Amanny Ahmad
Amanny Ahmad is an artist, chef, forager, ikebana enthusiast, writer, food activist and traveler based in new york city. born in utah to palestinian immigrants, ahmad spent her early life traveling back-and-forth between the southwest and her family’s village in the west bank, where her interest in foraging began, evolving as a way of preserving the culinary traditions of her family. since then, ahmad, who is a self-taught chef, has studied culinary traditions and wild food ways in italy, mexico, palestine, and north america, in an effort to record and help preserve indigenous culinary traditions and methods of survival.
www.amannyahmad.com
Art Seed at Marble House Project
Zain Alam
Zain Alam For Love, From the Law 2017 Audio/video 3:27 Premiered on Vice/Noisey Photo c/o Ilana Milner (ilanacaye.com)
Zain Alam is an artist whose work explores the life of minorities and marginalized groups—particularly at moments of self-preservation, assimilation, and cultural innovation. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” his recording project Humeysha has been covered by Vice, Fader, and Village Voice. His work has been supported by ArtCenter/South Florida, Harvard University, and the South Asian American Digital Archive. His writings on art and religion have been published in Miami Rail, Buzzfeed, and The New Yorker. His practice explores how borrowing technologies are transforming—and reinforcing—traditional ideas of creativity. Through sampling, remix, and synthesis techniques, he charts intimate relationships with older artwork and archival material to ask what it means to borrow. His work challenges notions of “authenticity” and the “auteur” in artistic production by pointing towards a new ethical understanding that differentiates assemblage from appropriation, especially in new forms like global music and open-source technology. His projects are guided by a search for fresh, responsible approaches to borrowing that revitalize our understandings of inheritance, influence, and genealogy. Alam began composing music while researching the dispersion of my family after the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. The following year he returned to India as an American India Foundation William J. Clinton Fellow working as an oral historian for the 1947 Partition Archive. He composed his debut album Humeysha while recording hundreds of hours of ethnography and found sound, collecting stories from survivors of the Partition. The songs and stories written from that time reflect a lifelong search to find sonic affinities between the many cultures that make up a diaspora. His forays in video began with his audio-visual project “Lavaan,” commissioned by SAADA in 2016 as part of the “Where We Belong: Artists in the Archive” program. The work was screened in SAADA workshops held in various cities to commemorate the anniversary of the Oak Creek massacre and fostered conversation on memory, archives, and xenophobia. As an artist-in-residence with Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF) and ArtCenter/South Florida, Alam developed new forms of solo performance and began a multi-disciplinary project on the ethics of sampling in music. It has since grown to include a set of essays, a musical composition, and an installation built with a sculptor inverting instruments to destabilize our present, dis-enchanted ways of hearing. Raised in Kennesaw, GA and presently based in Boston and Brooklyn, Alam is the 2017-2018 Artist-in-Residence at Harvard’s Science, Religion, and Culture Program.
humeysha.com
Zaina Alsous
Zaina Alsous is an abolitionist daughter of the Palestinian diaspora. Her writing has appeared in The Offing, the Boston Review, the New Inquiry, Best New Poets 2017 and elsewhere. Her chapbook Lemon Effigies won the Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize and was recently published on Anhinga Press.
Gabriela Álvarez
Gabriela Álvarez-canoas plantain and collards and mushroom
Gabriela Álvarez is a chef and founder of Liberation Cuisine. She began cooking after studying public health in academia for several years. The kitchen became her way to tackle inequalities in the food system, while maintaining a focus on individual agency. Her own relationship with food has served as a declaration of self-worthiness in a world that diminishes brown bodies as well as a point of connection to her Puerto Rican ancestry. Her menus are an exploration of her own identities and a reflection of the communities and collectives with whom she collaborates. Chef Gabriela Álvarez cooks in spaces of self-determination, healing, community celebration, and cultural preservation. In 2014 she founded Liberation Cuisine with the intention of nourishing movements for social change with sustainable ingredients and practices. She has cooked for Soul Fire Farm’s Black and Latinx Farmer Immersion Programs as well as Harriet’s Apothecary Healing Villages, Bedstuy Pride, and Race Forward's Racial Justice Trainings. Gabriela is known to co-create food experiences with other artists, healers, activists and chefs. For example, she offered nourishment as part of an all-day healing experience at the opening of The Caribbean Center African Diaspora Institute in October 2016. Gabriela collaborated with two other women of color chefs to cook for the 2016 Holyoke Food Justice Conference. In 2017 she hosted a multi-sensory pop-up dining experience for three nights at Once Upon A Tart. Gabriela teaches cooking classes dedicated to food as resiliency and honoring traditional food preparations.
