Jenna Crowder, Co-Founding Editor

Jenna Crowder is an artist, writer, and editor. Her writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, BURNAWAY, Temporary Art Review, Boston Art Review, and The Rib, among other arts journals, catalogs, and anthologies. Jenna’s art practice takes form as dialogues, screenings, performance, and other various modes of playing with language and critique.

Contributors

Jeffrey Ackerman is a painter and sculptor, living in Morrill, Maine. His work, as well as some of his writing, can be found on his website.

Frances Barker is an artist and experimental musician from southern Maine, who will graduate from the Maine College of Art in Spring of 2018 with a BFA in Painting with a minor in Music. Their work focuses on the space we take up, the greater presence of body, and our (messy) identities. They are an avid conversationalist and always available to reach at www.frncsbrkr.com.

Myron M. Beasley, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Chair of the American Studies program at Bates College, USA. His ethnographic research includes exploring the intersection of cultural politics and art and social change, as he believes in the power of artists and recognize them as cultural workers. The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Reed Foundation (The Ruth Landes Award), have awarded him fellowships and grants for his ethnographic writing about art and cultural engagement. His writing has appeared in many academic journals including Liminalities: The Journal of Performance Studies, The Journal of Poverty (which he served as guest editor for a special issue on the topic of Art and Social Policy), Text and Performance Quarterly, Museum & Social Issues, The Journal of Curatorial Studies, Gastronomica, ELSE and Performance Research. He is also an international curator.

Mariah Bergeron lives and works in Portland, Maine.

Marques Bostic is a Maine-based optometrist and visual artist with interests in color theory, site-specific installation, arts administration and running. He especially enjoys working in non-traditional settings and collaborating with artists with non-traditional backgrounds.

Meghan Brady is a painter who lives and works in midcoast Maine. Using painting, printmaking, drawing, and ceramics, Brady explores the limitless possibilities of an open process, including elements of the human form and abstraction. Brady shows with Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in NYC, ICON Contemporary Gallery in Brunswick, Maine, and Perimeter Gallery in Belfast, Maine. She has been included in exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art and CMCA. She is currently the artist-in-residence at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn, NY. Brady is a graduate of Smith College and Boston University’s MFA program in Painting.

Ashleigh Burskey is an Entrepreneurial Artist based in Portland, Maine, and co-founder of The Chart. She also serves on the board of the Friends of Congress Square Park. Ashleigh holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute and a Master of Arts in Teaching from Maine College of Art with K-12 Teacher Certification.

Olivia Canny grew up in rural Maine and on the internet. She studied philosophy and journalism at University of King’s College before transferring to Maine College of Art, where she received a BFA in Sculpture & Transdisciplinary Practices, channeling my interests in mass media patterns and related theory into works involving video installation and basic web development. She’s currently pursuing a Master of Arts in New Arts Journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, editing the News Section of student-run F Newsmagazine, and tutoring at the school’s Writing Center. Her professional and academic practices concern the intersection of current events, art, and late capitalism. In her free time, she like taking walks on Google Street View and irl.

Ian Carlsen is a freelance writer, actor, and amateur ornithologist. He has been living in Portland for more than a decade.

Born and raised in Paris, France of Haitian heritage, Edwige Charlot emigrated to the United States at the age of 9. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking with honors from the Maine College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in New England, Oregon, New Jersey, and New York. Edwige was awarded the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist award in 2013 and a Maine Arts Commission Good Idea Grant in 2011. Edwige has participated in exhibitions that explored issues of race, migration, heritage, and identity, including The Other Side of Shade (2013) and Undoing Racism in the Joanne Waxman Library at the Maine College of Art (2009). In addition to her art practice, she is currently an advisor to the People of Color Fund at the Maine Community Foundation and runs a strategy and design consultancy, Creative Approach co.

