Phung Huynh is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose practice is primarily in drawing, painting, and public art. Her work explores and challenges cultural perceptions of beauty standards and representations of Asian racial identity and culture. Her most current work of drawings on pink donut boxes and cross-stitched, personalized California license plates explores the complexities of the refugee experience in Southeast Asian communities.
Chef T is part of the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine’s art program.
Calida Rawles is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work merges sharp hyper-realism with poetic abstraction. Rawles intimately paints water as both a spiritually expansive and powerfully transportive element for her figures which are often inspired by those who are closest to her – family, friends, artists and other members from her extended community. A conduit for memory, storytelling, and veneration, water is also a historically charged symbol for its connection to racial segregation and ongoing anti-Black violence and trauma. Exploring the allegorical range of water, whether sharply turbulent or cosmically vast, Rawles creates an intersectional space for Black healing and boundless possibility.
Andrew DeCaen is an artist exploring works on paper disciplines including drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. His work is known for examining mundane experience in contemporary life with special interests in rituals and habits surrounding eating and the body. His recent work studies images of people standing in lines, without clear context of the lines’ purpose. They suggest our connectedness and our separateness through body language and physical appearance.
Deborah Kennedy, artist and author, created a series of large-scale installations on the Berlin Wall in 1989. This photograph, Walls Within: Berlin Wall, East Germany, is one of a series of portraits taken six months before the Wall fell. The image suggests the vulnerability of the individual confronting the unrestrained power of a military police state. Sadly, the United States' wall on the border of Mexico, and its ensuing humanitarian crisis, brings contemporary relevance to this work.
Dimpy Bhalotia is a photographer based in London and Bombay. Having worked in the fashion industry for many years with renowned designers in Europe, she found her love in black and white street photography. She finds art in the extraordinary details of the seemingly ordinary life on streets. To her, street photography is her visual lexicon, which has no smokescreen.
Eric McCracken is a Canadian artist living in San Francisco. He conceives and constructs exoskeletons, headdresses and costumes to visualize mental illness as an autobiographical narrative, as a means of self exploration. He draws self-portraits in a unique visual language that gives a visual representation to personal issues of mental illness and addiction.
Gisele Olson is an artist living in Jackson, Wyoming, who primarily works with tapestry and collage. Her recent series “This America” reflects on the work of modernist poet Robinson Jeffers to contemplate “the impending collapse” of the imperial United States a century after Jeffers first envisioned it. In this project, Olson alters vintage postcards to create new narratives that dismantle the materials’ nostalgic, comfortable perception of the U.S., using collage to critique and reinterpret America’s idyllic self-image.
Humaira Abid is Pakistan born American artist working with sculpture and miniature painting. Her work challenges women’s roles in Asian and Middle Eastern culture, and pushes the boundaries of taboo in society. With her unique cross-cultural perspective, Abid aims to re-examine the way we see everyday objects, allowing for conversation and stories to unfold around subjects that are often buried under the surface.
Jay Wilson is a U.S. computer artist, designer, illustrator, muralist, printmaker, and tapestry weaver living and working in Hawaii best known locally for his monumental glass mosaic murals commissioned by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Exploring composition and color on transparent layers, 5 times his computer art has been selected as the cover image for the exhibition catalogs of the Museum of Computer Art’s international, online competitions. Lockdown, a self-portrait with coronas refers to mental and physical survival in the face of a pandemic.
John Keatley is a photographer with a prolific background of editorial portraits. Since his foray into fine art, his projects have taken on a more multidimensional approach. In his “Uniform” series, he responds to his own personal strengths and insecurities. On a journey of self-discovery, Keatley delves into topics of identity, individuality, and perception of others.
Julia Fullerton-Batten is a fine-art photographer renowned for her highly cinematic visual story-telling. Each image in her large scale projects embellishes her subject matter in a series of thought-provoking narrative ‘stories' using staged tableaux and sophisticated lighting techniques. Julia’s use of unusual locations, highly creative settings, street-cast models, accented with cinematic lighting are hallmarks of her style. She insinuates visual tensions in her images and imbues them with a mystique that teases the viewer into continually re-examining the picture.
Nancy Burson is an American artist known for creating photographs using computer morphing technology to alter the human face. She is best known for her pioneering work in morphing technologies which age-enhance the human face and still enable law enforcement officials to locate missing children and adults. Her piece, Human Race Machine, was used for over a decade as a diversity tool that provided viewers with the visual experience of being another race. Her recent text based work elaborates on the issue of race, deconstructing it to the molecular level of DNA which unites all of humankind.
Ora Clay is a fiber artist living in Oakland. As a young child, she learned the craft of quilt making from her mother. Over the past several years, she has honed the art of quilt making beyond a hobby or simply utilitarian function, and into a method of artistic expression. Clay uses her quilts to tell stories and speak on issues of social justice and culture by incorporating photos, text, and commemorating people and events
Pamela Littky is a Los Angeles based photographer who is known for images of high-profile personalities. Her portraits capture well-known subjects in seemingly unguarded moments. In between shoots of world-famous actors and musicians for top commercial and editorial clients, Littky pursues personal projects that show a decidedly less glamorous but completely compelling side of American culture.
Raymond Bonavida is an emerging artist who challenges us to reimagine our environment. Motivated by his interests in light, spacetime, and human perception, he incorporates expressive camera movement into long exposure photography, producing bold, visceral images. As a former student of philosophy and psychology at UCLA, he continues to bring big questions about how we experience and understand the physical world into his art.
Sandra Cattaneo Adorno is a photographer who uses her practice as a means of constant exploration and adventure. She has no preconceived subjects, but rather follows intuition. Adorno uses photography as a tool for human connection, creating a perfect justification to approach people and capture their stories.
Shelby Alexander is a mixed media artist whose work expands contemporary concepts of drawing and painting by combining figurative works on paper with recycled textile backgrounds, aiming to call attention to the pollution of the fashion industry. Her work highlights the tension between the modern experience of beauty, consumption, and industrialization.
Shell Bird is a Canadian mixed media and installation artist living in Ohio. Her work combines salvaged materials and ephemera to create visual narratives. While revealing new potential in the seemingly insignificant, she seeks to open up meaningful conversations at the intersection of culture, technology, and the environment.
Sherry Knutson is a Northern California native based in Sacramento multidisciplinary artist working primarily with drawing and painting. Her work investigates the human condition reflected in our world today: relationships between culture and nature, young and old, the urban and the rural, art and craft, rich and poor, the feminine and the masculine.
Suzan Mandla is a Canadian photographer, who draws from a practice of scientific experimentation into making images. The photos are often manipulated digitally as a variety of conceptual studies. Her love of nature and innate curiosity in the natural world is a recurring focus, which combines intuition and close research.
Thu Nguyen is a Vietnamese artist currently living in Hawaii. After the fall of Saigon, she was separated from her family in a refugee camp near Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States. Her self portraits make use of elements in traditional Chinese art, which are interpreted through a contemporary lens, to explore issues of identity.
Tom Atwood is a photographer based in New York. His work over the past 15 years (Kings & Queens in Their Castles) has focused on an extensive series of portraits of prominent figures of the LGBTQ community, photographed in their own homes. This series alludes to actual queer kings and queens in history, while also featuring a contemplative look at the day-to-day scenes of these cultural luminaries.
Vicki DaSilva is an artist based in Canada, who uses a unique method of long-exposure photography to generate images. These images are perhaps more akin to ‘light-drawing’ or graffiti than photography. This process is time based, by nature, but also incorporates performance, intervention, and activism. At the same time, there is no physical trace of this work, which adheres to DaSilva’s core message of sustainability in the work.
