Sareh Imani is an Iranian-born, multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Imani received an MFA in Painting from the University of Tehran and an MFA from the Parsons School of Design in New York. In her practice, Imani explores the ways of achieving resourcefulness, through care, mending, and healing in times of inadequacy. For the past 2 years, she has been making a series of videos that study the relation between virtual and visceral, borrowing from medical methodologies and exploring the reparative potentials of art and science, intimacy and distance, instructions and poetics.Imani has been exhibiting her work in group shows both in the US (New York, Austin), Europe (Venice, Gothenburg), and the Middle East (Tehran, Dubai). She is the recipient of the one-year A.I.R fellowship (2020), and the Skowhegan School of painting and sculpture scholarship in 2018. In addition, she participated in the MASS MoCA residency (2018), AIM program at the Bronx Museum (2018), BRIC Workspace Residency (2019), BRIC Media fellowship (2020), and NARS foundation (2020).

Adam Eckstrom is half of the artist collaborative, Ghost of a Dream, with Lauren Was. The collaborative’s work embodies the essence of opulence while being constructed of materials that typically end up in the trash. They mine popular culture searching for discarded materials that people use trying to reach their goals. Whether it is a Hollywood film that transports the viewer into a dream reality, a travel poster promising a luxurious vacation, or a lottery ticket that gives the possibility of a future full of rich decadence; they use these remnants to both re-create people’s dreams, and portray the dreamer. They have recently been included in exhibitions at the MAAM museum, Galerie Paris-Beijing, Crystal Bridges Museum, Telfair Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens Museum, Frist Center for Visual Arts, The Courtauld, and The Mint. Other recent solo exhibitions include CES Gallery, Smack Mellon, and 601Artspace. Ghost of a Dream has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue Magazine, Hyperallergic, BlouinArtinfo, ArtFCity, W Magazine, Interview Magazine, World of Interiors, VICE Art Talks as a documentary, and Southern Foodways alliance as a short film. To learn more about Adam and Ghost of a Dream's work, please visit their C.V. on their website.

Marjorie Loflin (Board Treasurer / Executive Committee / Finance Committee Chair) is a Senior Accountant at Bernard Robinson & Company.

Kerri Mubaarak (Board Director / Executive Committee / Board Secretary)

If you encounter Kerri Mubaarak, it won’t take you long to figure out that her perspective is different. The way she approaches a subject—any subject— whether it’s an artist’s proposed work that she evaluates or a socio-political paradigm addressed in her performances is different. In fact, it’s difference that underlies all her works of theatrical art.

Kerri chose theater as a medium to express what she sees and senses interacting with “people in the periphery” a term she uses to describe those who are often marginalized by race, gender, religion or cultural norms. “The gift of this medium,” she says “is that the raw emotion of human experience can be shared openly and in the safety of an audience.” She considers the craft a practice of both art and healing that pre dates modern theater.

Kerri has a balance of skills earned during her tenure as Director of Caldcleugh Arts Center and as the Operations Manager for Elsewhere—a living museum and residency for visual artists. In 2015, she established Scrapmettle Entertainment Group—a theater development company—from an idea born from the desires of a community whose lives were positively influenced by the subtle healing effects of participating in live theater. Her team of emerging artists, directors and writers now use this platform to create new work, hone their craft or learn another aspects of the industry.

Kerri has written and produced a number of devised performances with her theater community in Greensboro, NC. She is an advocate for the arts, artists and the advancement of expressive art therapies.

Nich uses art to conjure immersive experience(s) and emotions within himself and others. Through human expression, he weaves together photography, poetry / creative writing, spoken word, illustration, multimedia, public installations, and bookmaking. He finds power in story--the way folktales travel through time, and how stories continuously shape many aspects in life. He seeks to create narratives that remind himself, and others, to unweave internalized harmful narratives / social standards, provoke self-love/smiles, create mischievous shenanigans, and to appreciate the many-varied emotions within the human experience.

Yari is a queer woman of color, an artist, and art historian focusing on bringing light and creating better opportunities in art spaces for queer artists of color. Even while pursuing her undergrad she took every opportunity to focus her papers on censorship of queer artist and lead seminar discussions on intersectional feminism. Her greatest affinity and source of inspiration for strength, courage, and charisma being the ballroom scene in 80's New York City. Truly falling in love with the mix of art, performance, and authenticity in personal identity and self-expression exhibited in the ballroom scene. She plans on focusing her future higher education on art history as it intertwines with the history of queer culture.

As a child, Lottie was confused that her friends wanted to play with Barbies. In her house, dolls and their disembodied parts were her father’s domain, along with broken kitchen appliances, Indian educational posters about personal hygiene, and hundreds of recorded VHS tapes of “very important” movies, recorded from TV. Lottie’s art draws on her family tradition of hoarding, using found objects, images and sounds to create sentimental and unsettling connections to the past. Her sculptures, soundscapes and installations explore relationships between remnant, memory and temporal experience. Lottie moved from Sydney, Australia to live in Berlin for reasons that have entirely to do with the vibrant arts scene, and nothing at all to do with the abundance of flea markets and second hand shops. Nothing at all.

Interdisciplinary artists Erin Ethridge (left) and Colleen Marie Foley (right) have been working together as Thorn since 2015. As a collaborative, Thorn questions ideas of shared or composite identity, memory and body. Thorn takes their relationship as subject and tool, searching for places where the physical and psychic boundaries between them soften and become permeable. They negotiate dualities of distance/closeness, pleasure/pain, self/other in pursuit of their limits. These efforts take the form of performance work, sculptural tools, and electronic media.

