Art Lecture Series – The Evergreen State College

4/22, Week 4: Julia Rooney

March 28, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Julia Rooney is a New York-based visual artist who makes paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Sensitive to the increasing dominance of a screen-based world, she creates work rooted in physicality and bodily perception of one’s environment, often responding to conditions such as light, scale, texture, and architecture. In addition to paint, she uses postal correspondence, cyanotype and other explicitly analog technologies to capture a sense of time and place. Rooney has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and been awarded residencies and fellowships through The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. She was born and raised in New York City, where she currently lives and works as a Teaching Artist.

5/6, Week 6: Miranda Mellis

March 28, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (Nightboat Books); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody (forthcoming, Solid Objects 2026). She has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony and was the ESRR Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Utah in 2026. With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She trained at the Upaya Zen Center as an interfaith, all faith, and no faith chaplain. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she teaches at The Evergreen State College. Read her intermittencies at: https://youareinlovewiththeimpossible.substack.com/.

5/20, Week 8: Ralph Pugay

March 28, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Ralph Pugay works across painting, drawing, and other media to build nonlinear worlds shaped by humor, contradiction, and the layered noise of contemporary culture. The works unfold through loose fables and open situations, where everyday absurdities, digital traces, and emotional undercurrents circulate and take form in different ways. Figures, animals, and gestures appear in shifting arrangements, informed by modes of being together that are adaptive, relational, and slightly off-balance, sometimes engaging narrative, other times existing without it. Humor plays a recurring role in the work, functioning as one of several ways the work navigates tenderness, friction, and surprise.

Pugay (b. 1983, Cavite, Philippines; lives and works in Portland, OR) holds a BA and MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Adams & Ollman , Cristin Tierney , AA|LA, Vox Populi, Seattle Art Museum, Hallie Ford Museum of Art , Marinaro, Chez Max Y Dorothea, Hunter College Art Galleries , and Ditch Projects.

2/25, Week 8: Dan Webb

February 19, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Dan Webb is a full-time wood carver, tinkerer, and sculptor. Dan has been showing in galleries and museums for over 20 years. His work is owned by numerous museums throughout the country, among them the Smithsonian, the New Museum, Seattle Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum, and the Museum Of Glass in Tacoma. In addition to gallery and museum shows, Dan has made public art projects since 2004. Dan’s work explores sculpted organic forms movement from transitional to fixed objects, the familiar and discarded in conversation with arms and legs frozen in flexion, extension, and retraction. Figures concealed by carved fabric stand hunched over masses of boots, while chairs blister and melt with globs of fir. Dan is a winner of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, the Betty Bowen Award, the Washington State Artist Fellowship award, and has been a finalist for the Neddy, and the Stranger Genius Award. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

1/28, Week 4: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes

January 28, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Maikoiyo Anabi Alley-Barnes (b. 1977, Seattle) is a multimedia artist, curator, filmmaker, writer, and designer exploring the resonance of genetic cultural memory through the mundane and the mystical. Alley-Barnes’ practice offers meditative narratives that reflect his fascination with, admiration for, and immersion in the aesthetic, ritual and continuum that is the Black Metaphysical. Be it through his headdress and mask work, PELTS, or unique brand of sculpture called refuse alchemy, Alley-Barnes’ practice brings a more visceral, lush, and sensual sensibility to our day-to-day lives.

Alley-Barnes has exhibited in the United States and internationally. In August of 2023, he unveiled his first large scale public art installation titled “Sent, Scent, Sense”. This work is the result of a photograph of one of the artist’s sculptures printed on vellum and layered onto a hand-drawn Kente cloth-coded pattern. The final work is realized as a digitized, large-scale print applied to the steel surface of a vehicle door located at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle.

Alley-Barnes has been invited to speak in the United States, Canada, and Europe where he engages in multidisciplinary, critical discourse about art historical scholarship, his own practice, and contemporary art. Alley-Barnes is a founding member of the multidisciplinary creative collective Black Constellation. He lives and works between Seattle, WA and Los Angeles, CA.

1/14, Week 2: Shaw Osha

January 14, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Shaw Osha is an artist and educator and has just finished an assemblage that reimagines her work over the last ten years as an artist’s book. The book mixes painting projects with writing to contemplate the relentlessness of racialization in American culture since slavery. Using fragile and unstable materials like pigments, flowers, paper, emotions, and language, her book compares, intersects, and maybe fleetingly locates a haunting of a personal, collective, and social ghost that resists comprehension or meaning but returns and repeats.

She has exhibited work in venues including New York’s Pocket Utopia; The Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University; Satellite UNC in Chapel Hill, NC, and the Ali Center in Louisville, KY. She is a member of the faculty at Evergreen and teaches an interdisciplinary arts curriculum that allows students to study at the intersections of intellectual, research, and creative activity.

2/11, Week 6: Estefania Puerta

January 14, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Estefania Puerta‘s work delves into organic/inorganic materials to form new poetics of transformation and translation. She is interested in what is gained and lost in the process of making and the new worlds that can emerge from recontextualizing materials. Her practice is rooted in world making, shape shifting, border crossing, and language failure. Her research in psycho-analysis as it relates to the history of hysteria, natural medicine/folklore, and personal histories of immigration and undocumentation in the U.S. has led to questions around what is considered “natural” and “alien” in her materially diverse work.

Puerta was recently awarded the 2024 Philip Guston Rome Prize. Her work has been recently exhibited at The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Nina Johnson Gallery, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, Lyles and King, and Micki Meng Gallery. She was included in the New England Triennial at DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in 2022. Puerta received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2018. She was born in Colombia and currently lives and works between Vermont and New York.

Week 2, 10/8 Katelyn Stiles

October 8, 2025 / oshas / 0 Comments

Xéetl’ee Katelyn Stiles is an artist and scholar working in the mediums of movement, film, drawing, and community-based research creation. Katelyn is Lingít, of the Kiks.ádi Clan (Raven/Frog) and Kaxátjaa Hít [Shattering Herring House] of Sheet’ká [Sitka, Alaska], and a citizen of Sitka Tribe of Alaska. Her ancestors are also Norwegian, English, and French settlers. Women of her clan are known as Kax̲átjaashaa [Herring Ladies] and this responsibility is central to her work.

Her creative community-based research centers the rematriation of Herring Lady embodied protocols with Yaaw [Pacific Herring] to co-create ecosystems. Her work crosses into critical Indigenous Studies, Improvisation and Performance Studies, and Feminist Science and Technology Studies, focusing on embodiment and relationality to land, water, the more-than-human, and technology. Movement is central to her work and she has danced professionally in different contexts. She also lived in Berlin, Germany for several years, where her film work was screened internationally in film festivals. Her recent projects include the film Yee eedé tooshí áa [We sing to you] and the creation of the Herring Lady and Shame Robe Dance, both collaborations with Ḵ’asheechtlaa Louise Brady and Herring Ladies.

Katelyn holds a PhD and MA in Native American Studies with a designated emphasis in Performance and Practice from the University of California, Davis. She also received a BA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley. She currently works as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Arts at Evergreen State College, and previously taught Indigenous Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast in Sheet’ká.

Week 4, 10/22 Robert Glück

October 8, 2025 / oshas / 0 Comments

Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer and editor. In the late 70’s, he and Bruce Boone founded New Narrative, a literary movement of self-reflexive storytelling that combines essay, lyric, and autobiography in one work. Glück is the author of the novels Margery Kempe, About Ed, and Jack the Modernist (all NYRB); the story collections, Elements and Denny Smith; and a volume of collected essays, Communal Nude. His books of poetry include La Fontaine with Bruce Boone, Reader, In Commemoration of the Visit with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox. With Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, he edited the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic and associate editor at Lapis Press. He served as director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Glück is a potter as well as a writer. He has shown his ceramics most recently at Treize Galerie in Paris and at Artists Space in New York. He lives “high on a hill” in San Francisco.

Week 6, 11/5 Rob Rhee

October 8, 2025 / oshas / 0 Comments

Rob Rhee is an artist, writer and an Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Visual Art program at the University of Washington. His work has been exhibited in the Pacific Northwest at the Portland Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Hedreen Gallery, and the Sarah Spurgeon Gallery at Central Washington University. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at the Hunterdon Art Museum, White Columns, the Fort Worth Contemporary Gallery and the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, as well as in the 10th Berlin Biennale, the 2011 Changwon Biennale, and at the Ilmin Museum of Art, in Seoul, South Korea. In 2018 he was awarded the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Art and was nominated for a Stranger Genius award in 2016. His blog, Tabletop, was Short-Listed for an Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation and his critical writing on art has been published in Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Arcade, Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters, and La Norda.