Jenn Corey is a writer and producer based out of Portland, Maine, and a recent graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo is a Chilean-born documentary filmmaker, artist, and teacher based in Northfield, Minnesota. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communications Studies from The University of Iowa and a Master of Fine Arts in Film, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With ties to both the American Midwest and the central coast of Chile, Cecilia’s work explores notions of displacement and belonging and is rooted in the experience of living in-between cultures. She uses a range of approaches and production methodologies—from the very personal and essayistic to the expansive and collaborative—to create works that move fluidly from the local to the global, and from the intimate to the openly political. Cecilia is invested in developing effective methods of collaboration with the people who take part in her work by transforming documentary subjects into active participants, co-creators of meaning, and architects of their representation. She is the recipient of an Established Artist Grant from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council (2014), a Jerome Foundation Film, Video, and Digital Media Grant (2016), and Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2016 and 2018). Her work has shown locally and abroad at venues such as MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, L’Alternativa (Spain), Arsenale (Germany), InVideo (Italy), Melbourne Latin American Film Festival, Puerto Vallarta International Film Festival (Mexico), Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (Chile), Cine las Américas (Texas), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Athens International Film Festival, Tucson Underground Film Festival, Gene Siskel Film Center, Miami International Film Festival, Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, and Frozen River Film Festival. She teaches in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at Carleton College.

Alana Dao is a writer and maker residing in Portland, Maine, with her husband and young daughter. She received a MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Smith College. She is currently a contributing writer for the online publication Dilettante Army and the Co-Founder/Executive Director of CSArt Maine, the first community art share program in the state.

Nyanen Deng is a writer, friend, and feral fashion squirrel from Portland, ME.

Brian Doody is an artist currently living in Portland, ME. Informed by a lower-class background, Brian’s work explores themes of grief, queer identity, online presence, and community. Brian’s work has been published in the form of zines and books through out the years, as well as appeared in numerous publications and group shows. Brian was the recipient of a 2017 Kindling Fund Arts Grant and a resident at Hewnoaks Artist Colony 2019.

Annika Earley is an artist based in Portland, Maine.

Vivian Ewing is a writer, editor and reporter. Her work is inspired by the gossip that fuels small towns, the oldest narratives and legends, and the places where these stories intersect. She works at The New York Times. Vivian is the creator and editor of Enter Rural Scene, an anthology of art and writing by women, trans and queer artists based throughout the country. She was the guest editor of Papersafe Magazine‘s final issue of photography and writing about photography. Her own writing has appeared in The New York Times, Papersafe Magazine, Wilt Magazine, the Vineyard Gazette, Don/Dean Blog, The Chart and on the walls of Lines of Sight, an exhibition in The Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Festival and in Knotweed, an exhibition at Aviary Gallery in Boston. Vivian was recently awarded a grant from PEN America, a Carlisle Family Scholarship to attend the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She has also been awarded a residency and grant at Mary Sky and a grant from the Kindling Fund, as administered by SPACE Gallery. She lives in New York.

Jacob Fall hails from Willimantic, Maine. He studied anthropology and art history at New York University. He has occasionally lectured at the Greenwood Cove Institute for Boreal Limnology.

Jaime Gaiti was born in 1993 on Long Island, New York, where she lived for 21 years. She attended Suffolk County Community College from 2011 to 2014 where she studied visual arts. During this time she also enrolled in numerous special effects makeup workshops in New York City where she expanded her knowledge of painting, sculpture and mold making. In 2014, Gaiti transferred to the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, where she lives today. She graduated with her Bachelor in Fine Art in Sculpture in 2016. Her work is inspired by the human body and its fragility and complexities. Gaiti has been involved in numerous student exhibitions, participating in her first group show in 2011 at the Sayville Art Gallery in New York. Since then she has participated in exhibitions in the Maurice N. Flecker Gallery in Selden, New York, and in the Porteous Building of the Maine College of Art in Portland. Her work is inspired by the vulnerability of the body and ideas of mortality as well the beautiful and grotesque.

Carolina González Valencia‘s practice lies at the intersection of personal, social, and political narratives. She weaves multiple media–animation, video, film, performance, writing, drawing, painting–to create documents that challenge social and historical representations of migration, otherness, diaspora, and labor. She has worked on projects in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Lebanon, and the United States. Carolina’s work has been shown internationally at such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Quito, Ecuador; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME); GAZE (San Francisco); International short films showcase (Jakarta, Indonesia); Full Frame Theater/International short films and videos (Durham, NC); Broward College (Davie, FL); Contra el Silencio Todas Las Voces (Mexico City); Cinemateca Distrital (Bogotá, Colombia); Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). She is the recipient of the Lyn Blumenthal Scholarship (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), the Gelman Travel Fellowship (School of the Art Institute of Chicago); and the Programa Nacional de Estímulos (Colombian Ministry of Culture). She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation). Carolina is now an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

Helen Greenbriar lives in Portland, Maine.

