Since 2010 Emmanuel College has hosted 48 artists from 16 different countries. Each artist is organized by the category they participated in during their residency, though many are interdisciplinary and explore many forms of art.
Photography
"Jewan Goo is a research-based artist whose image-based practice interrogates colonial juridical visibility through the analytic frameworks of visual culture studies and critical theory. His practice mobilizes forensic excavation and countervisual strategies to expose the regimes of documentation and legal architectures that engineer historical legitimacy and codify ideological narratives within state archives. Drawing on postcustodial archival theory and decolonial praxis, Goo engages in palimpsestic interventions, reconstructing visually undocumented histories and revealing the epistemic violence embedded in archival silences.
By treating shadow archives as contested sites, he asserts representational sovereignty and recuperates subjugated knowledge through images that challenge institutional authority and disrupt hegemonic frameworks. His research excavates how imperial scopic regimes, spatial dispositifs, and juridical infrastructures structure exclusion, mediate access to collective narratives, and naturalize power. Grounded in the analysis of state apparatuses and disciplinary power, Goo reconstructs the ways institutionalized epistemologies shape the perceptual and symbolic orders of the present.
Goo holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is a 2025–2027 Core Program Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston."
"Julia Albrecht is a German lens-based artist. It forwards itself to video performance, poetic writing, 3D printed sculptures, or AI text-based generated photographs. Within this media usage, the blank human body appears as a tool to translate my thoughts and question sociological and psychological behaviours. Her topics examine the linkage between sociological and psychological research and are intensively preoccupied with personal experiences. It constantly draws from a profound curiosity for humanitarian issues and cultural phenomena. Her body of work touches the realms of the paradoxical in life.
The materials in her installations form a contrast and resemble a balancing act. The subject matter is found between the wellbeing and discomfort, the thesis and the antithesis of each individual. Finding one's way in society is like walking a tightrope from birth. The spaces between identity and memory emerge from this imbalance."
"Nicolás m~ (b. 1983) creates installations, photographs, videos, and sonic works that blur the boundaries between analog and computer-generated media. Through his work, he seeks to produce an immersive experience that questions our perception, destabilize fixed meanings, and ultimately enables new ways of seeing and feeling.
In his photographic practice, Nicolás uses long exposure to create colors and effects, deliberately avoiding digital manipulation. This handcrafted process is reveal in the details and irregularities of his images. This approach reflects a socio-political stance, that challenges the homogenization and fast-paced productivity and consumption often driven by digital technologies.
Nicolás m~ was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and he spent his childhood on the coast of Uruguay. He participated in the Programa de Artistas at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires (2009) and was shortlisted for the Beca Kuitca/UTDT Fellowship, Buenos Aires (2011). He has received several fellowships, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2012); Yaddo artist residency, New York (2016); AMEXCID Fellowship, Mexico City (2016); Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, California (2017); and Djerassi Resident Artists Program, California (2019).
He has had solo exhibitions at Móvil, Buenos Aires (2022); Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2018); and Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2015). His group exhibitions include Museo MALBA, Buenos Aires (2023); Museo Amparo, Puebla, MX (2019); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires (2018), among others.
His work has been acquired by MALBA; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires; and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas and New York City.
Nicolás m~ lives and works in Berlin."
No Man's Land
No Man's Land is an exploration of irresolvable and un-relatable spaces - the dark cavities that populate the city. My interest in this subject began when I was living in Beijing and witnessed its renovation and the subsequent ambiguities of land usage that happened as a result. When I moved to Chicago in 2015, I was intrigued by similar issues, and I believe my explorations could have been undertaken in any number of urban settings. The phrase no man's land is often understood as undetermined territory that stays unoccupied and suffused with fear and uncertainty. I am interested in representing how structured intentions coincide with perplexing functions that exist in the urban landscape, as well as how those uncertain functions impact the human experience. The qualities that I look for are inaccessibility, uncertainty, deficiency, even brutality. In my photographs, I utilize natural and artificial light, as well as plant life and weather conditions to emphasize the character of these places. Ultimately, the work speaks to the tenuous relationship we have with the built environment and our attempts to reconcile the often-dysfunctional elements within the urban landscape.
I am a non-fiction photographer. Photography is a direct and immediate way for me to document the present for future reflection. My work is heavily inspired by the documentary work of the Farm Security Administration and the National Endowment for the Arts supported survey photography of the 1970s.
Maps, data, and geography play a significant role in guiding where and how I point my lens. Rather than seek out decisive moments, I look to subtract the element of time from my work, making photographs that communicate a universality of experience within a given local rather than the specific.
