@beckybrwn

Becky Brown was born in Manhattan and currently lives in Buffalo, NY. Her work celebrates material presence and the handmade mark as productive alternative to online culture, with the power to restore attention and joy. She received her MFA from Hunter College and is currently an Assistant Professor at SUNY University at Buffalo. Solo and two-person exhibitions include PS122 Gallery (NYC), Arts+Leisure Gallery (NYC), the Handwerker Gallery (Ithaca, NY), Raft of Sanity (Buffalo, NY) and Fort Gondo (St. Louis, MO). Group exhibitions include The Drawing Center, Queens Museum, Freight+Volume Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery and A.I.R. Gallery (all NYC); Last Projects (Los Angeles); Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art and Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY) and Religare Arts Initiative (Delhi, India). She has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay, Edward Albee and Saltonstall Foundations, among others. Her installation “No, said the Fruit Bowl,” in the kitchen of an abandoned home on Governors Island, was described in the New York Times as “machines vomiting as if in a bulimic’s nightmare.” She has received grant funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Bronx Council on the Arts. Her writing has been published in Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail.

+ Learn more about Becky Brown.

@williamsanten

Bill Santen was born in Lexington, KY and currently lives in Buffalo, NY. Between songwriting and the visual arts, he makes portraits of human and natural subjects, using observation, oral history, memory, reenactment and poetic interpretation. As the songwriter and musician Birddog (1995-2005), he released five records, covered in publications including Pitchfork, Mojo and ACE Magazines, and included in films and plays. Birddog has collaborated with musicians Elliott Smith, Glenn Kotche, Edith Frost and Jason Lowenstein. Since returning to songwriting in 2013, he has played at venues including Pianos, Pete’s Candy Store, the Greene Space and Dixon Place (NYC), Nietzsche’s and Fitz Books (Buffalo, NY) and Horseshoe Tavern (Toronto). As a visual artist, Santen works in 16mm film, video, sculpture and photography. Projects have been screened, performed or exhibited at Queens Museum, Thomas Erben Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and the Bronx River Art Center (all NYC), Raft of Sanity and Play/Ground (Buffalo); and abroad at the Masc Foundation, Vienna, Austria; Wschodnia Gallery, Lodz Poland; and the Overgaden Museum of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark. He has been an artist-in-residence at Mildred’s Lane in Narrowsburg, Pennsylvania; and earned his MFA from Columbia University and his BA from the University of Kentucky, College of Fine Arts.

+ Learn more about Bill Santen.

@benbencowan

Ben Cowan was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Indiana University. The artist can be spotted examining plants and buildings as he walks to and from his studio in Brooklyn, New York. Occupationally, Cowan has worked in the studio of Jeff Koons and presently as a Scenic Artist for motion pictures. Cowan draws inspiration from urban landscapes and gothic architecture, blending observed places, personal objects, and religious abstractions to create paintings that bridge reality and illusion, personifying the interpersonal and the supernatural. Cowan’s work has been shown at New York City’s 550 Gallery, The Painting Center, and Spring Break Art Show. Cowan’s work is in private and public collections including The University of Scranton, Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan, and The Racquet Club of Chicago.

+ Learn more about Ben Cowan.

@artdarkajian

Allyson Darakjian is a multidisciplinary artist investigating and utilizing her personal memories as “texts,” curious about how memory might be indexed within the body. She uses an interdisciplinary approach mixing performance, psychoanalysis, and painting to explore how intuitive marks and gestures expressed with her body reinterpret or embody the emotion of memories. Currently her work explores the maternal body as a liminal space between mother and other, a hyper-bodied, hybrid entity that is beings contained in one. Allyson has a BA in studio art from Westmont College and a MA in Theology and Culture with an emphasis in visual art from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. She recently received her MFA in interdisciplinary arts from the University of Nevada Reno. Her work has been featured in various illustration and design projects for International Arts Movement, Compagnia Colombari Theater Company, Lit Moon Theater Company, Ratatat Theater Company, Canlis Restaurant, Brehm Center Fuller Northwest, J. Shipley Creative, The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, Westmont College, Good Company Players and Cyclical Publishing. She is the recipient of the Richard Cook Award.

+ Learn more about Allyson Darkajian.

@riskerbach

Chris Baker is a graphic designer and artist based in Holland, Michigan, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2023. Playing on the line between Graphic Design and Art, his work shifts between the external and internal, the representation of self and others. The focus of the work becomes language, translation, culture, and learning. He has designed books, brands, and websites for many artists, as well as galleries, museums, and non-profits. This sort of design work informs the art he participates in. With a focus on graphic language, he works with an attention to symbols, like letter forms and numbers, which are then pushed toward abstraction through defamiliarization. Subsequently topics like memory, record, time and space arise. He works in a variety of mediums from painting to printmaking through code based practices like javascript, html, and css. His work can be found in the gift shop at many art museums around the world.

+ Learn more about Chris Baker.