Megan Grumbling is a poet, editor, and teacher in Portland. Her new poetry collection, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, is forthcoming in 2020.

Meg Hahn received her BFA in Painting from the Maine College of Art with a minor in Art History in 2017. Her interests aim to maintain both an active studio and academic art practice.

Gordon Hall is a sculptor, performance-maker, and writer based in New York. Hall has presented solo exhibitions at EMPAC (2014), Foxy Production (2014), Temple Contemporary (2016), The Renaissance Society (2018), MIT List Visual Arts Center (2018), and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2019). Hall’s sculptures and performances have been exhibited in a variety of group settings including Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2010), SculptureCenter (2012), Movement Research (2012), Brooklyn Museum (2014), White Columns (2015), Whitney Museum of American Art (2015), Hessel Museum at Bard College (2015), Chapter NY (2015), Art in General (2016), Wysing Arts Centre (2017), Abrons Arts Center (2017), Socrates Sculpture Park (2017), The Drawing Center (2018), David Zwirner New York (2018), and the Verge Center for the Arts (2019). Hall has organized lecture-performance programs at MoMA PS1(2012), Recess (2013, 2014), The Shandaken Project at Storm King Art Center (yearly, 2012 -2016), Interstate Projects (2017), Brooklyn Academy of Music (2017), Artists Space (2020), RISD Museum (2020), and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, producing a series of lectures and seminars in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Hall’s books include Reading Things—Gordon Hall on Gender, Sculpture, and Relearning How To See (Walker Art Center, 2016), AND PER SE AND (Art in General, 2016), Details (Walls Divide Press, 2017), The Number of Inches Between Them (MIT, Printed Matter, 2019), and OVER-BELIEFS, Gordon Hall Collected Writing 2011-2018 (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art/Container Corps, 2019). Hall’s work has been covered in Artforum, Artsy, Art in America, V Magazine, Randy, Bomb, Flash Art, Title Magazine, and Mousse Magazine, and they have published essays in Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge, 2012), Art Journal (2013), What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (SculptureCenter/Black Dog Press, 2015), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2016), and Art in America (2018), among many other contexts. Hall has been awarded residencies and grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Triangle Arts Association, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ACRE, Fire Island Artist Residency, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Hall holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Hampshire College. Hall was a 2019-2020 Provost Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design and will be resident faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2021.

Gordon Hall is represented by DOCUMENT.

Dylan Hausthor is a photographer, filmmaker, and editor based on a small island off the coast of Maine. His work is an act of hybridity–an effort to render field recordings into myth. Interested in small-town gossip and the fragility of journalistic truth, his work examines the borders between autobiography, fiction, and fact. Hausthor’s work has been showcased nationally and internationally by the Aperture Foundation, Ain’t-Bad, PHMuseum, Humble Arts, Nava Print Studio, Gomma, Yogurt Magazine, Void, and LensCulture. He founded Wilt Press in the spring of 2015 and is a current artist-in-residence at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, Maine.

Alison Hildreth graduated from Vassar College, studied at the Art Students League and National Academy in New York, and received her BFA from Portland School of Art. Hildreth is interested in history, cartography, literature, and the natural world and how these disciplines weave together into a mix of art, science, and metaphor. She explores these connections in mixed media, painting, drawing, and installation. Hildreth’s work has been exhibited extensively across the United States and she maintains a studio in Portland, Maine.

Francois Hughes is a social(ist) activist and artist based in Oakland. Francois usually works in a collective way, such as with Double Vision. His longest running collaboration has been with Art for a Democratic Society. Art for a Democratic Society is a collective who work on the streets through engagement with the public, institutional drag and “ideological service art.” A4DS have exhibited inside as well, including at Southern Exposure and with publications such as “The Capitalist Bathroom Experience” for the Museum of Capitalism.

Hilary Irons is an artist and curator who lives in Portland, Maine. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2008, and a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2002. Residencies have included the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, Hewnoaks, and Canterbury Shaker Village.

Andy Johnson is a DC-based art historian, curator, and arts writer. He is Director of Gallery 102 at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design; contributing editor at Dirt; and serves as Assistant Curator and Artist Liaison for Art on the Vine, hosted by the Agora Culture. He has curated and juried exhibitions with Gallery 102, DC Arts Center, Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Dupont Underground, the Smithsonian Institution, the Torpedo Factory, among others. He has presented research and spoken on panels at universities, galleries, and museums including Rutgers University, UC Santa Barbara, University of Georgia, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, GW Museum, Washington Project for the Arts, and others. He has published articles, exhibition reviews, and catalogue essays with Dirt, The Chart, Common Field’s Field Perspectives, The Rib, Pelican Bomb, BmoreArt, and more. He holds a M.A. in Art History from The George Washington University.

