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Pilar Agüero-Esparza

Visual Artist: Mixed Media, Print Maker, Sculptor, Textile

Born in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Pilar Agüero-Esparza was exposed to the potential of materials and the love of the hand-made working with her parents in their shoe repair shop. She received a BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and MFA from San Jose State University. Pilar has been an active artist, arts educator and arts administrator in the Bay Area exhibiting her work in numerous institutions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Triton Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Santa Cruz Museum, MACLA, Palo Alto Art Center, Galeria de la Raza, and the De Young Museum. Her public art commissions include a series of murals in the main reading area of the Biblioteca Latinoamericana Branch Library in San Jose.

Marianne Lettieri

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

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).

Stephanie Metz

Visual Artist: Sculptor

Stephanie Metz lives and works in San Jose, California and was a featured artist in Bay Area Currents 2009 at ProArts Gallery, Oakland, CA. She has exhibited at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco and New York, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Her numerous group exhibitions include Black Sheep: The Darker Side of Felt at the National Centre for Craft and Design in the U.K., Creatures: From Bigfoot to the Yeti Crab at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho, Formex Stockholm 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden, and Transmission: Experience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Gallery, Singapore. Metz was honored with two Center for Cultural Innovation Grants in 2011 and 2009. Her artwork has been reviewed and featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fiberarts Magazine, Craft Magazine, Artweek Magazine, and PBS. She received her BFA in Sculpture at the University of Oregon. Metz’s focus is overly domesticated creatures, especially those whose form has overgrown their function.

Fanny Retsek

Visual Artist: Mixed Media

Fanny Retsek combines printmaking with drawing, collage and stitching. Some of her pieces use the multiple of print to create larger-scale installations. Her work focuses on animal rights, species decline, and the cohabitation of humans and wild animals. She exhibits internationally and her prints are included in the collections of Fine Art Museums, San Francisco, Oakland Museum of Art, and the Corcoran in Washington DC. Her work has received honors, including an award from the curator of prints and drawings at the Chicago Art Institute. She received her MFA from San Jose State University. In addition to her own studio art practice, Fanny has worked as a professional master printer collaborating with artists on print projects. She is the Adult Studios Program Director at the Palo Alto Art Center.

Brian Taylor

Visual Artist: Mixed Media, Photographer

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

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

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

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