HEAVY BREATHING ARTISTS
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Clay AD was born in Indianapolis Indiana and now lives in Berlin where they are a somatic bodyworker, artist and writer. In their interdisciplinary practice they honour and explore illness, ecology, science fiction, transformation and the politics of care under capitalism -- by themselves, collectively and with their clients. They are a certified practitioner of the Pantarei Approach and their somatic work is informed by their background in improvisational dance, and personal practice of breath-work, meditation and visualization. Their first novel, "Metabolize, If Able" is available through Arcadia Missa Press UK and was named a finalist in the 31st Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. They writing has been published by Pilot Press, Futures Journal, Hematopoiesis Press, and Monster House Press. They have led somatic and writing workshops at NGBK Berlin and Shedhalle Zurich, and read internationally including at the Institute for Contemporary Arts London. They received their BFA from Cooper Union in 2014.
Clay's art and writing can be found on instagram at @pastacomplex and their somatic work @sentientsomatics
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Caroline Alexander was born and raised in San Francisco and graduated with a degree in theater, dance, and performance studies from UC Berkeley.
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Larry Arrington is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher whose choreography has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
Z Space, The Lab, CounterPULSE, ODC, The Garage, Cell Space, Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, Supperclub, backyards, living-rooms, and in New York at The American Realness Festival. She has been an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, CounterPULSE, Kunst-Stoff Arts, the Garage, and ODC’s Sandbox Series.
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Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (b. Damascus, 1990) is a visual artist, performer and curator. Bhutto’s work explores complex histories of colonialism that are resurrected by contemporary international politics. In the process he unpacks the intersections of queerness and Islam through a multi-media practice. He has shown in galleries, museums and theaters globally, as well as spoken extensively on the intersections of faith, radical thought and futurity.
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Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator whose work focuses on embodiment and digitality, archive theory, and new economies. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, and she collaborates widely with individuals and archives. She is the co-founder and curator of the Bay Area’s Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art salon; an artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive; and an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. In her past life she was probably an aerobics instructor.
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Chani Bockwinkel is a dancer person who works in photography and video. Her work was most recently shown at aunts, NYC and the Collage Festival in Philladelphia.
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BONANZA, the collective practice of Conrad Guevara, Lindsay Tully, and Lana Williams, centers around ideas of abstraction and questions of authorship, while dismantling ideas of the heroic artist. They have exhibited at Tmoro Projects, Interface Gallery, Artists’ Television Access, and n/a in the Bay area.
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8ulentina’s name is inspired by Bulent Ersoy, a legendary transgender Turkish singer. For 8ulentina, DJing is about creating a personal archive that tells a story; it can take the form of a Turkish trance remix, an Egyptian Mahraganat track, or a sad R&B track.
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Sarah Burke is a journalist and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing focuses on art, identity, social justice, technology, feminism, and the intersection therein. She is currently an editor at Broadly. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Wired, KQED, Broadly, Artsy, SFMoMA Open Space, Momus, Hyperallergic, Creators, Art Practical, Hi-Fructose, Complex, and the East Bay Express - of which she is the former Managing Editor.
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Joshua Kit Clayton is a musician, artist, and deejay based in San Francisco. He has been releasing and deejaying music in the space that spans and surrounds techno, house, dub, and noise for over 15 years, with recordings on a variety of labels including Orthlorng Musork, Cytrax, ~Scape, DropBeat, Soul Jazz, Context, Parallel, Mille Plateaux, Vertical Form, Background, Nummer, Musique Risquée, and Car Park.
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Zen Cohen received her MFA in Art Studio at the University of California at Davis and her BFA in Media Arts from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Her video, photo and performance projects have been presented in venues such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, deYoung Museum, Centro Atlántico Arte Moderno, ARTSpace New Haven, Vanity Projects, Center for New Music & Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley, Recombinant Media Lab, SOMArts, Krowswork, 21 Grand, Roxie Cinema and Artists Television Access (ATA).
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Tom Comitta is the author of ◯ (Ugly Ducking Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread), SENT (Invisible Venue) and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014(Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of 40 "night novels," art books and poetry. In 2017 he and Fire Drill staged Bill: The Musikill, an experimental musical, as part of Minneapolis's Momentum dance festival, commissioned by The Walker Art Center, The Cowles Center, and other local organizations. Previously based in the Bay Area, he now lives in Los Angeles.
