Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros is a renowned curator and critic from Mexico City who has made a significant impact on the Mexican contemporary art scene since the 1980s. A graduate from Universidad IberoAmericana’s Journalism Department, Espinosa de los Monteros has contributed to the growth of the Latin American art since the early stages of his career through independent, institutional, governmental, and educational work. Throughout the 90s, he was the Mexican Cultural Attaché in Venezuela and Canada while actively writing criticism for major international publications such as Art Nexus in Colombia and Mexico’s La Jornada. Currently, Espinosa de los Monteros serves as the Director of Visual and Performing Arts at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City where he also directs the university’s Galeria Metropolitana. His most recent independent curatorial project, Francisco Icaza: Me quiero ir al mar (Francisco Icaza: I Want to Go to the Sea), was exhibited at Mexico City’s prestigious Palacio de Bellas Artes museum in 2019.
Nalongo Palesa Ngwenya is a contemporary African Twin-Mama who spends much of her time writing to develop people & places while nurturing young women’s creative excellence for the advancement of the African continent, in her own way. Under her alias, Nalongo is author of Boldly Bloom Sis - Powerful Poetic Affirmations for Trans4mative Living.
Palesa has a research & policy career spanning over a decade. She began working with Maboneng Township Arts Experience as a project researcher and later became the organization’s development coordinator. She now serves as the organisation’s Managing Director. The Maboneng Township Arts Experience's emphasis on transformation, job creation, sustainability, plus the inclusion of peripheral under-resourced people, spaces and places in the context of relevant creative innovation, has been globally recognized. Inspired by an intuitive lifestyle of serving and learning while infusing Ubuntu into the travel industry, Palesa is finding ways to make good use of her B.A. in law, political science & international relations from Rhodes University. She finds great joy in sharing principles sustaining the initiative aiming to use cultural tourism to positively transform marginalised communities, while offering guests a one-of-a-kind South African experience to enjoy.
Siphiwe Ngwenya is a people, community and destination developer. His journey includes leading an art science expedition to the Antarctica to develop innovations for artists living in perilous neighbourhood conditions. Siphiwe’s background includes founding an award winning South African musical hip hop outfit called Skwatta Kamp, another word for neighbourhood or ghetto. Siphiwe has also launched the 1st home economy network of galleries in several neighbourhoods around South Africa. This has allowed for an alternative and lucrative international award winning tourism product for visitors across the world. The main theme around Siphiwe Ngwenya’s work is how can a Ghetto, through a people led approach, be turned into a Town through the arts and sciences? This question has been the central pillar to Siphiwe Ngwenya’s journey and mission to decentralise the arts economy so that it benefits the many poor around the world. Siphiwe has been supported by Barack Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative by being placed in a high level entrepreneurship boot camp in North-Western University in Chicago Illinois. He has also engaged with the International Public Arts Institute in Shanghai in deriving policies of how to research African Public Arts initiatives. The same expertise Siphiwe also applied to assisting the South African government in formulating an arts policy for one of its major provinces. Siphiwe Ngwenya serves as a board member for The South African Craft and Design Institute and is currently pursuing his honours in Cultural Policy Management at the University of Witwatersrand. Siphiwe Ngwenya’s unconventional methods into reaching his people centred goals have earned him the title ‘The Robbin Hood of the Arts’.
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and performance artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion and protest. Her works have been exhibited at Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago, IL), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia, PA), and Herbert Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY). A solo exhibition of her work, Despite the System, is opening at the Skirball Cultural Center and Museum (Los Angeles, CA) in October 2020.
Aram is a 2016 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, 2016 3Arts Awardee, and 2017 Sustainable Arts Foundation Awardee. She earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, Post-Bac from Maryland Institute College of Art, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1984, at eight years old, Guadalupe Maravilla immigrated alone to the United States from El Salvador in order to escape the Salvadoran Civil War. Maravilla was part of the first wave of undocumented children to come to the US from Central America. Maravilla became a US citizen at twenty-seven. In 2016, as a gesture of solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as a last name in his fake identity, Maravilla changed his birth name Irvin Morazan to Guadalupe Maravilla.
