Andrea Bowers | Pauline Kanako Kamiyama | Carmen Uriarte | David Russell | Ella Tetrault
Felicia Montes | Gabrielle Levine | Jamie Crooke | Rachael Filsinger | Rodrigo Marti
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Andrea Bowers
Andrea Bowers work focuses primarily on direct action and non-violent civil disobedience enacted through the lives of women. She presents the stories of activists to express her belief that dissent is essential to maintaining a democratic process, as well as to illustrate the importance of a political strategy that stands in opposition to violence and war. Her work explores the intersections between art and archival processes, and between aesthetics and political protest. Bowers believes cultural production can be an integral part of political action and can help serve as a voice in counter-hegemonic practices. She investigates the role of art in documentation, in-depth storytelling, and the reconsideration of historical recording. Many of her projects contextualize historical events in our contemporary situation and underscore their poignancy upon our current state of affairs.
Andrea Bowers has an MFA from CalArts and lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo shows include An Eloquent Woman at Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, Your Donations Do Our Work: Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy, UCR Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside, CA, and The Weight of Relevance at the Secession, Vienna and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Recent group shows include the Suddenly This Summer, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York 2008, California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Proyecto Civico at The Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT), Progress at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the L.A. Anarchist Book Fair. Bowers has a solo exhibition Mercy Mercy Me at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and a group exhibition curated by Berta Sichel, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, both opening in October 2009.
Bowers is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Galerie Mehdi Chouakri in Berlin, Galerie Praz-Delavallade in Paris, and Van Horn in Düsseldorf. She is currently a Guest Professor in the Graduate Public Practice at Otis College of Art and Design and an Adjunct Professor at Claremont Graduate University.
Pauline Kanako Kamiyama
Pauline Kanako Kamiyama is a non-profit and cultural arts administrator who believes it is her responsibility to ensure access and equity through advocacy, opportunities and linkages. Throughout her career, she hasprovided services in program development and management, volunteer management, special events, and community advocacy on both the local and national level to build community capacity.
Carmen Uniarte
Carmen is a Los Angeles native and recent 2006 graduate of Pitzer College, Claremont, CA with a degree in Art and Art History. As a Getty intern in 2005 she worked at the Center for the Arts in Pomona Art Colony fundraising and organizing the Annual Aztlan exhibition highlighting emerging and established international Chicano artists. Carmen was awarded three consecutive Urban Fellowships in the Center for California Cultural and Social Issues at Pitzer Collect. Through these fellowships she served as acommunity organizer and liason. After studying mural painting, she initiated three collaborative mural projects. The community partners included the Salvation Army and its afterschool program, wards at the Heman G. Stark Youth Corrections, Chino, Women in the Community Prison Mothers Program at Prototypes and the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center in which day laborers and Spanish language students participated in cultural exchange while designing and painting a mural on Pitzer's campus. All the murals focused on themes of unity to serve as a way to connect and illuminate diverse communities.
David Russell
David Russell paints elements of the natural world on large-scale walls and canvases. He is motivated by the visual aesthetic found in mountain and ocean environments across the globe. David graduated from University of Tulsa with a B.F.A. in Painting/Art history. He spent one year in Florence, Italy, studying Painting, Art History and Italian Language. Additionally, he pursued a professional teaching license in Art Education, providing him with eight years of public school teaching experience in K-12. Russell’s large format painting background has inspired the creation of his own mural painting company called Idealwallarts. His projects have ranged from hand painted wall signs, custom canvases, to large format pictorials. David is extremely excited about the Otis Public Practice program and the idea of shifting his own artistic practice in order to promote more community dialogue for social change.
Ella Tetrault
Ella Tetrault received her degree from the University of Toronto in International Development and Art History. As part of her studies, she travelled to Ghana to work with a Widow's Rights organization in the Ghanian basket industry. Her academic research focussed on helping groups in diverse community settings define and identify challenges through interdisciplinary art practices including participatory theatre and dialogical art.
While in Halifax, Ella co-organized the Show and Tell me lecture series and worked as a youth worker and arts facilitator at Phoenix Youth Programs. Her art practice explores the effects of the representation of a group identity upon an individual member. Using mediums ranging from painting, installation, and digital media, Ella has worked with youth and newcomer women's organizations on oral history projects. She is especially interested in using printmaking in public spaces as a carrier of community content.
