Bree Gant - April 2022

bree gant is an artist and thinker from the westside of Detroit. She cultivates a critical, embodied practice that engages art as a form for care and knowledge production. Using photography, film, movement, and installation, bree remarks on the social forces that shape and distort relationship to self and other. Their work is rooted in research and ritual and a legacy of Black queer performance. bree studied film at Howard University while gentrification paved over Washington, DC, and moved back to Detroit, when the city filed for bankruptcy, to see the cranes had followed her home. She has held residencies and fellowships with Art Matters, Kresge Arts in Detroit, Red Bull Arts, People in Education and Detroit Narrative Agency, and exhibits her artwork nationally. Some of their most transformative experiences were collaborative, improvisational performances with The Gathering, Visions of the Evolution, and The Fringe Society. bree is currently researching bus transit, binge watching early 2000s sci fi, and likely at a city park dancing in the snow.

Don Voisine - March 2022

Don Voisine, in Fort Kent, Me, attended the Portland School of Art and Concept, School for Visual Studies in Portland, ME. He received an honorary BFA from the Maine College of Art in 2000. Exhibiting regularly in the U. S. and Europe, Voisine was the subject of a 15 year survey of his paintings at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME) in the fall of 2016. Since 1997 Voisine has been a member of American Abstract Artists, an artist-run organization founded in 1936, and served as the President of the AAA from 2004 to 2012. In 2010 he was elected to the National Academy. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art News, The New York Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Collections include: Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Special Collection of the Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Academy Museum, New York, NY; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; and Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME. Voisine’s work is represented by McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY (US), Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO (US), dr. julius I ap, Berlin (DE), Floss und Schultz, Köln, (DE). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

The image of the painting below is "Passage" 2021, 38 x 48 in., oil & acrylic on wood panel.

Leenda Bonilla - March 2022

Leenda Bonilla is an interdisciplinary artist, arts/cultural producer, and community advocate. Her practice is influenced by her urban/suburban background (born in NYC, raised in The Bronx and Puerto Rico). Leenda develops diaristic projects which focus on the impact of pop culture and social tropes in her experience and communities that conceptualize the intersections of gender, race, and identity. As an “ambiguous beige” artist, Leenda is pulled towards addressing the nuances of colorisms and effects of colonial, patriarchal systems in society and cultural capitalism. Her work in mixed media interprets these ”- isms'' via photography, design, installation, performance, sculpture and collaborations to decolonize the model of the Latinx creative lens which has been primarily male and Eurocentric. Leenda’s ouvres and installation/performance work has been exhibited at Art in Odd Places, (NYC), AS220 (RI), The Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Taller Boricua (NYC), MOLAA (LA), among others. Leenda holds a Masters from the Pratt Institute in Arts/Cultural Management (‘09, Outstanding Merit/Honors with Distinction), and a BA from Manhattan College, Political Science/International Studies and is a proud member of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) Leadership Institute Program. leendabonilla.com, @leenda.art - Insta.

Sachiko Akiyama - March 2022

Sachiko Akiyama received her MFA in sculpture from Boston University and her work is represented by Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville, NC. Her sculptures exert a quiet, physical and psychological presence. She is interested in how tactile, physically assertive forms can describe the psyche – not a specific emotion of though, but rather a state of concentration and introspection. Akiyama has exhibited widely in the United States and she has received multiple fellowships and grants including the Piscataqua Artist Advancement Grant, the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Her work is in the permanent collections of the deCordova Museum and Gordon College. She currently resides in Portsmouth, NH.

Barbara Sullivan - February 2022

Barbara Sullivan is a painter/sculptor and installation artist living in Maine. She works in the age–old medium of fresco, which she learned when she was the head cook at The Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. 

Her work satirizes and celebrates the monotony of everyday life. 

Sullivan’s frescoes are both strange and familiar, tidy and off kilter, tragic and ebullient. The individual shaped fresco objects she makes work well individually, but she often groups them in narrative thematic scenarios using the wall as her ground. Her use of the age-old medium places Sullivan’s work firmly in the medium of painting yet they are individual bas-relief objects which exist simultaneously as sculpture. She attempts to bridge these two disciplines.  

