Earth Artist Mediums

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Yvonne Escalante

Visual Artist: Jeweler, Sculptor

Yvonne Escalante is a metalsmith artist based in San Jose. She is a lecturer at San Jose State University in metalsmithing, jewelry, and small sculpture. In addition to metal, her work also incorporates wood, glass, and found objects. Using these media, she employs mostly traditional craft techniques to produce sculpture that evokes items of manufacture while attempting to bring humor and frank attention to issues of global importance and personal meaning. Recent works have been exhibited at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA), City College of San Francisco, and the Oakland Museum of California.

Sam Hernandez

Visual Artist: Sculptor

Sam Hernández is a sculptor primarily known for his innovative work in wood. Hernández achieves poetic yet vigorous free-standing abstractions through such widely-varying tools as African adzes, Japanese saws, Native American crook knives, and high-powered sandblasters. From early work referencing the totemic, his more recent sculpture has moved in a looser, more lyrical direction as it simultaneously moves towards a powerful asymmetry and a more intuitively based manner of working. Although the work remains characteristically based in abstraction, the direction is being nourished by a more expressionist tone; works in steel and bronze, as well as inks and acrylics on paper, and oils on canvas and board, round out his current explorations. Recipient of numerous honors including a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, a Senior Fulbright Scholar Award, and Silicon Valley’s Artist Laureate, Hernandez’s work has been featured in numerous books, exhibition catalogues, and articles, and has been shown in museum and gallery exhibitions internationally. It is included in numerous public collections including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Macedonia, the Cantor Center at Stanford University, the Oakland Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Professor of Art at Santa Clara University 1977-2013, Hernandez divides his time between California and Spanish Catalunya.

Joel Slayton

Educator; Visual Artist: 3D, Computer Arts

Joel Slayton is a pioneering artist, educator, and curator. His professional activities explore contemporary culture as informed by emerging technologies. As co-founder of the L&J Ranch (launching fall 2018), Slayton is focused on cutting-edge research, creative projects and sense of place. He’s Professor Emeritus at San Jose State where he founded the CADRE Laboratory for New Media in 1984. Slayton’s artwork has been featured in over 100 exhibitions around the world including Berlin, Austria, Buenos Aires, and New York. For eight years he served as Executive Director of ZERO1, a Silicon Valley-based arts organization and agency for four international art biennials that featured over 600 artists from 45 countries. The SVNexus Award, sponsored by Adobe, was created to recognize pioneering artistic achievement at the intersection of arts and technology.

Gail Wight

Visual Artist: 3D, Ceramist, Mixed Media, Painter, Photographer, Print Maker

Gail Wight’s work primarily focuses on experimental media, including photography, video, interactive media, and printmaking. Her exhibition record includes nearly two dozen solo exhibits throughout North America and Great Britain. Her work has been collected by numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, the San Jose Museum of Art, and Centro Andaluz de Art Contemporaneo in Spain. Among her many artist residencies are western Australia’s Symbiotica, Art & Archaeology at Stonehenge, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and San Francisco’s Exploratorium. She has taught in the Art Practice program at Stanford University since 2003. Wight holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. Information about her work has been published in Art and Science Now and Information Art by Stephen Wilson, Art in the Age of Technoscience by Ingeborg Reichle, Evocative Objects by Sherry Turkle, and Kunst nach der Wissenschaft by Susanne Witzgall, among other publications.

Shannon Wright

Visual Artist: 3D, Architecture, Mixed Media, Sculptor

Shannon Wright is a sculptor and installation artist based in San José, California. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wright is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the Spatial Art Program at San José State University. She is represented by ADA Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Wright’s recent exhibition venues include the Dallas Art Fair; Untitled Miami Beach; Mulherin + Pollard Projects, New York City; ADA Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; and Scope Art Fairs in New York, Miami and London Wright was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and grew up primarily in Sydney, Australia. Her formative years as an artist were spent among the iron trestle bridges and abandoned turn-of-the-last-century hydroelectric power plants and foundries of Richmond, Virginia. She considers this environment to be the single biggest influence on all the artwork she has made since college.

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