In Conversation: Community and Criticality featuring Patricia Miranda with guests Jonathan VanDyke, Melissa Hilliard Potter, and Martha McDonald

Patricia Miranda (she/her) is an artist, curator, and educator. She is founder of The Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of donated lace works and family histories; The Crit Lab, graduate-level critical seminars for artists; and MAPSpace exhibition and residency space. Patricia manipulates donated and repurposed lace and linens to create sculptures, installations, and two-dimensional works. The aggregation of individual stitches into monumental works makes visible the untold stories of labor, and labor of care, in the lives of women.

Jonathan VanDyke’s (he/him) work reflects on the unfolding of art objects in a dynamic relationship to the passing of time. Manifested through installations, paintings, videos, sculpture, writings, collaborative projects, and live and durational works featuring performers from the queer community of which he is a part, VanDyke’s work prioritizes slowness, pauses, subtexts, and doubt. He has exhibited internationally, has been a resident at Yaddo, The Hans Scharoun House of the Ferdinand Moller Foundation in Germany, Qwatz in Rome, and several other prestigious institutions. He received his MFA from the Milton Avery School at Bard College.

Melissa Hilliard Potter (she/her) is a feminist interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited in numerous venues including White Columns, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, to name a few. Her films have been screened at international film festivals, such as the Cinneffable and the Reeling International LGBT Film Festival. Her work considers women’s culture through their handicraft, social customs, and gender rituals. She focuses on traditions that are endangered, underpaid and under-recognized due to industrialization, war, gender bias, and globalization.

Martha McDonald (she/her) makes performances and installations that feature handcrafted costumes and objects, which she activates through movement and song. She often develops site-specific interventions grounded in deep research into collections, archives, and historic material practices; and in response to the physical site. Her work has been shown extensively internationally and was included in Textiles: The Art of Mankind (Thames & Hudson, 2012) by Mary Schoeser. She received an MFA from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Elisheba Johnson: Wa Na Wari

Elisheba Johnson (she/they) is a curator, public artist, administrator, and disruptor. Feeling left out of the traditional art world, Johnson has dedicated her career to building bridges for artists of color to grow and thrive in our local arts community. Johnson, who has a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, was the owner of Faire Gallery Café, a multi-use art space that held art exhibitions, music shows, poetry readings and creative gatherings. For six years Faire Gallery Café provided space for Seattle’s young BIPOC arts ecology to create new work, meet future collaborators and experiment with new ideas. She has since worked extensively within her local art community including Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Network advisory council, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, the 2019 Portland Biennial, The Share Fund, Harvard’s Young American Leaders Program (YALP), and currently co-manages Wa Na Wari, a Black art center in Seattle’s Central Area that uses the arts to build community and resist displacement. Johnson has been awarded four Americans in the Arts Public Art Year in Review Awards and her personal art practice examines the beauty and triumph of Black life in America through mixed media and poetry.

Artists in Community with SDA Grant Awardees Gabi Nirino of the Chala Project and Jess Jones of Atlanta’s Lost Weavings

Gabi Nirino (she/her) is a weaver who creates two-dimensional and sculptural works of art. The Chala Project is a compilation of her work with corn husks (chala in the Quechua language) for over 12 years. Her research began as a part of a yarn production project with discarded materials at the National University of Lanús where she was teaching at the time. Her work with corn husks circles around art, jewelry, and identity. Corn is a foundational crop in the Americas. It is an apparent waste, which invisibly protects the earth and generates energy when it is thrown in the field. It appears as an element of cultural resistance, in relation to the defense of the original seeds and more just and sustainable ways of producing food.

Jess Jones (she/her) is a textile artist and Associate Professor of Textiles at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia as well as Affiliate Faculty with the Institute of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Jones’s work examines psycho-geography, textiles’ relationship to the urban environment, and the creation of digitally derived layered and stitched compositions. Her series, Weeping Quilts, can currently be seen at the Momentum Gallery in Asheville, NC.

Artist in Residence, Theda Sandiford

Theda Sandiford (she/her) is an award-winning self-taught fiber and installation artist based in Jersey City, NJ. Using racial trauma as a starting point, Theda juxtaposes various fibers with a variety of found materials using free form weaving, coiling, knotting, crochet, and jewelry making techniques. Meticulously collected materials and community donations, transformed by their collective memory become “social fabric,” weaving together contemporary issues and personal narratives. Community art making is key to her process. Theda curates’ multi-disciplinary experiences pairing people, sound and art making to create a safe space to explore themes such as equity & inclusion, sustainability, and personal wellbeing. Theda has shown extensively nationwide; including Expo Chicago, Untitled Art Fair, Governor’s Island, New Jersey Arts Annual and American Contemporary Craft: National Juried Exhibition. Among others, Theda received the 2020 Jersey City Arts, Visual Artist Award, the 2021 Fellowship in Craft from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and 2022 Jersey City Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship.