Artists Archive
F
bart fitzgerald (b. 1991) is a pastor, scholar, and cultural critic.
Learn moreClaire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes—there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.”
Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Recent shows include El Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F.; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Air de Paris, Paris; Regina Gallery, London and Moscow; MUSAC Contemporary Art Museu, Castilla y León, Spain; Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, Baltimore; Bunker Stuzki Contemporary Art Museum, Krakow; Mastermind, Casablanca; and Kunstlerhaus Wien, Vienna. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Metro Pictures, New York; T293, Napoli and Rome; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Galerie Chantal Crousel/Air de Paris, Paris. She is now preparing a catalogue with Buchhandlung Walther König.
Learn moreMusician Erik Friedlander is widely considered a master avant-garde jazz and classical cellist. Friedlander has released nine solo albums and three albums as a member of the John Zorn-led avant-jazz group Bar Kokhba. In high demand as a session musician, he has played with a wide range of artists, from pop stars Kelly Clarkson and Courtney Love, to indie folk stars Dar Williams and Paula Cole, to fellow vanguard artists Ikue Mori (TBA:07) and Laurie Anderson (TBA:06). Friedlander’s father, Lee Friedlander, has been a MacArthur Fellow whose photographs of street scenes and jazz greats have been widely shown at galleries across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art.
Learn moreStephaun E. Wallace, MS, MOL, is a thought leader, public health researcher, project manager at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and co-director of the University of Washington’s (UW) Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Community Action board (CAB), with a track record in developing, implementing, and evaluating major public health and human service programs in the areas of HIV/AIDS & STD prevention, care and treatment, in diverse, high-risk populations in the United States. Wallaces’ career highlights include Director of Programs/Deputy Director of the MOCHA Center, Inc.; Program/Training Coordinator of AID Atlanta, Inc. (where he co-founded the Evolution Center/Project); and Founding Executive Director of My Brothaz Keeper, Inc., and currently serves on several nonprofit boards, committees and coalitions, including maintaining active membership in national public health associations.
Mr. Wallace is a public health/social justice leader with more than 16 years of sexual/public health experience with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities and men who have sex with men (MSM), more than a decade of senior-level non-profit administrative and management experience, more than 20 of grassroots social justice/advocacy experience with LGBTQ/MSM communities, and a proven commitment to the illumination and eradication of HIV/AIDS and other health disparities via policy, research, education and advocacy. He has completed undergraduate degrees in psychology and criminal justice, Masters of Science degrees in Management and Organizational Leadership, and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in Epidemiology.
In the house and ball community (HBC), he is known as Stephaun Blahnik, Chairman/President of the House of Blahnik. Since 2000, Wallace has been an active part of the HBC, and has provided ballroom/life guidance and talent development for many ballroom superstars. Wallace has received several ballroom awards and accolades since being a part of this community; and has walked and won Best Dressed, American Runway, Face, and Sneaker vs. Sneaker in multiple regions of the country, in addition to having the honor of judging major and mini-balls around the United States. Wallace resurrected the House of Elite in 2000, and has been a part of the Houses of Revlon, Cavalli, Valentino, and now Blahnik. Wallace founded the Western New York Council of Houses, resurrected the Atlanta Ballroom Alliance, and has directly supported the Chicago, Carolinas, Kansas City, and the West Coast Ballroom Alliances over the years. Wallace also provides consultation to the federal agencies, and local and state health departments and organizations around the country on projects addressing the needs and issues of LGBT communities, especially those in the HBC. Additionally, Wallace co-lead the development of an intervention called Project VOGUE; which the 1st EVER CREATED research-based HIV prevention intervention focused on the HBC, utilizing community-based participatory research principles.
Learn moreLinyekula lives and works in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he runs Studios Kabako, which fosters the debuts of young Congolese artists in the fields of dance, theater, music, and video by providing training and producing works. Through the Studios, he has presented ten pieces and toured extensively in Europe, United States, and Africa. Linyekula is a member of the Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne, Germany, and he has received the 2007 Principal Award of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development.
Learn moreFaye Driscoll (b. 1975, California, lives and works in New York) is an award winning art and performance maker who uses an alchemy of bodies and voices, objects and live sound to conjure worlds that are, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. She creates immersive worlds of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation aimed to rile up the passive, numb, screened-out body. These interventions come in the shape of intimacies: a performer holding your hand, death metal song made through recording your stomping feet, a place to rest and a private guided choreography in your ear.
