@yolchiki

Yola Monakhov Stockton is an artist working in photography, film, and media on themes of ecology, land relations, and community practice. Her work engages collaboration with science laboratories, community groups, and other systems. She is particularly interested in forms of resilience and adaptation across webs of life within social and political contexts.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the George Eastman Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, JP Morgan Chase, and Fidelity Investments. She is the author of The Nature of Imitation (Schilt, 2015), a photographic monograph created in collaboration with scientists and ecologists who study bird behavior and migration. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Alice Austen Museum, George Eastman Museum, Last Projects LA (upcoming), Light Field Festival, Sasha Wolf Gallery, Garden Gallery LA, and Rick Wester Fine Art, and Tianshui Photography Festival, and is represented by Schilt. She has curated art and photography exhibitions at Buffalo State University, Columbia University, and the International Center of Photography.

She has also worked in photographic reportage, covering the Middle East, Central Asia, former Soviet Union, and cultural life in New York City, her work appearing in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, Marie Claire, Newsweek, Der Stern, Vostok, and other publications. Prior to coming to UH, she was Harnish Visiting Artist at Smith College and directed the Photography and Documentary Studies program at SUNY Buffalo State.

@yavgeniya.baras

Yevgeniya Baras is an artist based in New York.  She has exhibited her work at the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY); White Columns (NY, NY); The Landing Gallery (LA, CA); SOCO Gallery (Charlotte, NC); Nicelle Beauchene (NY, NY); Reyes Finn Gallery (Detroit, MI); Gavin Brown Enterprise (NY, NY); Inman Gallery (Houston, TX); Mother Gallery (NY, NY); Sperone Westwater Gallery (NY, NY); Thomas Erben Gallery (NY,NY); The Pit (LA, CA); as well as internationally including NBB Gallery (Berlin, Germany); Julien Cadet Gallery (Paris, France); Station Gallery (Sydney, Australia). She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters ( NY, NY).

Baras' paintings take shape through a process of layering and accumulation, combining oil media with various found and unconventional materials. The resulting objects hover between painting and sculptural relief, with layers that frequently extend onto the sides and supports of the canvas, refusing any definitive boundary. Within these stratified compositions, Baras creates symbolic topographies which address ideas of language, migration, and translation. The material richness of the work serves to generate abstractions that are encoded and deeply personal.

Yevgeniya is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant in 2023 and 2018. Baras was named Senior Fulbright Scholar for 2022/2023. She was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2021 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Baras was selected for the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018 and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014, she was named a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, LA Times, ArtForum, The New York Review of Books, and Art in America, amongst others.

Baras co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side (2010-2018).

Baras holds a BA in Psychology and Fine Arts and an MA in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007).

@tomelickart

Thomas Elick makes works on paper using ink, watercolor, acrylic, gouache, and collage elements-  found images, monoprints, and images printed from my phone. The imagery he produces could fall under the broad category of “maps”: inspired by schematic renderings of real or imagined landscapes, allegorical diagrams of the body or mind, weather modeling, or children’s placemat mazes. This kind of imagery is generally not intended to succeed as art, but to serve as a guide—surfaces that point toward meaning and prompt the viewer to mentally traverse a space formed through association, misdirection, and suggestion.

Thomas’s work as a paper conservator has connected him to the beauty of the folds, tears, stains and various mishaps addressed in his studio. His surfaces contain valleys and hills, cast shadows, and warp to emphasize or obfuscate the imagery of the piece. There are tears, holes, elements that lift or curl. The processes of damage and repair are integral to the finished drawing. The result is a dense and undulating surface that suggests both a textile and a sprawling, sprouting, confounding map.

The current drawings address themes of superstition, repetition and transformation of forms, and the impulse to anthropomorphize the natural world. Images of the spooky or malevolent sit beside sunsets, light spectra, and other markers of natural beauty. Weaving these elements together- a pockmarked moon by a skeletal hand- creates work that balances the playful and the unsettling; that splices together the moments of surprise, connection, and insight that an artistic  practice generates.

@t.istomina

Tatiana Istomina’s artwork is informed by double relocation: from Russia to the US, and from research in physics to contemporary art. The central questions of her practice are the conditions of knowledge and the variable concepts of truth. How do we know what we know? How do we know what we know is true? Is there one truth? Who owns it?

Isotomina’s recent work investigates the structures and underlying assumptions of various didactic systems, including the polarized landscape of contemporary news media, American primary education, and English as a Foreign Language instruction. She combines fragments from news articles, textbooks and my son’s second-grade notebooks into poetic juxtapositions, painstakingly reproducing them with hand-embroidery on fabric.

