For Brush Art Gallery Director Catherine Tedford,the gallery is not just a repository for artwork – it’s central to the academic mission. She explains, “All of our rotating exhibitions and educational programs are chosen and designed to meet the needs of students and faculty.  I see the gallery's mission as similar to that of the libraries: we use art objects in learning and teaching much like written texts and other media resources.  I'm increasingly involved with ideas surrounding ‘visual literacy’ and ‘literacies across the curriculum,’ and I believe that utilizing art objects and images can be a valuable way of making sense of the world around us.

“I feel an incredible sense of ‘family’ at St. Lawrence, with colleagues and students,” Tedford says. “I never expected such collegiality, support, and warmth,” she adds; she joined the St. Lawrence staff in 1989, having earned her MFA at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst.

Tedford cites two special aspects of her work: “That every exhibition project is different, and that I can work with amazing artists who are passionate about their work.”  She’s also an art scholar; she was an artist-in-residence in Budapest, Hungary, for two weeks in January 2008, continuing work on a global collection of street art and ephemera, and specifically art stickers, which was the theme of an exhibition that she organized in the Brush Gallery in 2006. Based on her research over the past four years, in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles and Toronto as well as Budapest, she gave a paper at the annual College Art Association Conference in February, titled "Takin' it to the Street and Stickin' it to the Man: Social and Political Resistance in Contemporary Sticker Art."