I frequently interview photographic subjects using open-ended, anthropological questioning practices in order to elicit organic, primary source perspectives. Interviews play a significant indirect and direct role in my photographic practice, with excerpts often presented alongside images.
My artistic point of departure comes from the gesture of observing others in order to explore myself, pushing the limits of documentary photography and representation with a continued exploration of the medium and using alternative forms of storytelling, I like to combine in my work the duality of the one who finds and the one who creates, pointing out the inefficiencies between what we hold to be truth and what the medium of photography purports to examine, my stirring amalgamations of fact and fiction are built on finding subconscious truths lurking just beneath our veneers.
Photography is also a tool for me to make sense, reorganize, and understand the world. I use it to explore the relationship between a place and its history, between people and their environments and between my world, my family, and myself.
The choice to work with photography (vs. painting, drawing or any other medium in the visual arts) lies in my recognition of this medium as "reflecting reality" but it never stays "real". The ability to alter the "real story" and create an alternative interpretation and narrative of an existing event is what attracted me the most in this medium. Sometimes, I find pictures to be more interesting than what they actually reference: Life itself. I believe that the greatest achievement of a photograph lies in the thin space between the ability to remind us of something we care about and to teach us something new.
Of the many different projects I have pursued in the past fifteen years, these motifs and methods of approach have been consistent in most of them and informed my decision of what and how to photograph.
The most essential thing I have learned in Lodz, where I was studying photography, is how to combine and employ many different art techniques in order to take photographs. The moment I discovered that art is the most significant component of my pictures was crucial. I understood that creating, modifying some things is really important element for me. It's kind of giving them a new life, new character. To achieve desired and intimate form, color and light is not sufficient so I attach this artistic component.
Through the pictures I show stories and share some of my observations, however, they are not explicit. Within images I always try to keep some kind of secret so that spectators should embark on an interior journey to find answers.
I currently work with photography video and performance. I try very hard to be a licensed fool and have a burning desire to explore beyond our paradigm.
In my work I use self-portraiture and automated performance to explore the ideas that I'm working with. I describe automated performance as a free flow
of thought translated in to action, inspired by ideas of free association developed by Sigmund Freud.
According to a new thought of interdisciplinarity of the Bauhaus, Nina Röder combines parameters of theatre with the medium photography. Her conceptual photographs concentrate on narrative image spaces and show (especially build up) rooms or places filled with a performative interpretation.
The conceptual content of Nina Röders work reflects on the examination with different aspects of constructing identity and the topic of mental determination. Her photographs argue with influences on the development of identity, such as the family background and its historical and provincial aspects. Other works are rather examining a self-constructed identity constructed through performative acts.
www.ninaroeder.de
Inspired to find the cause of his springtime allergies when he moved to Ohio from California, for the last 3 years Francis Schanberger has been collecting parts of trees, scanning them and printing them in the historical Vandyke Brown process.
Nineteenth century naturalists like Sir John Herschel, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Anna Atkins recorded their research in photogenic drawings. Some 170 years later Francis has returned to their photographic investigations. Francis's images invoke memories of his initial struggle to call Ohio home.
Ceramics
"My practice revolves around exploring the intersections in my Korean and Jewish identity while creating cyborg traditional Korean ceramics, performing, and printmaking. Moving forward I would like to be able to achieve similar clarity in concepts of the diaspora and high use of technique in my work as these artists. While attending the residency Penland in 2017, I revisited printmaking. I explored how the intersections of the manual process of printmaking and the digital platform of social media could create a sense of community. I’m interested in creating prints that no longer just exist in the fine arts world as a means to connect and exchange information about the singular identity in the larger community. Printmaking is a scalable distribution method that still holds the idea of preciousness. Although multiple prints are made creating higher accessibility, the limited number of prints emphasizes the uniqueness of each.
After falling in love with printmaking in my Sophomore year of High School I attended my Junior and Senior years at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and was more interested in sculpture such as using wood sculptures to create installations for my performances. I use archetypes in clothing and objects in my performances to create a conversation about the subversive nature of being a minority within a minority."
"My work consists of ceramic pieces.
The primary material I use is a sand-like substance called chamotte.
Chamotte is made by firing highly refractory clay at temperatures between 1300°C and 1400°C, then crushing it into a granular form. It is commonly used as a raw material for firebricks. I developed a unique technique in which I mix this sand with various substances, shape it, and then fire it in a ceramic kiln.
I have named this material "ceramics", which means "something that has been fired at high temperatures."