In Thank You For Coming, her recently completed trilogy of performance works—Attendance (2014), Play (2016), and Space (2019)—each took a distinct genre blurring while summoning the unnamed forces that surge between the viewer and the viewed. For her first solo exhibition, at Walker Art Center, Driscoll brought the immersive experience of theater into the exhibition space, inviting viewers to become active participants through a series of prompts and subtle directives from her series of audio works, Guided Choreographies for the Living and the Dead.
She is currently the Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and is the recipient of a Doris Duke Award, Guggenheim fellowship, a Bessie award and the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award, among many others. Select presentations include Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Walker Art Center, Melbourne Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires.
Learn more"Fever One" is a B-Boy and DJ originally from Seattle, WA who relocated to New York in 1997 and eventually joined the world famous Rock Steady Crew. He is most well known for his 'gunzblazin' style which he developed while studying with his mentors Icey Ice and Lil' Lep of the New York City Breakers. Inspired by a Poppin' Battle in Seattle's Central District and the aggression he saw in breakin’, Fever One became influenced by the spirituality and competitiveness of dancing by the age of ten. Since then, Fever One became a member of the world famous Rock Steady Crew which took his career to new heights. He has performed in many prestigious venues from Lincoln Center to Madison Square Garden and Fashion Week to Dancing with the Stars. He has also lectured about the history of hip-hop at Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington.
Learn moreFirst Nations Performing Arts is focused on cultural change, commissioning, touring and presenting Indigenous performance, as well as capacity building for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts sectors. For our all-ages intergenerational gathering we celebrate the FNPA Network Track members — a coalition of First Nations performing artists — in an evening which will evolve through sharing food, storytelling, interactive performance, music, noise, and artistic experimentation.
Learn moreForced Entertainment is a collective of six theater artists who have been working together since 1984. They have long had an obsession with virtual or described performance, exploring the possibilities of conjuring extraordinary scenes, images, and stories using language alone. Their work forges a strong link between form and content, reflecting the belief that the form of a project – the kind of experience it presents, the contract it makes with its audience, and how – is an inseparable and significant part of its meaning. Often described as being experimental or innovative, their approach to each work differs from project to project, taking inspiration from movies, the internet, stand-up, dance, bad television, performance art, and music as well as from theater itself. What ties the various strands of their work together is that the projects always strive to be vivid and original, demanding a lot from audiences and giving a lot in return.
Learn more“Singulum – the melancholy of empty urban streets at night, dirtied by litter, and cleansed by rain. It sounds like a piece of club music, slowed down, and with the beats removed – the hazy memory of the night before..”
– Martin P.
Singulum, LINE_075
Musique Machine, UK (January 2017)France Jobin is a sound / installation / artist, composer and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture”, revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital intersect. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in a variety of unconventional spaces and new technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe and Japan.
Jobin has created solo recordings for popmuzik records (JP), bake/staalplaat (NL), ROOM40 (AU), nvo (AT), DER (US), ATAK (JP), murmur records (JP), Baskaru (FR) and the prestigious LINE label (US). Jobin’s sound art is also part of countless compilation albums, notably on the ATAK (JP), bremsstrahlung (US), Mutek (CA), murmur records (JP), and/oar (US), tsuku boshi (FR), everest records (CH), and Contour Editions (US) labels. She is also featured in the influential book and recording, Extract, Portraits of Soundartists (book + 2 cd), released on the nonvisualobjects label (AT). The collaborative album ligne, created with sound artist Tomas Phillips, was released on the ATAK label (JP).