Erin Johnson is an artist and curator based in Portland, Maine. She is currently a Visiting Artist in Digital Media at Bowdoin College and received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013.

Juliet Karelsen received an MFA in painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2015 and 2016 she participated in fiber workshops at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, and began experimenting with various form of stitching, embroider,y and mixed media. Her work has been shown in Maine, New York City, New Hampshire, Boston, Ohio, and abroad in Spain, Argentina, and Switzerland. She was born and raised in New York City and has been living in Maine (mostly) since 1991.

Graeme Kennedy is Director of Marketing and Public Relations at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. Graeme is a Maine native who, after ten years living in New York and the west coast, decided to come back and set up shop in Portland. In addition to the PMA, he’s held positions at GQ, Rogues Gallery, and Might & Main. He lives in Yarmouth, where he spends most of his free time with his daughters.

Bukola Koiki is a Nigerian-American transdisciplinary artist whose work strives to collapse the single-story of the immigrant experience by engaging and interpreting the liminal spaces she inhabits through research and explorations of linguistic phenomena, cultural ontologies, generational memory and more. Her current research and studio work examines and responds to the insidious language deployed in published texts, commercial advertising, and other media to serve and promote the British colonial exploitation of Nigeria’s resources and its people. Her multidimensional fiber works reflect her material and technical curiosity and include hand-pulled prints rendered with embroidered collagraph plates, giant beads employing Nigerian hair threading techniques, handmade and hand-dyed paper and Indigo dyed and hand-printed Tyvek head ties. Koiki received her MFA in Applied Craft + Design from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2015 and her BFA in Communication Design from the University of North Texas in 2006. She was nominated for the Textile Society of America’s Brandford/Elliott Award and named a 2019 Shortlist Finalist for the American Craft Council’s Emerging Voices Award. Koiki has exhibited nationally, including in Chicago, IL, and Portland, OR. Koiki and her work have been featured in American Craft magazine, Surface Design Journal, online on Art21 Magazine and Art Practical Journal websites and she has been interviewed on NPR. She was awarded the AICAD Teaching Fellowship at Maine College of Art from 2017–2019 and completed the Fountainhead Fellowship in the Craft/Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in March 2020.

Ikram Lakhdhar is a Tunisian, LA-based curator and scholar. Her research driven exhibitions examine issues of race, gender, and the politics of colonial and oriental representation. Including her most recent exhibition at George Washington University and Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, Gallery 102, Water/ماء: Trespassing Liquid Highways, which investigated the subject of water as a transnational grounding to uncover colonialist and orientalist entanglements between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean seas. Lakhdhar holds an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A. in Art History, Museum Studies, and International Relations from Connecticut College. She is the Founding Editor of DIRT, an independent platform for inclusive and accessible arts discourse. She writes and speaks about art in radically generous and authentic spaces. She applies her arts politics background to maintain, build, and connect Common Field’s national network of arts organizers and organizations. Lakhdhar presented research at Art on the Vine Convening, NYU, the Jerusalem Fund, Parking Gallery in South Africa, GWU, and others. Her writing has been published in journals including Arts.Black, BmoreArt, and Common Field’s Field Perspectives. She received international awards for her curatorial praxis most recently from Valetta 2018 Culture Capital, the Getty Foundation, CIMAM, and the Toor Cummings for International Studies.

Julien Langevin is a critical artist, activist, and writer based in Portland, Maine. His current artistic interests involve the construction of self, gender, and perception. Ongoing political interests involve destroying the kyriarchy.

Shaun Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly – a diversion program for court-involved youth at the Brooklyn-based, non-profit Recess — is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment. Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, is a recipient of support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice and A Blade of Grass, and was recently profiled in the New York Times. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, with a recent solo exhibition at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). From fall 2018 through spring 2020, Leonardo enacted socially engaged projects at Pratt Institute as the School of Art, Visiting Fellow.