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Sofía Córdova: Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland, California, Córdova's work considers sci-fi and futurity, dance and music culture(s), the internet, mystical things, extinction and mutation, migration, and climate change under the conditions of late capitalism and its technologies. She is one half of the music duo, XUXA SANTAMARIA. Through this project she scores all of her video and performance work.
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Lisa Rybovich Crallé is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Bay Area. Her research focuses on corporeality and embodied experience in relation to sculpture, installation, and performance — art forms that respond to the physical presence of a viewer or participant. Her work has been presented at Cornell University, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, Syracuse University, Mills College, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Land and Sea, and Field Projects, among other venues. In addition to her studio practice, Lisa teaches at Berkeley City College and co-organizes Heavy Breathing with Sophia Wang.
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Laura Boles Faw’s work consists of investigations through sculptural objects, installations, curatorial projects, and collaborative ventures. She examines spatial and social constructions and looks to create new meanings and transformative fictions. She has exhibited at Scrawl Center for Drawing, Ever Gold Gallery, Alterspace, Meridian Gallery, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and Vast Space Projects in Las Vegas.
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Margit Galanter, MA GCFP is a movement educator, arts investigator, and dance poet living in Oakland. Her unique practice, Physical Intelligence, helps people experience the innate clarity and vitality one can uncover through the potency of movement. Physical Intelligence incorporates Margit’s expertise as a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitionercm, acupressurist, qigong practitioner, and movement artist. Margit received an MA in Movement Research and Practice from NYU’s Gallatin School in 2004. She works one-on-one with clients, teaches workshops, performs, and collaborates with practitioners from a wide range of media and disciplines. In her practices, she is committed to nourishing vivid lives.
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Elena Gross is an independent writer and culture critic living in Oakland, CA. She received an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in 2016, and her BA in Art History and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2012. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Elena was formerly the creator and co-host of the arts & visual culture podcast what are you looking at? published by Art Practical. Her most recent research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists. She has presented her writing and research at institutions and conferences across the U.S., including Nook Gallery, Southern Exposure, KADIST, Harvard College, YBCA, California College of the Arts, and the GLBT History Museum. Gross is the Exhibitions Associate at the Museum of the African Diaspora.
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Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon works in sound, installation, sculpture and performance. Her work is devised around audio and spatial feedback systems that manipulate the visitor’s awareness of sound and space. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2004) and an MFA from Stanford University (2011) where her research focused on the history of communications technology and the physiological and psychophysical effects of music and sound on the body.
Nola Hanson (b. 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is a trans artist whose practice centers the role of embodiment in contemporary social systems. Nola received their BFA in Painting and Art Criticism from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2014. They started boxing at the New Bed Stuy Boxing Center, a community-run boxing gym in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn in 2015. In 2017 they founded Trans Boxing, an experimental boxing club that prioritizes participants of various identities who have limited access to boxing training.
Nola's practice includes independent work as well as collaborative socially engaged projects, and has been shown in New York, Chicago, Portland, and Milwaukee. Nola is currently an MFA candidate in the Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University.
Samuel Hertz is a Berlin-based sound artist and researcher working at intersections of Earth-based sound, sonic sensualities, and climate change. Alongside his performances exists a strong research component based in Anthropocene studies, encompassing relationships between sound, geography, climate, and social ecologies working with institutions such as HKW/Max Planck Institute (DE), RHUL Centre for GeoHumanities (UK), and the University of Leeds (UK).
Carrie Hott is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. Her work is informed by a roving research practice that explores the current and historic infrastructural systems that mediate our collective experiences and perceptions.
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Nola Hanson (b. 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is a trans artist whose practice centers the role of embodiment in contemporary social systems. Nola received their BFA in Painting and Art Criticism from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2014. They started boxing at the New Bed Stuy Boxing Center, a community-run boxing gym in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn in 2015. In 2017 they founded Trans Boxing, an experimental boxing club that prioritizes participants of various identities who have limited access to boxing training.
Nola's practice includes independent work as well as collaborative socially engaged projects, and has been shown in New York, Chicago, Portland, and Milwaukee. Nola is currently an MFA candidate in the Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University.