I first encountered chamotte as a "tool" in ceramics. When firing ceramic works, the glaze (a glassy coating on the surface) can sometimes melt and flow. To prevent the work from sticking to the kiln during this process, chamotte is often used as a buffer between the piece and the kiln. Each time I used it, I was drawn to its rough texture and began to wonder if it could be used as a material in its own right.
I experimented with different mixtures and repeatedly tested its properties to see if it could be used to create any form I envisioned—ultimately aiming to elevate it into an artistic medium.
When I create a piece, I work in a way that the final form remains unknown until it is fired. This lack of complete control allows for the unexpected to emerge—like drawing blindfolded. I hope this process brings out more organic, dynamic shapes in the finished work."
— Yuko Hara
Ocean creatures, ancient Burano lace and fossils are the source of my inspiration. I try to put the results of my research and practice into modern context by engaging in creative experiments, making conceptual jewellery and abstract sculptures and combining my knowledge of metal work with skills in porcelain. In my work, I explore the opportunities offered by the synthesis of both fields. In my porcelain works, I explore the natural, trying to push the boundaries of ceramic techniques to another level of expression, reaching the edge of the potential of this traditional branch of art and craft. For now, I am focused mostly on porcelain works, using my particular technique by extruding material through a nozzle and creating unique spatial structures.
Website
Michael Eden is a maker whose work sits at the intersection of craft, design and art, exploring contemporary themes through the redesign of historical, culturally familiar objects utilising digital manufacturing and materials.
An MPhil research project at the Royal College of Art allowed him to explore how his interest in digital technology could be developed and combined with the craft skills that he had acquired during his previous experience as a potter.
Through this he investigates the relationship between hand and digital tools. He is particularly interested in how the tacit knowledge and sensibility to the 3 dimensional object, developed through extended ceramic practice can affect and influence the approach to the creation of objects using digital technology.
As a member of a unique generation that has bridged the digital divide, he firmly believes that he is able to contrast and compare life before and after the invention of the personal computer. For Eden it is a matter of choice, as life at the beginning of the 21st century has furnished makers with a wider choice of tools, materials and processes with which to realise ideas and concepts. All have their place, the new does not replace the old; the key is to make appropriate use of them.
My work stems from an interest in nature, science, and living systems and I believe whole-‐heartedly in arts capacity to enrich the way we see, experience, and understand the world around us. My primary focus is sculpture installation and I work to create immersive environments that invite viewers into imagined biological systems. It can often be hard to tell if the forms in my work are healthy or harmful growths and an important undercurrent is an interest in the human manipulation of living systems, particularly advances in bioengineering and experiments that involve combining or altering the basic components of nature. I see this frontier as fraught with both exciting and unsettling possibilities and while each work is imaginative, I hope to encourage viewers to consider the shifting nature of the world around them.
My work engages in subverting accepted and expected modes of feminine behavior by questioning the etiquette of the mundane. Much of my work places invented functional objects in a domestic context, and assigns sexually provocative implications to ordinary household routines. Paired with installation and interactive performance, my ceramic work re-contextualizes highly specific functional forms that have been forgotten, replaced, or improved upon by modern technology, generally to the aid of the modern homemaker. Centering on issues women regularly face regarding societal expectations, personal identity, and self-sacrifice, my work presents elements of craft, etiquette, and gender as seen through a sardonic lens. It is my intention, through this work, to both satirically illustrate the challenges I face as a woman and actively engage the viewer and participant to consider their role in perpetuating or shifting the dialogue around feminism today.
Objects become charged with meaning, history, sentiment, and the authority to tell stories as I rowdily rummage through thrift stores, dollar stores, hobby stores, and hardware stores seeking objects and materials, whose usefulness has been exhausted or underutilized and await a new imagined life. I carefully handpick and catalogue objects and materials that are familiar or boast a degree of promise and beauty to me. I put objects and stories together piece by piece, relentlessly tinkering with objects and ideas until they fit and work in a way that is very mine. After all, I am the boss of them. Narratives, both personal and adopted third person, slip into and then take over the work. I am attracted and magically repulsed by the insertion and "standardized personalization" of remembrance and celebration feted in kitsch and souvenir vernacular. I beg these ideas and objects to buck-up; acknowledge and engage their own artificiality and hidden agenda of astute cute.
amysantoferraro.com
Things will start with an undigested emotion or an idea that has to be worked through, making has become a way of understanding, a place to store things, perhaps a way of joining the inner experiences with outer surroundings. It is the difficult complicated emotions that interest me, the things which we like to keep concealed but which have nevertheless come to light, and that perhaps sit uneasily in our civilized world. I look to find a rhetoric, a means of articulation, for what I am trying to say whether in the everyday occurrences or in museum collections, books and my own photographs. I start searching and collecting, trying to find a face and a body for the invisible and unarticulated, and in doing so I look for different materials to create its texture. Many found objects are included, things that I may have come across whilst walking - that which lies underfoot, a stone between paving slabs, or a seed fallen from a tree. These are then absorbed and find a place in the material world of the sculpture.
