Visual Artist Biographies
Mirna Bamieh
Mirna Bamieh is an artist from Jerusalem/Palestine. She obtained a B.A in Psychology from Birzeit University in Ramallah (2002–2006) and an M.F.A. at Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem (2011–2013). She took part in Ashkal Alwan Home Works study program in Beirut (2013/14).
Her work attempts to understand and contemplate the ever-shifting politics, while equally questioning notions of land and geographies of in-between temporality. Her work looks more at scenarios that take the language of the absurd and the ironic, and uses them as tools for political commentary.
In 2017, obtaining a diploma in Professional Cooking made her develop works that use the mediums of storytelling and food for creating socially engaged projects through her art practice, such as Potato Talks and Palestine Hosting Society. The Palestine Hosting Society is a live art project, is an extension to Mirna Bamieh's research at the politics of disappearance, memory production, and her practice in creating artworks that unpack social concerns and limitations in contemporary political dilemmas, and reflect on the conditions that characterize Palestinian communities. The Palestine Hosting Society explores traditional food cultures in Palestine, especially those that are on the verge of disappearing. The project brings these dishes back to life over dinner tables, walks, and various interventions.
Her work has been featured on many platforms, such as Aj+, Hyperallergic, MoMa Ps1, Chronogram, El Comodista, BBC, al Ahram, Yale Theater magazine.
Bamieh was artist in Residency at The Invisible Dog in 2021.
Meriem Bennani
Meriem Bennani (b. 1988 in Rabat, Morocco) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Juxtaposing and mixing the language of reality TV, documentaries, phone footage, animation, and high production aesthetics, she explores the potential of storytelling while amplifying reality through a strategy of magical realism and humour. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question our contemporary society and its fractured identities, gender issues and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Bennani’s work has been shown at the Whitney Biennale, MoMA PS1, The Guggenheim museum, Art Dubai, The Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Public Art Fund, CLEARING and The Kitchen in New York.
Gabe Benzur
Working in oils, Gabriel Henry Benzur III has developed a unique style that is simultaneously lush and meticulous. The romantic and the voyeur meet in his paintings, which tease out an emotional vulnerability in the viewer. At their core is a very definitive perspective and themes of beauty, ownership and time – which are accentuated with his innate fascination with obscure pigments and handmade materials.
Born in Atlanta Georgia, Gabriel began painting at an early age. He received a BFA in painting and drawing from Millsaps College, Mississippi in 1998. He went on to study painting and drawing at the École Marchutz in France, and then studied graphic design from 1998 to 2000.
His paintings have been exhibited in group and solo shows in New York, London and Atlanta. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he continues to paint at his studio in the Invisible Dog Art Center.
Katie Butler
Katie Butler is a painter based in Akron, Ohio. She received her BFA from the University of Akron in 2017 and her MFA from Kent State University in 2021. Her allegorical still life paintings provide critical commentary on wealth and power in today's society. Recent exhibitions include “A Seat at the Table” at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York, “New Narratives” at Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland, and “Potluck” at Hashimoto Contemporary in Los Angeles. She has been featured in publications such as Canvas Cleveland and New American Paintings.
Chong Gon Byun
Chong Gon Byun is from South Korea and has lived and worked in New York since 1981. He received a grand prize from 1st Donga Art Competition in 1978 and participated in ‘Ecole de Seoul, one of the most important activities in modern contemporary art history in Korea. When he moved to New York his work was built up on international stages, had many more exhibitions in galleries and museums over the world, and many museums collected his works in the USA and Korea. The New York Times introduced his solo show in February 2000. MoMa film featured a showing and collected his documentary that was directed by Marie Losier in 2012.
Halsey Chait
Chait draws with pen and ink on paper and panel because it is the most immediate and meditative channel for revealing his visions of portals to universes within and without.
Using the center and an outer boundary as guides, the drawings feature dense aggregations of marks that bloom outwards, inspired by the mathematical rules that govern the growth processes of lifeforms and molecular structures.
Improvising with a lexicon of primeval and scientific biomorphic symbols, the drawings weave together the repetitive gestures of music, the mutating iterations of evolution, the turbulence of swarming organisms, and the architectural networks of vibrating space.