liberationcuisine.com
Simmi Aujla
Simmi Aujla is an Indian-American speculative fiction writer. She studied genre fiction at the VONA / Voices of Our Nation workshop in 2017, and is a 2018 fellow at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, participating in a program that provides emerging writers with workspace and support in the publication process. Her current work-in-progress is a collection of short stories featuring female protagonists in a near-future Bay Area. Simmi is a Brown alum and former journalist, with experience at Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. Keep up with her at www.simmiaujla.com.
http://www.simmiaujla.com
Ivy Baldwin
![IvyBaldwin_Keen [No. 2]_Dance_2017_Abrons Art Center_NYC.jpeg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57019fefd51cd411818396cd/1522682547284-62CKZAQBN9NC9NRQGBTC/IvyBaldwin_Keen+%5BNo.+2%5D_Dance_2017_Abrons+Art+Center_NYC.jpeg)
Ivy Baldwin/Ivy Baldwin Dance Keen [No. 2] Abrons Arts Center, NYC Photo by Maria Baranova
Ivy Baldwin is a NY-based choreographer and founder of Ivy Baldwin Dance. Since 1999, she has created 17 works for the Company, including 10 evening-length. Baldwin has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2014 BAM Next Wave Festival), Philip Johnson Glass House, The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Barnard College, The Wooden Floor, Dixon Place, and Dance New Amsterdam. Baldwin has received numerous awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (Choreography, 2014), Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Marble House; and been an Artist-in-Residence with BAM (2014 BAM Fisher AIR), Movement Research, ArtistNe(s)t (Romania), Sugar Salon, The Yard, and Abrons Arts Center. Baldwin has received funding from the Jerome Foundation, William and Karen Tell Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Dugas Family Foundation, Lumpkin Family Foundation, Puffin Foundation,The Fund for Good Work, and Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; and creative residencies from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Mount Tremper Arts, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), American Dance Institute, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and Kaatsbaan International Dance Center/NY Dance Force. Her work has also been presented by Tanz im August Festival/Danceoff! (Germany), Dans Contemporan International Festival (Romania), REDCAT (CA), Irvine Barclay Theater (CA), American Dance Institute (MD), The Painted Bride (PA), Appel Farm Performing Arts Center (NJ), Lincoln Center Out of Doors/Danceoff!, Symphony Space, 92nd St. Y, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Danspace Project, P.S. 122/Catch/COIL, and La MaMa, E.T.C. Baldwin worked with choreographer David Neumann (2014-2016) on An Octoroon and Futurity (SoHo Rep) and Hagoromo (BAM, ADI, Pocantico Center). Baldwin has been a guest artist/faculty at The New School/Eugene Lang, Barnard College, Hunter College, Rutgers University/Mason Gross, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, North Carolina School of the Arts, Iowa State University, and Long Island University. She is a graduate of North Carolina School of the Arts (BFA) and NYU Tisch School of the Arts (MFA).
