Alexis Convento

I come to understand my ancestral past by repeated stories that have been embellished over time or through family recipes that have been orally shared and lost in memory. Born 2nd-generation in the United States to a teenage mother, I fear the possibility that one day these roots—though inherently a part of me—will be weakened or lost over time. With these fears, the little that I know of my lineage, and as someone of the Pilipinx diaspora who is also a woman, brown, queer, and a migrant abroad, I actively work in the unearthing of these narratives: My recipe for Adobo includes as many aspects of the coconut to echo my family’s non-operating farm in the Philippines; I make my grandmother’s Lumpia Shanghai dish in honor of her sacrifice and migration to the USA in the 1960s. With these explorations, I wish to envision and build deeper relationships with home to pass on to future kin.

Sayote Slaw — Acidic, bright, and a touch floral; my own interpretation of a Thai green papaya salad, rooted in Filipino ingredients. Shredded chayote and mango pickled in coconut vinegar, topped with pink peppercorn.

Cooking and eating together has always been at the core of my Filipino American upbringing. As a child, I helped my grandmothers shred chicken for Pancit noodles and destem green beans for Pinakbet. As a teenager, my father—a formal culinary-trained chef—taught me the basics like how to hold a knife or make a roux. I know exactly how much water I need to cook rice by simply measuring with my finger. How I experiment and play in the kitchen today is influenced by fast-paced environments working in hospitality; staying organized, yet adventurous in choreography as a dancer; and working with scale and intention as a producer. Since moving from New York to Berlin in 2019, I’ve reflected on what brings me joy. I began a culinary artistic practice as Ulam by hosting Kamayan feasts based on the Manila Galleon Trade Route; I searched for Filipino ingredients such as kalamansi, coconut vinegar and Mang Tomas in Germany. I have been researching, making, and perfecting recipes of my own, with the hope to connect Filipino food and culture to the world, both at large and at a local scale.

Rachel Gita Karp

I make performances about U.S. politics and policy. My performance-making begins when I learn something about the U.S. that boggles my mind: a statistic about contemporary life that's problematic, an aspect of our country's past that's different from how we do things in the present. I do far-reaching research to make sense of what I've learned: recovering history, exploring culture, engaging experts. I then transform that research into invitations for others to interrogate the politics and policies with me. Through participation, curiosity, and generosity, we work together to understand these specific and systemic conditions on physical and intellectual, communal and personal levels--and to see how each person can act to change the politics and policies if they wish: to make them, and our country, what they want and need them to be.

A production photo from PACKING AND CRACKING, a party bus performance about gerrymandering. Co-created and directed by Rachel Gita Karp, presented in 2021 through the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics. Photo Credit: Kitoko Chargois.

Rachel Gita Karp writes and directs performances about U.S. politics and public policy. Her current focuses are reproductive freedom, gender representation in politics, voting, and privacy. Rachel has developed and directed new performances about these topics and more through The Drama League, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, Ars Nova, Mabou Mines, Irondale, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Center for Artistic Activism, the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics, Actors Theatre of Louisville, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, The Wild Project, The Brick, The Flea, IRT, Dixon Place, Philly Fringe, Incubator Arts Project, Women Center Stage, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Monson Arts, Barn Arts, Anonymous Ensemble, Orchard Project, the Powerhouse and Samuel French Festivals, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chatham University, Columbia University's graduate and undergraduate schools, and Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama. Associate and assistant directing credits include productions on Broadway, Off-, and regional, including productions through Signature Theatre, The Mad Ones, Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, 13P, Big Art Group, Woodshed Collective, and PearlDamour. BA, Columbia; MFA, Carnegie Mellon. At Carnegie Mellon, Rachel was a John Wells Directing Fellow, which supported her academics, and a Milton and Cynthia Friedman Fellow, which supported her work in women's policy research in Washington, D.C.

Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti

During this residency, I'll be working on a new piece for Argus Quartet. The subject of the new work is the Hawaiian concept of ahupuaʻa—land division centered around community needs—and will have a strong community engagement component. The work seeks to decolonize the concert hall by re-centering Indigenous ways of knowing.

Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) musician dedicated to the arts of our time. A "leading composer-performer" (The New York Times), Lanzilotti is the recipient of a 2020 Native Launchpad Artist Award and 2021 McKnight Visiting Composer Residency. Her “conceptually potent” compositions often deal with unique instrument-objects, such as The Noguchi Museum commissions involving sound sculptures. “Lanzilotti’s score brings us together across the world in remembrance, through the commitment of shared sonic gestures.” (Cities & Health) Lanzilotti’s current commissions include a string quartet for Argus Quartet for which she is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Awardee, and a new work for the GRAMMY-winning ensemble Roomful of Teeth supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Amy Ritter

I am influenced by working class people, their stories, workplaces, homes, and bodies; specifically those living in mobile homes. Tangentially I’m curious about my queer female body at work, as another building material, a symbol of invisible labor, stemming from a haunting feeling of a history and class that I can’t escape. My work is situated in sculpture, site-specificity, queer-identity and social practice. For the past 5 years I’ve documented mobile home parks (over 25 sites) and interviewed residents; compiled research on the mobile home industry and culture; and created and exhibited work influenced by these rudimentary archives I’ve built and my personal history growing up in a double-wide trailer in eastern Pennsylvania. I’m continuing to visit mobile home parks throughout the east coast and rust belt, systematically archiving with overarching research questions around the American Dream, specifically the myth of social mobility and the stigma and shame around places we call home.