Chait is deeply committed to the process of hand drawing algorithmic pattern creations that reflect the vibrating structures of the universe, the body, and molecules. He thrives off of the finality of ink on a surface, of creating permanent lines in a mutable plane of existence where it is impossible to undo what has been done. Where choice and action are bound together as one.
Chang Ya Chin
CHANG Ya Chin (b. 1985 Hong Kong) lives and works in her hometown Hong Kong and New York City. Trained in the academic classical tradition at academies in Florence, Paris and New York City, she now works in a variety of mediums including oil paint, graphite and pixels. Ya Chin is inspired by everyday objects, moments and the mash of cultures around her. Her work is often presented within juxtapositions centered around the interaction of the physical world, conceptual and her inner world.
Frida Foberg
Frida Foberg is a Swedish community-oriented artist, architect and educator based in New York. She holds an MA in Architecture from Aarhus School of Architecture. Her work unfolds the space that floats between individuals, their habits, cultures and conditions. By working with spatial elements encouraging interaction and reflection, she poses questions that explore the notion of self and others. Frida works actively with communities and organizations, holding space for the multitude of voices and their interactions. Her work has been exhibited in the 13th and 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale Di Venezia - Venice Italy, Arko Art Museum - Seoul Korea, Liljevalchs - Stockholm Sweden, Galeri Subsuelo - Berlin Germany, Grow Up - Toronto Canada, Bowery Ballroom - New York NY, Turn Park Art Space - West Stockbridge MA, Albany Center Gallery - Albany NY, Opalka Gallery - Albany NY and Arts Letters & Numbers - Averill Park NY, and includes collaborations with UNICEF, China Academy of Fine Art, Cooper Union, Big Picture Learning, Art Council Korea, Education Reimagined, Iowa State University, Siena College, Opalka Gallery, National Coalition Building Institute, AHS Theater Ensemble and Youth fx, developing programs and platforms to rethink and expand the field of architecture, education and social awareness.
Foodmasku
Antonius Wiriadjaja created the Instagram account Foodmasku — face masks made from meals eaten during COVID-19 self-isolation — after seeing a fellow artist wear a pickle face filter during a zoom meeting. A single piece of kale on his face turned into a daily food face-mask selfie. The project was selected by The New York Times as one of "five art accounts to follow on Instagram now" and he has been minting his work as non-fungible tokens since March of 2021.
Robin Frohardt
Known for her rich aesthetic and highly detailed constructions, Robin Frohardt is an award-winning theater and film director. Her narrative-based film, puppetry and sculpture use recognizable materials, often trash, to create richly detailed worlds that make magic of the mundane and highlight the trivialities of daily life. Her theatrical work has earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award and multiple Jim Henson Foundation Grants. Her play THE PIGEONING hailed by the New York Times as “a tender, fantastical symphony of the imagination,” debuted in 2013 and continues to tour at home and abroad. Her follow-up project THE PLASTIC BAG STORE premiered in Times Square in 2020 and has since toured to Los Angeles, Chicago, Adelaide and Austin. Her films have been official selections at The Telluride Film Festival, Aspen Shortsfest, The One Earth Film Festival and BAM.
Carles García O'Dowd
Carles García O'Dowd (b. 1988) is a New York-based, Spanish-Irish artist originally from Palma, Mallorca. His career has been shaped by activism, counter-culture, pop music, and cartoons. Employing drawing and printmaking as his primary creative modes, García O'Dowd's art explores the contradictions inherent within neoliberal societies through an imaginary pop cosmogony.
He has worked with the activist group "The Beehive Collective" in Maine in the United States and the outsider art group "Le Dernier Cri," in Marseille, France. García O'Dowd has lived and worked in Barcelona, Hamburg, Mexico, France, London, and throughout the U.S. He has also toured the world, giving storytelling presentations with "Project Úter," a collaborative drawing of massive scale about the right to abortion in Spain. He recently graduated with MFA with a Fulbright scholarship at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Jude Griebel
Jude Griebel’s work explores human impact on the world, by merging anatomies and landscapes into single sculptural forms. These detailed works provide new and fantastic understandings of eco-anxiety and speculate on possibilities beyond planetary collapse. His highly crafted sculptures visualize rampant cycles of human consumption and the resulting detriment to both the human self and surrounding world. The mechanics of consumerism is a driving theme behind his work, with a specific focus on the factory food system and its implications for land depletion and climate shift. These patterns are played out on the surfaces of sculptures that express the physical and psychological fallout.