@kat.chamberlain

Kat Chamberlin (b. 1981, Amsterdam, NL) lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been featured at notable institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Chicago Cultural Center, Baltimore Museum of Art and BRIC. She has shown at Helena Anrather, Hesse Flatow East, Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NY), Selena’s Mountain, Guest Spot at the Reinstitute, and Beverly’s among others. Kat completed her MFA in Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and is the recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Toby Devan Lewis Award and the William Dole Award. Kat has been a resident at the NARS Foundation, Lynda Benglis’s Santa Fe Compound Residency, the BRIC Media Arts Fellowship and the Makrolab Station as a resident ‘lab rat’ in the Slovenian pavilion during the 2003 Venice Biennial.

+ Learn more about Kat Chamberlin.

@aleishafitz

Aleisha Fitz (b. 1988) is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Colorado, USA. Composing primarily with ceramic sculpture, her work often features soft, dimensional surfaces and a fusion of architectural and organic forms. Her visual style draws upon forms found in nature, observing and sometimes obscuring them with scale or abstraction. Her detailed sculpting, alongside techniques such as carving, modeling, and slab construction concerns itself with light and balance to imply a sense of movement. Using tactile and elemental mediums ranging from metal and wood to fiber and clay, her work regards the body, the animal world, and symbols to invite associations and curiosity and ultimately, to reveal the invisible connections all around us. Since 2021, Fitz has resided in Mexico City. Her work features in various national and international collections.

+ Learn more about Aleisha Fitz.

@michael_gac_levin

Levin’s paintings aim at the mystery and the intensity of childhood. At the core, Levin’s work is a lighthearted, diaristic drawing practice guided by repetition and humor. Riding a wobbly line down into memory, the artist finds images that speak to our predicaments in the present and the uncertainty of the future. As they feed into paintings, the drawings take on color, bringing associations to nostalgia, the nocturnal, and the fantastical. Reflective, dreamlike compositions offer views of a world in which everything is animate and purposeful. A world where anything might suddenly rise to speak, stalk or play. A sense of archaic monumentality pervades the images, but feels as soft and yielding as a pillow fort or a loaf of bread.

+ Learn more about Michael Gac Levin.

@parentpueblo

Melina Gac Levin, MSEd is the founder of Pueblo, a learning platform that equips multicultural parents with the skills and information they need to parent confidently. Pueblo offers culturally sustaining online classes and consultations about child development. Melina has over a decade of experience supporting children, families and educators. She teaches graduate courses in child development at Bank Street College of Education, from which she holds dual masters degrees in Infant and Family Development, Early Childhood General and Special Education, and Early Intervention. Her undergraduate degree is from Columbia University, where she studied visual arts, Latino studies, and dance. Melina presents regularly at professional conferences including at Bank Street's Infancy Institute, the Language Series, and the NYSAIS Diversity and Equity in Curriculum Conference. She is a partner in Premier Pediatrics' First Month Project. Her writing can be found on her Substack, Motherly, The EveryMom, and Cup of Jo among other publications.

+ Learn more about Melina Gac Levin.

@meglipke

Meg Lipke was born in 1969 in Portland, Oregon and was raised in Burlington, Vermont and Cheshire, England. She received her MFA from Cornell University and has taught at The University of Northern Iowa, Cornell University, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been reviewed in Art in America, the Village Voice, the New York Times and many online publications. She lives and works in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

+ Learn more about Meg Lipke.

@adapootter

Wright Potter’s installations re-stage the material qualities of photography using reflective mylar and mirrors to capture and play with light, calling up a filmic process. The artist employs transparent and translucent materials, like acetate and mylar, to mimic analog film while invoking a feeling of hi-tech ephemerality. The prints are digitally altered, illuminated and flipped on their axis to muddle recognition, exploring the difference between formal surfaces and physical or metaphorical grounding.

+ Learn more about Ada Wright Potter.

@andrewhendrixsonstudio

Andrew Hendrixson is an artist, writer, and currently a doctoral student at Duke University where he was named the Bowden Scholar and where he works at the intersection of the arts, theology, and philosophy. He's been an artist-in-residence at the Whale and Star Studio, the Chautauqua Institute, the University of Dayton, the Springfield Museum of Art, and the Byrdcliffe Colony. His artwork and writing can be found in publications including New American Paintings, the Princeton Theological Review, Image, Yale Letters, and an essay of his was included in the anthology Best American Essays 2021. Andrew has worked and made art alongside incarcerated youth for the project Not Yet Fallen, traveled the country for an experimental work called The House Shows Project in which he held conversations about the arts in living rooms from LA to NYC, and is currently working with the City of Columbus, Ohio on a 50' mosaic mural. Andrew holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Florida and an MA in Philosophy, Theology, & the Arts from Yale University. He lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife, Lindsey, and their baby girl, Cora Eden.

+ Learn more about Andrew Hendrixson.

@sonyabergstudio

In her current work, Sonya Berg explores the relational weight of portraiture, using painting, photography, and collage techniques to create tension between realistic depth and superficial abstraction in the rendering of natural imagery. Her paintings become icons of sorts, challenging the media-laden consumer culture of images by elevating the ordinary and casual to the vulnerable and valuable. Born in Raleigh, NC and raised in suburban Philadelphia, Sonya received her MFA in painting from The University of Texas at Austin in 2010. She has held residencies at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, CA and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson VT. She currently teaches at St. Edward’s University in Austin.

Learn more about Sonya Berg.