www.ivybaldwindance.org
Kimberly Bartosik
Kimberly Bartosik , You are my heat and glare, Premiere, New York Live Arts, 2014, photo credit, Ian Douglas
Bessie Award-winning performer Kimberly Bartosik creates viscerally provocative choreographic projects that are built upon the development of a virtuosic movement language, rigorous conceptual explorations, and the creation of highly theatricalized environments. Her work, which is deeply informed by literature and cinema, involves complex plays on space, time, and audience perspective, dramatically illuminating the ephemeral nature of performance. Bartosik’s work has been commissioned and presented by BAM Next Wave (2018), Wexner Arts Center (2018), LUMBERYARD Contemporary Performing Arts (2018), New York Live Arts, American Realness festival, Dance Place, American Dance Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, Gibney Dance, Abrons Art Center, The Yard, MASS MoCA/Jacob’s Pillow, Danspace Project, French Institute Alliance Francaise’s Crossing the Line Festival, Festival Rencontres Chorégraphique Internationales de Seine-Saint Denis (France), Artdanthe Festival (France), BEAT Festival, The Kitchen, La Mama, Mount Tremper Arts, Princeton University, Barnard College, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Arizona State University, Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, and Movement Research. Bartosik is a 2017 National Dance Project (NDP) recipient, a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts. She is a 2017 (and 2010) MAP Fund grantee and has also received support for her choreographic work from the Jerome Foundation; FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts in partnership with The Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French American Cultural Exchange; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, USArtists International; New York Foundation for the Arts, Building Up Infrastructure Levels for Dance (BUILD); American Dance Abroad; New Music USA, Live Music for Dance; and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists and Emergency Grants. Bartosik is a 2017-19 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency Artist; and a 2017 Dancing Laboratory Residency Artist at the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron. She was a 2017 Bogliasco Foundation Fellow; a 2015 Merce Cunningham Fellow; and a 2016 Gibney Dance DiP Residence Artist. She is a recipient of a 2016-18 ART Capacity Building grant through Pentacle. Her most recent work, Étroits sont les Vaisseaux, premiered at Gibney Dance’s Agnes Varis Performance Lab in 2016 and was presented again as part of American Realness festival in 2017. Étroits will tour to the Wexner Arts Center in February 2018. She has been in creative residence at New York Live Arts, Live Feed and Studio Series; Gibney Dance Center’s DiP Residency, Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté à Belfort, France (FUSED); Governor’s Island through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program; Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University; Joyce Soho Artist Residency Program; La Guardia Performing Arts Center; Jacob’s Pillow; Kaatsbaan International Dance Center; Mount Tremper Arts; White Oak Plantation; and Movement Research. Bartosik was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 9 years and received a Bessie Award for Artistic Excellence in his work. She received her BFA from North Carolina School of the Arts, and MA in 20th Century Art and Art Criticism from The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Research of the New School University. She performed in the 2011 restaging of Robert Ashley’s 1967 opera, That Morning Thing, as part of Performa. She was a 2016 Princeton Fellowship Finalist, and has been a guest artist/faculty at Princeton University, The Juilliard School, University of North Carolina School for the Arts, Arizona State University’s Hergberger Institute for Design and the Arts, SUNY/Purchase, and Colorado College.
daela.org
Christian Berman
Christian Ruiz Berman "Mirage for Kokichi" Acrylic on panel 5"x7" 2017
I was born in Mexico City in 1982. I have a BA from Duke University, and later completed a masters degree in landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. I’m currently completing my MFA in painting, also at RISD. I have worked in environmental conservation, landscape architecture, art education, and public art. If life is a vast broth of chaotic acts and tangled reactions, making art is how I chart my way through the soup. Because I was forcefully removed from my homeland of Mexico and from much of my family at a young age, I became accustomed to localizing my identity within a precarious juncture of memory, fact and fiction. My work draws from personal histories of migration and adaptation, and I’m interested in the emotional and communicative power of the image. While I consider myself essentially non-religious, I am fascinated by the role of visual representations and symbols in mystical and shamanic practice, and have recently become quite interested in the intersections between contemporary philosophy and eastern/buddhist tradition. I consider my work meditative in that it strives to dissect and understand the components of my experience and of my cultural and aesthetic legacy in a way that might give a greater understanding of the whole. While I use symbols, architectures, and snippets of stories that are deeply personal and autobiographical, I want my paintings to embody a shared experience. The ability for the viewer to live their own life inside my work is extremely important to me, as is the work’s potential to inspire new narratives. The 20th century Indian philosopher J. Krisnamurti speaks about the importance of what he terms “joyful discontent.” This concept involves the abandonment of a quest for stability and security, which he deems are forms of premature death. I try to approach painting as someone that is always discontented, not with my station or success, but joyfully discontent because of a desire to know more, to learn more, to see more. I am also deeply influenced by the current writings of feminist philosophers like Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, who strive to build an ontology and worldview that privileges intra-actions and entanglements between things and systems rather than a reality built upon discrete objects and hierarchical actions. Barad writes about describing reality as an apparatus, in which each person, animal, relationship, and mechanism is an essential component of the present moment. She writes about the tentacular and woven nature of agency, as well as about humanity’s need for new symbols and figures that better reflect our current knowledge of quantum physics and the nature of reality and the mind. If there is a need for new symbols, new words, new ways of seeing things, how can I add to the conversation as a painter?