Griebel is a figurative sculptor based between Brooklyn, New York and Bergen, Canada. He has completed numerous residencies including Pioneer Works, New York; ISCP, New York; The Studios of MASS MoCA, North Adams and HALLE 14 Center for Contemporary Art, Leipzig. Recent exhibitions include the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; Galerie Sturm, Nuremberg; and the Spinnerei Archiv Massiv, Leipzig. Griebel’s work has been supported by major grants from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts and he is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. His work is in collections including Arsenal Contemporary Art, Montreal, the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee and the Volpert Foundation, New York.
Margot Guralnick
Margot Guralnick is a writer/editor and also a collector. When she adopted a rescue dog, she became a botanical artist thanks to her hunter-gatherer impulse: for the past seven years, she’s been making daily assemblages from the leaves and twigs she finds on her walks with her beloved mutt, Enrique. Her creations are ephemeral, often put together leash in hand on a patch of roadside and memorialized in photographs. These assemblages are her attempt to decipher and celebrate urban botanical life, so crucial to our well-being but so often completely unnoticed. New York City's trees and weeds present the exotic in the everyday—and provide a source of wonder and solace in the face of an alarming world. They teach the benefits of diversity and the many faces of fortitude. She’s had one-person shows of her work at and at Area on Third Avenue in LA, May-June 2022, and at Area at 1 Fifth Avenue in NYC, 2019. Welcome Mat, a piece she made with sprouting acorns on a doormat, was included in the The Flag Project at Rockefeller Center, NYC, March-April 2021, a show curated by Chris Boot, executive director of Aperture. In April 2018, her Elephant Ear Shield was in Every (ongoing) Day, a show about daily creative practices at Arena 1 Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
Charles Hickey
Charles Hickey (he/him) is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary artist from Atlanta, Georgia. Working primarily with digital modeling and digital fabrication, Hickey creates still lives, drawings, and 3D pen sculptures to explore body functions and visual communication. Engaging with how we see and how we represent objects in space, he pulls from the traditions of still life painting and sculpture, using the genre as an armature on which to experiment and communicate. Hickey received a M.F.A. in Studio Arts from Syracuse University in 2020 and a B.F.A. with a concentration in sculpture from Winthrop University in 2017. His work has been shown at the Everson Museum and Olive Tjaden and Experimental Galleries at Cornell University. He has had solo shows at the Random Access Gallery in Syracuse, NY and West Forty Third in Savannah, GA.
Khaled Hourani
Khaled Hourani lives and works in Ramallah. He was the Artistic Director 2007-2010 and the Director of the International Academy of Art - Palestine from 2010 to 2013. He previously worked as General Director of the Fine Arts Department in the Palestinian Ministry of Culture from 2004-06. Hourani participated in many local and international exhibitions, most recently in 2019 at Dispersed Crowds, a Solo exhibition at Zawyeh Gallery, Ramallah, Picasso and Spanish exile at Musée de art Moderne et Contemporain - Frac Occitanie Toulouse, Catastrophe and the Power of Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, a retrospective at Darat Al funun, Amman, Jordan 2014, the first retrospective exhibition at the CCA in Glasgow, and Gallery One in Ramallah, the Times Museum, Guangzhou in China and in the 2nd CAFA Biennale cafa Museum in Beijing. He participated in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and also in the Sharjah Biennial in 2011. Hourani is the co-founder of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah and the initiator of the 2011 Picasso in Palestine project, Hourani has curated and organized several exhibitions. He writes critically in the field of art and is an active member and founder of a number of cultural and art institutions. In 2013 he was awarded the Creative Time Prize for Art and Social Change in New York City, and in 2019 he was awarded The State of Palestine Appreciation Award for Art. In 2019 he published his book Searching about Jamal Al-Mahamel.