Her installations and screenings have been shown internationally at museums and festivals. Her work P Orbital released on LINE (Valence, LINE054) was presented in the context of ESCUCHAS, a first sound art exhibit for the Museum of Modern Art in Medellin, Colombia. P Orbital was also presented at CONTEXT-ing / Listening as CONTEXT at the Miami Art Fair in Florida, Call & Response, London Uk as well as at the Haunted formalism exhibit in LA curated by Volume. An invitation to the AIR Artist-In-Residence program in Krems, Austria enabled her to create und transit, a sound installation set in the MinoritenKirche cloister in Stein (AT). Her two ongoing collaborations with visual artist Cédrick Eymenier (FR) have resulted in EVENT HORIZON, an audio/video piece, and The Answer, a movie, with the soundtrack by France Jobin and Stephan Mathieu. EVENT HORIZON was screened in Paris (2010), at the Venezuela Biennale in Merida state (2010) and was performed live at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles (2010) and ISEA RUHR 2010 (DE). The Answer was screened at IAC, Villeurbanne, France in March – May 2016. In 2011, Jobin was one of five international artists selected to present her sound installation, Entre-Deux, in the new media exhibit Data/Fields, curated by Richard Chartier at Artisphere in the Washington, DC area, along with Ryoji Ikeda, Mark Fell, Caleb Coppock, and Andy Graydon. Her proposition received critical acclaim from the national press. Entre-Deux has recently been presented at N38E13 in Palermo, Sicily (2017). Her latest audio visual collaboration: “Mirror Neurons” with sound artist Fabio Perletta (IT) and xx+xy visuals (IT) was screened as a world premiere at A x S / ak-sis / FESTIVAL 2014 | CURIOSITY as part of the Synergetica Screening in Los Angeles in September 2014. In October 2015, France was invited to take part in an artist residency at EMPAC (Troy,NY) which resulted in the creation of a new light sound work entitled 4.35 – R0 – 413, a collaboration with Alena Samoray, lighting designer. Her latests installations, ‘Inter/sperse’ and ‘Entre/temps’ both premiered in Italy. ‘Inter/sperse’ is a site specific installation created in the context of an international residency organized by Museolaboratorio, LUX and farmacia901. It opened May 27 2017 at Museolaboratorio, Città Sant’Angelo Italy. ‘Entre/temps’ is a site specific installation commissioned by Enzo De Leonibus, artistic director of the EaRrEtMeI festival which opened in Palena, Itally, June 4 2017.
She has also participated in numerous music and new technology festivals such as Mutek (Montreal, 2001, 2004 – 2009, 2014, 2017), EM15 (Montreal 2014), EMPAC (US 2011, 2015), roBOT 8 (Italy 2015) Angelica Festival (Italy 2016), Portobeseno (Italy 2014), Interferenze – Liminaria (Italy 2014), Flussi Media Arts Festival (Italy 2014), FIMAV, SEND + RECEIVE (Winnipeg, 2003, 2005), Club Transmediale (Berlin, 2004), Shut up and Listen (Vienna, 2009), ISEA RUHR 2010 (Germany), the surface tension tour (Japan, 2012) and the Symétrie tour (Japan 2016).
“immersound” is a concert event/philosophy concept initiated by Jobin, which proposes the creation of a dedicated listening environment by focusing on the physical comfort of the audience within a specifically designed space. The premise of “immersound” is to seek out/explore new perceptions in and experiences of the listening process by pushing the notion of “immersion” to its possible limits.
She created and produced “immersound” from 2011 to 2015 at Oboro in Montreal.
She was a finalist at the Sonic Arts Awards 2014 (IT) in the Sonic Research category. In January 2013, the Conseil québécois de la musique (CQM) awarded the prestigious Opus Prize for Concert of the year to France Jobin for her concert at AKOUSMA 8.
Jobin’s work continues to evolve as technologies enable her to create new environments.
France Jobin is published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music UK Ltd
Learn more"We are ignited by the ways in which contemporary dance performance is emerging in current discourse. We publicly engage, observe and shape these conversations. FRONT was initiated as a platform for contemporary dance, giving voice to many different opinions and playing with modes of distribution. Four of us initiated this project: Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Robert Tyree. We are choreographers, dancers, and contributors to contemporary dance performance, who are based out of Portland, OR. We rely on the old-school tactics of the newspaper infused with current, new, and future energy of dance theory and practices. FRONT acts as a performance in which the form stays the same but the format is ever-shifting to directly meet the needs it instigates. It is an experiment."
Learn moreFUTURE DEATH TOLL (F-DT) is an art-oriented collective that releases Creative Commons licensed audio and video primarily online. The elusive group creates work circumventing the normal bounds that geography (namely museums and galleries but also physical media) imposes on an art form. Armed with modular synthesizers, projectors, and uniformed in blaze orange, F-DT is a throbbing mess of noise that mutates sound and video in a sculptural fashion.