Sullivan attended Monserrat School of Art in Beverly, MA, she holds a B.A. in Art and Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington and an M.F.A. from Vermont College in Montpelier, VT. She teaches drawing foundations at The University of Maine Farmington. She also teaches fresco workshops, including, The Aspen Institute, The Farnsworth Museum, Haystack Mountain School, Pratt Institute, Bowdoin, Colby, and The University of Maine. 

Barbara has been included in several Biennial Exhibitions at The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, and The Center for Maine Contemporary Art Rockport, ME. In 2007 she had her first solo Museum Exhibition, at The University of Maine Museum, Bangor, ME. She has shown in many group exhibitions in Maine and New England as well as in NY that include Morgan Rank Gallery, East Hampton, NY and "Fresh/Fresco", an exhibit at Ernest Rubenstein Gallery, “Fresco, Off The Wall” at The Hudson Guild Gallery, and at Safe Gallery in Brooklyn.  in New York City.  She is a recipient of both the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant and a Pollock/Krasner Grant.

Barbara is Represented by Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, ME. 

Jessica Straus - February 2022

A native of New Hampshire, Jessica Straus lives in the Boston area. Straus works primarily in wood and mixed media, and has most recently been creating site-specific, large scale installations. Inventiveness, humor and narrative are key elements of her sculpture. She is a passionate follower of Outsider Art and writes about her field research on the subject on her blog, “Quirk”.

Straus headed the Visual Arts Department at Concord Academy where she taught Sculpture and Drawing for over two decades. Straus has exhibited her work at numerous venues including Addison Gallery of American Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Fuller Craft Museum, Danforth Art Museum, Duxbury Art Complex Museum, DeCordova Museum, Brattleboro Museum, Ohio Sculpture Center, Qorikancha Museum of Peru, and ArtTerritoire in Normandy, France.Her work is in the collections of DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, Fuller Craft Museum, the Art Complex Museum, and numerous private and corporate collections.

Dalia Amara - February 2022

Dalia Amara is an American-Jordanian multidisciplinary artist working in photography, video, performance, and sculpture. Amara was raised in the USA, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, and UAE. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Amara has lectured, screened, and exhibited in New York, Toronto, and online at White Columns, Gallery 44, Selena Gallery, MOUNTAIN, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Her work has been written about in The New Yorker, Observer, Artnet News, The Art Newspaper, and Hyperallergic.

Ryan Adams - January 2022

Ryan Adams is a Portland Maine artist, born and raised, where he lives with his artist and designer wife and their two daughters. His background in traditional graffiti led him to creating large-scale mural work as well as hand lettered design and signage. His signature ‘gem’ style of work is a geometric breakdown of letterforms with shadows and highlights incorporated in order to create depth and movement. His work often including statements within them that addresses introspective or cultural issues. Currently, Ryan owns and operates a mural and signage company along with exploring and exhibiting his ‘gem’ style work in exterior and interior spaces.

Tempestt Hazel - January 2022

Tempestt Hazel is a curator, writer, artist advocate, and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago-based arts publication and archiving initiative that has promoted and preserved the practices of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists, and artists with disabilities across the Midwest since 2010. Thanks to a lovely nomination from by several members of The Blackivists archivist collective, her curatorial work and work with Sixty was recognized with a 2019 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists (and even though it’s been over two years, she’s still in disbelief over this). She is also the Arts Program Officer for the Field Foundation. At Field she advocates for resources to be directed to Chicago-based BIPOC organizations and artist-led projects that value solidarity economies, cooperative leadership, community organizing, community-defined art forms, and self-determination. Tempestt was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, spent several years in the California Bay Area, and has called Chicago her second home for over 12 years.

A collection of materials from my personal archive, arranged on a wood surface in a row. This image was made to accompany a visiting curator lecture called "To Keep, To Care, To Leave Behind" at the University of Illinois at Chicago in November 2021. Photo by Tempestt Hazel.