Chihiro ITO
Chihiro ITO is a Japanese painter and multi-media artist. He was born in Tokyo, where studied painting at Musashino Art University. He also took a continuing education writing course at the School of Visual Arts. He was an invited artist at European Capital of Culture events in Portugal, Cyprus and Serbia. In 2018 he received a grant from the Japanese government to come to the US, where he began documenting the remaining living artists associated with Fluxus. He encountered the artist Jonas Mekas during a visit to NYC. After these experiences, he began to make experimental films and poetry. He is the recipient of a Holbein award (2017), NYFA grant (2021), Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant (2021), award from Monira Foundation (2022), and award from Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (2022). His preferred activities are visiting MoMA PS1, Governors Island, Pioneer Works, Queens Museum, and Mizuma & Kips Gallery. In his art he looks for the poetry opportunity in ordinary objects and everyday experiences to connect people across geopolitical boundaries. He has immigrated to NYC.
Oliver Jeffers
Oliver Jeffers is a visual artist and author working in painting, bookmaking, illustration, collage, performance and sculpture. Curiosity, perspective, the power of storytelling, and humor are underlying themes throughout Oliver's practice. While investigating the ways the human mind understands its world, and place within that world, his work also functions as comic relief in the face of futility.
JR
JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors, from the suburbs of Paris to the slums of Brazil to the streets of New York, pasting huge portraits of anonymous people, from Kibera to Istanbul, from Los Angeles to Shanghai. In 2011 he received the TED Prize, after which he created Inside Out, an global participatory art project that allows people worldwide to get their picture taken and paste it to support an idea and share their experience – as of July 2022, over 450,000 people from more than 141 countries have participated, through mail or gigantic photobooths. His recent projects include a large-scale pasting in a maximum security prison in California, a TIME Magazine cover about Guns in America, a video mural including 1,200 people presented at SFMOMA, a collaboration with New York City Ballet, an Academy Award Nominated feature documentary co-directed with Nouvelle Vague legend Agnès Varda, a huge installation on the Pantheon in Paris, the pasting of a container ship, the pyramid of the Louvre, a monumental mural “à la Diego Rivera” in the suburbs of Paris, giant scaffolding installations at the 2016 Rio Olympics, an exhibition on the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island, a social restaurant for homeless and refugees in Paris or a gigantic installation at the US-Mexico border fence. As he remains anonymous, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/interpreter. That is what JR's work is about, raising questions.
Zhanna Kadyrova
Zhanna Kadyrova was born in 1981 in Brovary, the city in Kyiv region, Ukraine, where she currently lives and works. She graduated from Taras Shevchenko State Art School and received the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award, the Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Award for Public Art, the Grand Prix of the Kyiv Sculpture Project (all 2012) as well as a Pinchuk Art Centre Special Prize (2011) and Main Prize Winner (2013). Her works have been extensively exhibited worldwide, recently at the M17 Contemporary Art Centre, Kyiv (2021), the Shanghai International Sculpture Project JISP, Shanghai, the Ukrainian Institute in New York (2020). She participated at the 58th, 56th and 55th Venice Biennale, respectively in 2019, 2015 and 2013. Kadyrova's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Bureau for Cultural Translations, Leipzig, the Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria, the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Museum of Modern Art in Poland and the Pinchuk Art Centre (2012, 2013) in Kyiv, where her first major retrospective will be held in 2023.
Kadyrova’s practice, tackling since its very beginning disciplines as different as sculpture, photo, video, performance, deeply focuses on the exhibition site and space. In her work, the issue of context unravels to reveal the rhythm of History on the move - that of a world whose multiple layers disappear behind their immediacy. Often diverting the aesthetic canons of the socialist ideal still present in the heritage of contemporary Ukraine, Kadyrova’s perspective is partially informed by the plastic and symbolic values of urban building materials. Thus, ceramics, glass, stone and concrete enter the spotlight of her work.
Daniel Kukla
Daniel Kukla is a queer visual artist working in photography, video and installation. Kukla's research-based practice utilizes the photographic medium in experimental ways to interrogate themes of impermanence, evidence and abstraction, beauty and fragility, as well as frontiers that arise in the fields of art and ecology. By exploring ecological, historical and social processes that shape a place or idea, Kukla generates work that speaks to new ways of seeing where everything is intertwined and codependent.
