Growing up in Akron, Ohio, positioned on a longtime central traffic corridor within the continental United States, I became interested in how the region’s intermediary posture influences sense of place. Like painting, place is a conduit for understanding the world both as an observed object and a way of seeing.

 Cindy Phenix works across a multitude of mediums, including painting, drawing, and sculpture, utilizing a reciprocity of abstraction and figuration to convey complex narratives aimed to deconstruct the hierarchical power structures that govern society and social conduct. Navigating the tenuous relationship between the public and private, Phenix’s subject matter is regularly informed by participatory discussions through which the artist explores and brings awareness to shared experiences.

 Nereida Patricia’s practice spans sculpture, text, and performance, and explores themes of history, trans poetics, and identity. Her work draws from postcolonial and feminist theory, Peruvian symbolism, and autobiographical fragments to build new mythologies around the transformation of the human body.

 I make paintings to process contradictions between personal memory and cultural artifacts, and to explore the ways that color and image can be conduits for psychological environments. I am interested in the symbols and icons that have built mythologies around the landscape of the American West. I use these images as tools to meditate on the alienation and shame I feel from the daily cultural expectations driven by the belief of American exceptionalism. The works are stages where landscapes become curtains, birds become headstones, and the sun repeatedly rises and sets.

 I am a self-taught contemporary visual artist and mas man (carnival costume designer). My work includes mixed-media sculptural works that combine collage, painting, repurposed material, scrap metal, performance, and photography interrogating notions of cultural heritage, sexual and gender identity, and ritual practices as a first-generation African American Black queer man born to Trinidadian immigrants.

 My core practice involves recursive looping between photographic and painting processes: painted objects that become photographed photographic fragments printed/painted/torn, ad hoc collages of these fragments arranged on flatbed scanners, and inkjet-printed canvases of these scans functioning as starting points for oil paintings. This promiscuity between analog/digital, photographic/painted, and ordered/unhinged in my own practice is also what excites me about the broader state of painting in our current moment.

 This body of work was born slowly, evolving from the existential rupture (perhaps rapture) of leaving a twenty-five-year career as an art professor and freelance newspaper columnist to work in technology concept development at Thomson (RCA, if you prefer). Returning to the university, but now to informatics, I spent the next twenty years researching acoustic cognition and pedagogical strategies for the blind. These abrupt and diametric transitions—from sight to blindness, art to science—were freeing.

 Is there such a thing as too much good taste? Good taste praises the refined qualities of fine art and the ideal aesthetic and discards the materials that are broken, tacky, and misplaced. There are hidden treasures of exciting beauty everywhere, even in your garbage can, the sidewalk, or your grandma’s couch. In my paintings, garments, and fiber works I use colorful thrifted fabrics, garbage, and paint deemed not fit for a canvas to create forms that are inspired by or utilizing the body in some fashion.

 My work consists of mixed media image-objects that push against notions of essentialist motherhood. I use vernacular technology such as the cell phone photograph or personal digital archive, and remix—through painting, sewing, soft sculpture, and found object assemblage—a spectrum of maternal experiences, and embrace the slippage between the emotive/empirical and analog/digital forms.

 As a member of the Cherokee Nation, my process is a personal expression of the Native American Diaspora. Indigenous peoples were inventive with resources as they were removed from native homelands to new environments. Resourcefulness is instilled in my mind not only from my native ancestry, but also from a rural Kansas upbringing. I myself am a collage of cultures. I react by collaging materials from my ancestors’ contemporary community and personal collaging materials from my ancestors, contemporary community, and personal life experiences.