Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003). Jemison uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine “progress” and its alternatives.
Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Brooklyn Museum; the Drawing Center; LAXART; the New Museum; the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Laurel Gitlen; Team Gallery; and other venues. Her publishing project, Future Plan and Program, commissions literary work by artists of color and has published books by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and Harold Mendez, among others. She has participated in artist residencies at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Jemison has served as a visiting critic in the graduate art programs at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Illinois-Chicago. She was a 2013 Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awardee and a 2014 Art Matters Grantee. In 2015, she presented her new multipart commission Promise Machine at the Museum of Modern Art.
Jemison is currently an artist-in-residence in the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program. She teaches at Parsons The New School for Design, the Cooper Union, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Wendy Red Star is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Red Star received her B.F.A. from Montana State University-Bozeman and her M.F.A from UCLA in 2006. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her exhibitions include shows at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Hallie Ford Museum, The Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2009, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Missoula Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, National Museum of the American Indian-New York, Portland Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bockley Gallery, and Haw Contemporary gallery. She has been a visiting lecturer at a range of respected institutions, including The Banff Centre, CalArts, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Portland State University, Dartmouth Hood Museum, Figge Art Museum, Fairhaven College, Fine Artworks Center-Provincetown, and I.D.E.A. Space-Colorado College.
JOHN FEODOROV
Born in Los Angeles of mixed Navajo (Diné) and Euro-American heritage, John Feodorov grew up in the suburbs of Southern California while making annual visits to his family’s land near Whitehorse, NM. The time he spent with his mother and grandparents on their homestead near the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon continues to inform and impact his work.
John has been called a conceptual artist, a political artist, as well as a Native American artist, but he is still not sure how to define what he does. His work includes painting, drawing, assemblage, installation, video, music and songwriting. He also has engaged in experimental performance in the past, but not lately. Currently, he writes and performs with his art/pop band, The Almost Faithful.
John’s work as been widely exhibited and has been featured in several publications; most recently in Time and Time Again, by Lucy R. Lippard, and Manifestations, edited by Dr. Nancy Marie Mithlo. He was also featured in the first season of the PBS series, “Art 21: Art for the 21st Century”.
John has also worked with the Seattle-based afterschool arts program, Artscorps, and served as an Arts Commissioner for the City of Seattle. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Fairhaven College.
SARA SIESTREEM
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos and American, 1976-) is from the Umpqua River Valley in South Western Oregon. She grew up in Portland, Oregon. She is a Master Artist and Educator. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators and her training in both fields began in the home. Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. Siestreem is the weaving student of Greg Archuleta, Greg Robinson, and Nan MacDonald. She is represented by Augen Gallery in Portland and her work has been shown in museums and figures in prestigious private and public collections nationally.
Her studio work is multi-disciplinary. Her primary language is painting, but she also works in photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, and traditional weaving.
She teaches Foundations in Studio Arts and Indigenous Studies at PSU and Traditional Weaving Practices for The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. She works as a consultant and free lance educator for museums and cultural groups regionally. Siestreem also serves various youth organizations and individuals in the role of mentor, workshop leader, promoter, public speaker and volunteer.
She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon.
CORWIN CLAIRMONT
Corwin (Corky) Clairmont is a contemporary artist and enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Living in Los Angeles, Corky pursued a contemporary exhibiting artist career as well as teaching and becoming department head of printmaking at the Otis/Parsons Art Institute located in Los Angeles, Ca. Upon his return to Montana in 1984, Corky began administrative work at the newly credited Salish Kootenai College located in Pablo, Montana on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation. This included the creation of the SKC Fine Arts Department and art degree program. Through work as a printmaker, conceptual and installation artist, Corky’s images discuss and explore situations or issues that effect tribal people such as sovereignty, colonization, giving a cultural and historical perspective. Corky’s artwork has been exhibited through out the United States and in several Countries including Germany Norway, New Zealand, France, and most recently at the US Embassy located in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa. Awards have included Ford and National Endowment of the Arts, the Eiteljorg Fellowship Award, and the 2008 Montana Governors Award for Visual Arts. He currently serves on the State Board of the Montana Arts Council.