Steven and William Ladd
New York-based artists and brothers Steven and William Ladd have collaborated on artworks ranging from the miniscule to the massive for over two decades. Their artistic practice spans drawing, sculpture, text and bookmaking, is often made of textiles and beadwork and uses storytelling to express the deeper meaning of the work. Steven and William’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Architectural Digest and Art Forum and can be found in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fidelity International, Agnes Gund, Saint Louis Art Museum and Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In 2006 Steven and William founded Scrollathon as a way to empower and engage underserved communities through artistic collaborations. To date over 10,000 people from diverse ages, backgrounds and abilities have collaborated with Steven and William to create public artworks at locations including the commercial development City Point in Brooklyn, NY, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, GA and The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Through partnerships, Scrollathon has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Knight Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies. 2022 launches the National Scrollathon, uniting all 50 states, D.C. and 5 territories to illuminate America’s story through collaborative world class art coinciding with America’s 250th Birthday in 2026.
Spencer Merolla
Spencer Merolla studied religion as an undergraduate and had embarked on a career in academia before returning to her first love, visual art. Her work has explored the social practice and material culture of grief through various affectively-charged materials. Merolla has shown nationally and in Europe, most recently at Artpoetica in Brooklyn and Corte Dell'Arte in Venice. Her work has been featured on Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, and The Creators Project.
Stephen Morrison
Stephen Morrison was born in Maine in 1991. He earned his BFA from the Laguna College of Art and attended Yale Norfolk and the New York Studio Residency Program. He has recently exhibited at The Wassaic Project and The Invisible Dog Art Center. His work has also been a part of numerous group shows, most recently at Lauren Powell Projects, Ethan Cohen Gallery, and The Museum of the Dog.
Anne Mourier
Anne Mourier is a French-born conceptual artist. She works and lives partly in New York and partly in Venice, Italy where she collaborates with highly skilled artisans. Her work investigates the Feminine archetype. She likes the word “archetype” because the focus is on the timeless values of the feminine in each of us and not on gender. She seeks to raise awareness of these values of collaboration, compassion, nurturing, and patience and believe they could help regain balance in a culture that has lost its compass and runs wild. A continuing theme in her work is the theme of taking care of our homes, of ourselves and each other. She has exhibited in several international venues, including - les Rencontres d’Arles in France, and during the 2015 Venice Biennale. Her work is in the collection of the watermill center in New York. She is represented by Sohn Fine Art Gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Prune Nourry
Born in 1985 in Paris, Prune Nourry lives and works between New York and Paris. A graduate of the Ecole Boulle in woodcarving, she is represented by Galerie Templon (Paris – Brussels – New York).
In her projects, the artist raises ethical questions related to the notion of balance in the broadest sense: the body and healing, demographic imbalance due to sex selection and scientific aberrations, the ecosystem and interdependence between living species. Her practice combines sculpture, installation, performance, and video. She collaborates with artisans, works with diverse materials, and explores new techniques. The works she produces are mainly large volumes made in situ, which she destroys, buries, or stages in documented rituals, through photography and video. Her projects are international and based on meetings with specialists, psychoanalysts, geneticists, anthropologists, and researchers.
Nourry’s work extends over different productions in time and space. In China, she created an army of women in terracotta, inspired by the warriors of Xi’an, a project she entitled Terracotta Daughters. Her «daughters» were exhibited around the world between 2013 and 2015, from Shanghai to Paris via Zurich, New York, and Mexico City, before being buried in China in a secret location until 2030.
In 2018, following her breast cancer, the artist made an introspective documentary, recounting her struggle and her projects. Her film Serendipity was presented at the Berlin Film Festival, inaugurated MoMA’s Documentary Film Fortnight, then screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and as part of the Art Basel Film program. In 2019, she created a series of works on illness and healing entitled Catharsis, as well as the monumental installation L’Amazone Érogène, which was exhibited at the Bon Marché Rive Gauche in 2021. She became the first French artist to be invited to exhibit in this place in the Parisian hypocenter. Then, she published her introspective book Aux Amazones, a touching and inspiring testimony that puts creation at the service of healing. Mixing autobiographical accounts and expert reflections, it brings together points of view rarely associated in a book and is addressed to women who are facing the disease, but also to those who accompany them in this fight.
