Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama. From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood.

Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events. His work is now in collections of major museums throughout the country, on permanent display in the United Nations, and been displayed in the White House Rose Garden. In January of 2014, Holley completed a one-month artist-in-residence with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva Island, Florida, site of the acclaimed artist’s studio...Read More.

During Holley’s residency, he created Mixed.

Milla Toukkari is a visual artist from Helsinki, Finland. She has graduated with an MFA and MoA, majoring in printmaking and design. Her works are indebted to the transformative and transitional processes essential to printmaking, even though the pieces also involve elements from photography, writing, and installation. Nonetheless, the ever-fleeing and ultimately deconstructive nature of the printed image is in the core of her philosophical and artistic interests.Important, reoccurring and very much cherished concepts in her practice include (the politics of) archive, (constructed) memory, and the ontology of and the otherness in the (printed) image.

She has contributed to a publication touching the notion of the expended field of printmaking, published in 2017 by the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland.

Toukkari is a serious but seriously slow thinker.

During Toukkari's residency, they created Lover's Ear.

Spencer Merolla studied religion as an undergraduate and had embarked on a career in academia before finding her way back to her first love, visual art. Her work explores the social practices and material culture of grief and remembrance through various affectively-charged materials.

During Merolla's residency, she created Album Amicorum.

Alejandro Franco’s work is a quest to find a new function for discarded objects, to give them a new role, a new life. In an industrial landscape where made objects and information flows overwhelm us, he finds fulfillment in building characters out of various objects that were previously resting without purpose. Seeking hidden similarities between objects and in parallel striving to interpret thoughts are his great passions. He feels a need to intervene with these forgotten elements, to work with their poetic potential and create a convergence engaging people with their new existence. A seamless search for beauty, sifting through the detritus of everyday life.

During Franco's residency, he created Live Streaming.

lydia see is a multidisciplinary practitioner, educator, and curator of art + archives who is passionate about the uses of art for social justice + civic engagement. Working primarily at the intersections of photography with fiber/object/craft/performance, her practice involves material and conceptual investigation through research and collection and is rooted in history: literal and conceptual, local and global, intimate and environmental, personal and anonymous.

Through processes of collecting, arranging, stitching, weaving, photographing, re-photographing, and combining, the archive is reinterpreted in mundane domestic materials, accumulations, and outdated media to draw connections between memory, ephemerality and changes in technology. In her social practice she advises as a creative consultant and strategist with a focus on inclusive and accessible interpretive collateral and expanded engagement.

During see's residency, she created The Records Room.

Kimberly Lyle’s work explores our human relationships to systems of language, communication, learning, and technology. Within each of these systems she often uses translation as a strategy for understanding the movement of meaning - between languages, between people, between mediums. By questioning these larger structures in often personal ways, she hopes to better understand how they come to shape our identity, relationships to each other, and perceptions of the world.

During Lyle's residency, she created Staircase Score.

Sidney Stretz is an artist and educator originally from Columbia, MO. She received her MFA from the California College of Arts and her BFA from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Stretz makes work about everyday struggles, strange social situations, and failure. As an artist she works to highlight and improve circumstances and situations that others may not feel are valid or important. Through attempts to build community and mutual benefit, she develops a sense of engagement with a wide variety of groups of people that are looking for creative solutions to their community-based dreams. Sidney likes the Titanic, dogs, and making pies.

Stretz is currently an artist-in-residence for the Southern Constellations 2018: Rural Residency in Rockingham County–an Elsewhere Elsewhere project in partnership with the Reckon Holler Homestead.

During her residency with Elsewhere Goes To Madison at Reckon Holler, Stretz created Instructions On Waving.

Adam Carlin is a social practice artist that lives and works in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is currently the Director of Greensboro Project Space, a contemporary art center at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Program Director for the Community Arts Collaborative where he creates and oversees community engaged projects for the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and advances partnerships between the college and the community. He is also co-Founder and co-Director of Creek Colleges, an organization that creates schools on the banks of rivers, lakes, and creeks that are going through active restoration. Carlin is interested in creating opportunities for formalized social interactions that take the form of institutes which constructs projects that highlight under-recognized histories, idiosyncratic activities, and public dynamics. Participation and collaboration are integral to his practice and he often work site and situation-specifically. It is common that he as a large variety of projects and institutes going on at one time which occasionally connect and cross, creating systems of engaged research and production. He received a BFA from California College of the Arts and is currently pursuing his MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.

During his residency with Elsewhere Goes To Madison at Reckon Holler, Carlin created Project #1 and Project #2.

ABCIV: a new breed of designer, the Animist, who channels the voice of the material, which speaks in the silence. CloudBank Productions: a multi-format media group portraying People & Places in Time. Floating Circus: in collaboration with Amazon Annie, a celebration of rare individuals & their incredible talents.

During his residency with Elsewhere Goes To Madison at Reckon Holler, Cousins (ABCIV) created These Madison Times!