The driving force behind my work is to create an alternate world that comprises excerpted and fragmented narratives from personal and cultural memories, fables and natural history. Through understanding and manipulating raw material or chemicals, I strive to create forms that reveal not only my ideas but the characteristics and history of the medium itself. I have worked exhaustively with a variety of traditional medium; printmaking, ceramics and metalsmithing. Each medium also denotes a specific way of storytelling. My printed works on paper function as proposition and contemplative manifestation of the invisible order of the universe. They are composed of geometric forms inspired by magic charts and mandalas juxtaposed with renderings and acid washes that resemble nebulas or alchemy. I am also creating a series of fantasy landscapes in clay that installed in the gallery suggest a garden setting. I want to explore the Garden as a mysterious, paradisiacal enclosure that transcends time and disorder. Through creating collections of fictitious monuments and artifacts, I am composing the history of a mystical world in a non-‐linear manner by suggesting its existence and decline. Grew up in Macau, a colony of Portugal on the brink of its dissolution and then an immigrant in the United States, the anomic nature of history and culture and the nostalgia for collective memories have caused me to be drawn towards nature and the utopian. By building an encyclopedic body of work that is pantologic and objective, I would like viewers to engage in their own imagination and wonder for the inexplicable and unknown.
HEIDILAU.ORG
Clay is a material that has been mythically linked with physical embodiment for millennia and across myriads of cultures. It can implicate a hairless, fleshy landscape and emulate the skin's life-glow. As clay dries, it takes on the delicately withered patterns of the aging body. Its mutable nature and transformative properties allow for a process through which Frame seeks transmutation.
This work takes into account the 20th century psychotherapist Paul Schilder's writings in The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. He theorized that the body image is in continual flux, and stressed its mobility, flexibility, and fluidity. He emphasized the changing nature of the body image and stated, "It is the continuous build-up of a shape which is immediately dissolved and built up again." The plasticity of clay enables Frame to transcend the boundaries of her skin. By manipulating her physical borders, she performs a protean identity.
www.teriframe.com
Darien Johnson is concerned with how the absorption of information through digital media defines a person's notion of reality.
Stemming from an awareness of continually altered states of perceptual consciousness, Darien's work represents the entanglement of human cognition and digital processing. By acquiring and manipulating visual information, he acts as the human element while directly engaging in the process in question. The digital compositions are then china painted onto porcelain forms, which are manifestations of the seemingly fluid movement of human cognition.
www.darienjohnson.com
Printmaking
Grant M. Brownlow is a Michigan born and raised interdisciplinary artist and educator working primarily in printmaking and mixed media paintings. Grant creates intricate industrial-inspired compositions exploring the post-industrial midwestern psyche. The work, informed by his life and upbringing around post-industrial and automotive-centered ephemera, confronts ideas including class, identity, distortion of influences and self-destructive tendencies.
Grant was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he was heavily influenced by the industrial landscape of the Midwestern United States. During this time, Grant frequented autobody shops, racetracks, forgotten industrial sites and worked in plastic automotive factories. Grant studied Studio Art at Albion College after which he received his MFA from Purdue University in 2024. Grant currently lives and works in the greater Detroit, Michigan region.
"My work depicts a feminist bio scientific imaginary. I use the lives and behaviors of non-human organisms like fungi and parasites as a jumping off point to invent creatures whose abstracted bodies and biological processes allow me to explore ideas of identity, embodiment, and reproductive labor through a feminist lens. The genesis point of my work is a reverence for and desire to elevate mid century feminine-coded print ephemera: greeting cards, sewing packets, and recipe books - which I use to create digital collages. These materials are reminiscent of the domestic spaces to which they belong and often carry an aura of use in the form of handwritten notes or dog-eared pages. Through a process of repetitive mirroring, images of objects like flowers and aprons acquire an otherworldly quality and become removed from their original context.
My prints, installations and artist books are characterized by a graphic sense of color, pattern, and design. I draw inspiration from the aesthetics of biological life under a microscope, using bilateral symmetry and self-similarity in my compositions. Digital processes allow me to mimic the algorithmic tendencies of nature-as-designer, while printmaking allows me to create multiples with slight, often accidental variations -- the same way that a morphology is expressed differently across members of a species. By situating my works within installation environments, I extend the act of collage to the gallery wall. In this way, I emphasize the materiality of the prints, referencing the body and building a world around them that suggests ideas of parasitism, symbiosis and mutation."