Ivan Rios Fetchko - January 2022

Ivan Rios-Fetchko (b. 1994) is a painter and photographer currently living and working in Los Angeles, California, where he was raised. In 2018, he graduated from the Brown/RISD Dual-Degree program with a BFA in Painting from RISD and a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown. His work deals with history, memory, and how they appear in the American landscape and mythos.

Lisi Raskin - December 2021

Lisi Raskin’s creative and curricular practices have become laboratories where they deliberately build anti-architectural bridges between politicized subject matter, queer ontologies, abstraction, collaborative making, non-hierarchical and intersectional interventions into normative systems of power, and engaged pedagogy. These laboratories have supported the making of paintings, drawings, objects, videos, animations, and large, constructed environments that house pedagogical, performative, and socially engaged programming. Raskin is currently working on a book about engaged and inclusive pedagogy. As a member of the rock band Peebls, Raskin has loved, laughed, cooked, and eaten in the process of co-authoring an album of intersectional propaganda for children of all ages.

Mariah Garnett - December 2021

Mariah Garnett (b. 1980, Portland, ME; lives and works in Los Angeles) mixes documentary, narrative and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that accesses existing people and communities beyond her immediate experience. Using source material that ranges from found text to iconic gay porn stars, Garnett often inserts herself into the films, creating cinematic allegories that codify and locate identity. Garnett received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2011 and a BA from Brown University in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, CA (2019); Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, UK (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2016); Buenos Tiempos Int., Brussels, Belgium (2014); 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco (2013); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2010). Garnett's work has been included in group exhibitions at Fierman Gallery, New York (2019); Magic Hour, Joshua Tree (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Vamiali, Athens, Greece (2017); Goldsmiths, London, UK (2017); National Broadcast, Ireland (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); ARTSPACE, Auckland, NZ (2014); and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012). She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video (2019); Macdowell Colony Fellowship (2017); Harpo Emerging Artist Grant (2017); Artadia Los Angeles Award (2016); Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant (2015); and California Community Fund Atlass Fellowship (2014). Her feature film Trouble debuted at BFI London Film Festival 2019, UK and New York Film Festival 2019. Garnett's work is in the collection of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Jesse Littlefield - December 2021

Jesse Littlefield (b. 1977, Massachusetts) has mounted a solo show at Zieher Smith & Horton (New York) and was featured in a two-person exhibition alongside Sadie Laska at Harper’s Books (East Hampton, NY). Littlefield has participated in group exhibitions at Galeri Jacob Bjorn (Aarhaus, Denmark), Gallery Steinsland Berliner (Stockholm), and Martos Gallery (New York). Jesse Littlefield currently lives and works in Portland, Me.

B. Ingrid Olson - November 2021

B. Ingrid Olson (b. 1987) lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. In 2022, Olson will have concurrent solo exhibitions, History Mother and Little Sister, at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Fingered Eyed, i8 Gallery, Reykjavík (2019); Forehead and Brain, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2018); Klein / Olson, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois (2017). Select group exhibitions include The Inconstant World, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California (2021); Dependent Objects, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois (2018); Being: New Photography 2018, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (2018); and Lost Without Your Rhythm, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2018). Olson graduated with a BFA in 2010 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois.

Never odd or even (perhaps the bone I think I am biting is my own tail), 2013-2020
Inkjet print and UV printed matboard in aluminum frame
14.5 x 12.5 in or 12.5 x 14.5 in (36.8 x 31.75 cm or 31.75 x 36.8 cm)

Isaac Jaegerman - November 2021

Isaac Jaegerman is a visual artist working in Portland, Maine. His work centers on drawing and painting, printmaking and cut-paper mediums. Inventing landscapes and pulling natural artifacts into abstract space, Jaegerman explores the way nature can be off-balance, full of near symmetry while falling into disorder, dissonant and alluring. Jaegerman has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, ME, and the Gardenship Residency, NJ. He is a co-founder and co-director of New System Exhibitions in Portland, ME, and recently had an exhibition of ekphrastic work based on a collaboration with poet and fiction writer, Elias Peirce at New System. He has shown his work at Able Baker Contemporary and Cove St. Arts in Portland, ME, and the Pocket Gallery, Newark, NJ. Jaegerman received his BA in Visual Art from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, in 2016.