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Samuel Hertz is a Berlin-based sound artist and researcher working at intersections of Earth-based sound, sonic sensualities, and climate change. Alongside his performances exists a strong research component based in Anthropocene studies, encompassing relationships between sound, geography, climate, and social ecologies working with institutions such as HKW/Max Planck Institute (DE), RHUL Centre for GeoHumanities (UK), and the University of Leeds (UK).
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Carrie Hott is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. Her work is informed by a roving research practice that explores the current and historic infrastructural systems that mediate our collective experiences and perceptions.
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Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs and works under the alias of La Chica Boom. She uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization
to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, Mexicanidad, and proper and improper ethnic, gender, and queer subjects. As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within immigrant, anti-rape, and prison abolitionist movements.
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Christopher Robert Jones is an interdisciplinary artist based in Illinois. Their research is centered around the ‘failure’ or ‘malfunctioning’ of the body and how those experiences are situated at points of intersection between queer and crip discourses. Using sculpture, installation, and performance strategies, their work aims to create ruptures in the layers of cultural/political/historical sediment through which compulsory normativity and compulsory ablebodiedness are disseminated. Christopher received B.A.s in Art Studio and Technocultural studies from UC Davis and is currently a M.F.A. candidate at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
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Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a Korean-American multimedia artist who contemplates and reimagines digitally constructed on/offline (non)human experiences. Thinking through making, she performs moments of incomprehension: when language loses its coherence, necessitates absurd leaps in logic, and reroutes into intuitive and improvisational sense-making forms of expression. Her current projects examine the influences of consumer technologies on human and (non)human interaction and the feelosophical experiences of the body. She is the founding director of Synthetic Empathic Intelligent Companion Artefacts (SEICA) Human Interaction Labs, founder of The Living Lab, co-founder of sharing turtle™ (with libi rose striegl), and one of the collaborators at the Centre for Emotional Materiality (founded by Surabhi Saraf ). Kim is the author of Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, which was published by The Accomplices / Civil Coping Mechanisms (June 17, 2019) and the coauthor of Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-tales of the Digital Afterlife with Mark Amerika, published with Open Humanities Press (November, 2019).
Kim has shown work in numerous on/offline exhibition spaces, screenings, and festivals around the world. She received the ArtSlant Award in New Media (2013), New Media Caucus Distinguished Scholar Award (2019), and Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award (2020). She was an artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive (2017), Korea National University of the Arts (2017), Black & White Projects (2016), and at the Museum of Human Achievement (2019) and Electrofringe with artist libi rose striegl (2019).
Kim received a B.S. in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and M.F.A. from the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP) at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Kim has shown work in numerous on/offline exhibition spaces, screenings, and festivals around the world. She received the ArtSlant Award in New Media (2013), New Media Caucus Distinguished Scholar Award (2019), and Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award (2020). She was an artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive (2017), Korea National University of the Arts (2017), Black & White Projects (2016), and at the Museum of Human Achievement (2019) and Electrofringe with artist libi rose striegl (2019).
Kim received a B.S. in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and M.F.A. from the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP) at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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Claudia La Rocco is the author of The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited), selected poetry, performance texts, images and criticism, and the novel petit cadeau, which was published by The Chocolate Factory Theater in print and live editions. She has received grants and residencies from such organizations as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts, and has bylines in numerous publications, including ARTFORUM, BOMB, and The New York Times, where she was an arts critic and reporter from 2005-2015. animals & giraffes, her duo with musician/composer Phillip Greenlief and an ongoing roster of collaborators, has released two albums: July (with various musicians; Edgetone Records, 2017) and Landlocked Beach (with Wobbly; Creative Sources, 2018). In February 2016 she became editor-in-chief of Open Space.
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Layton Lachman After working in the San Francisco Bay Area for seven years, Layton Lachman is now emerging as a Berlin-based artist. They are working in dance performance and continue to be deeply invested in the politics of alternative modes of artistic collaboration, curation, and social organizing. Their research is often in the realm of somatics and finding methods of utilizing these experiential practices in the creation of immersive worlds of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation.
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Christina Linden began working as Associate Curator of Painting & Sculpture at the Oakland Museum of California in the winter of 2013. Prior to her tenure at OMCA, Linden worked as an independent curator and writer based in Oakland with projects at SFMOMA, Kadist Art Foundation, and Stanford. She teaches as visiting graduate faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, holds a Master of Arts in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from New York University.
