Ayanah Moor

AIR June 2019

Ayanah Moor (b. 1973 in Norfolk, VA) is a conceptual artist whose work explores blackness, gender, desire and language. She works across various media to create paintings, prints, drawings and performance. Her national and international exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the DePaul Art Museum, (Chicago, IL); Adobe Books, (San Francisco); The Studio Museum in Harlem, (NY); The Andy Warhol Museum, (Pittsburgh); ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives—University of Southern California Libraries; Subliminal Projects, (Echo Park, CA); Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, (Auckland, New Zealand); and Proyecto ‘ace, (Buenos Aires, Argentina). She has been awarded artist residencies at The Center for Book, Paper & Print, Chicago, and Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago); the Proyecto ‘ace (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Auckland Print Studio in New Zealand; Women’s Studio Workshop and Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York; Vermont Studio Center (Johnson) and Atlantic Center for the Arts with Master Artist Kerry James Marshall in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Her practice has been featured in books by scholar Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness (2011) and Terry Smith’s, What is Contemporary Art? (2009). Dan S. Wang & Anthony Romero’s 2016 text, The Social Practice that is Race, described her work alongside Hank Willis Thomas and Ellen Gallagher as “carrying forward a new black arts tradition.” Ayanah Moor earned a BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia.

www.ayanah.com

Ella Weber

AIR August 2019

Weber intentionally maintains menial jobs, unrelated to the arts, as a means to fuel her practice. Currently she resides in her parent’s suburban basement and slices meat in a grocery store deli. The deli acts as extension of her studio and a tool to reduce the gap between artists and non-artists alike. She’s a starving artist financially, not literally, thanks to the unlimited meat and cheese at her disposal. As a means for compensation, she has taken over 10,000 photos and videos while on the clock. Utilizing the job skills required, she upends the delicate line between consumer and viewer, performer and employee, artist and gallery. Through video, image, sound, text, and the labor of an 8-hour shift, her work draws connections between consumerism, sexuality and spirituality.



She earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an MFA with distinction in printmaking from the University of Kansas. Weber has attended residencies at PLAYA, Jentel, PrattMWP, Ox-Bow School of Art, Kimmel Harding Nelson, The Wassaic Project, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Signal Culture, Anderson Ranch, The Frans Masereel Center and Santa Reparata International School of Art. Weber is the recipient of a 2019 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council and an OAEA award for Best New Media Artist. Her video, Cycle, won first prize in the International Cube Art Project. The artist has exhibited widely at venues such as The Haw Contemporary, International Print Center of New York, Art at Wharepuke, Project Project, Bradbury Art Musuem, Lamaar Dodd School of Art, Forum Gallery at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute and most recently, The Union for Contemporary Art. When she is not slicing ham, she teaches at The University of Nebraska–Omaha and mentors high school students through the Joslyn’s Kent Bellows Mentoring program.

Caitlin Baucom

AIR September 2019

Caitlin Baucom is a composer, performer and organizer in Brooklyn. Her work has shown across the US and Europe at MoMA PS1, HERE Arts, Dixon Place, Knockdown Center, Superchief Gallery, Secret Project Robot, Halle 14, Kulturhuset, Mana Contemporary, SIGNAL Gallery, and many more. As a performer for the Museum of Modern Art, she has interpreted the work of Lygia Clark, James Lee Byars, Yoko Ono and Adrian Piper. In 2016 she began curating and hosting community in her loft under the umbrella TREVORSHAUS, and has since been invited to presented immersive programming at Secret Project Robot, Knockdown Center, Mana Contemporary, and H0l0, and to develop the 2017 MoMA PS1 Sunday Session SPITTLE OF THE MOON.