Kathleen Henderson - November 2021

Kathleen Henderson is a visual artist living and working in the Bay Area. With a tense and energetic line, using oil stick and brush on paper, she creates works that are at once comic, perverse, poignant, and beautiful.

Her work has been the subject of numerous solo shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as the Drawing Center in New York. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been a staff artist at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland for over ten years. Creative Growth is the country’s oldest and largest center for artists with disabilities in the country. She is the founding editor of the Creative Growth magazine, which examines and showcases the unfolding and expanding world of art and disability. Henderson also runs a weekly poetry workshop for poets with disabilities in Oakland with participating poets around the country and publishes their yearly chapbook.

Melissa Levin - September 2021

Melissa Levin is an artist-centered curator, values-driven arts administrator, and steadfast advocate for just and equitable practices in the arts. She has over 15 years of experience leading non-profit arts organizations and realizing ambitious public art projects and exhibitions.

For more than 12 years, Melissa worked at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) where she was the Vice President of Cultural Programs. Her role encompassed wide-ranging institutional and artistic leadership, including directing LMCC’s major artist-centered and public-facing initiatives. From 2010–2017, she led the inaugural and ongoing design and programming at LMCC’s multi-disciplinary Arts Center at Governors Island, supporting 60+ artists year-round and attracting 8,000 visitors during a 4-month public season. She oversaw multiple competitive artist residency programs, operating out of temporarily vacant commercial spaces in Lower Manhattan, and annually serving upwards of 100 artists. Melissa also curated and produced the River To River Festival, a critically-acclaimed, two-week, site-based festival, transforming over 25 public and historically significant spaces throughout Lower Manhattan and on Governors Island, ultimately producing more than 20 place-based projects for 100,000 audience members annually. Artistically, River To River deeply engaged with complex narratives and histories in sites and spaces, centered womxn, artists of color, and queer artists, and amplified underrepresented voices.

Within her decade-long multi-disciplinary curatorial practice, Melissa has also conceived and curated exhibitions including "(Counter)Public Art, Intervention, & Performance in Lower Manhattan from 1978-1993" (2015–16) featuring Jenny Holzer, Tehching Hsieh, Guerrilla Girls, and Pope.L, among others; and Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s experimental solo show, "A Supple Perimeter" (2017). Starting in 2016, with collaborator Alex Fialho, Melissa has curated exhibitions dedicated to the late artist Michael Richards, including "Michael Richards: Winged" at LMCC (2016) and Stanford University (2019). At Stanford, they also organized the interdisciplinary academic symposium “Flight, Diaspora, Identity, and Afterlife: A Symposium on the Art of Michael Richards.” They recently curated Richards’ first museum retrospective, "Michael Richards: Are You Down?" [https://mocanomi.org/2020/11/michael-richards-are-you-down/]—on view at MOCA North Miami from April–October 2021—and are currently editing and authoring Richards’ first monograph.

In 2017, Melissa’s extensive work with Michael Richards’ estate drew the attention of the art advisory firm Art Agency, Partners and she went on to lead their newly formed Artists, Estates, and Foundations division as Vice President in its inaugural three years. At AAP, she both shaped the strategy and vision for this new department and worked directly with artists, families, and estates to implement nuanced approaches to promoting their artistic practices, and to developing values-based initiatives.

Deeply committed to field-wide equity and artist-centered non-profit leadership, Melissa additionally serves on the boards of the Alliance of Artists Communities [https://artistcommunities.org] and Danspace Project [https://danspaceproject.org].

Melissa holds a B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College.