www.cruizberman.com
Tal Beery
Tal Beery, Glossary of Institutional Prefixes, Mixed Media Installation, Dimensions Variable, 2017 (Detail: Dolly Maass Gallery, Purchase College, New York) Photograph: Charlotte Woolf
Tal Beery is a New York-based artist and educator. He is co-founder of Eco Practicum, an artist-run school for ecological justice and founding faculty at School of Apocalypse, examining the connections between creative practice and notions of survival. Beery is also a core member of Occupy Museums, a collective fighting the economic and social injustices propagated by institutions of art and culture. His curatorial research considers the relationships between art and epochal change. Beery’s written work and interviews have appeared in numerous publications and his personal and collaborative works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US and Europe, including the 2012 Berlin Biennale, Brooklyn Museum, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
http://www.talbeery.com
Erica Berry
Erica Berry _"Beasts Among Us"_October 2017 issue of Creative Nonfiction's TRUE STORY magazine
Erica Berry is a 2018 graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in creative nonfiction, where she was a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. She is the winner of a 2018 AWP Intro Journal Award, a 2018 Minnesota State Arts Board Initiative Grant, the 2017 Kurt Brown Prize in Creative Nonfiction, the 2017 Southeast Review Narrative Nonfiction Award, and the 2016 and 2017 Gesell Awards in Creative Nonfiction. Her journalism and essays have been published in True Story, The Southeast Review, Literary Hub, Guernica, Pacific Standard, The Atlantic, and others, and is forthcoming in Colorado Review. She is currently working on a collection of essays about fear.
Rosana Caban
A still with one of my synthesizers, a Korg Volca Keys. I'm learning to create external MIDI controllers out of objects like light sculptures that can control the Volca Keys, or other synthesizers using MIDI data.
Rosana Cabán is a Brooklyn based sound artist and musician. Along with national touring with the band Psychic Twin, she has performed as a musician off Broadway (Cruel Intentions the Musical) and in museums and alternative spaces such as the Ace Hotel New York for “Roto Hotel”, the Brooklyn Museum for "The Oral History of the Female Drummer” and Naama Tsabars’ "composition 20" on the High Line in Manhattan. She has a recording studio in Brooklyn where she is currently writing and producing an EP that will be part visual installation, part music recording.
www.rosanacaban.com
Art Seed at Marble House Project
Yanira Castro
Yanira Castro Court/Garden Performance work 2015 Federal Hall, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's River To River Festival photo by Maria Baranova photo
Yanira Castro's interdisciplinary work takes the form of live performances and installations that incorporate text, movement and video. The work focuses on the significance of gathering and watching--the historical, political and social resonances of the act of being present together in performance. In her work, Castro negotiates complexities of sources, authorship and practice with a team of collaborators (including the audience) to build the work as a communal act. Castro is a Puerto-Rican artist based in Brooklyn. In 2009, she formed the interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi, an anagram of her name. Her work has been presented and commissioned extensively in New York by organizations including The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Arts Center, Invisible Dog Art Center, ISSUE Project Room, Danspace Project, and Dance Theater Workshop. She is a 2016 NY Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellow, 2017 Gibney Dance Center DiP Artist, and a participant of LMCC’s Extended Life program (2017-2015). She has been a Returning Choreographic Fellow at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Vermont Performance Lab Artist, BRIClab Artist, Dance New Amsterdam Artist-in-Residence, Artist Ne(s)t AIR (Romania), Sugar Salon Fellow, and Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow. Her work has been recognized with awards including NEFA’s National Dance Project, The Jerome Foundation, MAP Fund, New Music USA, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and USArtists International. In 2009, she won a Bessie Award for “Dark Horse/Black Forest” at The Gershwin Hotel presented by PS122. The archive for her participatory performance project, "The People to Come" (thepeopletocome.org), was featured in The New Museum’s exhibit “Performance Archiving Performance” in 2013. In 2017, her trilogy of works CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR were presented simultaneously over three weeks in NYC by three commissioning organizations, The Chocolate Factory, Abrons Arts Center and The Invisible Dog Art Center. Castro received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College and in 2017 received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater.