Justin Levesque is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Portland, Maine. He received his BFA in Photography from the University of Southern Maine in 2010. Levesque is a Maine Arts Commission Artist Project Grant recipient (2015, 2017), and in 2015, was selected as one of thirteen emerging photographers under 30 in Maine by Maine Media Workshops + College’s PhoPa Gallery. Levesque has exhibited throughout New England and nationally at Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS; Terrault Contemporary in Baltimore, MD; and JanKossen Contemporary in New York City. In 2015, he created an independent artist residency aboard an Eimskip container ship sailing from Maine to Iceland. In 2016 Levesque then installed a public art intervention in a shipping container about his residency with support from The Kindling Fund, an Andy Warhol Regional Regranting Program administered by Space Gallery. In response to his work about Maine’s emerging relationship to the North Atlantic and Arctic, he was invited to be a fellow of The Arctic Circle artist residency in Svalbard, just 10 degrees from the North Pole, in June 2017.

Rose Linke is a writer and editor who grew up on the freeways of Los Angeles and now walks the hills of San Francisco. Her work has been seen at the ZERO1 Biennial, during San Francisco’s Litquake Festival, within THE THING Quarterly, projected onto The Great Wall of Oakland, and as part of the PLACE TALKS series at the Prelinger Library. She is the editor of A Long Wait: Double Vision by Orbis Editions, co-editor of the annual publication of the Living Room Light Exchange, and co-editor of the book Museum of Capitalism now in its second edition from Inventory Press.

Jessica Lynne is co-founder and editor of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. She received her B.A. in Africana Studies from NYU and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Art21 and The Cue Foundation, Callaloo, and The Center for Book Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Aperture, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail.

David Martínez is a sculptural artist and recent graduate of Maine College of Art focusing on the topics of child development and how certain instances in a child’s upbringing can affect their outcome as an adult. Born and raised in Stamford, Connecticut, the big city of Manhattan, New York, was easily accessible. Growing up around such a large city, along with having a rich Hispanic background, David is highly influenced by the urban life and its affects on his upbringing as a child. His overall goal is to open up discussion and to raise awareness through his art making.

James McAnally is the co-founder and executive director of The Luminary, an expansive platform for art, thought, and action based in St. Louis, MO. McAnally also serves as the executive editor and co-founder of Temporary Art Review, an international platform for contemporary art criticism that focuses on artist-run and alternative spaces, and is a founding member of Common Field, a national network of independent art spaces and organizers. McAnally has presented exhibitions, talks and lectures at venues such as the Walker Art Center, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation with Ballroom Marfa, Kadist Art Foundation, The Contemporary, Gwangju Biennial, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Kansas City Art Institute, INCA, Transformer, Washington University in St. Louis, and Moore College of Art and Design and has served as a Visual Arts panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. McAnally’s writing has appeared in publications such as Art Journal, Art in America, Bomb, Hyperallergic, OEI, Terremoto, and Pelican Bomb, among others, and his publications are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Brooklyn Museum. McAnally is a recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing.

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of the novel To Sleep as Animals and several chapbooks, most recently the collection Cream River and the forthcoming pocket-sized edition One Thousand Owls Behind Your Chest. His stories have been honored by the Maine Literary Awards, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Glimmer Train Stories, and have been published in Slice, the Collagist, and the Believer, among others.

npilar is an analog radio program co-hosted by artists Anne Buckwalter and Pilar Nadal. Each episode is recorded live on cassette tape each Sunday, sometimes in Pilar’s kitchen. The half-hour long show is a platform for discussion on a wide variety of topics, including but not limited to: contemporary art, literature, films, holidays, underwear, celebrities, sex, monsters, food, and outer space.

Oliver is a research-based artist and writer. They attended the Academy of Visual Arts in Hong Kong Baptist University and Maine College of Art. They have published writings, performed, and exhibited their works in both Hong Kong and New England. Focusing on pessimism, the critique of institutions, apocryphal narration and archives, Oliver’s art practice includes installation, video, durational and participatory performance, and drawing. Other than researching and writing about ufology itself, their writings are often focused on exhibitions and artwork about ufology in the context of curatorial methods and institutions, aiming to explore alternative ways to write about ufology and to create an inclusive space within the fringe science communities for queer art workers. Oliver is a queer and trans person of colour growing up in the aftertaste of colonisation in Hong Kong. This identity contributes a lot to the basics of their work.

