Mario Gonzales

I work with words which are slippery things. Meanings change over time and interpretations vary. But words also have a rhythm and a force behind that. At times I hear and feel this clearly and it moves me to play and love and find some depth to myself and the world I see. This is art. To use whatever we can, a stone, a sound, a color and reveal "the unseen world of passion and of thought."

These are a few of the journals where my short fiction has been published: Sonora Review (Univ of Arizona) New England Review (Middlebury College) Rio Grande Review(University of Texas, El Paso and Los Angeles Review(Red Hen Press) These include the works: Chisme, Malditos, El Mano Negra and Five Minutes to Nasrim. They were published between 2011-2020.

Mario J. Gonzales was born in Fresno, CA and raised in a rural community of Mexican immigrants and Chicanos. His mother and aunt both seasonal agricultural workers looked after him. They are buena gente. He is a first-generation college graduate who ultimately received his PhD in cultural anthropology at Washington State University. His fiction concerning campesinos, immigrants, the unlucky and the magical can be found in such lit journals as Quarterly West, Sonora Review, New England Review, Los Angeles Review and other fine periodicals. He is currently a professor of cultural anthropology at New Mexico Highlands University and a resident of the west side of Albuquerque.

Joan Linder

In a culture hyper-saturated by electronic imagery I use traditional materials—pen, ink watercolor and paper—to create images and objects that explore the sub-technological processes of observation and mark making. Through the continual act of slow looking, I describe an intense response to my subject matter, which is as contemporary as my means are old-fashioned. My work, often a meditation on the quotidian, engages imagery such as sinks full of dishes and discarded amazon boxes to the mundane landscapes in my region that contain buried toxic chemicals and radioactive waste including the eponymous Love Canal and lesser known Lake Ontario Ordnance Works. I consider themes of power, politics, sexuality, history and the every day.

Hooker 102nd Street, 2016, 6 books; 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. each when closed; each 60 accordion pages; each 5 1/2 x 105 in. when opened, the entire piece is about 550” long when in display. 6" x 60 running feet of pen-and-ink landscape drawing of toxic waste sites in Buffalo/Niagara Falls is a drawing on one side of the fence at LOVE CANAL, made from direct observation in notebooks.

Thumbnail - Birds, Bugs and Beasts, 2021. PS97 Addition lobby entrance, 1855 Stillwell Ave, Brooklyn. Collection NYC Department of Education, Public Art for Public Schools. Joan Linder’s site-specific artwork designed for the lobby of the new PS 97 addition presents a diverse and fantastical ecosystem. The artwork consists of two digitally-printed porcelain tile murals on each side of the entrance and porcelain enamel birds mounted to the soffit above. Intending to bring the outside in and compliment the energy of the neighborhood. Linder spent time in Bensonhurst making drawings, taking photographs, and researching migratory, invasive, cultivated, native, and historic plants and animals.

Joan Linder's artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues that included include Kunstahallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark; Gwanjgu Art Museum, the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, and The Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her awards include residency fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell and a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Art in America, and the NY Times. Her most recent exhibition at Cristin Tierney Gallery was written about in New York Magazine. In 2021 she completed a permanent public artwork for the NYC Department of Education’s Public Art For Public Schools PS 97 The Highlawn in Brooklyn. Her curatorial practice includes the 2019-2020 exhibition Hot Spots: Radioactivity in the Landscape, at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries and Krannert Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is Professor of Art at the University at Buffalo SUNY.

Cecily Parks

Invested in women's experiences in the natural world, my poems chronicle the love and heartbreak of observation, how once you begin close reading the world, there’s no way out of the bind of seeing.

Book cover for the anthology I edited, The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2016)

Thumbnail - Book cover for my most recent poetry collection, O'Nights (Alice James Books, 2015)

Cecily Parks is at work on a third poetry collection, poems from which appear in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Best American Poetry 2020, and Best American Poetry 2021. She is the poetry editor for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

Leslie Roberts

I translate ephemeral language into rule-based abstraction, in works that are diagrams of their own making. Each painting contains a list of contemporary vernacular, collected from signage, email, instruction manuals, product labels, ads, and other everyday sources. On slate-like gessoed panels, I chart columns of writing into grids of pigment and line. The ordered process of mapping language allows unexpected color relationships, in configurations that are pattern-like but irregular. The lists and annotations are finally inseparable from the painted structures they create. Each panel is a record of observing, thinking, and making.

