Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist from Tacoma, Washington. Lacing salvaged textiles such as window screens and debris netting with acrylic paint, Jordan simulates cycles of removal to surface questions about human relationships. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his investigations are often staged or permanently embedded in public space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition: In The Interim – Ritual Ground for a Future Black Archive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamisseverybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023).
Ellen Levy is the author of A Book About Ray (MIT Press, 2024), the first full-length survey of the career of the collagist and correspondence artist Ray Johnson (American, 1927-1995). Her other writings include Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford UP, 2011), and essays and reviews on poetry, visual art, theater, and television in such publications as Dissent, Genre, Modernism/Modernity, The Nation, Parkett, and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has taught at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt University.
Music X Habitat X Art is an interdisciplinary group comprised of three artists whose medium is digital artwork. Yaoyue Huang, Amelie Jiang, and Scott Sherman work together to present classical and contemporary music in new ways to audiences, engaging them visually and aurally. They merge contemporary piano music with digital art and performance installation. Their process is intensely collaborative, working with music, photographs, and re-imagining them into a final film which is a commentary on both the music and images themselves.
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.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His forthcoming book “Blood On The Fog” is being released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
Simone Savannah is a writer, performer and teacher, born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of Uses of My Body (Barrow Street 2020) and Like Kansas (Big Lucks 2018). Simone earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas, her M.Ed. and B.A. from Ohio University.
Use this link to join Simone’s Zoom talk – https://zoom.us/j/92320967393
Patte Loper is an interdisciplinary artist based in painting who experiments with sculpture and video to explore a range of subject matter including feminist utopianism, new materialism, and the ecological imaginary. She was born in Colorado and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, a subtropical college town where she first developed an appreciation for the ways nature and culture can overlap. She currently lives and works in New York City and Boston, MA where she is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Her practice began exclusively with conceptually based figurative painting and the work morphed over time into an experimental practice that utilizes painting, drawing, video, installation, and performance. Her early work involved re-creating masterworks with an eye towards feminist re-interpretation. Deeply rooted in painting’s discourse, her current practice uses painterly logic to create three dimensional structures that evoke landscape and still life and link mid century formalism, architectural theory and utopian idealism. Recent exhibitions have considered the ethics of architecture, the relationship between social justice and climate change, sustainable energy technology, and intersectionality in Arab and Western identity.
She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Drawing Center (New York, NY), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (New York, NY), the Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), the Licini Museum (Ascoli Piceno, Italy), LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island (New York, NY), the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences (Charleston, WV), the PalaentologicalMuseum (Cortina, Italy), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Suyama Space (Seattle, WA), and the Zuckerman Museum (Atlanta, GA). Her work has been reviewed in the Italian edition of Flash Art, Artnet, Time Out, Chicago, and the Boston Globe, and is in the collections of the Rene diRosa Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Hirshhorn Museum.
She has participated in residency fellowships at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, and was a participant in the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program 2014-2016. She is currently a member artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program.
Storme Webber is a Two Spirit, Alutiiq/Black/Choctaw, internationally-nurtured poet, playwright, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She creates blues-influenced, socially-engaged texts and images exploring identity, art activism, and the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, memory and spirit.
Storme’s poetry collections include Diaspora, Blues Divine, and the forthcoming Noirish Lesbiana. Her solo theatre works include Buddy Rabbit, Noirish Lesbiana: A Night at the Sub Room, and Wild Tales of Renegade Halfbreed Bulldagger. She has been highlighted in numerous anthologies, documentaries (including Venus Boyz, May Ayim: Hope in Heart, What’s Right with Gays These Days?, Living Two Spirit), and international performance tours.
Storme is an inspired educator, bringing art, history & soul as a visiting artist in programs across the country. She enjoys teaching Creative Writing to young people at the University of Washington. She has served as featured faculty at Hedgebrook, Whidbey Island Writer’s Conference, Chuckanut Writer’s Conference, The University of Puget Sound, Seattle University, and Richard Hugo House.
Storme was honored to receive a 2015 James W. Ray Venture Project Award from the Artist Trust/Frye Art Museum Consortium. Storme’s work has also been supported & awarded by 4Culture, Hedgebrook, Richard Hugo House, Pride Foundation, Seattle Art Museum, CIRI Foundation, City of Seattle and Jack Straw Foundation.
Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual video artist. She is the author of three books of poems and three chapbooks, including most recently, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2015) and Good Stock Strange Blood (forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2017). She is currently at work on a memoir. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other magazines.
Martin is also a co-founder of the Black Took Collective, an experimental performance art/poetry group of three, and a member of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a global arts collective. She has been awarded the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and a 2016 Investing in Professional Artists Grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments. Martin is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and Co-director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
Small shifts in what is familiar amplify human presence and speak to the intricacies of social relations in MK Guth’s work. Her videos depart from everyday scenarios into the site of fiction as an entry point to more complicated issues of identity and self and her sculptural installations often act as visual containers for audience interaction.
M.K. Guth is a visual artist working in video, photography, sculpture, performance, and interactive based exchange projects. In 2012, Marylhurst University released the first Monograph on Guth’s work. The NY Times, Flash Art, ArtForum on line 500 words, Art News, Art in America, and Sculpture magazine are just a few of the periodicals where Guth’s work has been discussed. She is a recipient of a Bonnie Bronson Award, a Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award through the Seattle Art Museum and an Award of Merit from the Bellevue Art Museum.
She has exhibited with numerous galleries and institutions including, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, Boise Art Museum, The Melbourne International Arts Festival, Australia, Nottdance Festival, Nottingham, England, Swiss Institute, NYC, Gallery-Pfeister, Copenhagen, Franklin Parrasch Gallery NYC, Betty Moody Houston TX, White Columns, NYC, The Art Production Fund (NYC / Las Vegas), Yerba Buena, in San Francisco and the Henry Art Museum. Guth is a member and the originator of RED SHOE DELIVERY SERVICE, a collaborative interactive video/performance project. (with Molly Dilworth and Cris Moss) www.redshoedeliveryservice.com MK Guth is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland Oregon and is an Associate Professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