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Claude Linden Smith was born in September 2014. Claude screams a lot and mostly in a happy way. While rolling used to be a favorite hobby, as of May 2015 there is a lot of crawling by sliding around on the belly like a lizard. Standing up with support is also a current interest, and a good guess is that there will be walking and running by August.
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Julz Hale Mary is a multi-media performance artist who exposes the absurdity of polite society, with a particular focus on interrogating the white patriarchy by creating campy renderings of feminized pathologies. Their work has been featured at SOMArts, The Lab, Artists’ Television Access, Submission, The Stud, Seattle LGBT Film Festival, Boston LGBT Film Festival, and The Center for Sex and Culture.
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Olive Mckeon is a dancer and researcher from Northern California, who writes on the intersections between Marxism, feminism, and dance studies. She holds a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, completing a dissertation on historical materialist approaches to San Francisco modern dance history. From 2012-2017, she was a member of a curatorial collective called SALTA that put together a monthly series of experimental dance in Oakland. From 2015-2017, she co-directed the Dance Studies Working Group at UC Berkeley. She has danced with the choreographers Abby Crain, Hana van der Kolk, Sophia Wang, and Jmy James Kidd as well as in her own work.
Olivia Mole was born in London, England in 1975. She attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, and received an MA in Production Design from the National Film and Television School in the UK. Her work has been shown guerrilla style in her own garage, at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Southern Exposure, the Wattis Institute, and Pro Arts Oakland.
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Olivia Mole was born in London, England in 1975. She attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, and received an MA in Production Design from the National Film and Television School in the UK. Her work has been shown guerrilla style in her own garage, at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Southern Exposure, the Wattis Institute, and Pro Arts Oakland.
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Christian Nagler is an artist and writer based in Oakland, California. He works at the intersection of bodily movement and geo-financial systems. Recent projects include Market Fitness and Yoga for Adjuncts, which pursues economic critique through kinesthetic, participatory performances. Lately, he has been doing ethnographic research into the performance culture of Silicon Valley, making videos like Shoulder Babies, and working to build an organization called phoebe.
A book Human Capital: A Life was published in 2016. Other recent writing can be found in TDR, Performance Research, and Art Practical.
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Raphael Noz is a San Francisco-based artist and educator whose performances have been shown at The San Diego Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, as well as many galleries and venues in the Bay Area and beyond. He holds an MFA from CCA and an MS from Wheelock College in Education, and is currently a Root Division studio artist.
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Jasmine Nyende is a new media and performance artist from South Central Los Angeles. Her work revolves around social media and deleted posts, the shame in public memory and the ephemerality of beauty. She sees her art as a never-ending attempt to take the perfect selfie. Jasmine is currently writing a book of poems entitled Tension about a family. She runs a radio show on KCHUNG Radio and publishes the art & poetry zine Fit Form Function.Her band Fuck U Pay Us is an Afropunk band based out of South Central, LA. They are Uhuru Moor (vocals/guitar), Tianna Nicole (drums), Jasmine Nyende (vocals), and Ayotunde Osareme (bass).
Jeepneys (Anna Luisa Petrisko) is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist. Named after the iconic converted WWII army jeeps of the Philippines, she is of mixed race Filipina and Slovak heritage and her work focuses on the complexities of identity, memory, and language through a decolonizing and critical lens.
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Jeepneys (Anna Luisa Petrisko) is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist. Named after the iconic converted WWII army jeeps of the Philippines, she is of mixed race Filipina and Slovak heritage and her work focuses on the complexities of identity, memory, and language through a decolonizing and critical lens.
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Brontez Purnell is author of the cult zine “Fag School,” frontman for his band “The Younger Lovers,” and founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He earned a B.F.A. in Theatre and Contemporary Dance at California State University, East Bay, just published his first novella,” Johnny Would You Love Me (if My Dick Were Bigger),” with Rudos and Rubes, and will publish a second novel, “Since I Laid My Burden Down…,” with the Sister Spit imprint of City Lights Books.
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Kate Rhoades is an Oakland-based multimedia artist. She received her BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design and her MFA from Mills College. Rhoades has been a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and has taught art students of all ages. Her work has been exhibited in art venues, alleys, and hotel rooms across the United States and Canada.
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Judith Rodenbeck’s teaching and research encompass critical theory, performance studies, the politics of aesthetics, and radical pedagogy, especially as these engage with modernism and its avant-gardes and with contemporary art.