In 2021, Nourry presented a solo exhibition entitled Projet Phenix at the Galerie Templon in Paris. It revives the tradition of portraiture and the intimacy between the artist and her model. Eight visually impaired people are invited to pose in her studio. Blindfolded, without ever seeing them, –neither before, nor during, nor after– she undertakes to create their bust, through touching and listening. Plunged into absolute darkness, the exhibition invites visitors to live this experience in turn.
At the beginning of 2022, she signed the scenography of Atys, the opera-ballet created by Lully for Louis XIV, a new version directed and choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj. The production was presented at the Grand Théâtre de Genève and then at the Opéra Royal de Versailles. In September, Nourry will present her solo exhibition Infinite Arrows at Galerie Templon in Brussels, consisting of geometric works based on arrows. At the same time, the artist is working on a monumental installation Mater Earth for the Château La Coste, which will be inaugurated in October 2022.
Jeremy Olson
Born in Ojai, CA; Jeremy Olson is a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily in painting, with excursions into sculpture and video. His work has been exhibited in New York, London, Miami, Hong Kong, Berlin, Baltimore, Antwerp, Melbourne, and Seoul. Jeremy recently received a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting. Jeremy has been an artist in residence at Praksis Oslo in Norway, Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska, Oxbow School of Art & Artists’ Residency in Michigan, and the SVA Summer Residency in New York. Jeremy received a BFA from the University of Arizona and an MFA from NYU Steinhardt. He is represented by Unit London and Mindy Solomon Gallery.
Sarah Palmer
Sarah Palmer is a photography-based artist who was born in San Francisco and lives in Brooklyn. She received her BA in English and Italian from Vassar College and MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from School of Visual Arts. She was awarded the 2011 Aperture Portfolio Prize and has had solo exhibitions at Mrs. Gallery, NADA Miami, Aperture, and The Wild Project. Her work has been exhibited in recent years at Transmitter (Brooklyn, NY), Monti 8 (Latina, Italy), Rachel Uffner Gallery (NYC), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn, NY), and Launch F18 (NYC). Recent commissions include The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and New Directions Press. She has been self-publishing a series of artist books since 2015, most recently including The Sweets of Pillage and Slipping Rose. Her practice, based in the studio, envisions a wide-ranging and complex conversation about the physical and psychological worlds we inhabit, exploring such disparate topics as performative eroticism, environmental calamity, and photography’s complex relationship to representation. She is currently the Interim Associate Director of BFA Photography at Parsons School of Design, and teaches in the Parsons BFA and MFA Photography programs.
María-Elena Pombo
Working under the moniker Fragmentario, María-Elena Pombo is an interdisciplinary artist with a research-based practice centered around participatory-actions. She was born in Caracas (Venezuela) in 1988 and is based in Brooklyn (USA) since 2011.
Her work has been exhibited at Mana Contemporary (Jersey City), Somerset House (London, England), A/D/O (Brooklyn), SXSW (Austin), Yamamoto Seika (Osaka, Japan), La Guarimba Film Festival (Amantea, Italy) and more. Most recently at the London Design Biennale where her installation ‘La Rentrada’ won the Theme Medal. Pombo has received grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Restoration Project, and others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue Latin America, Forbes, The Financial Times, The Slowdown, Dezeen, and others. Likewise in the book "True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes".
Pombo has worked as faculty at Parsons School of Design, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York Botanical Garden, and as guest lecturer and critic at other traditional and experimental spaces across the USA, Europe, and Japan.
Mac Premo
American, b. 1973; RISD ‘95; artist, filmmaker, commercial director. Mac’s films have exhibited in film festivals worldwide, and his art has exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Belfast, London, Florida and MoMA PS1 in Queens. Mac has won 13 New York Emmy® Awards for his video and animation work, including awards for best commercial, photography, set design and best PSA. Sometimes he writes and performs one-man plays. Mac is a NYFA Fellow, and lives in Brooklyn with his tremendous wife and two totally radical kids. And also their dog, Philomena.
Aaron Ruff
As a young boy growing up in Maine, Aaron was fascinated with the idea of stumbling upon hidden treasures and unearthing ancient relics. Created in 2006, the “Digby & Iona” namesake stems from a trip to Nova Scotia, taken before the company had ever been established. Feeling a connection with the small province and wanting to maintain a level of anonymity, Ruff chose to name his company after the two quiet seaside towns in Nova Scotia.
