A life in art

An assistant professor in the Department of Art in the Ric Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, Lemonias’ research builds on memories and photographs of family and friends, exploring such themes as labor, identity, class, immigration and race, and the ways in which human experience intersects with them.

“I use intimate experiences of my family and myself to show how the personal becomes political, whether we like it or not,” Lemonias said.

Her work in printmaking includes traditional silk screening; relief, a process of removing material from a medium to create a transferable image; and collagraphy, in which materials are added to a medium to transfer images.

Lemonias often repurposes found items to make commercially viable work. Artists, she tells students, must prioritize creating a market for their work if they want to earn a living at it, they must be resourceful. “Eighty percent of my source material is found,” she said. “I look for the potential of what (found materials) can be.”

A Rowan University faculty member since 2023, Lemonias was artist-in-residence with the Casa Santa Ana Foundation in Panama this past summer; had a solo exhibition at the Guttenberg Arts foundation in Hudson County from Nov. 9 to Dec. 8; and contributed a piece to the project “Cookbook Lookbook,” which was recently acquired by the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Her works are often a tribute to family, including a large, green and black relief print of her great grandfather that hangs in her office, and a variety of pieces that represent the nature of caregiving, unheralded work that’s often performed by marginalized people for the children of wealthy parents. 

Much of that work was inspired by her mother’s experience as a caregiver and by her own. After emigrating to the U.S. as a child, Lemonias worked as a nanny in college.

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