St. OlafCollege and later received an M.F.A. in Artisanry – Ceramics from the University of Massachusetts- Dartmouth.  He is currently an instructor of Art at Inver Hills Community College and Minneapolis College.  He creates functional pottery and ceramic sculpture from his home studio in Northfield, MN. 

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Jay Jensen has taught Ceramics, Intro to Art and Digital Art and has been a faculty since 2004.  He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cites. His main concerns that drives his work is function, form and surface. Working as a graphic designer for 10 years and his interest in printmaking has recently inspired the surface treatment of his pottery.

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Rachel began working at Inver Hills Community College in 2004 after she earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin – River Falls. She returned to school in 2009 to pursue a post-bach program in ceramics at the University of Florida.  In 2010 she started an MFA program in art at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale. Rachel returned to the Twin Cities after graduation in 2013 and began working at Inver Hills again in 2014.  Her favorite media for personal use is clay but she enjoys helping students gain confidence as they experiment with all media.

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