@kimfaler

Kim Faler's interdisciplinary practice explores everyday experiences and questions how memory and trust unfold over the passage of time. Recent solo exhibitions include PALO Gallery (New York City, NY), the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University (Providence, RI), the Beeler Gallery at the Columbus College of Art & Design (Columbus, OH), and the Saint Kate Hotel (Milwaukee, WI). She has also shown at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), creating two site-specific installations. Faler’s work has garnered international recognition, earning her numerous awards such as the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, a US Fulbright Scholarship (to Brazil), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (Captiva, FL), the Artpace International Artist-in-Residence Program (San Antonio, TX), and the Kohler Artist/Industry Program (Sheboygan, WI). Her work is available at PALO Gallery, NYC.

@ktucek

Kaitlyn Tucek lives and works in Denver, CO. Tucek is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work has been shown in New York, Aspen, Palm Springs and Denver, including exhibits at The Dairy Arts Center, Black Cube Nomadic Museum, Leon Gallery, Friend of a Friend, and K Contemporary Gallery. Tucek has been featured in SW Contemporary Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Aspen Times, Westword, Denver Life Magazine, Modern in Denver, CPR’s Denverite, and was named one of Denver’s top 5 artists to watch and collect by 5280 Magazine. From Long Island, NY, Tucek graduated from Pratt Institute in 2006 and was awarded a Master’s from CUNY Queens College in 2013. Tucek also works in education at The Clyfford Still Museum and Arapahoe Community College.

@deputyglitters

Matt Tripodi is a self-taught artist whose work resonates with a nostalgic energy of the 80s and 90s. His diverse interests inform his visual content and infuse his art with a humor, joy, and absurdity. Through painting and sculpture, Tripodi explores playful themes, often incorporating food, neon lights, diagrams, and childlike mark-making. While his style is light-hearted and whimsical, there is a depth to his work that reflects his musings on life, human experience, and artistic rebellion.

@suzannedittenber

Suzanne Dittenber received her BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, her MFA from the University of New Hampshire, and has completed studies at the New York Studio School and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at Florida State University, Michigan State University, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Wiregrass Museum of Art, Atlanta Contemporary, Mana Contemporary, Blue Mountain Gallery, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Chiba City Museum Art, and CICA Museum. Dittenber has been awarded artist residency grants at ISCP, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, MICA’s Alfred and Trafford Klots Residency in Brittany, France, and the Heliker LaHotan Foundation Residency on Cranberry Island, Maine.

She lives and works in Asheville, NC where she is an Associate Professor of Painting at UNC Asheville.

@tomschramstudio

Tom Schram lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and works as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Western Carolina University. His exhibition record includes Art Fields (Lake City, SC), Lyndon House (Athens, GA), Bascom Center for the Visual Arts (Highlands, NC), Echo Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), Del Mar College (Corpus Christi, TX), and Eastern Mennonite University (Harrisburg, PA), He obtained a BFA in Painting from UNC Asheville and an MFA in Sculpture from Clemson University.

Schram’s studio work involves a conversational relationship between viewer, place and material. He works in a variety of methods including object making, interactive installation, video, and sound and is intrigued by the continually progressive use of technology in daily life as it intersects, and at times conflicts with, one’s ability to experience and observe actual physical and social landscapes.

He has worked as a professional fabricator on projects such as the High Line in New York City and the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He has given several lectures on his work including the last two SECAC Conferences, presenting Examining Site Identity in Georgia’s Production Forests and Post Consumer Making Materials.

@benbencowan

Ben Cowan was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Indiana University. The artist can be spotted examining plants and buildings as he walks to and from his studio in Brooklyn, New York. Occupationally, Cowan has worked in the studio of Jeff Koons and presently as a Scenic Artist for motion pictures. Cowan draws inspiration from urban landscapes and gothic architecture, blending observed places, personal objects, and religious abstractions to create paintings that bridge reality and illusion, personifying the interpersonal and the supernatural. Cowan’s work has been shown at New York City’s 550 Gallery, The Painting Center, and Spring Break Art Show. Cowan’s work is in private and public collections including The University of Scranton, Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan, and The Racquet Club of Chicago.