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Lucy Kim - September 2021

Lucy Kim is a visual artist working in painting, sculpture, and biological media. Her work explores visual mechanisms, such as distortion and projection, that are involved in the transition from physical subject to image. Recent exhibitions were held at the ICA Boston; Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge; Institute of Fine Arts-NYU, New York; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs; Lisa Cooley, New York among others. She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art, and is a recipient of the ICA Foster Prize, Artadia Award, Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship and the Mass Cultural Council Grant. Kim has participated in artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell, and the Broad Institute. Her work is in the collection of the ICA Boston; Kadist Foundation, Paris/San Francisco; MFA Boston; and the New York Public Library, New York. Kim is an Associate Professor of Art at Boston University.

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Dr. Melissa Doft, Plastic Surgeon 1. Oil paint, acrylic paint, urethane resin, epoxy, fiberglass, wood framing, 92 x 60 in., 2016. Photo: Tony Luong

See more of Lucy’s work here.

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Auto-Synthetic (Orange). Oil paint, acrylic paint, urethane resin, epoxy, fiberglass, powder-coated aluminum frame, 37 x 23.5 x 2 in., 2018. Photo: Tony Luong

Stephanie Dinkins - August 2021

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates platforms for dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Dinkins’ art practice employs emerging technologies, documentary practices, and social collaboration toward equity and community sovereignty. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded social and technological ecosystems. Dinkins is a professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Professor in Art.

Dinkins earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Studies Program. She exhibits and publicly advocates for inclusive AI internationally at a broad spectrum of community, private, and institutional venues. Dinkins is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow and Knight Arts & Tech Fellow. Previous fellowships, residencies and support include the Artist Fellow of the Berggruen Institute and Lucas Artists Fellow in Visual Arts at Montalvo Art Center, CA Onassis Foundation, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Creative Capital, Soros Equality Fellowship, Data and Society Research Institute Fellowship, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works Tech Lab, NEW INC, Blue Mountain Center; The Laundromat Project; Santa Fe Art Institute and Art/Omi.
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The New York Times featured Dinkins in its pages as an AI influencer. Wired, Art In America, Artsy, Art21, Hyperallergic, the BBC, Wilson Quarterly, and a host of popular podcasts have recently highlighted Dinkins' art and ideas.

Photo by Hilary Schaffner

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See more of Stephanie’s work here.

Karen Adrienne - August 2021

Karen moved to Maine in 1987 and taught Printmaking, Drawing, and Bookmaking at the University of Maine @ Augusta until 2017. Her print works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and she has received numerous grants and awards.

Karen’s prints are conceptually and physically embedded in reciprocity. They are built by the mutual relationship of concealing and revealing, plan and chance. As she investigates properties of nature with marks and inky flats of color, she explores properties of paper by folding with the pressure of the press. Layers are built upon until she has captured a momentary balance of chance with a fugitive experience of nature. It’s about chance, and the urge to capture a moment and the vision of that experience. “

Her travels and residencies have informed her creative work and influenced the media used.  Artist residencies include Vermont Studio Center Residency, Tilting Artist in Residence, Fogo Island, Newfoundland & Labrador Canada, Anderson Ranch Fellowship sponsored by Boston Printmakers, NEFA Fellowship, NEA & Arts International Travel Grant, MAC grants, Karl Hoffer Society, Fundacion Valpariso, and MARC Residencies.

Karen Adrienne is also the owner and director of Artdogs Studios, founded in 2004, and Circling the Square Fine Art Press, founded in 2007.  Both of these studios are located in a rehabbed 1860’s building in the historic district in Gardiner, Maine.

Artdogs Studios creates a community of working artists with five artist day studios and one artist residence.  Circling the Square Fine Art Press is an open-access press that builds a community of print-based artist in Central Maine and provides a non-toxic studio and a gallery for the display of their work.  The press has participated in local and international print exchanges including the Solisquoy Press in Orkney Scotland, and Estamperia Quitena in Quito, Ecuador.

Photo by Hilary Schaffner

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Canaries in the Coal mine

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Sky Totem, 2019

See more of Karen’s work here.