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Natalya Burd

Visual Artist: Illustrator, Print Maker

A visual artist who paints and works in ink on paper, Natalya Burd was born in Bishkek, Kirghizia, then a republic of the USSR. After graduation with distinction from the Kirghiz State College of Art and later-Stroganov Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry (Monumental Painting and Decorative and Applied Glass), Natalya immigrated to the U.S. in 1996. She made her way to the Pacific Northwest where she earned a BFA from Oregon State University, followed by an MFA from the University of Washington in 1999. She has had one and two-person exhibitions at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco; at Sarah Spergeon Gallery at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA; at Art Object Gallery in San Jose, CA; and at Wiseman Gallery in Grants Pass, OR. Burd has participated in numerous group shows in California, Oregon and Washington. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco.

Sam Hernandez

Visual Artist: Sculptor, Visual Artist

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.

Marianne Lettieri

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

Marianne Lettieri creates art from commonplace objects that people have used over time and no longer find desirable or necessary. Her mixed media constructions explore the process by which relics of the past illuminate and inform current contexts. Marianne is an artist-in-residence at the Cubberley Artists Studio Program, sponsored by the City of Palo Alto. Marianne is on the leadership team of Doing Good Well, a national initiative to empower next generation female arts and culture leaders. She is on the board of directors of Council for The Arts, Palo Alto and Mid-Peninsula Area (CAPA).

Joe Miller

Visual Artist: 3D, Visual Artist

Joe Miller is a visual artist based in San Jose. His art combines found, acquired, and artist-made objects with text and image to comment on the place of the individual in our manufactured environment. Recent exhibits at local venues include Art Ark Gallery, Anne & Mark’s Art Party, Empire Seven Studios, and Space 47. He has pieces in permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum and Triton Museum of Art. He is the board president of WORKS/San José; board member, and design and publications director of Poetry Center San José; and a board member and programming co-chair of the American Institute of Graphic Arts SF.

Brian Taylor

Visual Artist: Mixed Media, Photographer, Visual Artist

Brian Taylor was born in Tucson, Arizona. He received his B.A. Degree in Visual Arts from the University of California at San Diego, an M.A. from Stanford University, and his M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico. Brian is known for his innovative explorations of alternative photographic processes including historic 19th Century printing techniques, mixed media, and hand made books. He has been a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Polaroid Corporation. His work has been exhibited nationally and abroad in numerous solo and group shows and is included in the permanent collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. His work has been published in American Photographer, Photo Asia, Exploring Color Photography, Photographic Possibilities, and Artworks. Brian has taught photography workshops for over 20 years at institutions including the Friends of Photography, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley, Stanford University, Photo Alliance, and f/295 at Carnegie Mellon. Brian is currently Professor of Photography in the Department of Art and Art History at California State University, San Jose.

Gail Wight

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

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.

Flo Oy Wong

Visual Artist: 3D, Mixed Media, Visual Artist

My art is symbolic of this country’s multiple canons. My work is significant because it inserts little-known chronicles into the cultural landscape. Influenced by the contemporary artists, Faith Ringgold, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Joseph Cornell, I make art that speaks of personal, family, community, cultural, and historical stories. To retrieve these narratives I interview people that I find heroic in order to explore disquieting matters that transform me and viewers to a place of healing, connecting, and understanding. I use cloth rice sacks, sequins, beads, old suitcases, scanned photographs, magazine text, Chinese funeral paper, flags of the United States, needle, and thread to create my mixed-media installations. In acknowledgement of my identity as an American of Chinese descent I frequently use Chinese and English text in my work. Featured on KQED’s Spark: http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=4392

Shannon Wright

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

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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