acanarytorsi.org
Ava Chin
Ava Chin, Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love and the Perfect Meal (Simon & Schuster, 2014)
Ava Chin is the author of EATING WILDLY, 1st Prize winner in the 2015 M.F.K. Fisher Book Awards. Kirkus Reviews called Eating Wildly “A delectable feast of the heart,” and Library Journal deemed it one of the “Best Books of 2014.” Her writing has appeared in The New York Times (“Urban Forager”), the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, Saveur, and Eating Well, among others. She is the inaugural Jean Strouse Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, and has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. An associate professor of creative nonfiction at CUNY, Ava is working on a nonfiction book about the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act laws upon her family in New York’s Chinatown. The Huffington Post named her one of "9 Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading."
http://www.avachin.com
Gaby Collins-Fernandez
Gaby Collins-Fernandez Family Portrait Sphinx oil, acrylic and digital photocollage on terrycloth 38" x 40"
Gaby Collins-Fernandez (b. USA, 1987) is an artist living and working in New York City. She holds degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A.) and the Yale School of Art (M.F.A., Painting/Printmaking). Her work has been shown in the US and internationally, most recently at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama Nathalie Karg Gallery, Danese Corey, and currently in an exhibition at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. Her work has been discussed in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail and artcritical. She is a recipient of a Fellowship at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, and a 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award. Collins-Fernandez is also a writer whose texts have appeared in publications such as the popular Painting on Paintings blog, The Miami Rail, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her translations with Kimberly Kruge of Golden Age Spanish sonnets was published in 2015 in Riot of Perfume. Collins-Fernandez is also an editor and founder of Precog Magazine, and is a co-director of the New York-based art and music collaborative, BombPop!Up. Her work is in the collections of the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Maine, and the Alex Katz Foundation, NY.
www.gabycollinsfernandez.com
Alika Cooper
Alika Cooper , Wet Suit IV and Wet Suit V, Bronze, 2017, exhibited at Situations gallery, ny, ny, 18”x 8”x 8” each
ALIKA COOPER ALIKA COOPER (b. 1979, Guam) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received both her MFA and BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Solo and twoperson exhibitions include Madeline Cake SITUATIONS, New York; Wet Suits Good Weather Gallery, Little Rock; Have A Sex fort gondo, Saint Louis; The Disguised Edge MULHERIN, Toronto; UPBRAID Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and GLASS Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco. She was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant, the MagicTrillium Press Yesland Prize, and the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fellowship. She has participated in The Viewing Program at The Drawing Center, New York; MOTION PICTURE at The Saint Louis Art Museum; and was Artist in Residence at Galleria Studio Legale in Marzano Appio, Italy.
Alikacooper.com
Jesse Epstein
Jesse Epstein 34x25x36 Film Created in 2009 National PBS Broadcast on POV, MoMA Screening
Jesse Erika Epstein is a Sundance Award-Winning documentary filmmaker. She received an Masters Degree in Documentary Film from NYU, and was named one of “25 filmmakers to watch” by Filmmaker Magazine. Her films have screened in over 40 film festivals worldwide, at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Mass MoCA, The Peabody Museum, and Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. Jesse's film 34x25x36 received a national PBS Broadcast on POV. She also has a published video Op-Doc in the New York Times. Jesse has received grants from Chicken & Egg Pictures, The Fledgling Fund, Catapult, and a National Endowment for the Arts residency at The MacDowell Arts Colony. Jesse is currently the Z-Tech Video Coordinator at Zumix -- where she teaches and mentors youth in East Boston.
www.JesseDocs.com
Maya Erdelyi
Tamar Ettun
Tamar Ettun Noa Mixed Media with Sound 2018
Tamar Ettun is a Brooklyn based sculptor and performance artist, who is the founder of The Moving Company. Ettun received her MFA from Yale University in 2010 where she was awarded the Alice English Kimball Fellowship. She studied at Cooper Union in 2007, while earning her BFA from Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. Ettun has had exhibitions and performances at The Watermill Center, e-flux, Madison Square Park, Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, Uppsala Art Museum in Sweden, Fridman Gallery, Braverman Gallery, PERFORMA 09, 11 and 13. The artist has been honored by organizations including The Pollock Krasner Foundation, Franklin Furnace, Macdowell Fellowship, RECESS, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art Production Fund and Socrates Sculpture Park. She is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vagas, which will open in 2018.
http://www.tamarettun.com
Art Seed at Marble House Project
