University Authors 2025

In 2009, former Provost Willard Gingerich and former Dean of Library Services Judith Lin Hunt established the University Authors Recognition Program to celebrate Montclair’s collective community of scholarship and artistic production.

The University Authors Recognition Program honors academic and creative works published by Montclair State University faculty, staff, and administrators.

A reception will celebrate faculty and staff who have published or edited monographs, textbooks, exhibit catalogs and/or produced creative works resulting in CDs or DVDs or streaming media from 2022 through 2025. Desserts and coffee will be served. Come celebrate!

Location: Sprague Library – Quiet Study Area 1st Floor
Date: Thursday, Apr 3, 2025
Time: 2:30 – 4:00

2025 College of the Arts University Authors

• Midnight Moment: A Decade of Artists in Times Square: “The first and only book on Times Square’s iconic Midnight Moment series, the world’s largest and longest-running digital public art program. Presented nightly to millions of viewers each year, Midnight Moment showcases the work of contemporary artists on one of the world’s most iconic canvases the electronic billboards of Times Square in New York City. A collaboration between Times Square Arts and artists – both established and emerging – this is a coordinated display of cutting-edge moving-image content and has earned the distinction of being the world’s largest and longest-running digital public-art program. Synchronized on over 90 billboard screens in the heart of Times Square nightly from 11:57 pm to 12:00 am, Midnight Moment has brought innovative and accessible public art to local and global visitors for more than a decade. A celebration of this monumental platform for public art, this eponymous retrospective memorializes ten years of the more than 130 artists that have participated in the program. The complex and immersive experience of public art in Times Square is brilliantly captured in this book with reflections from some of the program’s most notable artists; and behind-the-scenes information about how it’s coordinated, executed, and commemorated. Featured artists include Jeffrey Gibson, Shantell Martin, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge, Rashaad Newsome, Nick Cave, Pipilotti Rist, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, Tracey Emin, Björk, JR, Isaac Julien, Ryan McGinley, Alfredo Jaar, Charles Atlas, Marco Brambilla, Andy Warhol, Shahzia Sikander, Fischli & weiss, Alex Da Corte, Alex Prager, Sophie Calle, Chitra Ganesh, Peter Campus, Lucy Raven & 13BC, Allison Janae Hamilton, David Hockney, Studio DRIFT, Cory Arcangel, and Joan Jonas”–Publisher’s description.
  Charlotte Kent is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Design
• The Audiovisual Teacher: “A young boy growing up in rural China, reared by a loving family and surrounded by the arts, decides that he wants to become a teacher. After beginning his adult life, he sets his sights on the United States to continue his adventure and hone his craft as an educator. A fascination with technology establishes his niche and paves the way for a prolific career. His appreciation for technology was peripheral to his dedication toward teaching, learning, and communication. Unfortuntately, many viewed him as out of touch with the ever-steepening curve of progress that diminished his acclaim. Through adversity and doubt, he found peace through creative expression and a life-long love of the humanities. The Audiovisual Teacher shares the story of Dr. Hamilton Lee, a native of Shantung, China, whose life and career remind us that we should not be blinded by the allure of new technology, but instead seek to understand how it can help us to better embrace our vocations.”–Back cover.
  Julian Costa is a an Adjunct Professor in the School of Communication and Media
• Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art: “The absurd is a lens on the disturbances of our moment and a challenge to the propositions about and solutions for the world. The absurd shakes off the paralysis that what we know must be the only thing we (re)produce. Those willing to recognize that truth and confront it, rather than flee from it, are thereby introduced to the political writ large. Critical art allows the absurd a space within which audiences can observe their own tendencies and assumptions. The absurd in art reveals our inculcation into hegemonic belief structures and the necessity to question the systems to which we subscribe. Today we see the absurd in memes, performative politics, and art, expressing the confusion and disorientation wrought by the endless, emerging crises of our 24/7 relations. This edited collection, featuring contributions by well-known artists and scholars, adopts ideas and practices associated with the absurd to explain how the contemporary moment is absurd and how absurdity is a useful, potentially radical tool within the contemporary.” — Back cover.
  Charlotte Kent is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Design
• Babe in the Woods, or The Art of Getting Lost: From acclaimed painter Julie Heffernan, a wholly original and visually stunning four-color graphic work of autofiction about a young mother who — lost overnight on a hike with her infant son — experiences an extraordinary journey of memory, remorse, and rebirth that offers her a new way of seeing the world; for readers of Alison Bechdel, Roz Chast, and Marjane Satrapi. One summer day, a young artist with a newborn — sleep-deprived, desperate to escape her hot, cramped apartment and her oblivious husband — sets off on a hike in the country with her baby boy, Sam, strapped to her front and her senses fully attuned to the colors, the sounds, and the flora and fauna in the woods around her. During her journey, Julie reflects on her childhood, her parents, her marriage, and her path to becoming a painter. Her memories soon merge with the imaginative pictorial worlds she invents in her work, creating a glorious and perturbing narrative. When Julie suddenly realizes that they are lost, with few supplies, as darkness begins to set in, she must come to terms with the sudden gravity of her situation and invent tools for coping. She then discovers her own resourcefulness: snacking on wild garlic and fixing a torn shoe; tucking herself and her baby into a cave for the night; climbing a tall tree for a better vantage point. Each step in the unknown terrain of the forest leads her deeper into a reckoning with survival and unresolved past issues. She invokes the struggles of painters like Artemesia Gentileschi, women’s strength in Rubens’ Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, and the plights of activists like Julia Butterfly Hill, illuminating how great art can be a vehicle for perspective — how it teaches us how to see, think, and navigate obstacles and wonders and find one’s way out into a capacious and self-determined life. Beautifully told and illustrated by an established fine painter whose work has been collected around the world, Julie Heffernan’s Babe in the Woods is an extraordinary journey of memory, remorse, and rebirth, and a powerful lesson in trust in one’s self, offering a new way of seeing for anyone who feels lost in the world.
  Julie Heffernan is a Professor in the Department of Art and Design