Japanese-born, Yoshiko Shimano challenges to transform the paper so it no longer speaks as “paper”, but has a density of physical presence that is one with its imagery. By using many different printmaking marks, she wishes to unify existing mediums and layers into a seamless language. When hung in one space, her large-scale installation prints become environmental works that interact with the architecture and create a new atmosphere.
She embraces an artist’s responsibilities within society to expand beyond studio practices or gallery presentations. She has offered many local and international outreach projects and made prints for various minority groups and victims of natural disasters with her students through the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico. She received her B.F.A. degree from California College of the Arts and M.F.A. degree from Mills College in Oakland, California. Shimano currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Within the past couple of years, I have been obsessively searching, collecting, and investigating photographs and documentary films depicting Iranian politicians before and after the 1979 revolution. These images are mainly, but not solely, depicting officials meeting in formal gatherings. The expansive archive of photographs and documentary films, depicting both public and private gatherings of male politicians of the last fifty years of Iranian history, seems to be a perfect zone to study this marriage between manhood and history.
These politicians, officers, and governors are the newest additions to my male protagonists who had been appearing in my work earlier. I am frightened and yet fascinated by men. To me, it is pure curiosity in a species, similar to the people who are interested in studying ants, for instance.
Many of my drawings and prints are interpreted, edited, and distorted alterations of some of those photographs mentioned earlier. These are accompanied with some everyday elements (office plants, generic chairs, rugs, curtains) coming from different times and spaces. I select my characters from a cluster of images, most of which I had never seen when I was in Iran, mainly due to the very selective circulation of images of this sort accessible in books and magazines during the pre-internet era.
My practice is a constant flipping through old magazines and books, digging up historical archives, and surfing the internet. It is amusing yet curious to watch these figures either acknowledging each other's presence and behaviors or completely ignoring them by the force of my drawing or printing. In my pictures, a figure of a very respected ambassador might end up sitting next to a group of anti-government leaders all together watching a cockfight. I am particularly interested in the character castration that happens when these bodies travel from one image to another; from one place to another. It is an attempt to reshape the history: I like to think that I am a puppeteer, and these scenes are my own interpretation of what alternatively could or should have happened.
At times, I feel I understand the concept of manhood and the Iranian history very well, simply because: 1) I identify as a man and, 2) I am an Iranian. Yet, I feel I do not know or understand either of them. This contradiction is the impetus that compels me to make the images I make. Given the current political climate, when it feels that the events of the twentieth century follow into the twenty-first century, these images go back and forth in time and space as the protagonists appear in the new settings I can arrange for them.
My prints are meticulous and technical; this tight precision encourages the viewer to look closely. They are primarily black and white. The lack of color allows graphic content to be dominant. The imagery is composed of complex, impossible interiors with a strong perspective foundation and traditional approach. Visually, they are dark in tone, filled with organic textures, and geometric patterns. The spaces are abandoned, empty, forgotten rooms that are devoid of life. The elements have deteriorated these areas, making them confusing and mysterious, yet inviting at the same time. They do not exist, and they cannot exist in any time period.
Filtered through the lens of art history, the natural sciences, literature, religion/mythology and contemporary mass media, my artistic inquiries explore the idea of wilderness and how it has changed from being a tangible, albeit romanticized, place--for example, Renaissance depictions of a utopian Garden of Eden or the mysterious and untamed vision depicted in Hudson River School paintings--to an even more distorted fiction or myth taking form in artificial and virtual realities. This myth has a powerful affect on our fragmented perception of the environment and our place in it. Throughout history we have striven to dominate and exploit "wild-ness" for our benefit, while at the same time art has been employed as a means to translate, analyze, and reconfigure our idea of nature. My recent pieces combine various perceptions of the natural world, ranging from non-objective, scientific views to Judeo-Christian ideas of mankind's dominion over "every living thing that moveth upon the earth" to pagan views of natural occurrences as codes or messages to be deciphered. My work fuses Italian Renaissance painting, 17th-century Dutch still life, 19th-century scientific illustration, old collections in natural science museums, with a twenty-first century aesthetic informed by photography and mass media.
Focusing on the continuum of harmony and conflict in which humans exist within the natural world-its plants, animals, landscape, and weather-and the self-centered way in which we define and categorize nature based on its usefulness, I have been re-reading and analyzing Shakespeare's frequent and varied references to nature. This research informs the imagery in my most recent etchings and lithographs, and has even changed the way I approach the creation of a piece. The tug-of-war between chaos and balance that is the hallmark of Shakespeare becomes a part of my working process. Through the use of multiple layers I strive to visually communicate the constant back-and-forth between abandonment and control that is not only the literal process of printmaking but is also a metaphor for our relationship to nature.
