Artists Archive
Andrew Gilbert is a Los Angeles-based performer, musician, and teacher. In 2007 he co-founded Poor Dog Group, an experimental performance collective with whom he has developed six works as a sound designer and performer, performing in venues including REDCAT, the Experimental Media and Performance Art Center (EMPAC), The Getty Villa, Grotowski Institute in Poland, Bitef Theater in Serbia, and the Pula International Theater Festival in Croatia. House Music, an ongoing co-creation with choreographer Jennie Liu, is a performance for 16 guests rooted in an ongoing study of Japanese tea ceremony, and has been performed since 2014 at venues including Prelude Festival, Live Arts Exchange, HomeLA, The Mistake Room and the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. He most recently designed sound for choreographer Faye Driscoll's Thank You for Coming: Space. Andrew is one half of the band Royal Auditorium. @royalauditorium @andrewgilbertindependentartist
Learn more.Compost Cooperative takes the tossed-out leftovers from digital culture and breaks them down to grow a more lush virtual landscape. In the ease of mass consumption and the gold rush for the supposedly infinite space provided by the Internet, much of our digital infrastructure and the tools used to make it go disconcertingly unexamined. We believe that through cultivating a biome of thoughtful appropriation, re-design, humor, and the surreal we can begin to glimpse a microcosm of new possibility and the recipe to get there. Together we make websites, video games, educational materials, and a range of other media that playfully percolates on our ever-decaying/blossoming digital world.
.Compost Cooperative is: Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zan Kerrigan, and Carly Barton. Our work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in the Maine College of Art and Design in Maine, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon, and the Utkal University of Culture in Odisha, India. Learn moreDrew Michael was born in Bethel, Alaska, and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. He started his art career at the University of Alaska Anchorage in a carving class with Joe Senungetuk in 1997. From there, his practice has developed through the study of other artists' work and through his own experience in trial and error. He has learned under the guidance of Kathleen Carlo and Larry Ahvakana in Anchorage, AK.
His art is deeply influenced by the people and events he has encountered in his life. Currently, his work uses imagery of religious iconography blended with traditional mask making with the hopes of bringing to light different ways of healing. His work is created with a focus on using new materials and combinations of mixed media. He uses carving as a form of expression, to draw understanding and compassion from within, and is constantly using new materials to broaden the form of his work.
"With everything I create I aim to exemplify my thoughts on how our humanity exists within this world, emotions about my relationships with others, perceptions of energy in all things and the constant acceptance into balance. As I learn about my own path I blend my traditional knowledge with everyday living experience and somehow try to connect with that ancestral wisdom that I see us all having within and around."
Learn moreFounded in 2020, Elbow Room is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community art studio and gallery dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. More than 30 participating artists visit Elbow Room’s SE Portland studio (and satellite community art programming) each week to develop their creative practice, experiment with new materials, cultivate their portfolio of finished artwork, and to build community through friendship and collaboration. Elbow Room provides art materials and mentorship in painting, drawing, creative writing, sewing, digital media/video, music, hand tool woodworking, ceramics, and many other forms of art making. Participating artists pay no out-of-pocket expenses for materials or studio access, and they have opportunities to show and sell their work through Elbow Room’s gallery and through Elbow Room’s efforts to network with other contemporary art spaces.
Elbow Room and PICA have fostered an ongoing community partnership since 2022. Through weekly studio arts programs hosted by PICA, Elbow Room artists have access to PICA’s library of art books for inspiration and immersion into contemporary art, and can work with a wide range of artistic media in PICA’s Resource Room.
Learn moreEmily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Originally from Alaska, she is currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, history, and role in community. Her work is currently supported by Creative Capital, Map Fund, a Joyce Award and The Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts. Emily is a 2013 Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at the University of Minnesota, a 2012 Headlands Center for the Arts and MacDowell Artist in Residence, a Native Arts and Cultures Fellow (2011), a MANCC Choreographer Fellow (2009/2010/2012), a MAP Fund Grant recipient (2009/2010/2012/2013), and McKnight Fellow (2009). She received a 2012 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performance for her work, The Thank-you Bar, at New York Live Arts. Her current work, Niicugni, is touring to Florida State University/MANCC/Seven Days of Opening Nights, Coil Festival/PS122/Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC), Redfern Arts Center at Keene State (NH), Arizona State University, Tigertail (Miami), Northrop Auditorium (MN), PICA (Portland, OR) and Bunnell Street Gallery (AK).
