Vantage Points offers art education and mentoring to current and lifelong students to develop their artistic practice.
Who We Are
Our instructors are experienced, working artists who practice in a wide range of media and have employed different approaches in developing their careers. All of them are dedicated to assisting developing artists in exploring their chosen mediums and techniques to evolve their creative vision.
Heidi Norton
Founder
Photography/Sculpture/Installation
Heidi Norton is a contemporary artist, educator and writer living and working in NYC. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has taught all over the United States at some of the most acclaimed art institutions and universities, including SAIC, Parsons The New School, Fashion Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Purchase College, Columbia College Chicago, as well as many city colleges. At SAIC she worked as a faculty advisor for Admissions for 15 years traveling all over the US reviewing and advising on portfolio development. She has served on admission selection committees, worked as the Photography Department faculty academic advisor for 7 years, and was the inaugural visiting artist consultant to the Unilever Corporation. Additionally, Norton has worked in the fashion and beauty world as a photography retoucher and served on the Board at the Maple Street School. Her work is in the collection of many major institutions including the Art Institute and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Her 1970s origin as a child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia is expressed through her sculptural work, which seeks to “preserve” and present organic materials by photographing and encasing them in glass, wax, resin and paint. Heidi has exhibited both nationally and internationally and has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Elmhurst Art Museum, Northeastern Illinois University, among others. Selected group exhibitions include Contemporary Museum Baltimore, Chicago Cultural Center, Gallery 400 University of Illinois Chicago, La Box Gallery National School of Art France, DePaul Art Museum, Pablo de Lillo Estudio, Oviedo, Spain, The New Art Center, The Knitting Factory NY and GRIMM NY. Norton's works and writings have been published in Frieze, Art21, BOMB magazine and Journal for Artistic Research, Grafts by Michael Marder, and the newly released, Why Look at Plants ed. by Giovanni Aloi.
Kate Steciw
Instructor
Sculpture/Photography/Video/Image Manipulation
Kate Steciw is a contemporary artist and educator working in Upstate New York. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA from Smith College. She uses sculpture, photography, new media, video, and image manipulation in her artwork. Kate worked as a professional retoucher for 20 plus years and has taught at Pratt, SAIC, and conducts her own retouching workshops. Because much of Steciw's work considers the object within the context of mass media and the web, her art can be associated with the canon of postinternet movement and is seen in many photography textbooks.
Letha Wilson
Instructor
Photography/Sculpture/Installation
Letha Wilson is a mixed media artist who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, raised in Colorado, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her outdoor excursions amongst the Rocky Mountains have placed the natural world and its photographic image at the root of her artistic interests. She earned her BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009.
Antonio Bever
Instructor
Photography/Video/Books/Zines
Antonio is an artist and educator working and living between NYC and LA. He graduated with a BFA in photography from Purchase College and is currently an MFA candidate at University of California at Riverside. His work explores themes of consumption and commodity fetishism within the urban environment.
Natalie Baxter
Instructor
Fibers and Soft Sculpture
Natalie Baxter (b. 1985, Lexington, Kentucky) explores concepts of place-identity, nostalgic americana, and gender stereotypes through sculptures that playfully push controversial issues. Baxter received her MFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012, has exhibited her work in galleries and museums internationally. Press for Baxter’s work includes, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, and Bomb Magazine.
Nyeema Morgan
Nyeema Morgan
Instructor
Interdisciplinary Artist
Nyeema Morgan (b. 1977, Philadelphia, PA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Her works include large-scale drawings, sculptures and printed matter, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Nyeema’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally.She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon.
Jaqueline Cedar
Instructor
Painting/Drawing/Installation
Jaqueline Cedar was born in Los Angeles, CA and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2009 she received an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Recent exhibitions include Shelter Gallery, New York (2022), Shin Haus, New York (2022), Smoke the Moon, Santa Fe (2022), Ladies' Room, Los Angeles (2021), 11 Newel, Brooklyn (2021), Peripheral Space, Los Angeles (2021), Hesse Flatow, New York (2020), Drawer NYC (2020), Field Projects, New York (2020), Underdonk, Brooklyn (2018), and David Risley Gallery Velvet Ropes, Copenhagen (2018). Press includes Artnet, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, Two Coats of Paint, New American Paintings, Gorky's Granddaughter, Painters' Table, and The Boston Globe. Cedar's paintings and drawings address uncanny scenarios where characters engage themselves and one another with sincerity and purpose. Moments of desire, self-reflection, and lack of control motivate postures filled with bravado and vulnerability. In October 2019 Cedar launched the curatorial exhibition program Good Naked Gallery. Projects hover around the intimate and awkward with a focus on work that engages tactility, humor, movement, and play.
Shala Miller
Instructor
Photography/Video/Writing
Shala Miller, also known as Freddie June when she sings, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where she should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find her way out, and find her way into an understanding of herself and her history, using photography, video, writing and singing as an aid in this process. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied photography, film, video and writing.
