NICOLE JACQUARD is currently a Professor and Area Coordinator of the Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design Program at Indiana University. She received her BA from Indiana University in 1991 and her first MFA in 1994 from The University of Michigan. While on a Fulbright Fellowship in Australia she received her second MFA from The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in 1995. In 2001 she returned to RMIT University and completed her Ph.D. in Fine Arts in 2004. Her doctoral research focused on integrating Computer-Aided Design, Computer-Aided Machining, and Rapid Prototyping & Machining (CAD, CAM, RP&M) within a contemporary studio practice. Jacquard was awarded a second Fulbright from 2017-18 to Scotland where her research focused on the incorporation of augmented reality into her work.
Nicole was President of the Society of North American Goldsmiths serving two terms from 2015 – 17, and from 2017- 19. She has had ten solo exhibitions and participated in over 100 invitational/juried exhibitions in the USA, Europe, Asia + Australia. Her work is in the collection of the International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemet Hungary, and the Riga Porcelain Museum in Riga, Latvia. Nicole has presented over 45 lectures on her work + and has had papers accepted to present at conferences in the UK, Australia, China, + the USA. Her work is published in over 65 of books, catalogues + websites, and her two solo catalogues, Personal Objects : Personal Spaces Catalogue printed in 07, and her self-titled catalogue, Nicole Jacquard, from 05, are both available through Charon Kransen Arts.
TAYLOR JASPER is the Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. Since joining the Walker in 2023, her curatorial projects and exhibitions have included This Must Be the Place (2024), a reinstallation of the Walker’s permanent collection; Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon (2024); Kandis Williams: A Surface (2025); Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love (co-curator, 2026); and Olalekan Jeyifous: The Road Became a River (2026). Between 2020 and 2023, Jasper was the Curatorial Associate for Visual and Performing Arts at the Momentary, affiliated with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where she supported several exhibitions including Yvette Mayorga: What a Time to be (2022); Cauleen Smith: Space Station: Radiant Behind the Sun (2021); Diana Al-Hadid: Ash in the Trade Winds (2021); and Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody (2021). Prior to the Momentary, Jasper was a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where she was an integral part of the curatorial and editorial teams for the exhibition and catalogue The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. Jasper was born and raised in Richmond, VA and received her BA in Black Studies and Art History from the College of William & Mary in 2018.
MELISSA ORESKY’s painting and collage based multidisciplinary practice is focused on consideration of plants as living beings and as kin. Her work explores the aliveness and awareness of plants, speculating on their capacities for communication and interiority. While looking at plants as direct subject matter for artworks, she also enacts what could be considered a plantlike process in the studio by “growing” paintings or collages through iterative processes over long periods of time. The studio functions. as an ecosystem, with by-products and scraps from one work providing material for the next. Her most recent work presents plant forms as writing, with leaf and stem structures repeating through horizontal landscapes as letters and words across a page.
Melissa Oresky has shown her work nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Redhead, Brooklyn, NY; The Franklin, Chicago; Color Club, Chicago, Boundary, Chicago; Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN; K. Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco; Tripod Space Project, Busan, South Korea; Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand; and OQBO Gallery, Berlin, Germany. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has attended residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, Schloss Plüschow, Germany and The Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico. Originally from Maryland, she lives and works in Normal, Illinois where she is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Illinois State University.