Thorn created Fly Down From Us during their residency.

Katie Hubbell’s multimedia practice operates within the formal slippages of installation, sculpture, performance, and video. She examines mass-media aesthetization, highlighting the tensions and comforts embedded within sensuous images. Using objects from everyday life, Hubbell’s practice reveals the flirtations and repulsions, states of boredom and states of obsession, parallels and contradictions which inhabit twenty-first century advertisement culture and self-help models of care. Katie received an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

By deconstructing and transforming canonized familiar myths from varied beliefs and traditions, and creating fantastic realms, where characters with elusive gender, sexual and political identities serve as alternative cultural heroes – Gil Yefman challenges and undermines the structured definitions and portrayal of the “other”, in order to explore and cherish the intrinsic potential of the extraordinary. He uses a manifold spectrum of practices and media, with a predilection towards the craftswomanship of crochet knitting. Yefman indulges in the therapeutic virtues of knitting as means to dwell on personal and collective traumas, as well as to reflect upon recurrent obsessive patterns in mankind's societies.

April Danielle Lewis (b. 1980 in Okinawa, Japan) is an artist, visionary, and community cultivator. Her work explores the intersections of history, place, and identity with a social justice and community building lens. Interventions, performances, installations and experiences are vehicles she uses to express these themes.In her early childhood, she went to work with her mother in her grandparents’ millinery shop. She was often given scrap materials from the hats that were being manufactured to keep her busy while her family worked. She was able to use bits of fabric and trimmings and was given her own space in the back of the shop where she was able to attach things to the walls and create her own unique space and sculptural forms. This introduction to making and materials has rooted the themes of placemaking and the use of found materials that continue to appear in her work. Over the past 20 years Lewis’ daughter has often been a subject, participant or had a hand in her artistic practice allowing motherhood to also play an integral role in creating a lens through which she sees and creates. Derived from a printmaking background, her performances and interventions often involve working in multiples, repetitive actions and building a framework that allows for works and performances to naturally evolve. Her work collaborates and invites her audience to be participants in engaging and building community.

Communications

Yvonna is a Black Agender Diviner, Conceptual Artist, and Arts Organizer based out of Greensboro, NC. In their own work, they explore themes of gender+sexuality, memory, personal responsibility, and poverty. Through a variety of mediums, they navigate their experience and their desires. They study trends in beauty, homemaking, and sustainability in an attempt to make direct links with critical race, gender, and art theory. They also practice multiple forms of divination and understand the practice to be one of mapping narratives.They have curated interactive gallery shows, appeared on panels centered around southern sexuality, and organized affordable clothing pop ups in their community in low income areas. Through the continuation of organizing workshops, pop ups, and exhibitions, they aim to shift preconceived notions of inaccessibility.

Coe Lapossy works in Massachusetts, trolling modernism and queerly lecturing at UMass. Their work investigates how popular culture gets into your heart, your mind, and changes you. Their current project connects the movie Prelude To A Kiss, the magicians trick of sawing a woman in half, and Donald Judd’s stacked sculptures. These stories and objects are reinterpreted with a new cast of characters, through painting, sculpture, and performance. 

During Lapossy's residency, they created Trap Door.

Marina Peng (b. Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is a multimedia installation artist living and working in St. Louis, MO. She received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her practice combines performance, video, text, and built structures to comment on the rigid social structures that restrict marginalized identities.

During Peng's residency, she created PSA: Satellite.

Silvi Naçi’s practice investigates gender and cultural identity, language and time, the body as subject/object, and the consequences of patriarchy. The work engages in the dialectic between the aesthetically beautiful and historical genealogy, identity and socio-political structures, the ‘puritan’ and the ‘bitch’. Rooted in feminist ideas, Naçi’s work examines the relationship between power and privilege, weight and trauma, and uses historical references to expand on broader truths, while underscoring debates around social politics, identity and representation through contemporary art practices. Their interest lies in the subtle and violent ways decolonization and migration affects and reshapes a people, language, gender identity, as well as social and cultural dynamics.

They created {Don't} Touch My Flower during their residency.

Jay Gould is a Baltimore based artist and educator whose work is work engages ideas of science and exploration fused with storytelling to create work that invites audiences to share a sense of discovery and a moment of curiosity. He has been dreaming of spaceships, wormholes, time travel and other paradoxes his entire life. Jay now uses a combination of wet-plate photography and handcrafted wood sculpture, along with the influence of abundant coffee, to create bizarrely inquisitive works that traverse space and time. 

During Gould's residency, he created Silver Spirits.

Eva Wǒ is a Chinese-New Mexican multimedia artist, curator, hustler, and sex magik worker. Her work casts spells of homoerotic cultural nourishment, liberation, and self-love set in a fantasy future dream for infinite gender/sexual self-determination. Currently she is co-curating Hot Bits, a touring queer sex-positive film and arts festival. Eva is also a recipient of the Leeway Transformation Award.

During Wǒ's residency, she created Welcome.

Yixuan Pan is an artist who was born and raised in the land of fish and rice, Hunan, China.To deal with issues of translation and communication as well as reimagining the western hegemony through a global outlook, her anti-disciplinary practice merges multiple media and modes of presentation such as installation, video, performance, lollipop making, music therapy practicing, choral conducting, and more. By dislocating language from its context and form, Pan questions the linguistic structures people learn and unlearn in relation to comfort, temperature, transparency, hierarchy and power dynamics.

During Pan's residency, she created An Orchestra At Elsewhere.