Amazon Annie has made a career out of wrestling; she is a self-made producer, performer and promoter who has thrown a decade's worth of concept parties in NYC.

As a fabricator and designer, she has built a wide array of installations from wrestling rings to mud pits. Her events include public participation as well as staged performances. Working alongside Avery Cousins, the 'Floating Circus' had its debut last August, and was her first foray into a more traditional circus theme. For more: August 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

During her residency with Elsewhere Goes To Madison at Reckon Holler, Amazon Annie created Memory Lane Photo Booth.

Tiny polished pieces of nature, shipped long distances to wait. Lying lazily on markets that look incredibly alike, eventually becoming someone’s pocket fortune or nightstand reassurance. Nelly-scented incense and Icelandic glacial water tapped on bottles with a cool sticker. 15 missed calls and they say eating blue smarties while wearing Crocs shoes causes immediate cancer. Ásgerður Birna Björnsdóttir is a visual artist busy with making sense of the abundance of materials around her.

Hannah Lewis is a visual artist, vintage clothing seller, and treasure hunter born and raised in southwest Florida. Organizing her embarrassingly large troll doll collection, restoring old clothing, and searching for bizarre objects to include in her next artwork are just a few of her favorite pastimes.

Lewis's sculptural works explore how branding and media influence the ways in which we identify ourselves and behave. She is especially interested in the (oftentimes toxic) relationship between marginalized consumers and objects of consumption. Forced to grapple with a socio-political climate that isn't always hospitable for fat women of color, Lewis imagines a future where her differences are both recognized and celebrated.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Lewis created Dress-Up.

Antonia B. Larkin is a multidisciplinary artist whose main focus is contemporary black womanhood. Larkin completed a MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of art, and a BFA in fine art from Georgia Southern University.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Larkin created Vessel.

Carolyn Clayton is an artist whose work seeks to cultivate an enhanced awareness of our shared lives with things. She has long been interested in the traces that human beings leave on material objects. Not only the observable scratches, smudges and smells that hint at past occurrences, but also the invisible and undetectable ones. She is enamored with how something as simple as touch can drastically shift an object’s perceived value, making it tainted or treasured (contaminated or cherished). This has positioned her to ask whether object history is retained in the fragments of everyday things, which she explores by interacting with, collecting, photographing, pulverizing and reassembling second-hand objects.

Mandy Messina is an interdisciplinary South African artist living and working in Oklahoma. Once, while filing out an application at a DMV they were asked to pick a different race (so as not to confuse hypothetical police during a hypothetical chase). A lot of art making ensued. Mandy is petty. During their residency at Elsewhere, Messina created CHANNELS.

Edison Peñafiel is an Ecuadorian visual artist living in South Florida. He studied Fine Arts and Art History at the Florida International University, Miami (2016). Having experienced and witnessed first-hand one of the turn of century’s everlasting dilemma—immigration and the economic/political instability in Ecuador/South America, Peñafiel brings the ambiguity of personal experience to global contexts. His installations are most often framed in paradoxical and absurd representations of specific events. Composing with video, drawing, sculpture, and animation, he transforms serious social incidents into potent poetic allegories. Conscious of our innumerable perspectives to interpret the world, Peñafiel uses large projections that blend with actual environments, extending his bizarre video and animated scenes into our reality.

During his residency at Elsewhere, Peñafiel created Ni Aqui, Ni Alla (Neither Here Nor There).

Sarah Nelson Wright is a Brooklyn based artist and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates media projects about the urban experience that reveal hidden value, investigate individual roles in larger systems, and open avenues for intervention. Her work encompasses video, installation, interactive media and public art. Her current project, Invisible Seams, has taken her from New York to California to India to Sri Lanka and to Elsewhere in Greensboro to take a deep dive into the history, systems and people behind mass produced clothing. She teaches digital media art at Marymount Manhattan College in NYC.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Wright created Invisible Seams.

Jeremiah Jones is an artist who creates objects and videos that explore the complex histories, landscapes and relationships that form our world. His process includes found image research, field production, and material projects in the studio to create complex works that bring to bear contemporary systems and mythologies. His work often incorporates the formal elements of projected light and sound.

During his residency at Elsewhere, Jones created Elsewhere Filters.

Katherine Quinn is a researcher and poet from the frigid land of upstate NY. She spends her days scribbling words on old envelopes, pondering community dynamics, and attempting to grow plants.

Kyra Gross is an artist, theorist, and community organizer who believed a big man in the sky was watching her for most of her life. She now uses object making as a means to analyze the implications of religious thought on how people view themselves, others, and their communities from an anthropological point of view.Her work visualizes a the future of women as intellectual giants surviving and thriving in oppressive systems. She hopes to help others reorient their lives post-god and provide a platform for identities which have been historically suppressed. She believes the systems that we collectively live in today are producing a dying planet - requiring a new generation of thought and activity- divorced from present-day binaries.