@artdarkajian

Allyson Darakjian is a multidisciplinary artist investigating and utilizing her personal memories as “texts,” curious about how memory might be indexed within the body. She uses an interdisciplinary approach mixing performance, psychoanalysis, and painting to explore how intuitive marks and gestures expressed with her body reinterpret or embody the emotion of memories. Currently her work explores the maternal body as a liminal space between mother and other, a hyper-bodied, hybrid entity that is beings contained in one. Allyson has a BA in studio art from Westmont College and a MA in Theology and Culture with an emphasis in visual art from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. She recently received her MFA in interdisciplinary arts from the University of Nevada Reno. Her work has been featured in various illustration and design projects for International Arts Movement, Compagnia Colombari Theater Company, Lit Moon Theater Company, Ratatat Theater Company, Canlis Restaurant, Brehm Center Fuller Northwest, J. Shipley Creative, The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, Westmont College, Good Company Players and Cyclical Publishing. She is the recipient of the Richard Cook Award.

@beckybrwn

Becky Brown was born in Manhattan and currently lives in Buffalo, NY. Her work celebrates material presence and the handmade mark as productive alternative to online culture, with the power to restore attention and joy. She received her MFA from Hunter College and is currently an Assistant Professor at SUNY University at Buffalo. Solo and two-person exhibitions include PS122 Gallery (NYC), Arts+Leisure Gallery (NYC), the Handwerker Gallery (Ithaca, NY), Raft of Sanity (Buffalo, NY) and Fort Gondo (St. Louis, MO). Group exhibitions include The Drawing Center, Queens Museum, Freight+Volume Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery and A.I.R. Gallery (all NYC); Last Projects (Los Angeles); Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art and Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY) and Religare Arts Initiative (Delhi, India). She has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay, Edward Albee and Saltonstall Foundations, among others. Her installation “No, said the Fruit Bowl,” in the kitchen of an abandoned home on Governors Island, was described in the New York Times as “machines vomiting as if in a bulimic’s nightmare.” She has received grant funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Bronx Council on the Arts. Her writing has been published in Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail.

@williamsanten

Bill Santen was born in Lexington, KY and currently lives in Buffalo, NY. Between songwriting and the visual arts, he makes portraits of human and natural subjects, using observation, oral history, memory, reenactment and poetic interpretation. As the songwriter and musician Birddog (1995-2005), he released five records, covered in publications including Pitchfork, Mojo and ACE Magazines, and included in films and plays. Birddog has collaborated with musicians Elliott Smith, Glenn Kotche, Edith Frost and Jason Lowenstein. Since returning to songwriting in 2013, he has played at venues including Pianos, Pete’s Candy Store, the Greene Space and Dixon Place (NYC), Nietzsche’s and Fitz Books (Buffalo, NY) and Horseshoe Tavern (Toronto). As a visual artist, Santen works in 16mm film, video, sculpture and photography. Projects have been screened, performed or exhibited at Queens Museum, Thomas Erben Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and the Bronx River Art Center (all NYC), Raft of Sanity and Play/Ground (Buffalo); and abroad at the Masc Foundation, Vienna, Austria; Wschodnia Gallery, Lodz Poland; and the Overgaden Museum of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark. He has been an artist-in-residence at Mildred’s Lane in Narrowsburg, Pennsylvania; and earned his MFA from Columbia University and his BA from the University of Kentucky, College of Fine Arts.

@riskerbach

Chris Baker is a graphic designer and artist based in Holland, Michigan, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2023. Playing on the line between Graphic Design and Art, his work shifts between the external and internal, the representation of self and others. The focus of the work becomes language, translation, culture, and learning. He has designed books, brands, and websites for many artists, as well as galleries, museums, and non-profits. This sort of design work informs the art he participates in. With a focus on graphic language, he works with an attention to symbols, like letter forms and numbers, which are then pushed toward abstraction through defamiliarization. Subsequently topics like memory, record, time and space arise. He works in a variety of mediums from painting to printmaking through code based practices like javascript, html, and css. His work can be found in the gift shop at many art museums around the world.

@kat.chamberlain

Kat Chamberlin (b. 1981, Amsterdam, NL) lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been featured at notable institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Chicago Cultural Center, Baltimore Museum of Art and BRIC. She has shown at Helena Anrather, Hesse Flatow East, Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NY), Selena’s Mountain, Guest Spot at the Reinstitute, and Beverly’s among others. Kat completed her MFA in Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and is the recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Toby Devan Lewis Award and the William Dole Award. Kat has been a resident at the NARS Foundation, Lynda Benglis’s Santa Fe Compound Residency, the BRIC Media Arts Fellowship and the Makrolab Station as a resident ‘lab rat’ in the Slovenian pavilion during the 2003 Venice Biennial.