Selected Press
"Shedding Light on the Last Frontier," Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, January 4, 2013.
"Emily Johnson in Conversation with Ain Gordon," Movement Research Critical Correspondance, January 9, 2013.
Call & Response: Spandex and Basketballs, Emily Johnson, Mental Contagion, July/August 2008.
Learn moreEmily Jones and Hannah Krafcik make performances and facilitate movement practices together. They are white settlers residing on the unceded lands of the Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas, and many other Tribes, also known today as Portland, OR. Hannah (they/them) is a neurodivergent dancer and writer. Emily (she/they) is a dancer, movement educator, and bodyworker. The artists’ long-standing collaboration is driven by considering how power dynamics impact their body/minds and behaviors.
Learn moreGarrick Imatani is an artist who uses performance, functional objects, or interaction to draw attention to one’s embodied subjectivity. Working across sculpture, photography, video, and installation, recent projects focus on reimagining racialized historical erasures into more believable and inspired futures. Past works have included collaborating with illegally-surveilled activists to readjust city archives, re-enacting labor on the transcontinental railroad, and working with the Grand Ronde tribe to replicate their sacred meteorite held at the American Museum of Natural History.
Learn moreHolly Mititquq Nordlum is an Iñupiaq (Inuit) artist who comes from the northern village of Kotzebue, Alaska. Nordlum works in a variety of media, using each to best cast light on Indigenous people. Her tattoo work and traditional markings revitalization effort is based on a 10,000-year Inuit history and is a machine-free process that facilitates healing, pride, and celebration from the traumas of colonization and individual experience. She organizes trainings, using traditional patterns in in-depth sessions to foster real change for people—in the end, creating community in the marks left behind. Nordlum’s public artwork educates about the still-surviving tribes of Alaska: their stories, histories, and cultures. Holly speaks publicly about the systems which continue to oppress her people and prevent their thriving.
In 2004 she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Alaska, and in the last five years she has received a Time Warner Fellowship from Sundance, an Art Matters grant, an Alaska Humanities Forum grant, an Alaska Native Visionary Award, a Rasmuson Artist Project Grant and Fellowship, an NDN Collective Indigenous Artists Grant, and she was part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Artist Leadership Program.
Learn moreJennie MaryTai Liu is an artist working across performance, choreography, video, and writing. She has worked in institutions and artist-run spaces including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources, The Mistake Room, The Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, PICA, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. She is currently organizing a 2022 performance exhibition funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation engaging LA dance artists to respond to modern dance activity in early twentieth-century LA. Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group.
Learn moreRaven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of a United States Artists fellowship in music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
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 moreSimon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker working between alternate documentary forms, abstract diary films, 16mm projection performance, and video installation. He has exhibited at film festivals and institutions globally including the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, British Film Institute, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Cinéma du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, “Dreamlands: Expanded,” and a solo-presentation at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s quadruple 16mm projection “Highview” with other recent works for their Permanent Collections. Liu is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. Liu is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.
Learn moreTrajal Harrell’s work has been presented in New York and across the US at venues including New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, American Realness Festival, ICA Boston, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, and Walker Arts Center, among others. Internationally, his work has toured in France, Switzerland, Portugal, Japan, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Poland, Croatia, Brazil, and Mexico, and has shown his performances in visual art contexts such as Performa, Fondation Cartier (Paris), The New Museum, The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Art Basel-Miami Beach, as well as galleries in Tokyo, Berlin, and New York. His latest works have been seen in 2013 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and MoMA PS1.
Learn moreTravis Stewart is a contemporary Northwest artist of Chinook, Rogue River, and Kalapuya descent. He lives in Grand Ronde, Oregon, and works in a variety of mediums to depict stories defined by the cultural landscape and design of the Willamette Valley and Columbia River people. He also works as a curator at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center (Grand Ronde, OR) and has devoted his life to the preservation of the art and culture of the tribes of Western Oregon. Travis is a founding member of the Shawash Ili?i Kanim Tilixam, which is a nonprofit cultural preservation group and canoe family that works to impart traditional teachings to at-risk tribal youth through song, dance, language, and art.
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