Alumni Q&A: Mariel Capanna ‘06

We recently had the pleasure of catching up with artist and educator Mariel Capanna ’06. Capanna is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Swarthmore College and a celebrated painter, with her work featured in major institutional shows—including Giornata, a solo exhibition currently at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. 

Capanna shared reflections on her recent exhibitions, her unique path to becoming a fresco painter, and how her time at GFS continues to influence her approach to art and teaching today.

What's been going on in your career over the last few years?

Mariel Capanna: This is my third year teaching at Swarthmore College. I teach drawing and painting classes, and excitingly, a fresco course every fall. We’ve actually been able to set up a dedicated fresco shop on campus, making Swarthmore College one of the few places in the country where fresco can be properly studied and practiced.

As far as my studio practice is concerned, it’s been a busy few years! I had my first solo museum show at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which opened in February 2025 and is up through late January 2026. My second institutional show is coming up in March 2026 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, which will be an exhibition of large oil paintings and a fresco installation. And this autumn, my Portland-based gallery Adams and Ollman presented Commonplace, a show of small paintings, and also brought my work to the Paris Internationale Art Fair.

Can you tell us a bit more about your show at the Clark?

The show is set in the museum’s more public, communal spaces, with two large oil paintings on two walls near the café, and a fresco installation by the library in the Manton Research Center. I developed a pair of oil paintings that look empty from a distance but reveal themselves to be full of tiny, almost invisible marks when viewed up close. These paintings are both celebratory and elegiac, and I associate them with the joys and challenges of remembering after a great loss.

The fresco installation is a kind of formal inverse: it is heavy, chunky, and intimate. I associate it with the all-consuming experience of having an infant child.

What inspired your interest in fresco as an artistic medium? It's so unique! 

Right after graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, I took a yearlong road trip around the country to collect imagery for a series of landscape paintings. Something about this itinerant year inspired an interest in developing paintings that were made to stay put. This brought me to fresco painting. I applied for and received a grant to study with a fresco conservator in Florence, Italy—I wasn’t aware of any real options for formal fresco training available in the U.S.

Then in 2017 I was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture—a summer art residency in central Maine, which happens to have a fresco shop. Painting can be such a solitary experience, but the fresco shop at Skowhegan is this wonderfully vibrant gathering place for parallel work and collaboration. I’ve been lucky to be invited back to Skowhegan each summer to work as a fresco instructor. 

What does the process of creating a fresco look like?

A fresco is a painting with earth and mineral pigments painted into freshly applied lime plaster. Most frescos are made on walls prepared with three to five layers of plaster. You mix plaster with a hoe, apply it to the wall with a trowel, then paint onto the final layer while it’s still wet. Through a chemical process of carbonization the marks crystallize, becoming a permanent part of the wall's surface. It’s almost like a “wall tattoo.” For large works that need to be moved, like the one at the Clark, the wall itself is custom-built to be jacked up and dragged through the building.
 

How do you balance your roles as working artist and teacher? 

It’s tricky, but when I get it right, the teaching feeds the studio practice, and the studio practice feeds the teaching. The introductory painting class I teach is especially invigorating. Working with beginners—most of whom are not art majors—reminds me of what it's like to take risks and learn to see in new ways, which brings life back into my own studio.

Has becoming a teacher made you look at your GFS education differently?

What I valued most about GFS was how I felt supported as a "person in the round." I was encouraged to maintain a constellation of interests—choir, sports (I was softball and tennis captain!), Classics, and science—and they all supported each other. That philosophy of supporting the whole student is what I bring into my classroom today.

The weekly Quaker Meeting tradition was also profound—that simultaneous sense of looking inward while sharing a space with a community fosters great respect for other people's deep internal worlds. I want that inward looking and shared experience in my classroom as well.
 

What I valued most about GFS was how I felt supported as a 'person in the round.' I was encouraged to maintain a constellation of interests—choir, sports, Classics, and science—and they all supported each other.

Did any experiences as a GFS student influence your career as an artist or your art-making style?

My Junior Project, which wasn’t art related, was influential. I worked as a cook in a restaurant—the work was intensely physical, and I realized I liked to be on my feet. This feeling connects strongly to the physicality and team dynamic of fresco painting.

And there was an iconic assignment that has stuck with me: negative space drawing in Bob Reinhardt's class. The idea of understanding an object by "looking around the thing" is something I emphasize in my teaching and use conceptually in my own work. 
 

What’s your advice for current GFS students or recent alumni who are artists?

My main advice is to follow the path of your interests and let it take odd, idiosyncratic twists and turns. Don't be overly concerned with what you ought to do or what’s expected of you. My interest in fresco, even when I didn't fully understand it, created momentum and opened every door for me.

Also, maintain a community. My career relies entirely on a network of peers, mentors, and friends—including those from GFS. Maintaining dialogue feeds the work and opens doors. And for those who know they want to be an artist: just keep drawing and making things.

Fun fact: I met my husband at GFS! We weren’t romantically involved as classmates, but we later reconnected. When we were choosing our child's name, we realized we both still had our copies of The Odes of Horace from our Latin class at GFS, which inspired us to name our son Horace!