In my work I examine the systems of logic and order that we use to enforce perceptions of structure. Our interactions and conversations with these systems often inhabit polarities of fact and fiction. These spaces of actuality, memory, imagination, and paradox describe the nuances of our experiences. My investigation into duality, and the often difficult to define spaces that are formed in the "in betweens", is partially due to my history as a first generation American. From an early age I experienced living within two worlds (languages, histories, cultures), and realized the distinctions formed by specific spaces. I spoke my native Estonian in the privacy of home and family, while English was reserved for public situations. This blueprint of delineation keeps me firmly grounded in between, mapping out both sides, simultaneously as a participant and a record keeper.
The source imagery for my current body of work is borrowed from silver and gold-plated decorative objects from the 17th to 19th century. The original history of these objects is of only anecdotal interest to me. I am primarily interested in these objects because of the patterns that adorn them. I digitally isolate elements of ornamentation which then become the basis for making large- scale installations as well as editions of single prints, painting in gouache and artist books.
For my installation projects, I create extravagantly ornate environments using the low-tech process and materials of screenprinting. I treat screenprinting as a precise way of painting, placing color next to color to create images which have the illusion of three-dimensional form and metallic sheen. I make large editions of prints which I use as building material to stage environments which play with the conventions of ornamentation and pattern.
tracihorgen.com
I construct fabricated visual spaces and forms that are in many ways, ambiguous; encouraging the viewer to discern order by means of their subjective reasoning. We, as humans share many physical commonalities, such as organs, muscle and bone structure; we also share our surroundings. Despite this, on a perceptual level our personal understanding of our world is something that can probably never be shared completely or understood fully by another being. It is personally inspiring, to consider the unique and exceptional realities we all create daily.
Monika Meler was born and raised in Poland and immigrated to the United States at the age of ten. Her work examines the immigrant experience and the desire for a place that no longer exists.
The images in her prints explore the Poland that only exists in her mind, as the country has changed beyond recognition since her departure. She uses images that reference architectural structures, her father's elaborate gardens, and her mother's rich collection of textiles. Printed in many overlapping layers, these images repeat, change direction, and dominance. All of these actions mimic the actions of memory.
Mari LaCure's interest in particles and formations stems from the idea of reducing something to its basic elements in order to understand it better. In her drawings Mari layers and juxtaposes images of both large scale and the minute to set up harmonious relationships between different structures. The microscopic forms are inspired by atoms and molecules, cellular structures, and veins; macroscopic imagery extends to weather patterns, tree branches, constellations, and galaxies. The interaction of many different delicate materials in her work encourages the viewer to experience a heightened sensitivity and awareness to the visible and seemingly invisible in the world.
Social Practice
Kristal Sotomayor is an award-winning nonbinary Peruvian American director, producer, journalist and curator based in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Named one of “10 Latinx Filmmakers You Should Know About” by HipLatina, they are a 2023 DOC NYC Documentary New Leader Honoree and Rockwood Documentary Leadership Fellow. Kristal’s short Latinx immigrant rights documentary Expanding Sanctuary won the Philadelphia Filmmaker Award at the 2024 BlackStar Film Festival and is distributed through OTV, Kanopy, and New Day Films. Their short experimental documentary Don’t Cry For Me All You Drag Queens won Best LGBTQ Documentary at the 2025 Poppy Jasper International Film Festival. Kristal’s debut narrative short film Las Cosas Que Brillan is a coming of age story about a Trans Latina mermaid and produced with support from BlackStar. They are in development on their debut feature documentary Untitled PARS Project about surveillance of immigrant communities, produced with support from the Sundance Film Institute. They are in production on their first audio documentary on water rights in Pennsylvania through support from Voice of Witness. They are in development on a number of short and feature-length directorial projects through their company Sotomayor Productions. Kristal’s work has also been supported by the Outfest, Points North Institute, MDOCS, DCTV, and NeXtDoc. They have curated acclaimed programming across the country at SFFILM, Frameline, True/False Film Fest, and the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival. They are the Editor-in-Chief of the cinéSPEAK Journal and their freelance writing bylines include The Philadelphia Inquirer, Documentary Magazine, Autostraddle, AL DÍA, and WHYY.