Maravilla creates fictionalized performances, videos, sculptures and drawings that incorporate his pre-colonial Central American ancestry, personal mythology, and autobiography. Through a multidisciplinary studio practice, Maravilla traces the history of his own displacement, interrogates the parallels between pre-Columbian cultures and our border politics.
Guadalupe Maravilla has performed and presented work extensively in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, MARTE (El Salvador), Central America Biennial X (Costa Rica), XI Nicaragua Biennial, Performa 11 & 13, Fuse-Box Festival, Exit Art, Smack Mellon, Rubin Foundation, the Drawing Center and the ICA/VCU in Richmond, Virginia. Maravilla has upcoming projects at the 2020 Guatemala Biennial, Site Santa Fe, Phoenix Art Museum, São Paulo Museum of Art (Brazil) and a performance at Knockdown Center in New York.
Awards and fellowships include; Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 2019, Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space 2019, Map fund 2019, Creative Capital Grant 2016, Franklin Furnace 2018, Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant 2016, Art Matters Grant 2013, Art Matters Fellowship 2017, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship 2018, Dedalus Foundation Grant 2013 and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award 2003. Residencies include; LMCC Workspace, SOMA, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Drawing Center Open Sessions.
Maravilla has been featured in the NY Times, Brooklyn Rail, the Guardian, Art Forum and many other publications. Maravilla’s work has been collected privately and by museums such as MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami.
Julia Galloway is a utilitarian potter and professor. She is currently the Director of the School of Art and Professor at the University of Montana, Missoula. Julia was born and raised in Boston. She did her graduate studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, her BFA at New York State College of Art & Design at Alfred University and studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design as well as Massachusetts College of Art.
Julia has exhibited across the US, Canada, and Asia. Julia’s work is included in the collections of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC, Long Beach Art Museum, Long Beach CA, The Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV, Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT, The Clay Art Center, Port Chester, NY, and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Julia has served on the board of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and The Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. Her work has been published in Ceramics Monthly, Studio Potter, Art and Perception and Clay Times. She also is in “The Ceramic Spectrum” by Robin Hopper, “The Art of Contemporary Pottery” by Kevin Hulch, “Craft in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artist and Objects”, and The Ceramic Continuum, Archie Bray Foundation. In addition, she has developed service-based websites: “Montana Clay” and “the field guide for ceramics artisans”.
Jane Shellenbarger was born in Detroit, Michigan. She was a CORE student at Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina from 1987-1989. Jane received her B.F.A. degree from the Kansas City Art Institute, and her M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Following graduate school, she worked as a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, MT, 1996-97. She established her studio pottery, Mill Station Pottery, in rural Hale, Michigan in 1997. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in the School for American Crafts. She has taught at at Northern Michigan University, Kansas City Art Institute, the University of Northern Iowa, Penland School of Crafts, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Jane has exhibited her work in several galleries around the country including; Leslie Ferrin Gallery, Lacoste Gallery, Lill Street, AKAR Gallery, Sante Fe Clay, Philadelphia Clay Studio, Red Lodge Clay Center and Baltimore Clayworks among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, The Weisman Art Museum, The Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, The University Museum, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, University of Arkansas, San Bao Ceramic Art Institute, Jingdezhen, China, and Ohi Museum, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan
Sam Harvey is a ceramic artist who maintains a studio practice in Aspen, Co. He first fell in love with clay in High School while attending the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He then attended the Kansas City Art Institute where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts. Landing in Boulder, Colorado he became deeper friends with, and later a graduate student of, artist Betty Woodman. After discovering that Woodman would not continue teaching at the University, he chose not to return to C.U. – Boulder. Instead he spent a year of studies abroad in China, Nepal, Italy and England. He completed his MFA at the New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred University. He has taught and lectured for many universities and community organizations across the globe including Taiwan, Jamaica, Canada, Chile and in the US in Colorado, New York, Texas, California, and Wyoming.
Feeling the call of the mountains, he moved back to Aspen, Colorado where he completed numerous artist’s residencies and where he currently resides. He is a co-owner of the Harvey/Meadows Gallery, focusing on contemporary ceramics and works on paper. He currently serves on the Boards of both the Anderson Ranch Art Center and the Carbondale Clay Center. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and is included in many public and private collections including the American Museum of Ceramic Art, CA and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY.