The son of a craftsman, Ruff has grown up with a strong sense of artistry and construction. Working as both a carpenter and cabinetmaker, he enrolled at Parsons to study furniture design. After taking a class in jewelry making, Ruff soon discovered his true craft. While enjoying the familiarity and technique of creating furniture, he found a more intimate connection with constructing objects that people could wear and cherish. This connection is distinct in each one of his well-crafted pieces.
Ruff now works out of his Brooklyn studio, creating jewelry inspired by everything from history and literature, to the design of nature and tools of necessity. Ruff also draws from his childhood fantasies of exploration, which lends a playful quality to his work.
Alana Salguero
Alana Salguero's artwork explores both the whimsical humor and surreality of altered words, and the grotesque yet beautiful process of decay. She works in mediums including watercolor, gouache, papier mache, and digital art. Alana is an artist-in-residence at the Invisible Dog Art Center and was recently a Gullkistan artist-in-residence in Iceland. Her illustrations have appeared in outlets including Guernica, The Rumpus, Hobart, and Montana Mouthful Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn with her dog, Doodle.
Takao Shiraishi
Takao Shiraishi is a Japanese artist specializes in construction and fabrication. He has twenty-five years of experience in the construction industry. In 2009, he began his artistic career by opening a gallery in Osaka, Japan. Since then, he has collaborated with different artists for a variety of projects: Prune Nourry (Anima, 2016, at The Invisible Dog Art Center), JR (Casa Amarela, 2017, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and Diirby (La Lua, 2017, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). A Tea Room is his first solo work in the United States.
Adam Parker Smith
Adam Parker Smith (b. 1978, Arcata, CA) is a sculpture and installation artist. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz (BA Painting, 2000), the Tyler School of Art at Temple University (MFA Painting, 2003), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008). Smith has had solo exhibitions at The Hole (New York and Los Angeles, 2019, 2017, 2016, 2020, 2022); Galería Curro (Guadalajara, 2019); and Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco, 2014). Smith has been included in group exhibitions at Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco, 2019); Marlborough (London, 2019); Library Street Collective (Detroit, 2018), Galerie Odile Ouizeman (Paris, 2018); Honor Fraser (Los Angeles, 2016), Eric Firestone Gallery (East Hampton, 2016), and Derek Eller (New York, 2015). Reviews of his work have appeared in Art in America (March 2013, Brian Boucher) and The New York Times (August 2015, Roberta Smith), among other various international publications; his work has been featured in Paper Magazine, Interview, AUTRE, Forbes, Art News, The New Yorker, Modern Painters, The Village Voice, and The New York Post. In 2015, he was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and has participated in artist residencies at Abron Arts Center, Wave Hill, Triangle, Swing Space, Sculpture Space and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others. Smith lives and works in Brooklyn.
Elena Subach
Elena Subach, visual artist and curator. Born in 1980 in Chervonohrad, Ukraine. She obtained a university degree in Economics, but now works as a researcher in Lviv National Art Gallery, Ukraine.
Main topics in her artistic practices are: life in province, religion, connection between mythology and identity, her private relations with the world and her own country, with life and death. She looks for unique people, communities, places.
Elena came to photography in 2012, living in Lviv and joining 5x5/Dzyga art community. She is a Member of “Ukrainian Photographic Alternative”. Her photos were published in Gup magazine, British Journal of Photography, SZ Magazine, C41, It’s Nice That, Lensculture, Calvert Journal, Der Greif, Bird in Flight, Sandvich Magazine, Knock Magazine. Her works were exhibited in Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany, France, Poland, Georgia and Ukraine. She was a special prize winner in Bird in Flight competition “New East Photo Prize 2016” and Grand Prix Gomma grant 2019, Future Talents 2019 nominee, Poland’s Ministry of Culture programme “Gaude Polonia 2019” scholarship holder.
Peter Treiber Jr.
Peter Treiber Jr. is an artist, farmer, and carpenter. Since moving from Brooklyn (where he had a studio at The Invisible Dog) in 2016 to his family’s farm on the North Fork of Long Island, his work has evolved to a sharper focus on the land and all the possibilities that come from it.