Lisa Blas is a visual artist of Guamanian / Italian-American descent working in painting, collage, photography, and installation. Based in New York, she draws from art history, nature, and current events to reflect on specific cultural and political legacies, past and present. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, while living and working in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Lille, France and Brussels, Belgium during the years of 2001 – 2012. Concurrent with exhibiting her work, Blas has taught across disciplines in Fine Art and Art History at the undergraduate and graduate level, with a special focus on the museum and historical archives. Recent solo exhibitions are LISA BLAS / Still Lifes, Sometimes Repeated at Rossicontemporary, Brussels, LISA BLAS / As if pruning a tree, after Matisse at Musée Matisse, Cateau-Cambrésis, France, and group exhibitions A Particular Kind of Solitude: An exhibition inspired by the writings of Robert Walser at the Elizabeth Street Garden, New York, and Sensations That Announce The Future at Evergreen College Gallery, Olympia, Washington. She is currently working on a project for the forthcoming issue of Public Art Dialogue: The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence, to be published in winter 2016. B.A. 1996 University of Southern California / Political Science M.F.A. 2001 Claremont Graduate University / Painting
Historian and philosopher of art, Thierry de Duve, is Professor emeritus from the University of Lille 3, and was Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, for the fall semester of 2013. His English publications include Pictorial Nominalism (1991), Kant after Duchamp (1996), Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (1996, 2010), Look—100 Years of Contemporary Art (2001), and Sewn In the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp (2012). He is presently finishing a book of essays on aesthetics, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Alison O’Daniel works weave narrative between films, objectmaking and performance. Utilizing sound and its synesthetic displacement onto materials, O’Daniel builds a visual, aural and haptic vocabulary through varying levels of access to sound, color and material. O’Daniel’s previous feature-length film Night Sky premiered at the Anthology Film Archive in conjunction with Performa 11 and the exhibition Walking Forward-Running Past at Art In General, New York. Night Sky has been presented with live musical accompaniment by various musicians or with live Sign Language accompaniment at The Nightingale (Chicago), MOCAD (Detroit), NYU, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Jurassic Technology and other venues. She is the recipient of grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Art Matters, the Franklin Furnace Fund and the California Community Foundation.
Recent solo exhibitions include Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include Untitled Art Fair, L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice, CA, and Zic Zerp Gallery in Rotterdam. Writing about O’Daniel’s work has appeared in ArtForum, the L.A. Times, L.A. Weekly, and ArtReview. She is currently working on her second feature length film, The Tuba Thieves.
Born in Peekskill, NY, Dannielle Tegeder currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and maintains a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation in Manhattan. She received a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase (1994), and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (1997). For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction. While the core of her work is paintings and drawings, she has recently begun to include large-scale installation, sculptural objects, video, sound, and animation.
Since receiving her MFA in 1997 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dannielle’s work has been presented in over 100 gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. She has participated in numerous institution exhibitions including PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Several of her drawings have recently been purchased as part of the Contemporary Drawing Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, and her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, NC.
Cassie Thornton is also known as the Feminist Economics Department (The FED). The FED works with imaginary financial limitations. On earth, we have amassed excessive public, private and personal debt, justifying an inability to provide shelter or food, education, or healthcare for many, and much less, go to space. Collective fear of debt is so strong that when we look at the sky we see the debt ceiling where the ozone used to be, rather than an expansive universe with infinite possibility. Thus, The FED’s materials are in themselves financial forms– debt and its accomplice, security.
On earth, The FED constructs situations where members of the public observe and confront financialization– in order to see it as an idea that can be manipulated rather than the absolute way of living and being. Through producing experimental moments in public spaces, participants test and extend what can be considered ‘real’. This work involves ordinary people doing extraordinary things— dancers touching the surfaces inside financial institutions, actors selling their nervous breakdowns to pay off debt, security guards protecting public vulnerability by reciting poetry written on the job, and people screaming their debt to space over the radio.
Amjad Faur currently teaches photography and visual arts at The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. He came to Evergreen from the University of Arkansas, where he primarily taught art history and critical theory. His current research involves the overlapping visual languages of colonial Europe in the Middle East and the tropes/signifiers scattered throughout Western art history that harmonize with these expansionist tendencies.
Steven Hendricks was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He moved out west to attend Evergreen. He completed his MFA in Writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then returned to Washington to teach at Evergreen. Hendricks’s work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, Fold: The Reader, The Encyclopedia Project (Vol. 2), Sidebrow, and at XCP (archived at PennSound, 2005). Hendricks is also a practicing bookbinder and letterpress printer. His artists’ book work, Breathing Machine, appears in Lark Books’ anthology 500 Handmade Books: Inspiring Interpretations of a Timeless Form. He has shown artist book works in galleries in Olympia, Portland, and Seattle. His first novel, Little is Left to Tell, was published by Starcherone Books in the Fall of 2014.
Kim Miller received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York City and her MFA from Vermont College. Miller has shown videos, performed live and combinations thereof on national tours and international shows, from China to Milwaukee. Kim was awarded the Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship 2009-10, Artist-in-Residence at Compeung, Doi Saket, Thailand in 2011 & 2012, Artist-in-Residence at Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2013-14 and a Puffin Foundation, Ltd. Grant in 2014.
She has taught in the humanities and design department at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand; the film and graphic design departments in the United States at UW-Milwaukee; and in the foundations, fine art, liberal studies and design departments of Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
