The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to announce the appointment of Beverly Acha as Assistant Professor in Print within the Department of Art and Art History beginning July 2019.
“We are delighted to have Beverly Acha join us among the faculty in Studio Art this Fall,” writes Chair of the Search Committee and Studio Art Professor, John Yancey. “Acha has a background in painting and printmaking, and promises to bring new ideas to the department and extend the reach and relevance of Print.”
Interested in the intersections between form, repetition and indexicality; Acha makes paintings, drawings and prints that investigate the relationship between the formal and the social and push the boundaries between the body and space. Committed to color and abstraction, Acha employs formal languages of mapping, scientific diagrams, architecture, landscape and poetry to point towards the thresholds between knowing and seeing, experience and memory, and the real and imagined.
Jeff Williams, Associate Professor of Studio Art notes: “I have been thoroughly impressed by her commitment to undergraduate and graduate education. She is an inspiring professor and a constructive influence on her students. In her studio practice, Acha generates images of the unseen, underlying structures that make up the world around us. Sonic vibrations, refracting light, and a range of temporal modes are harmoniously delineated in her paintings and prints. I look forward to seeing what happens with her practice here at UT, where there is an interdisciplinary field of possible discussions and collaborations across campus.”
Before her appointment at UT Austin, Acha held teaching positions at Williams College, University of California at Davis, and Oberlin College, where she collaborated with faculty in TIMARA (Technology in Music and Related Arts), the experimental music department of the Oberlin Conservatory. She holds a BA in Studio Art and American Studies with a concentration in Critical and Cultural Theory from Williams College (2009), an MFA from Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking (2012) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018). Her exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at Underdonk in Brooklyn, NY; The Roswell Museum and Art Center in Roswell, NM; and group exhibitions at DC Moore Gallery, NYC; El Museo del Barrio, NYC; La MaMa Galleria, NYC; International Print Center of New York, NYC; and Smack Mellon, NYC, among others.
Acha’s work has been recognized with awards including the Aon-CUE Artist Empowerment Award, Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Travel Grant to study Brazilian Modernist Architecture and the work of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, and the Frederick M. Peyser Prize in Painting. She has participated in residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Lighthouse Works, Wassaic Project and Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, among others.
Acha was born in Miami, Florida and currently lives and works between New York City and Austin, Texas. This winter, her work will be included in exhibitions at Fordham University and Alfred University. She was awarded the Zeta Orionis Fellowship to attend a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center this upcoming December.