He strives to highlight the less utilized tools and materials available on the farm. He harvests plants to dye fabrics, distill spirits, brew beer and nourish himself and others. He collects what would typically be discarded and highlights the beauty of it. He places tremendous value in the handmade, using every opportunity on the farm to learn how something works, from traditional practices of harvesting grain to the newest fermentation techniques. Farming has become, for Peter, the greatest creative expression he could have ever hoped for, with the artmaking truly indiscernible from his other daily pursuits.
Peter currently lives and works on the farm with his girlfriend Sophie and dog Peaches. He shows with the gallery VSOP Projects of Greenport, NY.
Arjan Van Dal
Arjan van Dal is a Dutch ceramicist based in London, working on the crossroad between craft, art and design. His departure point is a skills based approach. The outcome looks almost manufactured, for which attention to detail and expertise are essential. Subtle details reveal the handmade nature of the pieces. Form and color are the central elements in his work. The white porcelain is his canvas that is colored and then moulded. The final pieces are polished intensively for a highly tactile experience and to increase the perception of the color embedded in the material. Creating work that through simplicity of form and austere handling of material communicates honesty with a refined touch.
Richard J Vivenzio Jr
Richard Vivenzio is an interdisciplinary artist practicing in Brooklyn, NY. They received a MFA in Fine Art from The School of Visual Art in 2016. Through sculpture and installation, Vivenzio’s work explores interior and exterior space through tangible and perceived intervention. Using common materials, light, shadow, and gravity, their work draws visual conclusions to how the unseen affects perception, with the intangible materials being as important as the physical. Using this concept, Vivenzio’s recent work has been bringing light to the effects of climate change, the current ecological crisis we are all facing. Beginning in 2017, Vivenzio has been working on an ongoing project of site specific, ephemeral land art throughout America and abroad, confronting the topics of: plastic pollution, reef destruction, wildfires, and rising sea levels. Vivenzio strives to find sustainable ways to create work, while speaking to the greater subject of climate change and the ramifications of pollution and consumerism. Work from this series is in the permanent collection of the Yuki Nii Foundation and has been shown multiple times at The Williamsburg Art and Historic Center NY, Las Cruces Gallery at the Southwest Environmental Center NM, and Rockefeller Center in collaboration with The Climate Museum and The United Nations Environmental Program.
Additionally, Vivenzio has shown at; The New House Center of Contemporary Art, C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts (DE), Galería Azotea (MX), and The Hole Gallery. He has been included in fairs; Pulse Art Fair-Projects, and Flux Art Fair, and has been published in Hyperallergic, Artnet, and Time Out Magazine.
Pancho Westendarp
Pancho Westendarp is a Mexican Visual artist. His work has been presented in different shows and festivals in Mexico, USA, Brazil, UK, Latvia, Nigeria, Spain and France. He participated at XV and XVII Photography Biennial of Centro de la Imagen at Mexico City ,was selected to be part of the Discoveries program of Photo España and was part of Riga Photomonth in the show Eating Pineapples in the Moon. He is represented by NY-based Gallery Robert Henry Contemporary and participated at Aqua Art Miami Fair, Volta Basel and SWAB Barcelona. With the support of the Fulbright-Garcia Robles and Fonca - Conacyt scholarships, he finished the MFA program of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. His work is part of the Credit Suisse collection, Fundació Vallpalou and Colección Zarur.
Maya Yadid
Maya Yadid, born in Jerusalem, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Upstate NY and NYC. Her work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of collective and subjective memory, critical history, personal narratives, and materiality. Her practice explores the marginal spaces of diasporic identity and in particular, that of the Arab-Jews, also known as Mizrahim. Archival research, food and social interventions are often used as a way of celebrating this underrepresented culture. By incorporating traditions of ceramic and sculpture, with unorthodox materials she seeks to break the limitations of that medium. Yadid earned a BFA in Fine Arts from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Jerusalem) in 2011 and MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in 2020 (NYC). her work was shown at Museum of Contemporary Art of Tamaulipas (Mexico), NADA and Spring Break Art Fair (NYC) Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), MoBY Museums of Bat-Yam, (IL) Tel-Aviv Museum (IL), Giorgio Cini Foundation (Venice) and more.