Artist Jason Lord to Lead Hands-On Creative Exploration at LI

Lyndon Institute welcomes artist and educator Jason Lord as its next Barbara Follett Artist-in-Residence, from November 1 through December 16, 2026. With more than 30 years of teaching experience, Lord brings an approach to artmaking that connects creative thinking with practical skills, experimentation, and the materials people encounter in everyday life. During his residency, he will work with LI students and faculty to explore how ordinary and discarded objects can become the starting point for new ideas, functional designs, and works of art.

Lord works across a range of mediums, including sculpture, paper casting, woodworking, and performance, often combining these approaches in installations that invite people to reconsider familiar objects and their surroundings. His practice is grounded in questions about human experience and the intersection between objects, places, and people. Rather than beginning with a fixed outcome in mind, he experiments with materials and processes, allowing discoveries along the way to shape the work. His approach makes room for different perspectives and shows how creative work can develop through observation, tinkering, and a willingness to try something inventive.

Lord’s approach to making draws on the experimental traditions of art and design that bring functional craft, artistic expression, and unconventional materials together. His work has connections to the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College traditions, as well as the assemblage practices of artists like Robert Rauschenberg. He transforms discarded items lost to time into responsive, interactive installations, combining functional craft with small-scale three-dimensional constructions and open-ended inquiry. At LI, he will develop assemblage work informed by a long-standing walking practice, transforming gathered objects into small sculptures while experimenting with paper casting and designing custom wooden lamps with unique, place-based paper shades.

Students and faculty will have opportunities to engage with these processes and explore how overlooked materials can be made into something useful, unexpected, or entirely new through hands-on experimentation and thoughtful making.

For LI students, the residency offers a chance to learn directly from a practicing artist while exploring how ideas take shape through making. Lord’s work demonstrates that creative practice does not depend on expensive materials or a fully formed plan. It starts with observing, asking questions, working with what is on hand, and learning through experimentation. These principles connect naturally to Lyndon Institute’s Productive Learning model, in which students develop knowledge and skills by applying them to purposeful work. By working alongside Lord, students can try unfamiliar techniques, solve problems as they arise, and see how an idea develops through the decisions and discoveries involved in transforming something.

Lord has received residencies and fellowships from organizations including the McColl Center, Vermont Studio Center, Peter Bullough Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Penland School of Craft. His honors include the Windgate Distinguished Fellowship for Innovation in Craft from the Hambidge Center and a National Gallery of Art Teaching Fellowship. He holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Across more than three decades of teaching in schools, universities, museums, and art centers, he has worked with learners of all ages, bringing his experience as an artist directly into the learning process.

The Barbara Follett Artist-in-Residence program brings working artists into the Lyndon Institute community so students and faculty can engage directly with professional creative practice. Through Lord’s residency, students and faculty will have the opportunity to explore materials, learn new ways of making, and see how creative ideas develop through experimentation and practical work. The residency extends LI’s Productive Learning model into the arts, connecting what students learn with what they make and giving them opportunities to approach familiar materials and problems from new perspectives.

Lord looks forward to working with the Lyndon Institute community this fall, sharing his approach to making and learning with students and faculty.