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Leslie Roberts had recent solo shows at 57W57Arts in NYC (2021) and at Minus Space in Brooklyn (2019). She has also exhibited at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, McKenzie Fine Art, Pierogi Gallery, PPOW, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, the Visual Arts Center of NJ, the Weatherspoon Museum (Greensboro, NC), and the Wellin Museum (Clinton, NY.) She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Marble House Project. Roberts has an MFA from Queens College and a BA from Yale, and attended Skowhegan and the New York Studio School. She is represented by Minus Space, and is a professor at Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Christopher Williams

A curious “alchemist of theatre" aiming to transcend boundaries between a variety of art forms, Christopher Williams continues to hone a distinctive personal style that combines contemporary dance with visual design, music, and puppetry to yield multifaceted movement-based performance works in his own imaginative genre. Fascinated by the ways in which the earliest bands of humans ritually engaged with supernatural denizens of otherworlds, Williams creates works that present his own contemporary queer testimony to our primeval cultural impulse to journey beyond the known realm. By combining highly technical choreographic vocabulary with vivid visual designs and music integral to each new work, Williams aims to revive an ancient sense of ritual and spectacle by immersing a broad public in fantastical new worlds.

Casey Hess and Alexander Olivieri as Oreads in "Narcissus" (2021) commissioned by New York Live Arts. Photo by Marc Safran Photography

Thumbnail - Gentry George as Amore in "Il Giardino d'Amore" (2017) commissioned by Danspace Project. Photo by Andrew Jordan.

Christopher Williams, dubbed “the downtown prodigy” (The New Yorker) and “one of the most exciting choreographic voices out there” (The New York Times) is a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award-winning choreographer, dancer, and puppeteer working in New York City and abroad since 1999. His works have been presented internationally in Colombia, Holland, Spain, Malawi, France, England, Italy, and Russia as well as in many New York City venues including Lincoln Center, City Center, New York Live Arts, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, PS 122, La Mama, and the 92nd Street Y. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Center for Ballet & the Arts, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and has since performed for Tere O’Connor Dance, Douglas Dunn & Dancers, Rebecca Lazier, Yoshiko Chuma, John Kelly, Dan Hurlin, and Basil Twist, among others.

Sichong Xie

My practice​ combines movement and material in body-based sculptural forms, including masks, costumes, and other objects. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, I investigate these forms and movements within global communities to reconsider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. My practice raises questions about identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of my body in the ever-changing environment. My current project features an array of objects and movements - bamboo scaffolding, industrial privacy screen, sound, and durational performance - through which I reimagine the architectural drawing my grandfather created in late 1950s and early 1960s. I draw attention to invisible labor behind each architecture by incorporating an industrial privacy screen throughout the installation as a way of repurposing a mass-produced material that is commonly used between construction zones and industrial sites.

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Bio

Sichong Xie​ combines movement and material in body-based sculptural forms, including masks, costumes, and other objects. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, Xie investigates these forms and movements within global communities to re-consider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. She raises questions about identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of her body in the ever-changing environment. ​Xie received her MFA ​from the California Institute of the Arts, CA. Her most recent multi-media installation “Memory Structure, Scaffold Series” is currently on view at Wende Museum in Culver City, CA. She was a fellowship artist at The Studios at​ MASS MoCA, The Watermill Center and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. In 2017, Xie was chosen to participate at Hauser & Wirth Somerset exchange residency in Bath, UK where she created a four-hour durational performance/installation “Walking With The Disappeared”. Recent exhibitions include the Wende Museum, Los Angeles, USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, OCAT Art Museum in Xi’An, China, LACE Gallery, Los Angeles, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, Automata Arts, Los Angeles, Chashama Gallery, New York, Eli Klein Gallery, New York, and The Watermill Center, New York.