@aleishafitz

Aleisha Fitz (b. 1988) is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Colorado, USA. Composing primarily with ceramic sculpture, her work often features soft, dimensional surfaces and a fusion of architectural and organic forms. Her visual style draws upon forms found in nature, observing and sometimes obscuring them with scale or abstraction. Her detailed sculpting, alongside techniques such as carving, modeling, and slab construction concerns itself with light and balance to imply a sense of movement. Using tactile and elemental mediums ranging from metal and wood to fiber and clay, her work regards the body, the animal world, and symbols to invite associations and curiosity and ultimately, to reveal the invisible connections all around us. Since 2021, Fitz has resided in Mexico City. Her work features in various national and international collections.

@michael_gac_levin

Levin’s paintings aim at the mystery and the intensity of childhood. At the core, Levin’s work is a lighthearted, diaristic drawing practice guided by repetition and humor. Riding a wobbly line down into memory, the artist finds images that speak to our predicaments in the present and the uncertainty of the future. As they feed into paintings, the drawings take on color, bringing associations to nostalgia, the nocturnal, and the fantastical. Reflective, dreamlike compositions offer views of a world in which everything is animate and purposeful. A world where anything might suddenly rise to speak, stalk or play. A sense of archaic monumentality pervades the images, but feels as soft and yielding as a pillow fort or a loaf of bread.

@parentpueblo

Melina Gac Levin, MSEd is the founder of Pueblo, a learning platform that equips multicultural parents with the skills and information they need to parent confidently. Pueblo offers culturally sustaining online classes and consultations about child development. Melina has over a decade of experience supporting children, families and educators. She teaches graduate courses in child development at Bank Street College of Education, from which she holds dual masters degrees in Infant and Family Development, Early Childhood General and Special Education, and Early Intervention. Her undergraduate degree is from Columbia University, where she studied visual arts, Latino studies, and dance. Melina presents regularly at professional conferences including at Bank Street's Infancy Institute, the Language Series, and the NYSAIS Diversity and Equity in Curriculum Conference. She is a partner in Premier Pediatrics' First Month Project. Her writing can be found on her Substack, Motherly, The EveryMom, and Cup of Jo among other publications.

@meglipke

Meg Lipke was born in 1969 in Portland, Oregon and was raised in Burlington, Vermont and Cheshire, England. She received her MFA from Cornell University and has taught at The University of Northern Iowa, Cornell University, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been reviewed in Art in America, the Village Voice, the New York Times and many online publications. She lives and works in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

@adapootter

Wright Potter’s installations re-stage the material qualities of photography using reflective mylar and mirrors to capture and play with light, calling up a filmic process. The artist employs transparent and translucent materials, like acetate and mylar, to mimic analog film while invoking a feeling of hi-tech ephemerality. The prints are digitally altered, illuminated and flipped on their axis to muddle recognition, exploring the difference between formal surfaces and physical or metaphorical grounding.

@andrewhendrixsonstudio

Andrew Hendrixson is an artist, writer, and currently a doctoral student at Duke University where he was named the Bowden Scholar and where he works at the intersection of the arts, theology, and philosophy. He's been an artist-in-residence at the Whale and Star Studio, the Chautauqua Institute, the University of Dayton, the Springfield Museum of Art, and the Byrdcliffe Colony. His artwork and writing can be found in publications including New American Paintings, the Princeton Theological Review, Image, Yale Letters, and an essay of his was included in the anthology Best American Essays 2021. Andrew has worked and made art alongside incarcerated youth for the project Not Yet Fallen, traveled the country for an experimental work called The House Shows Project in which he held conversations about the arts in living rooms from LA to NYC, and is currently working with the City of Columbus, Ohio on a 50' mosaic mural. Andrew holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Florida and an MA in Philosophy, Theology, & the Arts from Yale University. He lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife, Lindsey, and their baby girl, Cora Eden.

@sonyabergstudio

In her current work, Sonya Berg explores the relational weight of portraiture, using painting, photography, and collage techniques to create tension between realistic depth and superficial abstraction in the rendering of natural imagery. Her paintings become icons of sorts, challenging the media-laden consumer culture of images by elevating the ordinary and casual to the vulnerable and valuable. Born in Raleigh, NC and raised in suburban Philadelphia, Sonya received her MFA in painting from The University of Texas at Austin in 2010. She has held residencies at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, CA and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson VT. She currently teaches at St. Edward’s University in Austin.