Learn moreFletcher is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. He has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years. Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland. Selected Press 500 Words: Harrell Fletcher, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, February 1, 2010 Selected Video
Learn moreIngri Midgard Fiksdal (b. 1982) is a Norwegian choreographer and performer. She is based in Oslo and has been making work since graduating from the MA in Choreography at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2006. Her work tours internationally to venues such as brut-Wien (AUS), Kampnagel (DE), Inkonst (SE), MDT (SE), In Between Time (UK), ANTI festival (FI), The Armory Show (US), LIMIT Festival (RS), HIFA (ZIM), Nordwind (DE), Baltoscandal (EST), and Homo Novus festival (LT). Fiksdal has recently been admitted into the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Program, and has from October 2013 commenced on a three-year artistic research project (PhD). Fiksdal’s work deals with perception and affectivity, and several of her pieces take shape as part performance and part live concert. The audience is always integral to the work, which aims to produce temporary collectives between performers and spectators. This notion of collectivity here refers to modes of attention and sensorial transference, rather than to interactivity. An ongoing theme within Fiksdal’s work is the ritual, and the rituals’ inherent capacity of transforming and ultimately transcending its partakers. This is approached from various angles to research how these capacities could be transferred to the performance-concerts created. Within this, the relation between cognition and affectivity, and how they operate in perception and in production of meaning, is central. Fiksdal often works in collaboration with other artists, such as visual artist, and composer Ingvild Langgård/Phaedra and scenographer Signe Becker.
Learn more“Ferver’s performances are so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms.” —The New Yorker
Jack Ferver has been creating full-length works since 2007. He has been presented at The French Institute Alliance Francaise (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), PS 122 (NYC), The New Museum (NYC), The Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Diverse Works (Houston, TX), Danspace Project (NYC), Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Dixon Place (NYC), and Théâtre de Vanves in France. Shorter and solo works have been presented at MoMA/PS1, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Dance New Amsterdam, LaMaMa E.T.C., The Culture Project, and NP Gallery (all NYC). His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The New Yorker, ArtForum, Modern Painters, TimeOut New York, The New York Post, The Boston Globe, and Dance Magazine. As an actor, credits include the film Gayby, Strangers With Candy (Comedy Central), and numerous other film and theatre projects. His writing has been published in the magazine Novembre. He has curated for Danspace Project, Center for Performance Research, and Dance New Amsterdam. He also teaches at NYU, Bard College, has guest taught at SUNY Purchase, and has set choreography at The Juilliard School.
Selected Press
"Laughing and Crying at Ghosts, Fictive and Real," The New York Times, December 11, 2010
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Jack Ferver and his work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreMarcus Fischer is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Portland, Oregon. A first-generation American artist who creates, collects, and transforms sound into immersive, layered compositions that accompany performances and exhibitions. Site-specific assemblages of exposed speakers, tape loops, and objects are characteristic of his installations, paired with melodies of restraint and tension. He has released numerous recordings—both solo and collaborative —on 12k, a label that has decisively defined and developed its own concept of minimalism in the realms of experimental and ambient music. Fischer contributed two sound works and two performances to the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has been selected for residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Rauschenberg Residency, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and MacDowell. In 2024 he was awarded The Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts as well as the International Music & Composition Fellowship from the Montalvo Arts Center’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program
Fischer has performed and recorded as a solo artist, as a member of Wild Card and in collaborations with artists such as Taylor Deupree, Aki Onda, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Laura Ortman + Raven Chacon, Stephen Vitiello, Calexico and Simon Scott.
Learn moreMona Vatamanu (Romania) and Florin Tudor (Switzerland) live in Bucharest, Romania, where they have been working together since 2000. Their practice spans film, photography, painting, performance, and installation, and reflects the social upheavals of post-communist Eastern Europe. The duo has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, and has been featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Vatamanu and Tudor have had residencies at Basis Voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht, AIR Vienna, and Project Room at Ludwig Museum in Budapest, among others. They received first prize in the 2006 Fair:Play Video Festival in Berlin. Vatamanu and Tudor are represented by Lombard Fried Projects, New York.
Peripheries
Moscow's Poplar Curse, New York Magazine, April 17, 2011.
Learn moreNatalie Figueroa is an activist and community organizer that has addressed the intersections of art and revolution for over 18 years. Natalie, a Chicago native, has organized alongside youth of color to address issues of police brutality, segregation, access to comprehensive health education and racial injustice in public schools. Currently, she is working on building community in Portland through her art collective YGB.