Originally from California, Eden Osucha is a professor and scholar of American Literature and Cultural Studies at Bates College. She earned a Ph.D. in English from Duke University, an M.A. in English from U.C. Davis, and a B.A. in American Studies from Wellesley College. Her research in the areas of American literature and visual culture focuses on interrelations of U.S. racial discourse with concepts of publicness and privacy in media culture and law.

Veronica A. Peréz is an artist whose work primarily focuses on using sculpture as a tool from which to empower people by means of exercising radical empathy. Peréz uses sculpture as a means to create intense personal moments that critically contest narratives of identity by means of hybridization, alongside ideal of beauty and nostalgia. Fragility echoes sentiments of a lost self and at the same time, parallels contemporary feminist tensions. Peréz has a BFA from Moore College of Art and Design and a Masters in Fine Arts from Maine College of Art and she is currently working in Westbrook, ME. Her most recent solo exhibition untitled, was at Kingston Gallery in Boston, ME. Currently, she teaches at Southern Maine Community College in the Sculpture Dept. and Bomb Diggity Arts in Portland, ME. She was previously an artist-in-residence in Rockland, Maine, through the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation.

Yulia Pinkusevich is an interdisciplinary visual artist born in Kharkov, Ukraine. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University and Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. Yulia has exhibited nationally and internationally including site-specific projects executed in Paris, France and Buenos Aires, Argentina, her work is represented by Kent Fine Art in New York. Pinkusevich has been awarded residency grants from Wildlands, Lucid Arts Foundation, Autodesk Pier 9, Facebook HQ, Recology (San Francisco Dump), Cite des Arts International (Paris), Headlands Center for the Arts, Redux in Charleston, South Carolina, Goldwell Open Air Museum Las Vegas and The Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos. She was also the recipient of The San Francisco Foundations Phelan, Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts she is currently a fellow at Experiential Space Research Lab at Gray Area, supported by the Knight Foundation. Yulia has lectured at Stanford University and is currently the Joan Danforth Professor and Department Chair of the Art and Visual Culture Department at Mills College in Oakland, CA.

Julie Poitras Santos is a visual artist based in Portland, Maine. Also a writer, her research interests include the relationship between site, story and mobility, and often involve areas where art and language intersect. She works as Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art.

Skye Priestley is an artist, poet and critic living in Portland. He likes to play soccer and ride his bike. You can find some of his writing and artwork at sjpriest.wordpress.com.

Joshua Reiman is an artist living in Portland, ME, where he is an assistant professor of the MFA in Studio Art and chair of the Sculpture Program at the Maine College of Art.

Theresa Secord is a traditional Penobscot basket maker and the founding director of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (MIBA). During her 20 years of leadership, MIBA was credited with saving the endangered art of ash and sweet grass basketry by: lowering the average age of basket makers from 63 to 40; and increasing numbers of weavers from 55 to more than 200; in the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes. Over the course of 30 years, Theresa taught more than a dozen apprentices the endangered art of ash and sweet grass basketry. Now, some of her apprentice’s apprentices have apprentices! Theresa has been honored several times for her advocacy. Among the most notable, the National Endowment for the Arts bestowed her with the prestigious life time achievement award, the National Heritage Fellowship, in 2016. In 2003, she was awarded the Prize for Creativity in Rural Life by the Women’s World Summit Foundation, granted at the UN in Geneva Switzerland, for helping basket makers rise out of poverty. She has won a number of first place ribbons for her own basketry at the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Eiteljorg Indian Art Market, and the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market. Her baskets are in many private and museum collections. In addition to weaving baskets, Theresa continues to help other artists achieve their own goals of art and economic self-sufficiency, through work for national Native arts organizations; First Peoples Fund of Rapid City and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation of Portland, OR. In Maine, Theresa sits on the Governing Board of the Colby College Museum of Art, has consulted to the Portland Museum of Art on the Portland Biennial, and has co-curated a number of local Wabanaki basketry exhibitions.

Irina Skornyakova is an artist and designer residing in Portland, ME. In her studio, she creates surface-based work which aims to reconcile the feel of natural elements with the coldness of the technological landscape. Irina was born in Moscow and lived in Japan. Irina’s current visual projects and collaborations can be seen at http://erasedbyus.tumblr.com and http://irinaskornyakova.tumblr.com/.

Maia Snow graduated from Maine College of Art  (’13) with a degree in Painting. She currently she lives and works in Portland, Maine. Her studio is located at Space Studios in the downtown Portland area.