Leah Dixon
Instructor
Sculpture
I build sculptures and spatial interventions that address spaces where bodies and architecture collide - fallen monuments, games, the military, nightlife and other public meeting places. I build all of my work by hand via labor-intensive processes - resulting in playful geometric materialities, that question historical narrative and propaganda.
Roxanne Jackson
Instructor
Ceramics/Sculpture
Roxanne Jackson is a ceramic artist and sculptor living in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Her macabre works are black-humored investigations of the links between transformation, myth and pop-culture. Press for her work includes The New York Times, The New Yorker, The LA Times, Juxtapoz Magazine, Hyperallergic, Forbes, Metal Magazine, The Huffington Post, Artnet, The Observer, Gothamist, Whitehot Magazine, Beautiful Decay, Cool Hunting and Ceramics Monthly, among others. She is the recipient of residencies at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park (Japan), the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (NE), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), Wassaic Project (NY), PLOP (UK), Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts (ME), the Ceramic Center of Berlin (Germany), funded by a Jerome Project Grant, and the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen (China), funded by an NCECA fellowship. Jackson has exhibited widely, showing her work in exhibitions at DUVE Berlin Gallery (Germany), Cob Gallery (London), Anonymous Gallery (Mexico City), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami), Garis and Hahn (LA), Kunstraum Niederösterreich (Vienna) and Untitled Art Fair (Miami Beach) with Richard Heller Gallery. She has recently shown her work in New York City at venues including The Hole, SARDINE, Underdonk, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Room 57 Gallery, Honey Ramka, Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, Dinner Gallery and SPRING/BREAK Art Fair. Roxanne had works in the exhibition “Friends and Friends of Friends” at the Schlossmuseum in Linz, Austria, and her work was recently on view in Design Miami and Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach, FL (2021). Her solo show, Nature is a Whore: A Comedy & A Tragedy, is currently on view at The Hole (NYC).
Rachel de Joode
Instructor
Photography/Sculpture/Installation
Rachel de Joode is a Dutch-born, Berlin-based multi-media artist and educator. De Joode’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group shows in museums, institutions, and galleries. De Joode mixes mediums, particularly those of photography, sculpture, and painting. Her work embodies the digital age’s ambivalent relationship to the material.
She is interested in digital thinking and how digital gestures express themselves in analog forms. As such, her work often begins digital, which she then translates into three-dimensional space.
She photographs and digitally manipulates abstract compositions of real surfaces. These surfaces are the basis of her investigation into the relationship between three-dimensional objects and their two-dimensional (re)presentation forms.
Caroline Falby
Instructor
Drawing/Collage/Painting/Digital Media
Born in Toronto, Canada, Caroline Falby layers drawing, collage, painting and digital practices to interweave historical events and personal experience into new cultural narratives. Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, the Spring/Break Art Show,The Bronx Museum, NurtureART, and the Queens Museum. She was granted a Swing Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; a Project Fellowship from the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop; a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship; the Artcycle MFA Discovers Prize; an AIM Residency at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, a Brooklyn Arts Council Grant, a Media/Film grant from NYSCA; a Puffin Foundation Grant, International Artist Residency from NARS and an artist grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Her work has been written about in publications such as the NYTimes, artnet magazine, On Curate and Testudo magazine. She holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY.
Kat Chamberlin
Instructor
Drawing/Sculpture/Installation
Born in the Netherlands and raised in Turkey, Kat Chamberlin is a Brooklyn-based artist. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S and internationally, and featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Chicago Cultural Center, Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery in Boston, TSA and BRIC in New York City. Kat completed her Masters in Fine Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Toby Devan Lewis Award and the William Dole Award.
Leonora Loeb
Instructor
Sculpture/Installation/Video
Leonora Loeb is a visual artist working primarily with sculpture, installation, and video. Originally from NYC, she received her BA in Fine Art from Pitzer College, CA; and received her MFA in NYC from the School of Visual Arts in 2010.
A dual citizen of the USA and Italy, Leonora has worked in the US and abroad; and received support from institutions such as Mabou Mines, NYC, and Chashama North, NY. Her projects have been mentioned and discussed in publications such as Art Maze Magazine and Artnet as well as artist-run spaces such as Two Coats of Paint, Art Spiel, and Drawing on the Utopic.
She has participated in exhibitions in the NYC area including Momenta Art, Front Room Gallery, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, and Deanna Evans Projects. Leonora has worked on collaborative multi-media projects for venues such as The Clock Tower Gallery (No Longer Empty), LIC, Queens, and The Gateway Project in Newark, NJ.
Leonora is full-time faculty in the Visual Studies department of LIM College.
She is based in NYC and is a curator at Underdonk, an artist-run space in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
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