"D.S. Kinsel is an award-winning creative entrepreneur and cultural agitator who expresses his creativity through various mediums, including painting, printmaking, collage, installation, curating, performance, and public art. His work focuses on themes such as space keeping, urban tradition, hip-hop, informalism, and cultural re-appropriation. D.S. has received several accolades, including being a former AmeriCorps Public Ally member and an Awardee of the Pittsburgh Courier Fab 40, Pittsburgh Magazine PUMP 40 Under 40, Pgh Tech Council Creative of The Year, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette's "Top Ten People To Meet in 2016," and the Incline's "Who's Next" for 2018.
D.S. is also the co-founder of BOOM Concepts, a creative hub dedicated to advancing black and brown artists representing marginalized communities. Since its establishment in 2014, BOOM Concepts, based in Pittsburgh, has curated 50 on-site exhibitions, paid over $150k in artist fees, and produced 200+ events across the country. It serves as a space for field building, knowledge sharing, mentorship, and storytelling, continually challenging and uplifting the creative community. In 2021, BOOM Concepts was selected as one of the partners to represent The Greater Pittsburgh Region on the Google Arts & Culture platform and recognized as one of Pittsburgh's Cultural Treasures through The Heinz Endowments and The Ford Foundation."
"My artwork centers on understanding how social traditions affect social and civil rights. Historically, I believe embroidery's limited, personal narratives and representation have contributed to restricted and adverse identity politics. I want to raise awareness as to how this cultural practice has silently, but powerfully influenced the condition of people's parity, representation, and treatment.
Ubiquitous in all cultures, the medium of embroidery contains its own patriarchal or submissive history. My threaded artworks aim to elevate the concept of craft to high-end fine art, a feminist empowerment source, and a tool for diverse expression in what I call boomerang intersectionalism. Boomerang intersectionalism starts with feminism’s tenant of“the personal is political” and removes the personal from a topic/subject, so the viewer can focus on and consider the object that was initially made personal. This way more people can access, assert, and share their own personal experiences and identity on the topic/subject at hand. The artwork then becomes more inclusive and accessible to a wider audience as opposed to artwork that promotes a single narrative. In effect, the artwork, able to support and accept multiple, simultaneous narratives, then returns to but widens the concept of the “personal is political.” I believe this artistic and intellectual approach to form and subject is imperative to supporting today’s fourth wave of feminism. Boomerang intersectionalism helps viewer’s to understand the medium's power and influence over identity politics, the body and health, semiotics, education, consumerism, capitalism, etc. It provides a platform that supports multiple narratives, which incites attention to the various solutions to equality and justice each one individually requires.
I want to push the boundaries of traditional embroidery by combining the stitching process with observational painting techniques and color theory while restricting myself to a gridded system. I do not map, sketch, or use computer programing to create my artworks. I work exclusively by sight (except for lettering in order to avoid lint damage and spacing errors, which saves time). I believe these limitations presents a significant process challenge compared to other thread applications, but this is on purpose in order to elevate embroidery and cross-stitch into the realm of high-end fine art.
In my practice, I also seek to democratize embroidery, make it more widely accessible, and an intersectional platform for diverse expression, subjects, and narratives. I believe this way it can be a unique platform for education, empathy, and listening. My goal is to modernize time-honored rituals so that they support and represent modern lifestyles, values, and feminist goals. I hope modernizing certain rituals and customs will also inspire activism and empowerment in its viewers. By exploring historically repressive social folk art, traditions and rituals, my artwork endeavors to graduate it beyond its domestic stereotypes, limited narratives, and exclusionary practices. It aims to examine the nature of our customs, their affect, and create a productive conversation surrounding identity politics and the hidden social influences that hold society back."
I have been a practicing artist since 1980. During that time, I investigated the balance of science and play, as seen in my "Experimental Aviation" series. In 2001, I re-directed my creative energy into building innovative programming and curating exhibitions specifically through my positions as curator and executive director of two art institutions. In 2014, I retired from arts management, returning to the creation of artwork and independent curatorial projects. I have begun a new series titled, "Work Wont Kill You" which deals with the relationship between work and creation. This exemplifies my many years investigating the relationship between logic and play mixed with my study of organizational management in institutions that hold creativity within their mission. I began this study by taking the symbol of a uniform, a worker's attire and an emblem of cohesive identity, and asking the question, "Is it possible for invention and creativity to thrive in standardized frameworks?" "Is it not human nature to change and invent and even rebel in confining constructions?" "Aren't we really best when we are coloring outside the lines?"
With every project, I define every aspect of "making" as work and every aspect of "work" as art. I create a task, employ people to complete the task and present the results. Every aspect of the social event is part of the overall aesthetic experience and the constructed object becomes a memory filled with the viewers and workers' collective contexts.