Although growing up in Maine, Benjamin Spalding has recently returned to his home state after a 7 year hiatus living abroad in Berlin, Germany. During his time away, he participated is several international exhibitions, residencies and helped run a small gallery space with several of his peers. Although his undergraduate degree was focused on marketing and mass media studies, he is currently pursuing his MFA at Maine College of Art, exploring the “body” as a metaphor for individual experience in regards to notions of displacement, intimacy and collective wonder.

Andrea Steves is an internationally exhibited artist, curator, researcher, and organizer currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her recent projects explore capitalism, climate change, public history, and the creation of speculative institutions. Andrea has spent the last few years developing the curatorial project Museum of Capitalism, a public museum that imagines the end of capitalism. Museum of Capitalism was the 2016 recipient of the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award, and has appeared in Oakland (2017), Sausalito, CA (Headlands Center for the Arts, 2017), Boston (Tufts / SMFA, 2018), New York (The New School, 2019), and Vienna, Austria (das weisse haus, 2020). Andrea co-edited the publication Museum of Capitalism (Inventory Press, 2017), with an expanded 2nd edition forthcoming (Inventory Press, 2019). Recent residencies include: Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), Skalar Experimental Sound Art Residency (Iceland), The Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI), and Hewnoaks Artist Colony (Lovell, ME). Andrea is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School where she is co-curating Museum of Capitalism at the Parson’s Sheila C. Johnson Design Center Gallery.

Chris Stiegler is a professor and curator of contemporary art based in Portland, Maine. Currently he runs the Institute for American Art with John Sundling, his husband and collaborator. The project, situated in their apartment, showcases the work of a single artist per show as a way to engage the viewer differently. Founded in 2012, the Institute has shown the work of artists, curators, cultural producers, and publishers. In the coming years we hope to expand our geographic reach while maintaining our domestic operation.

Ellen Y. Tani, PhD is an art historian, independent curator, and critic based in Boston, MA. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2015 from the Department of Art & Art History, and her research focuses on issues of race and ethnicity in modern and contemporary art. She is currently a Lecturer at Brandeis University, and has a few exhibitions still on view at the ICA/Boston, including Tschabalala Self: Out of Body and Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After Kusama. Her writing has been featured in Art Practical, Daily Serving, American Quarterly, Apricota journal, and Artsy.

Clare Tyrrell-Morin is an arts writer, publicist and US-China cultural instigator based between her physical nest in Portland, Maine, and a virtual nest in Hong Kong — where she grew up.

Katie Vida (Brooklyn, NY) is an interdisciplinary visual artist and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Maine College of Art. In addition, Vida has served as independent curator at venues including Franklin Street Works (Stamford, CT), Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), and The Lab (San Francisco, CA), among others.

Grant Wahlquist is a gallerist, curator, critic, and attorney living in Vinalhaven and Portland, Maine. His Portland-based gallery represents emerging and mid-career artists from throughout the United States. Its exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum.com, ArtNews, Art New England, The Chart, Hyperallergic, the Portland Press Herald, The Rib, and numerous others. His writing has appeared in Art Ltd, Aspect: the Chronicle of New Media Art, The Chart, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and in catalogues published by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Mulier Mulier Gallery, the Orange County Museum of Art, Peter Blake Gallery, the Pitzer College Art Galleries, and the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT’s Documents of Contemporary Art. He is a regular contributor to Frog, a French art and architecture publication affiliated with Le Consortium in Dijon.

Kathy Weinberg is an artist and writer living in Morrill Maine, just outside of Belfast. Her poetry has been published in Off the Coast Literary Journal, The Island Reader, and she was one of three winners in the Maine Community Foundation essay contest, A Place in Maine, in 2013. Kathy is also an artist working in a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture and photography. She has exhibited her work in New York, Germany, and Maine. Her profession in antique and architectural restoration includes museum period room installation projects at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of the City of New York, and private residences and collections.

Lia Wilson is a writer living and working in Portland, Maine. Her research interests include investigating the advantages and hazards of identity-focused practices, institutions, and historical categories in contemporary art, in particular the field of outsider art and its discourse surrounding artists with mental illnesses. She has a BFA in Printmaking from the College of Santa Fe and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts.

Emily Jane Young received her MFA from Stonecoast and BFA from the University of Maine at Farmington. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Word Portland, a literary reading series held at LFK in Portland. She is co-editor of the collection Be Wilder and her work has appeared in the anthologies I Could Be Here Now and Be Wilder.