Amy Ritter_SCAFFOLD_Xerox photographic images_2019_ Largest figure is 14 FT tall & smallest figure is 5 Ft 5 IN tall_ Porch Gallery in Upstate NY_ This project was part of a solo exhibition I had in upstate NY called FAÇADE | SCAFFOLD. I created a human scaffolding using the body as building material to talk about class hierarchy and social mobility.

Amy Ritter grew up in Eastern, PA in the rural town of Orefield. Her work is an exploration of her relationship to her physical self vis-à-vis mobile homes and their interior landscapes. It stages her memories of her experience of growing up in a mobile home community—a place she left but still feels connected to. Through her ongoing work of archiving these homes and neighborhoods she also creates immersive installations and site-specific public sculptures. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University (2014) and a BFA from Tyler School of Art (2009) and attended Skowhegan in 2016. Ritter has had solo exhibitions at Loyola University; The Arlington Arts Center; Fleisher Art Memorial; the Sculpture Center; and Gravy Gallery. She was the recipient of Smack Mellon’s Hot Picks List; Finalist for a Creative time grant, 2021; and has received numerous residencies and fellowships including Vermont Studio Center, Fine Arts Work Center; MiXER at D’ Clinic, Hungary; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Trestle Gallery, Yaddo; and currently an Engaging Artist Fellow through More Art. This summer she will be in residence at The Atlantic Arts Center in Florida as an Associate Artist and recently installed a new public sculpture at sculpture at Franconia Sculpture Park.

Matt Siegle

My work examines the interconnection of human beings and the natural world as it relates to the American West. I explore archives, artifacts, and ephemera of bodily existence with a multi-disciplinary approach that encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, and drawing. The artwork is universally inspired by my own personal experience as queer American and my desire to expand the tropes of the American landscape.

TALL / Social Club / Tucson, AZ 2019 34 3/4 x 48 5/16 Oil, acrylic, and sweeping compound on canvas

Matt Siegle is a Los Angeles-based visual artist. He has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including Liste Art Fair Basel (2021) with Good Weather (Chicago/North Little Rock). In 2022, he will participate in how we are in time and space at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, curated by Michael Ned Holte, and will exhibit on the moon with the Arch Mission Foundation. Siegle’s studio practice is currently peripatetic; he teaches sculpture at Dartmouth College.

Asia Stewart

I use performance to question the limits of the category of “woman” and assess how constructions of gender intersect and interact with race, class, and sexuality. I particularly focus on the liminal position of Black women, who are readily identified as being spectacular figures: either sub-human, machine, or monstrous. Featuring looped behaviors, my performances flirt with excess and absurdity to rival the sheer incomprehensibility of the systems and structures that have been manufactured to oppress Others. Each performance centers body memories and is inspired by my attempts to reckon with my estranged relationship to my gendered and racialized queer self.

In Gorgades, I covered my entire body in dark, artificial hair. While clothed in my dress of hair, I performed normal tasks like braiding, tying, and combing my hair, and completed actions, like sweeping the floor.

Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. After receiving degrees in the social sciences from Cambridge and Harvard University, she has sought ways to embody abstract sociological theories and transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. As a National YoungArts Winner in Musical Theatre and a former National Arts Policy Roundtable Fellow with Americans for the Arts, Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality. In 2020, Stewart concluded her first independent performance series, Graft, which attempts to capture the violence that constructions of whiteness and femininity wrought on Black bodies. Works from that series are currently being showcased in Sentient.Art.Film’s 2021 Omnibus project and appeared in Whitney White’s installation experience and musical DEFINITION at the Mercury Store in Brooklyn in Summer 2021. Stewart has begun a new performance series on intergenerational trauma and sexual violence as an artist-in-residence at the NARS Foundation. That work will premiere in Brooklyn in June 2022.

Toisha Tucker

Tucker is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer. Their work explores three often-overlapping veins of critique. They use art as a mode of cultural organizing illuminating social constructions of gender, race, and identity. They posit incisive critiques of contemporary and historical events of Western society. They delve into the anthropomorphic relationship between technology and humans, contemporary dystopia and human empathy. Their practice is process and research based and manifests through text-based prints, photographs, video, participatory works, sculptural installations, analog and virtual physical labor, crafting, repetition, and other media that aim to directly engage with the body. Tucker’s work reflects their deep desire for precision in material, firsthand experiential evidence, and fabrication that conveys these elements. Many of the pieces are ongoing and mutable.

behind the mask of infinite energy (a play in three acts), 2021, made while in residence with the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation.

Tucker (b. 1980, Oklahoma) received their BA in Philosophy and History with a concentration in English Literature from Cornell University and their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Design. They have exhibited in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Verona. They were a 2021 NYC Artist Corps artist, 2020 BRIO Grantee and the 2019-19 Wellesley College Alice C. Cole Fellow. They are an alum of ACRE, Bemis, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, AIR at Andrew Freedman Home and an Affliated Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Tucker is a published author and has curated two exhibitions. They were a Field Organizer for Hillary for America in 2016 in South Philly. Tucker resides in the Bronx with their partner, a thriving aloe plant named Wednesday and a fiddle leaf fig named Newton.