melissa m button

melissa m button is the Associate Director in the School of art and serves as Senior Lecturer in Painting/Drawing.  button received her B.S in Architecture from Arizona State University in 1994 and an MFA in Drawing in 2001. button’s practice includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and mixed media collages. The works explore her interest in space and constructed realities whereupon the she uses the collaboration of interior and exterior spaces - creating distortions through perspective, layered transparencies, and disappearing edges; reinventing the viewer’s observed reality and continually shifting the narrative inside these spaces.   Button’s work has been exhibited nationally and throughout China and Europe.   As an artist and a scholar, she is dedicated to innovative pedagogy and implementing inclusive and diverse teaching practices.  As such it has garnered her invitations to speak at FATE-Foundations in Art: Theory & Education Conference, and the Thinking Through Drawing Symposium in London, UK.  Recently, she was awarded the Glenfiddich Artist in Residence in Banffshire, Scotland to pursue 3 months of research.   She received 2 project grants that provided funding for collaborative exhibitions in China.  Her work has been published in the Superstition Review, American Artist, and New American Paintings.  She has shown her work in the Micro Museum in Brooklyn, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Collins, CO, Mesa Contemporary Art Museum in Mesa, AZ, and the Bridge Gallery 798 District in Beijing, China among others.