Her first book Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (MIT, 2011) explores the emergence of performance and intermedia in the American fine arts of the 1950s. She is currently working on several book-length projects: case-studies of four women artists engaged with media ecologies ca. 1969, which will feature essays on Lygia Clark, Joan Jonas, Alison Knowles, and Marta Minujin; a longitudinal study of the intersections between what Marcel Mauss called “techniques of the body” and the visual arts, configured through the notion of the performative; and an experimental text, Bipedal Modernity. Her work has also appeared in journals such as October, Grey Room, X-TRA, Artforum, Modern Painters, Sculpture, Woman’s Art Journaland Camera Austria, among others.
Rodenbeck is assistant professor of media and cultural studies at University of California, Riverside.
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Rusti (she/they) is a somatic organizer and practitioner currently living in Philadelphia, PA. She holds a MA in Embodiment Studies from Goddard College and has been training with the Strozzi Institute and generative somatics since 2016. She has also been a practicing LMT since 2011. Rusti is driven by a deep belief in the capabilities that our bodies hold to help us navigate, heal from, and disrupt the social conditions we exist within and are shaped by. She is the author of "Social Bodies: The Shaping of Internal and External Worlds", as well as various articles and zines. She facilitates various somatic workshops in Philadelphia, using embodiment as a tool for social research and collective healing. IG: @thridspace.somatics
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P Sazani is a writer, artist, and teacher living and working in Los Angeles. She writes science fiction about religion, poetry about matter, and essays about performance. She is one half of the All-Wash-Away Sacred Harp Singers of Los Angeles (AWASH), an experimental publication collective interested in semiotic disaster. Through AWASH she edits DanceNotes, a chapbook series that publishes experiments in dance notation. Her writing has been performed in Los Angeles at REDCAT, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Women’s Center for Creative Work, the mortuary, and Beyond Baroque, and has been published by Wolfman Books, Vallum, and Riting. She is currently finishing a fellowship at CalArts.
Peter Simensky is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum 52, New York; Museum 500meter, Sapporo; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. He is a recipient of the NYFA Fellows Grant, Oregon Arts Commission / Hallie Ford Family Opportunity Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants, MacDowell Colony, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture to name a few. Currently he is producing work and research on the silver industry for the La Tallera, Proyecto Siqueiros in Mexico City / Cuernavaca, MX. Peter Simensky Chairs the Sculpture, Individualized, and Community Arts programs at California College of the Arts.
Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist. Recently, he’s been living nomadically, mostly in California. He exhibits his work internationally, at various galleries, biennials and museums. For many years, he was a professional musician and now he makes music as ROOS and with the duo, NewVillager. His novel The Book of Formation is out with Melville House Books and he contributes dialogues to ArtReview, The Believer, and various other publications. He is currently the host of Subject Object Verb, a new podcast from ArtReview.
Chris Sollars Artist and director of 667Shotwell, Sollars work revolves around the reclamation and subversion of public space through interventions and performance. The results are documented using photographs, sculpture, and video that are integrated into mixed-media installations. Sollars is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture, Mills College, Oakland, CA. Awards include 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2013 San Francisco Arts Commission: Individual Artist Commission Grant, 2012 Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists Grant, 2007 Eureka Fellowship Award, 2007 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Grant, 2009 Headlands Center for the Arts residency, and 2015 Recology Artist is Residence.
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Peter Simensky is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum 52, New York; Museum 500meter, Sapporo; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. He is a recipient of the NYFA Fellows Grant, Oregon Arts Commission / Hallie Ford Family Opportunity Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants, MacDowell Colony, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture to name a few. Currently he is producing work and research on the silver industry for the La Tallera, Proyecto Siqueiros in Mexico City / Cuernavaca, MX. Peter Simensky Chairs the Sculpture, Individualized, and Community Arts programs at California College of the Arts.
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Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist. Recently, he’s been living nomadically, mostly in California. He exhibits his work internationally, at various galleries, biennials and museums. For many years, he was a professional musician and now he makes music as ROOS and with the duo, NewVillager. His novel The Book of Formation is out with Melville House Books and he contributes dialogues to ArtReview, The Believer, and various other publications. He is currently the host of Subject Object Verb, a new podcast from ArtReview.