The result is a performance installation that is defined by the collective experience of working and interacting with the audience in this work.
LIFE'S WORK
We are many, and Emcee C.M. is just one of us. The work we do combines large-scale public, social and collaborative event-based projects with a more internal process of self-reflection through fiction, storytelling, and filmmaking.
The work we do concerns all of us, we, people. We are alive, working and playing. We have our personal and our general struggles. We are trying to understand the anxieties that freeze us in place, and celebrate our power to overcome them. If our work is how we define ourselves, then our life is work, our work is life, and it is our life's work. Work describes what all of us do with our time when we are actively engaged in living. To do work is the basic activity of being alive. This is the starting point: whatever else gets incorporated into a specific project, our work is always about work.
My work has taken me in many directions; however, I have always had a love of materials and our heritage. I like the challenge of working on site specific locations and trying to create a concept to marry my idea with place. I also like the challenge of creating a solo show where works within the exhibition feed off each other, and while pieces work in their own right, when put together they create a crescendo. Sometime the material within the solo exhibition can vary from bricks, to glass, wax, text, drawings, ceramics and video. When the work begins it gathers its own momentum and I find that I have to follow its direction which can be exhausting, but, at the same time, somehow liberating.
The exploration of human relations and their social context is central to my practice. I'm particularly interested in working with disempowered communities facing social, class and/or economic injustices. After identifying a specific problem in a particular community, I begin the process of engagement. As I submerge myself into the local, I then start drawing parallels with the global; narratives generated by individual voices recurrently mirror other voices in different micro-societies around the world that are not necessarily related with one another. These invisible lines that link one story to another, to another... become the source of my research to produce work, in an attempt to have a better understanding of human behavior, thus parting from an understanding of the individual voice. Whether the final product of my projects becomes a sound or video installation, a collaboration, a shared activity for the community to take part...the climax of the process remains in the possibility of inviting each individual and their voice to participate as a medium that has the power to encourage other voices and other voices...and other voices, to make a contribution towards change.
On its bend toward justice, the arc of history is indeed long, but it's also liquid, subject to change. This fluidity of historical truth leaves it open to revision and manipulation - blurring the line separating the right or the wrong side of history. My work stands in this temporal river momentarily redirecting the water, where history, culture, economics and politics float.
My underlying process is physical, below the surface - an excavation of memory from sediment, bringing artifacts to the surface - and then, a reconstruction. In fact there is a term in archeology known as anastylosis, defined as: the archeological reassembly of ruined monuments from fallen or decayed fragments, incorporating new materials when necessary. This is very close to a description of how I see my work, except that I often do this process in reverse. Taking monuments, myths, histories, culture, I break them down into fragments, incorporate some new material (from the present or imagined future) and put them back together as a new, constructed meaning, imagining different outcomes and parallel narratives.
The success of my work thrives on the interaction with new communities and environments. Through a careful investigative method involving the gathering of regional materials, native plants, local stories, architectural landmarks and historic research I have focused on the creation of site-generated works of art that illuminate the unobserved in our day to day surroundings and the challenges facing our environment.
I have developed an interdisciplinary practice that incorporates a wide spectrum of resources and techniques. I am intrigued with the process of creating a controlled environment where the work organically develops and changes over time. This form of artistic creation represents the constant state of entropy we live in, and how the delicate characteristics of memory and time can both erode and enhance our interpretations of experience.
With each new project I lean towards a minimalist approach. I focus on exploring the formal use of light, color, pattern, space and time - by interweaving manmade, natural, and living materials to create a sense of elegance out of the simplest of gestures. My intent is to evoke a visceral encounter that comments on the compartmentalized preservation of Nature and History, while planting a new awareness of the tenuous relationship between ourselves, nature and the built environment.
crystal am nelson is a civically engaged, multidisciplinary artist who works in social practice, curation, photography, video, performance and installation in order to activate under-articulated histories and alternative subjectivities.
She regularly collaborates with other artists, often to perform happenings that position artists as service-providers or cultural docents to the public. Another aspect of her practice includes creating site-specific interventions that are in direct response to not only the history and geography of a location but also to its position in the contemporary sociopolitical landscape.
At the center of Drew Ippoliti's practice is an interest in the vernacular language of tools and containers, using a traditional, skill-based approach coupled with examinations of history. Drew generates objects and installations rooted in craft, concerned with how the individual relates to the mass.
In 2009 he was awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship to China to study Ceramics and Architecture along the ancient Silk Road. For the last two years, Drew has remained in China, constructing an international practice of lecturing and making work at various universities and residencies.