Stephen Zaima

Zaima has been painting program coordinator for the art department from 2001-present and coordinator of Syracuse University's studio art program in Florence Italy in 95/96 and 97/98; prior to that he ran the visiting artist program for 12 years. Zaima received an M.F.A. from the University of California at Davis in 1971. He is currently running the Visiting Artist Program for Painting and is active with various global initiatives.

Solo shows include an exhibition at the Villa Romana, Florence, 2000. This exhibition has held in the limonaia of the historic Villa Romana in Florence, Italy. The residency and exhibition was sponsored by the German Cultural Institute for Artists. Another solo exhibition was at John Cabot University, Rome, 1999. This solo exhibition was accompanied by this introductory statement by New York art critic, editor, and gallery director Saul Ostrow:  "Stephen Zaima's paintings are dominated by a stylized image of Christ's crown of thorns - there is no irony in this - just hope and memory. These paintings with their lovingly painted fields of sensuous color and iconography of paint wed the sacred to the profane. This marriage of the ecstatic imagery of Christianity and the materiality of modernism hold out not only the promise of transcendence and pleasure, but also reflects upon the human condition and art's humanist and expressive value. By collapsing the imagery of the Baroque and that of high modernism, Zaima produces paintings that are a compressed history of human consciousness in which the promise of emancipation is forever defined by sacrifice, pain, transcendence, and deferred pleasure."

Several group shows include the Dorsky Museum Hudson River Valley Artists New Paltz 2002; Atendi Gallery Group Show London England 2000; Fulton Street Gallery Saints and Martyrs Troy, N.Y. 2000; American Consulate Florence Studio Arts Faculty Florence Italy 1999; Elena Zang Gallery Miniatures Shady (Woodstock), N.Y. 1998; and the Donatello Studios Florence Italy 1998. Zaima’s lectures include "Giorgione, Titian, and Manet" John Cabot University, Rome, Italy, 1999 and Zaima at MassArt in Boston, 2005. Zaima’s paper “From the Renaissance, The First Modernist Painter: Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) to Andres Serrano (1950- )” was accepted by the 4th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities in January 2006.  Additionally, he organized the traveling exhibition To Never Forget/Faces of the Fallen to Syracuse University in 2005.