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Chris Sollars Artist and director of 667Shotwell, Sollars work revolves around the reclamation and subversion of public space through interventions and performance. The results are documented using photographs, sculpture, and video that are integrated into mixed-media installations. Sollars is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture, Mills College, Oakland, CA. Awards include 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2013 San Francisco Arts Commission: Individual Artist Commission Grant, 2012 Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists Grant, 2007 Eureka Fellowship Award, 2007 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Grant, 2009 Headlands Center for the Arts residency, and 2015 Recology Artist is Residence.
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Stairwell’s is a hybrid project – part curatorial platform, part social engagement – run by artists Carey Lin and Sarah Hotchkiss. Founded in 2011, we organize site-specific exhibitions, interactive events and facilitated explorations of the urban landscape. We aim to create new models for audiences to engage with art by shifting exhibitions out of traditional gallery settings and into transitional spaces like stairwells, garages, balconies and windows.
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Stephanie Syjuco: Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and included in exhibitions at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, The 12th Havana Bienal, The 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), among others. A long-time educator, she has taught at Stanford University, The California College of the Arts, The San Francisco Art Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, and is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of California at Berkeley. She lives and works in Oakland, California.
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Liza Sylvestre is the co-founder of Creating Language Through Arts, an educational arts residency that focuses on using art as a means of communication when there are language barriers present due to hearing loss. In 2014 she was awarded both and Artists Initiative and Arts Learning grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Recently she has been the recipient of a VSA Jerome Emerging Artists Grant, a fellowship through Art(ists) on the Verge and an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been shown nationally at venues including The Plains Art Museum, the Weisman Art Museum, Roots and Culture, Lease Agreement Gallery, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and Soo VAC. Her work has been written about in Art in America, Mousse Magazine, SciArt Magazine and the Weisman Art Museum's Incubator Web Platform. Most recently Sylvestre has served as the artist in residence at the Center for Applied Translational Sensory Science and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, MN. In February 2019 the Minnesota Commission of the Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing (MNCDHH) awarded Sylvestre a Citizen Advocate Award for her exemplary work in advocating for and with deaf, deafblind, and hard of hearing Minnesotans. During the 2019/20 academic year Sylvestre is a Kate Neal Kinley fellow completing work at Gallery 400 and the University of Chicago, and a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Brian Tester has been involved in music and art-focused practices and collaborations since the late 1990s, bringing a focus on sonic detail, left field allusion, and an intuitive grasp of improvisation to each musical project he has been involved in. In addition to solo appearances, he currently performs in the minimal electronics duo Spaceburn, and in a constantly morphing variety of bands and projects, as performer and engineer.
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Eli Thorne is a transgender Oakland based hybrid artist born in Harrogate, England, and raised in Santa Cruz, California. He received his BFA from UC Berkeley and his MFA from Mills College. His work has been shown in a variety of spaces in the Bay Area, the greater US, and Canada.
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Cassie Thornton is a feminist economist and artist. In her newest work, she turns towards the development of experimental techniques for healing the social and biomedical wounds that result from surviving smash and grab capitalism. These techniques are meant to support the development of collective powers for those made weak, invisible, sick and isolated by capitalism, so those who have been trampled may begin to heal and generate the ideas and practices for a benevolent future society.
Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University. Their scholarship in the environmental and medical humanities, literary and cultural studies, and feminist, queer, and trans studies, has been published in differences, Women and Performance, Criticism, Post45, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Critical Inquiry. Their public writing has appeared in such venues as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Rambling, Full Stop, Arcade, Make Magazine, and Chicago Review.
Jean-Thomas' monograph in progress, Breathing Aesthetics, argues that breathing has emerged, since the 1970s, as a medium that configures embodiment and experience as effects of biopolitical and necropolitical forces. Within a crisis in the reproduction of life marked by the air's pollution, weaponization, and monetization, articulations of individual and collective survival and persistence must grapple with the management and dispersal of the risks of breath. Breathing Aesthetics surveys minoritarian contexts where the aestheticization of breathing generates medium-specific and historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity. Jean-Thomas is also editing, with Drew Strombeck, the collection Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s.
More information on past and upcoming projects is available at jttremblay.wordpress.com.
Sophia Wang creates and performs movement-based works in collaboration with performance artists, writers, and visual and sound artists. She co-founded the Brontez Purnell Dance Company and has danced for artists Xavier le Roy, Tino Sehgal, Jérôme Bel, Xandra Ibarra, and Amara Tabor-Smith. She earned a PhD in English from U.C. Berkeley, and integrates her research and performance practices through writing and curatorial projects focused on critical somatics: thinking with and as bodies.