Learn moreRaja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, a director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory. He is a three-time Princess Grace Award winner (2017, 2018, 2019), two-time Lucille Lortel Award nominee (2019, 2020), and 2019 Chita Rivera Award nominee. In 2020 he was the Obie Award winner and Outer Critics Circle Award honoree for choreography for the Pulitzer-winning musical A Strange Loop. In 2019 he was an SDCF Joe A. Callaway Award finalist for both A Strange Loop and the Pulitzer-winning play Fairview. Raja is also the 2019–2020 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2019 Creative Capital award recipient. He is a current fellow of HERE Arts, the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School. Over the past decade, Kelly has created fifteen evening-length premieres with his company the feath3r theory as well as directing and choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City. His choreography has also garnered a 2018 Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and he was Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.
Learn morerise x fall is an in-progress multimedia collaboration between rubén garcía marrufo, maximiliano, and Jaleesa Johnston. Conjured from liminal space, this work considers the rise and fall of an empire, and the possibilities between stability and instability. Taking inspiration from the ocean’s crashing waves against the earth, rise x fall simultaneously inhabits the space between the pain and fear of death, as well as the hope and growth of rebirth.
ARTISTS' BIOS
mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist working in BLKwvv, a generative multimedia mythos: a Black reclamation rococo aesthetic and agenda based in exploring and expanding the multiplicity and fluidity of the Black self through pleasure, desirability, innocence, and imagination as performance, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, and publications.
rubén garcía marrufo is a border artist.
https://rubengarciamarrufo.com/
Jaleesa Johnston is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and arts administrator currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been the recipient of the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency, and Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship. She has exhibited her work in cities along the West Coast, including San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, and she occasionally facilitates workshops and classes in new media and performance art. Jaleesa also organizes public programs as Programs Lead in the Learning and Community Partnerships Department at the Portland Art Museum.
Learn moreShannon Funchess is an activist and self-taught, interdisciplinary queer performance artist. The founder, vocalist, producer of internationally revered, electronic music project LIGHT ASYLUM founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2007, she has engaged audiences in performance at DIY art spaces, museums, galleries, music festivals and nightclubs in the U.K., North America, Europe, South America, Scandinavia, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Australia and Canada. Her musical journey began in a gospel choir of a southern baptist church in Spokane, Washington at the age of nine. With an ethos rooted in community and a passion for collaboration, she has joined forces with artistic peers and allies globally. From recording studio vocal features, creating sound design and remix productions for performance artists The Knife, LEECH, Yves Tumor, TR/ST, Chris Garneau and Justin Kennedy among others to lending vocals and appearing as an actor in video installation works of Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Michelle Handelman, Gloria Maximo, Wu Tsang, Tony Ousler, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner. She has regularly been invited on stages as a guest performer / musician with artists the likes of The Knife, LCD Sound System, TV on the Radio, electronic music pioneer Laurie Anderson, Coco Rosie and Christeene. Funchess has established herself as a force across her community and is lauded for her cathartic performances as well as a DJ at established art institutions, clubs and underground events. She’s at home in all stages of her creative exploration and continues to produce music and art within her community in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreMelanie Valera (Tender Forever) was born in Southwestern France in 1977. 3 albums (on K Records) and 800 shows later, she’s now pursuing multimedia projects for venues including La Cité Internationale (Paris) and the Whitney Museum (New York). Though she lives today in Portland, OR, her pop project leaps towards a world where we can close the gaps between countries, ideologies and, ultimately, hearts.
Learn moreTesar Freeman is an artist and amateur historian whose work is concerned with the revision of history and the physical vessels of ideologies. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Peripheries
Learn moreRyan Bunao, Bianca AE Mack, Haevyn, Cay Horiuchi, Adam Lucero, Jack Malstrom, Jen Tam, Samantha Pollock
UwU Collective is a Portland-based artist collective organizing underground events with an aim to uplift our Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPOC) and Trans/Gender non-conforming (T/GNC) community. We are a collective of 8 members and over 30 collaborators. We are multidisciplinary artists whose practices include DJing, performance, sound, digital, video, and installation art. Together, we share values and visions imagining and exercising an empathetic world in which we can thrive and celebrate one another through underground music and multidisciplinary art practices.
UwU honors and contributes to the legacy of our queer BIPOC ancerstors who have paved the way for one another and those to come next against all odds. We are here today to imagine our version of the future—creating intentional space for joy, healing, and hope through music, collaboration, experimentation, empathy for one another, and the drive to create a better world.
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