https://vimeo.com/caitlinbaucom

Sharbreon Plummer

AIR October 2019

Sharbreon Plummer is an artist Ph.D. Student (The Ohio State University) and creative strategist. Her upbringing in southern Louisiana informs her interest and investment in how culture and ancient practices act as influencers of personal expression and contemporary work, specifically within the Global South. Her areas of focus and research include: Black women's work, fiber art, systemic racism and erasure, equity based interpretation, oral history and cultural preservation through storytelling, and African American material and visual culture. Her current dissertation research project focuses on restorying of the contributions and representation of Black women fiber artists color in craft/art histories. Most recently she was selected to be an Alliance of Artist Communities Diversity and Leadership Fellow, YWCA Leadership for Social Change Fellow (Columbus, OH) and participant in the 2018 Tate Intensive (London, UK). She has created and facilitated work presented in/for institutions such as Project Row Houses (Houston, TX), Rush Corridor Gallery (New York, NY), the African American Museum in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA), Hampshire College (Amherst, MA) and Americans for the Arts. Her work has been supported by organizations such as the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation and the Embroiderer’s Guild of America. As an artist, her work is often ephemeral and site specific. It is a reflection of her diasporic identity, always seeking to reconnect to home and resituate the voices of her ancestors in the spaces that they built and belong in. Oral histories, collective making, and re-appropriation of imagery and materials are just a few of the approaches she uses to research and create work that processes the triumphs, defeats, and legacies of marginalized voices. In addition to maintaining her research and practice, Sharbreon continues to serve as an independent consultant on special projects and artistic collaborations.

sharbreonplummer.com

Heather Beardsley

AIR November - December 2019

Heather Beardsley is an American visual artist from Virginia Beach, VA. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fibers and Material Studies in 2015, and a BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia in 2009. Following her MFA, she received a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art in Vienna, Austria for the 2015-2016 academic year. In 2016 she was awarded a twelve month International Artist Scholarship by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Germany. Recently she has had solo exhibitions at the Staatliches Naturhistorisches Museum Braunschweig, Germany, Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria and St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Recent group exhibitions include Fake at Science Gallery, Dublin, Amateras Annual Mini Paper Art Competition at the National Palace of Culture in Bulgaria, Off the Wall at the Spartanburg Art Museum, and New Waves 2019 at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2018 she was awarded residencies at bartr, in Budapest, Hungary, and KulturKontakt in Vienna, Austria, and she will be an artist-in-residence at Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing, China in 2019. She has upcoming group exhibitions at Yeiser Art Center, Shangyuan Art Museum and Science Gallery Detroit.

http://www.heatherbeardsley.com

Cory Tamler

AIR January 2020

Cory Tamler works across performance, writing, & installation to create fresh points of contact between environments & the objects (human & nonhuman) within them. She runs a nameless, experimental, small but dangerous performance collective in Brooklyn. Her background in playwriting & physics informs her practice, lending it strong elements of both storytelling & experimental thinking. She has created & participated in research-based performance projects in the United States, Germany, & Serbia, and has worked with museums & companies including the New Museum for Contemporary Art, The Civilians, the James Gallery, Sprat Artistic Ensemble, Yinzerspielen, & the School of Making Thinking. She writes & translates (from German, & collaboratively from Serbo-Croatian) essays, criticism, fiction, & plays/performance pieces. As a core artist with Maine-based civic arts organization Open Waters since 2010, Cory has written a play based on the lives & work of small-scale farmers in Southern Maine, led collaborative writing-science workshops with marine biologists & community members, & co-written a book of performance scores that help readers & performers step into the scales of migratory Penobscot River fish. She is the project director of the In Kinship Archives & Performance Fellowship through Open Waters. Cory is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Theatre & Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY, & a teaching fellow in the Department of Theater at Brooklyn College. During her 2010–2011 Fulbright tenure, Cory focused on post-migrant & collaborative theatre practices in Berlin. Her academic & critical writing & translations have been published in Studies in Musical Theatre, Asymptote, Culturebot, The Offing, Extended Play, Howlround, & SCENA. Based in Brooklyn since 2011, Cory grew up in Pittsburgh & has lived in Chicago, Berlin, & on a farm in Brewster, NY.

http://corytamler.com/

TABLEAU STATIONS: Isak Immanuel + Marina Fukushima

AIR February - March 2020

Tableau Stations is an intercultural arts platform, based in San Francisco and active internationally. It was initiated by Isak Immanuel, in 2004. In collaboration, Isak Immanuel and Marina Fukushima have worked on several uniquely composed intergenerational dance performances. Focused on local/global questions of place, family, community, and instability, projects have been researched and presented at Headlands Center for the Arts, NOHspace, CounterPulse, Kinosaki International Art Center, Little Tokyo + LAB AIR, Seoul Dance Center, and TPAM (Tokyo/Yokohama Performing Arts Meeting). In 2018, they collaborated with locals to develop “THINGS EVAPORATE – dances of sickness and health” as artist-in-residents in Beppu, Japan.

