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.
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.
Jennifer West (b.1966, Topanga, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has explored materialism in film for over fifteen years. She is known for her digitized films that are made by hand manipulating film celluloid. Joanna Kleinberg wrote on her work in Frieze “the intermingling of materiality, feeling and identity creates a wild blend of synaesthetic experience wherein the substances of life literally and figuratively colour the film. West’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze and Mousse Magazine. West has produced sixteen zine artist books which were recently acquired by the Getty Museum.
Significant commissions include works for LIAF Biennial (2022); Seattle Art Museum (2016-2017); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2016); The High Line, New York, NY (2012); MIT List Visual Arts Center (2011); Aspen Art Museum (2010); and Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London (2009). West has had solo exhibitions and presentations at the Pompidou Center, Paris (2022); Times Square Arts, New York (2021); JOAN Los Angeles (2020); Contemporary Art Museum St Louis (2018); Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Seattle Art Museum (2016-2017); Museo d’Arte Nuoro, Sardinia (2017); Tramway, Glasgow (2016); S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK (2012); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2010); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, (2010); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); White Columns, New York, NY (2007). She received an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a BA from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.She has lectured widely on her ideas of the “Analogital” and is the Program Director of MFA Art and an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design. In 2022, a monograph on her work, Media Archaeology was published by Radius Books, funded by a grant from the Thoma Foundation.
Director/Creator Daniel Harm explores a reality where humans use innovation, collaboration, and imagination to exist symbiotically with ourselves, with Nature, & with the living creatures who call Planet Earth their home.
Over the last twenty years, Daniel Harm accumulated their unique skill set from their experience as a professional athlete, as an evocative filmmaker and photographer, as a wilderness explorer, & as a patron supported artisan stoneworker who spent years working alone in the mountains.
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” James Baldwin
Gilda Sheppard is currently a member of the faculty in Sociology, Cultural and Media Studies at Evergreen State College in Tacoma, Washington. From 1995-96 Sheppard was a visiting lecturer at University of Cape Coast in the Sociology, Anthropology and Demography Department, and in 2018 she was a visiting lecturer at Ashesi University in Ghana, West Africa.
Sheppard is an award-winning filmmaker who has screened her documentaries throughout the United States, and internationally in Ghana, West Africa, at the Festival Afrique 360 in Cannes, France, and in Berlin Germany at the International Black Film Festival. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film and a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship.
Her documentaries include stories of resilience of Liberian women and children refugees in Ghana; three generations of Black families in an urban neighborhood in Buffalo, New York; and a film ethnography of stories from folklore started by Zora Neale Hurston in Alabama’s AfricaTown.
She currently completed her documentary Since I Been Down on education, organizing and healing developed and led by incarcerated women and men in Washington State’s prisons. Since I Been Down has been accepted at over10 film festivals in USA and Canada and won the Gold Prize at the Social Justice Film Festival and recognized among “Best of the Fest” at DOC NYC the largest documentary film festival in USA. Since I Been Down has been praised by Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of CA, Santa Cruz Angela Davis, at a DOCNYC 2020 Facebook Live Event with Director Gilda Sheppard, King County (WA) Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, and Executive Director of Abolitionist Law Center Robert Saleem Holbrook. Seattle Met named Since I Been Down as “What to Watch” in 2020.
For over a decade Sheppard has taught sociology classes in Washington State prisons, Sheppard is a sponsor for the Black Prisoner’s Caucus in Washington State, and is a co-founder and faculty for FEPPS- Freedom Education for Puget Sound an organization offering college credited courses at Washington Correctional Center for Women.
Sheppard is the author of several publications including Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way (2013)
SINCE I BEEN DOWN streaming 2/5-2/10
You are invited one and all to a rare opportunity to watch our Evergreen-Tacoma colleague Dr. Gilda Sheppard’s long-awaited new documentary film SINCE I BEEN DOWN
This timely work of art has been accumulating an avalanche of accolades: DOCNYC 2020 Audience Favorite. Winner of the 2020 Social Justice Film Feature Documentary Gold Prize. One of Seattle Met’s top movies not to miss. Seattle Times feature by Evergreen alumn Naomi Ishisaka. Please see below for a poster with a lovely quote from Gilda.
Starting this Friday 2/5 at noon and ending Wednesday 2/10 at 5pm, the film will be exclusively available to the Evergreen community for asynchronous streaming in the “virtual screening room” that we have created for “Reimagining Community Safety.” (Please note: no recording of any type will be allowed.)
Bill Basquin, filmmaker (From Inside of Here), is a multi-modal artist who enjoys the lessons that come from working with people, living with a tiny cat, and continuing to attune to worlds both wild and domestic. Bill’s films have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Mix Festival, Documenta, and the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and designer who explores the resonance of genetic cultural memory through the mystical and the mundane. The child of two prolific creators, he developed his practice under the tutelage of his parents, Curtis R. Barnes and Royal Alley-Barnes. He is part of the Black Constellation, a collective that also includes Shabazz Palaces, THEESatisfaction, and Nep Sidhu. Alley-Barnes has exhibited sculpture and films in numerous traditional and new-media-based settings. He has been, and continues to be, instrumental in the creation of seminal cultural spaces in Seattle, including the influential mixed-use space pun(c)tuation, among others. In 2014, Alley-Barnes was the recipient of the Neddy Artist Award in the open medium category. Alley-Barnes lives and works in Seattle.
Vivian Hua (華婷婷) is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer who regularly traverses up and down the west coast. As the Executive Director at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, a Co-Founder of the civil rights film series, The Seventh Art Stand, and the Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary arts publication, REDEFINE, much of her work unifies her interest in the metaphysical with her belief that art can positively transform the self and society.
Her narrative short film, Searching Skies–which touches on the controversial topic of Syrian refugee resettlement in the United States–was released in 2017, after making festival rounds. She is currently writing her next film projects, as well as researching national efforts to preserve cultural space.
A vibrant selection of contemporary experimental animation from filmmakers in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Peru. Curated by the Moebius Animación collaborative, these 16 short films produced between 2007 and 2014 represent an effort to map trends in technical, narrative, material, and sensorial/affective dimensions in recent experimental animation.
Experience a diverse selection of vibrant experimental animation from filmmakers in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Peru.
She has received grants from the Howard Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts and The Fund for Poetry, the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and residency fellowships from Ledig House/Writers OMI and The Edward Albee Foundation; in 2009 she was the recipient of an apexart “outbound” residency grant to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She teaches in the MFA programs at Pratt Institute and Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and was the 2016 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at U.C. Berkeley. She is a longtime member of Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, for which she edits several books a year and heads up the Dossier Series of investigative texts, and she recently co-founded Bushel, an art and community space in Delhi, NY. Her first novel, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.