John Cohorst was born and raised in Kansas, ceramic artist John Cohorst creates both functional and sculptural ceramic art. He received his B.F.A. and M.A. from Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg Kansas, where he concentrated in functional ceramics. After graduating, he accepted a position as an artist assistant at Jun Kaneko’s Studio, in Omaha Nebraska. Shortly after leaving the Kaneko Studio, he traveled to Japan and studied wood firing techniques in the ancient kiln site town of Tokoname. In 2012 he was accepted as an artist in residence at the Carbondale Clay Center in Carbondale, Colorado. After completion of that residency John moved into the Studio for Arts and Works (SAW) where his studio is currently located. John’s work has been shown in numerous galleries throughout the Midwest, as well as internationally in Japan, China, and Italy.
Born in Mexico City, and currently based in New York, Aliza Nisenbaum’s paintings are intimate exchanges between herself and her subjects. The artist makes portraits of undocumented Latin American immigrants, and of other distinct communities, using the focused attention of observational painting to mark those who are socially unmarked in society, along with the apparently anonymous goods that constitute a transnational trade in quotidian objects. Often lushly decorated with patterned textiles, her canvases ask for close looking in keeping with her personal connections to her subjects.
Recently she has presented her work at the Phillips Collection, Boston ICA, LA MOCA, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Whitney Biennial 2017; The Flag Art Foundation; The ICA at MECA; Biennial of the Americas, MCA, Denver; the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Her most recent exhibition was at Anton Kern gallery 2019; And she will have an upcoming solo show at Tate Liverpool in 2020. She is represented by Anton Kern gallery and is Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Amir H. Fallah creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that utilize personal history as an entry point to discuss race, representation, the body, and the memories of cultures and countries left behind. Through this process, the artist’s works employ nuanced and emotive narratives that evoke an inquiry about identity, the immigrant experience, and the history of portraiture.
Fallah interrogates systems of representation embedded in the history of Western art. His ornate environments combine visual vocabularies of painting and collage with elements of installation to deconstruct material modes of identity formation. Portraits of veiled subjects capitalize on ambiguity to skillfully weave fact and fiction, while questioning how to create a portrait without representing the physicality of the sitter. While the stories that surround his subjects are deeply personal and are told through the intimate possessions they hold most dear, his work addresses generational immigrant experiences of movement, trauma, and celebration. Fallah wryly incorporates Western art historical references into paintings formally rooted in the pattern-based visual language of Islamic Art. In doing so, his paintings possess a hybridity that reflects his own background as an Iranian-American immigrant straddling cultures.
Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. In 2015, Fallah had a solo exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2009, the artist was chosen to participate in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. Fallah’s painting Calling On The Past received the 2018 Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago and is now part of the permanent collection at the SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. In 2019 Fallah was awarded a permanent public art commission by the LA Art Commission and won the COLA Artist fellowship. The artist is also in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, McEvoy Foundation For The Arts, San Francisco, Neuman Museum, Kansas City, The Microsoft Collection, Plattsburg State Art Museum, Plattsburgh, NY, Cerritos College Public Art Collection, Norwalk, CA and Salsali Private Museum, Dubai, UAE. Currently the artist has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson.
Susan Stewart is a poet, critic, and translator, and an Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of many books of prose, including On Longing, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, and The Poet's Freedom. Her books of poetry include Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her recent Cinder: New and Selected Poems. She is a former MacArthur Fellow, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Berlin Prize Fellow, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Joan Jonas is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Jonas' experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre. Working between mediums and across genres (biography, mythology, folklore), she has animated countless intellectual and artistic experiments in translation, technology, and narrative. She is often said to be a pioneer, but her work is frequently a site of collaboration. In her own words: “I always merge with the subject I’m trying to understand and represent.” Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.
Jonas was born in New York in 1936. She studied at Mount Holyoke and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before returning to the city and receiving her MFA in sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. Since then, her work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (1979); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1983,1994); Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany (2001); and Queens Museum of Art, New York (2003-2004). She’s had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1994); Pat Hearn Gallery, New York (2003); Le Plateau and Jeu de Paume, Paris (2005); Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona (2007-2008); The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2008); HangarBicocca, Milan (2014); Tate Modern, London (2018); Museu Serralves, Porto (2019); Ocean Space, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art 21, Venice (2019) and she has presented major performances at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1974); The Kitchen, New York (1972, 1975, 2004, 2016); San Francisco Museum of Art (1976); Kunstmuseum Bern (2004); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2008); Performa, New York (2013, 2019); Danspace, New York (2018). Jonas represented the US at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and has participated in six editions of documenta in Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 2002, 2012).