Isak Immanuel grew up in Taos, New Mexico and East Los Angeles, US. He received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Practices from California College of the Arts (1999). Since, he has worked with numerous choreographers and movement artists, including: Anna Halprin, Katsura Kan, Yuko Kaseki, Thomas Langhoff (Munich State Opera/SF Opera), Koichi and Hiroko Tamano (Harupin Ha), Shinichi Iova-Koga (inkBoat), Surjit Nongmeikapam, and others. His works, such as "Wind Stations - a curation of missing people", "ANICONIC", "Made of Silence, Air, and Glass", and others, have been researched and presented internationally in numerous contexts, including: Attakkalari India Biennial in Bangalore, Akiyoshidai International Art Village in Japan, Dock 11 Berlin and the 7th International Choreography Competition - ‘no ballet’ in Germany, Fabrica Europa / Moving_Movimento in Italy, and through fellowships from the Japan-US Friendship Commission/National Endowment for the Arts, and the Hemera Foundation/Tending Space in the US.

Marina Fukushima was born in Tokyo, Japan and immigrated to the US in 1992. Specializing in Dance, she received a BFA from Butler University (2001) and an MFA from the University of Iowa (2005). Since, she has created her own choreographic works such as “Family Seasons” (2016) in collaboration with her parents (both visual artists) and was a resident artist at Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland for the project “Eleven and a Half Hours” (2017) and at Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei (in collaboration with visual designer Olivia Ting), with whom she created the work “Room in a Pinhole”. Also, she has performed with numerous companies and choreographers, including Kunst-Stoff, Lenora Lee, ODC, Catharine Galasso, Christine Bonansea, project agora, and Tableau Stations, touring throughout the US and internationally in Germany, Greece, Peru, Taiwan, and Japan.

www.tableaustations.org

Gemma Marmalade

AIR June/October 2020

Gemma Marmalade is a British artist and scholar currently undertaking doctoral research titled: In A Manner of Speaking: The Subversive Voice in Performative Art at the Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University. This near-completed enquiry examines the performing artists’ voice as, potentially, a subversive agent. It is motivated by a process of thinking, making, and showing performance-based art works that utilize voice in a way that deliberately skews meaning and a distorting of the conventional delivery of contexts and information.

With an active research profile, Gemma is a Professor in Critical and Theoretical Approaches to Photography at the University of Derby. As an artist, her work specializes in audacious spectacles in photography, video and performance which playfully negotiate the authenticity of hierarchical institutions with social and queer politics. Gemma’s practice is exhibited widely, including Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; The Photographers' Gallery, London; The Apulia Film Commission, Bari; and the State Museum of Gulag, Moscow.

Las Vegas and its community have particular cultural resonance to Gemma’s interests and is a powerful source of inspiration for the development of future work. Gemma is keen to engage connection and collaboration with the city's creative contributors.

gemmamarmalade.com

Kevin Goodrich

AIR July 2020

b. 1984, Newark Valley, NY Kevin Goodrich is an interdisciplinary artist working in printmaking, sculpture and painting. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, where he taught until 2017. He is currently an Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the Art Department at Cornish College of the Arts. He lives and works in Seattle.

Goodrich writes of his work: I am fascinated by the abundance and repetition in a society saturated with imagery, at the speed of which it is consumed, and the impact mass-production and dissemination still holds on how we understand the value of any given object. I view this common, yet complex environment as a landscape to observe and interpret. My recent work has been focused on images and objects that are easily accessible, immediately recognizable, and that have a relationship to the representation of past-utopias. These include palm trees, used car ads, refrigerators, building materials, boxes, and other various found images. I choose these references as a way to address my interests in the uncanny as a condition, or near-schism, with the familiar. There is a kind of idealism and dark humor in prompting the viewer to look for even more meaning in an object or image that is so readily known and unremarkable. My intention with imagery is not to invite a past-due sense of nuance or overlooked importance, but to orient the viewer towards a perspective where they are questioning the objective reality of an object before them. This prompt expands my exploration between spatial structures and the language of reproduction. My background as a printmaker continues to inform my work as the preoccupation with the original and the multiple persists despite the materials I work with. I play with the expectations of reading familiar images by employing strategies of fiction, mimesis, and the spatial organization of collage. This direct engagement with illusion, the slippery slope in regards to its authenticity, and its relationship to the history of representation creates opportunities for me to explore different modes of production freely. As an interdisciplinary artist, my work in print, sculpture, and painting holds a high regard for the traditions of how things are made, even if the end results are to undermine those specific histories in order to achieve new problems from which to confront a past or current tradition.