Leila Weefur (She/They/He) is a trans-gender-noncomforming artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Through video, installation, writing, and lecture-performances they examine the performativity intrinsic to systems of belonging present in our lived experiences. The work brings together concepts of the sensorial memory, abject, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. Weefur is a recipient of the Hung Liu award, the Murphy & Cadogan award, and the Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including SFMOMA, The Wattis Institute, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York. Weefur is a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. They are a member of film collective, The Black Aesthetic.
Anna Martine Whitehead does performance. She has been presented by venues including the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; San José Museum of Art; Velocity Dance Center; Chicago Cultural Center; Links Hall; AUNTS; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, Jesse Hewit, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others. She has been recognized with awards from the Graham Foundation, 3Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Rauschenberg Foundation, and Djerassi. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical; and has contributed chapters to a range of publications including Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Sobsercove, 2016), Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (2016), and Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU, 2009). Martine is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).
Danielle Wright is a interdisciplinary visual artist drawn to the politics and poetics of witnessing. Her work examines language, materials, and the language of materials while exploring how notions of identity, intimacy, and trauma overlap/intersect. She is fascinated by where “you” end and “I” begin. As such her work aims to soften delineations between artist and viewer/participant. In addition to her studio practice, she serves as a Teaching Artist at Creativity Explored, a nonprofit art gallery and studio for adults with developmental disabilities in the Mission District of San Francisco.
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Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University. Their scholarship in the environmental and medical humanities, literary and cultural studies, and feminist, queer, and trans studies, has been published in differences, Women and Performance, Criticism, Post45, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Critical Inquiry. Their public writing has appeared in such venues as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Rambling, Full Stop, Arcade, Make Magazine, and Chicago Review.
Jean-Thomas' monograph in progress, Breathing Aesthetics, argues that breathing has emerged, since the 1970s, as a medium that configures embodiment and experience as effects of biopolitical and necropolitical forces. Within a crisis in the reproduction of life marked by the air's pollution, weaponization, and monetization, articulations of individual and collective survival and persistence must grapple with the management and dispersal of the risks of breath. Breathing Aesthetics surveys minoritarian contexts where the aestheticization of breathing generates medium-specific and historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity. Jean-Thomas is also editing, with Drew Strombeck, the collection Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s.
More information on past and upcoming projects is available at jttremblay.wordpress.com.
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Sophia Wang creates and performs movement-based works in collaboration with performance artists, writers, and visual and sound artists. She co-founded the Brontez Purnell Dance Company and has danced for artists Xavier le Roy, Tino Sehgal, Jérôme Bel, Xandra Ibarra, and Amara Tabor-Smith. She earned a PhD in English from U.C. Berkeley, and integrates her research and performance practices through writing and curatorial projects focused on critical somatics: thinking with and as bodies.
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Leila Weefur (She/They/He) is a trans-gender-noncomforming artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Through video, installation, writing, and lecture-performances they examine the performativity intrinsic to systems of belonging present in our lived experiences. The work brings together concepts of the sensorial memory, abject, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. Weefur is a recipient of the Hung Liu award, the Murphy & Cadogan award, and the Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including SFMOMA, The Wattis Institute, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York. Weefur is a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. They are a member of film collective, The Black Aesthetic.
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Anna Martine Whitehead does performance. She has been presented by venues including the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; San José Museum of Art; Velocity Dance Center; Chicago Cultural Center; Links Hall; AUNTS; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, Jesse Hewit, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others. She has been recognized with awards from the Graham Foundation, 3Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Rauschenberg Foundation, and Djerassi. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical; and has contributed chapters to a range of publications including Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Sobsercove, 2016), Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (2016), and Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU, 2009). Martine is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).
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Danielle Wright is a interdisciplinary visual artist drawn to the politics and poetics of witnessing. Her work examines language, materials, and the language of materials while exploring how notions of identity, intimacy, and trauma overlap/intersect. She is fascinated by where “you” end and “I” begin. As such her work aims to soften delineations between artist and viewer/participant. In addition to her studio practice, she serves as a Teaching Artist at Creativity Explored, a nonprofit art gallery and studio for adults with developmental disabilities in the Mission District of San Francisco.