Felicia Montes
Felicia Montes is a Chicana Indigenous artist, activist, academic, community & event organizer, and poet & performer living and working in the Los Angeles area. She believes art is a tool for education, empowerment and transformation and has translated her passion for art and social justice as the cofounder and coordinating member of two groundbreaking creative women’s collectives, Mujeres de Maiz and In Lak Ech.
Felicia writes and performs about social and spiritual change as she works on the front lines of activism and organizing. Known throughout the Los Angeles area as an established Chicana cultural worker of a new generation, she has worked with most of the key arts and cultural centers and social service agencies in the greater East Los Angeles area.
Having organized and performed in hundreds of cultural events, marches, protests for many artists and social justice causes, her current goal is to focus on her own visual art and multimedia performances and creations. Felicia holds a B.A from UCLA in World Arts & Cultures with a minor in Chicano Studies and a M.A in Chicano Studies from Cal State Northridge. She is currently completing an MFA in Public Practice at Otis College of Art & Design.
Gabrielle Levine
Gabrielle Levine was born in Los Angeles and graduated from Crossroads High School in Santa Monica. Currently she is a graduate student in the Public Practice Program at the OTIS College of Art and Design. She attended and earned her Baccalaureate Degree at The Evergreen State College in Washington State.
Levine continues her connection with the community in Olympia and at Evergreen as a member of The Evergreen State College Friends of the Library Board of Directors. When she returned to Los Angeles she began working full-time as an artist, a painter and printmaker, and part-time as a docent and later in the museum bookstore at UCLA’s Hammer Museum. For six months prior to graduate school, she worked as an intern in Advancement and Membership at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
Levine also worked with tribal members at the Longhouse on Evergreen’s campus as an undergraduate student, and became acquainted with Native Peoples’ issues. Her interest in environmental stewardship is evident in her prints and paintings, which investigate the detrimental effect upon the arctic environment— the land, the indigenous human and animal populations— by unrestrained exploration and exploitation of oil, gas and coal. She is a colorist and the beauty of her work makes it approachable; yet the message, a dire warning, is as inescapable as the solution, the urgent need to develop alternative forms of energy.
Jamie Crooke
Originally from South Florida, Jamie Crooke now reside in Los Angeles, California. She holds a bachelors degree in studio art from Florida Atlantic University, and has also studied art therapy on a graduate level at Lesley University in Cambridge. Over the years she has worked with various non-profits such as Arts for Learning, VSA Arts of Massachusetts, Young at Art, United Cerebral Palsy of Broward County, Cambridge Public School system, Tewksbury State Hospital and MoCA of Miami. Crooke's roles have included working as: a teaching artist, arts facilitator, art therapist, festival coordinator and museum monitor. Some of the communities that she has worked with include homeless families, children and teens with serve physical disabilities, at risk youth, early childhood in Little Haiti, adults with severe disabilities in the mental health department and teachers of a early learning center in Chelsea, MA. Working primarily with arts education and integration, her interests also include social and political issues around access and equality. Crooke's artwork is concerned with expressing ideas through various mediums such as: ceramics, illustrations, sculptures, installation and performance. She has exhibited in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Boston area, France and Japan.
Rachael Filsinger
Rachael hails from Washington DC and has been a photographer since elementary age. While studying photojournalism in high school, it began a lifelong captivation with images of social justice. Upon graduating from film school on the west coast in August 2005, she worked with grassroots organization Common Ground Collective in Louisiana. Rachael became an east coast vagabond, spanning from Tampa, Florida to Rockport, Maine. Important shaping events include black & white darkroom education for middle schoolers in the at-risk neighborhood of Hunt's Point, South Bronx, NY. More recently, teaching has brought her to Los Angeles, in area charter schools stretching from the desert to south central in everything from animation to pottery. Her current goals are to remain active in community education and enrichment.
Rodrigo Marti
Starting from a painting and sculpture background, Rodrigo’s work has steadily moved towards installation, collaborative projects and thorough research in participatory art making. Key work experiences include, developing and teaching a Portraiture and Identity course at Greenwich Secondary School, executing a mural project with the kids of CESCOM, a community center (both in Leon, Mexico) and ‘Dandy Berry’, an installation constructed as a pared down cityscape housing a viewer activated system of lights, microphones and speakers for the Nuit Blanche Festival, 2008, with friend and architect Danny Shaddick.
Rodrigo was born in Guadalajara, Mexico but based out of Canada since 1986. Currently he is completing his MFA in Public Practice at Otis College, Los Angeles, CA.
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