kevingoodrich.org

Daniel Melo

AIR September 2020

Daniel Melo is a latinx artist and multi-instrumentalist based in San Francisco. His most recent work was made in response to Building 960, a former ammunition storage facility in Fort Barry California and Nike Missile Site SF-88, a Cold War Era nuclear launch platform meters away. Both are within a landscape that holds the presence of the state’s potential alongside an otherwise peaceful experience of hills next to the Pacific. The son of Colombian immigrants, Melo's research into the Presidio archive and architectural interventions aimed to absorb the dark history embedded within the historical and architectural space of Building 960. Melo installed textiles used in uniforms and tarps used to cover objects throughout the rooms and hallways of Building 960 which he then photographed thinking about the military’s capacity to decide the value of another’s life in addition to the institution’s lack of transparency.

Melo earned a New Genres MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in English Literature from Kenyon College. In 2019 he was selected by the J. Paul Getty Museum Senior Curator of Photography James A. Ganz, for a group exhibition in upstate New York. His work in images and textile will be included at the South African Visual Arts Historians lectures in November 2019. He has shown in Buenos Aires, New York, and San Francisco and his work is held in various private collections including in Colombia and the United States. Beginning in July 2019, he’ll attend the SOMA Artist Program in Mexico City.

https://www.danielmelo.com

Ralph Farris

AIR October - December 2020

Ralph Farris is a Juilliard-trained multi-instrumentalist, performer, music director, curator, composer, arranger, and record producer. He is a tireless collaborator, whether working as an individual, or as a founding member and Artistic Director of ETHEL, the genre-bending string quartet described by The New York Times as “indefatigable and eclectic,” and by The New Yorker as “vital and brilliant”. That spirit has led to work with a who’s-who of rock stars, filmmakers, choreographers, educators, stage directors and poets. 

Ralph has taken part in major collaborations with ETHEL, Robert Mirabal, Molissa Fenley and Frank Cassara, Annie-B Parson, Vijay Iyer, Stewart Copeland, Martin Scorsese (on the short The Key to Reserva), and Kurt Elling (on the GRAMMY®-winning album Dedicated to You: the Music of Coltrane and Hartman); toured extensively with Roger Daltrey (as Music Director and lead fiddle), Todd Rundgren, Joe Jackson, Ensemble Modern, Bang On A Can, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Ensemble, and Kaki King; performed in concert with Seiji Ozawa, John Williams, Leonard Bernstein, David Byrne, Thomas Dolby, Tom Verlaine, Jill Sobule, Andrew Bird, Fernando Otero, Jake Shimabukuro, JP Jofre, Pete Townshend, Alice Cooper, Sinead O’Connor, Lou Reed, and Trey Anastasio; conducted The Lion King and Annie on Broadway; composed for film (Noelle Brower’s short Everything Is Ordinary; Anika Burt’s short Begin Again; Susan Todd’s short The Mother Is the One Who Stretches (with ETHEL); Danièle Wilmouth’s feature Eleanore And The Timekeeper (with ETHEL); Jehane Noujaim’s industrial Pangea Day), for dance (Monkeyhouse), and for the stage (Aquila Theatre’s productions of A Female Philoctetes and The Tempest, Jarrett & Raja, Lawler & Fadoul, the Jerome Foundation, BRIC Arts Media, Arts Brookfield, OZ Nashville, BAM, and the NEA); arranged music for Five For Fighting (the GRAMMY®-nominated hit “Superman (It’s Not Easy)”), Dishwalla, Chantal Kreviazuk, Room 11, Pound, Dayna Kurtz, Lord Graham Russell (of Air Supply), and the University of Michigan; recorded with Paul Simon, Depeche Mode, Ivy, Fountains of Wayne, Regina Carter, Clay Aiken, Rod Stewart, Natalie Merchant, Better than Ezra, and Harry Connick, Jr.; and produced records for ETHEL and the Hevreh Ensemble. With ETHEL, Ralph has been honored by ASCAP and nominated for a Native American Music Award. ETHEL is the Resident Ensemble at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Balcony Bar, Quartet-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center’s 2018/19 Face the Music, and Ensemble-in-Residence at Denison University, where, in 2017, the ensemble members received honorary doctorates.

Currently, Ralph is composing a full-length musical, a ballet based on Snow White for Pineapple Dance, performing in his new all-viola quartet Firewood, touring as part of ETHEL’s production of CIRCUS – Wandering City, a multi-media performance that originated at BAM, and producing a series of contemporary classical recordings for composer Stanley Grill.