Joan Jonas is currently Professor Emerita in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Program in Art, Culture and Technology in Boston, and is the author of reference texts on the performing arts. Jonas is the recipient of fellowships and grants and in 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, presented to those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind. She lives and works in New York.
Diana Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1981 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Art History from Kent State University in 2003,andan MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond in 2005.She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. She has been the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Grant, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Grant. She is also a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. Al-Hadid has had solo exhibitions at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, RI, NYU Abu Dhabi University Gallery, Abu Dhabi, UAE, The Vienna Secession in Vienna, Austria, the Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH, the Akron Museum of Art, Akron, OH, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NCthe Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA,the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX,the Centro de Arte Contemporánea, La Conservera, Murcia, Spain,the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV,and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.Her work is included in collections such as the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, theWhitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY,the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA,the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,TX, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro,NC. She has had large public installations at Madison Square Park, New York, NY, and at Williams College, Williamstown, MA. She is represented in New York by Marianne Boesky Gallery.
Devin Allen is a documentary photographer, born and raised in West Baltimore, who takes his city as his subject. He rose to national attention when one of his photographs of the Baltimore Up- rising was published on the cover of Time in May 2015. While Allen’s photography historicizes Baltimore, his educational programs are dedicated to empowering young people with cameras so they can tell their stories.
Andy Bichlbaum began his current adulthood by inserting a swarm of kissing men to a shoot-'em-up video game just before it shipped to store shelves. Finding himself fired and momentarily famous, he opted to go into weird activism. Since then, as co-founder of the Yes Men (www.theyesmen.org), he's worked for entities such as Exxon, Dow, Monsanto, and the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as for the New York Times, the New York Post, and the Washington Post, all without their approval.
Elizabeth King combines figurative sculpture with stop-frame animation in works that blur the boundary between actual and virtual object. Influenced by the history of the puppet, the automaton, and literature’s legends in which the artificial figure comes to life, her work touches on the mind/body riddle, the anatomy of emotion, the human/machine interface, and the direct gaze in an increasingly mediated world. Her most recent solo show Radical Small was on view at MASS MoCA from February 2017 through January 2018. She is represented by Danese/Corey in New York. She taught at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Sculpture and Extended Media from 1985 to 2015.
Miguel Luciano is a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, popular culture, social justice and migration, through sculpture, painting and socially engaged public art projects. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; El Museo Nacional de Bella Artes de la Habana, Cuba; La Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris; El Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; The San Juan Poly-Graphic Triennial, Puerto Rico, and The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award Grant, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award, and he was a fellow of the smARTpower Program – an international, community-based art initiative of the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. His work is featured in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Newark Museum, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.
Luciano is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and Yale University School of Art. He is currently an A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art and an Artist in Residence within the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Civic Practice Partnership Artist Residency program.
Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women.
Rosler has for many years produced works on war and the national security climate, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad, in which her photomontage series played a critical part. She has also published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification.
A retrospective of her work has been shown internationally, and her writing is published widely in publications such as Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst.
In 2012, she presented a new series of photographs, taken during her trip to Cuba in January 1981, and in November, she presented the Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA in New York. In 2013, her book of essays, Culture Class, which deals with the role of artists in cities and gentrification, was published by e-flux and Sternberg Press. Most recently, she produced the exhibition and public project Guide for the Perplexed: How to Succeed in the New Poland at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland.
Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist, who often works with photography to explore themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. He received a B.F.A. in photography and Africana studies from New York University, an M.F.A./M.A. in photography and visual criticism from the California College of Arts as well as an honorary doctorate from MICA. Thomas’ monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture. He has exhibited internationally at such venues as the International Center of Photography, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain; Studio Museum in Harlem; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Bilphena Yahwon is a Baltimore-based writer, researcher, organizer, and womanist. She is also a member of Press Press, an interdisciplinary publishing practice organized to shift and deepen the understanding of voices, identities, and narratives. Her work uses a womanist approach and centers women’s health and well-being, transformative/restorative justice, and intersectionality.