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Visual Artist: Painter, Print Maker

Evident in her meticulous, cross-referential body of work Acebo Davis reflects the symmetry of the artist’s duty as a professional recorder of experience and memory and the basic human desire to do so. Looking at Acebo Davis’s ouevre now, one realizes that her work was not only timely, but also is timeless. -Reena Jana / Art Writer (New York City, NY)

Andrea Bechert

Performing Artist: Set Designer

Andrea Bechert has designed over 350 productions and numerous world premieres at theatres across the country. Companies she has designed for include TheatreWorks, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, The Cleveland Playhouse, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Musical Theatre of San Jose, Opera San Jose, Center Repertory Theatre, the Magic Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, Peninsula Youth Theatre, San Jose Children’s Musical Theatre Company, the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas, and many others. Her designs have been included in the 2005 World Design Expo and her designs for Mad Forest were selected for the 1996 Prague Quadrennial exhibit. Her numerous awards include Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards (most recently for Fun Home), and more than 20 other regional design awards. Andrea currently teaches design for Theatre & Film at San Jose State University, and has taught at and been a guest at several other universities. Andrea is a proud and active member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829.

Ryan Carrington

Visual Artist: Sculptor, Textile

Ryan Carrington works as a lecturer at San Jose State University teaching sculpture, foundry work, and mold making. Having received his MFA in spatial art from SJSU he went on to earned his BFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in ceramics and woodworking. Carrington also spent 18 months as an artist-in-residence at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado, an experience that the artist credits with as having as much impact on my work as any formal education. His work deals with a wide range of issues that connect labor, class, work ethic and economics with his personal history and family. Using cast objects, construction materials, and tools that combine craftsmanship with symbolic irony, he touches on themes of labor through gallery installations, performances, and site-specific work. Artist Statement: My work addresses the shift in public perspective towards the culturally defined roles of blue and white-collar workers in the United States. It bridges issues of labor, class, work ethic and economics with my personal and family history. Within my studio practice I delve deep into processes that parallel the monotony and tedium that laborers endure. By using construction materials directly off the shelf from Home Depot, pieces of uniforms that represent America’s workforce, and performing acts of labor while dressed as a CEO, I invite a discussion about the ever-changing class struggle in the United States. My intent is to provide a conduit for empathy between our stratified society by inspiring dialogue across communities of people that represent the corners of our culture, history and socio-economic status.

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.

Truong Tran

Educator; Literary Arts: Poet; Visual Artist: Mixed Media

Truong Tran (born 1969) is a Vietnamese-American poet, visual artist, and teacher. His collection dust and conscience (2002) won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Prize, and in 2003, he served as Writer in Residence for Intersection for the Arts. Tran currently lives in San Francisco, where he teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University, and is Writer in Residence at the San Francisco School of the Arts. Artist Statement: Day In The Life … On days when I am not working as a poet and teacher, I try to wake up early. I empty my oversized messenger bag of books and papers and the previous day’s half-eaten lunch. I place the strap over my left shoulder, with the bag firmly secured to my back. I begin to walk. I walk for as long as it takes to fill the bag with stuff: branches, findings from the local thrift stores, choice items left in boxes on sidewalks and, if I’m lucky, something I’ve never seen before. Once the bag is filled, I return home, empty the contents from the bag, creating mounds of what some might consider piles of junk. I see them as source materials and the beginnings to my art making process. I am committed to using these recycled materials as an environmentally conscious artist but also as an artist who strives to make art accessible through both its practice and use of materials. Quite frankly, I get a kick out of forcing these disparate objects to come together, compromising and accommodating one another in their process of becoming something new, something beautiful. I refer to what I do as art making because I do not paint, draw or sculpt in a traditional or learned consideration of artistic craft. My craft is founded in the doing. I glue things together. I make things fit. I dip things in wax. I cut. I build. I weave. I think. I fill things up with paint using ketchup bottles. I stare at things in hopes that these things will talk back to me. This is what I do. It makes me happy. It allows me to lose myself in the process of doing. It makes me sad. It allows me to find myself in the process of seeing. I insist on it being called art at the end of the day.

Consuelo J. Underwood

Visual Artist: Textile

Consuelo Jiménez Underwood is most well known for her textiles and installation work. Her work represents her own history as a migrant agricultural worker, signifying her hybrid culture as well as the arbitrary lines that divide her homes. Artistic expression is deeply tied to traditional Huichol weaving, a heritage she incorporates into her large mixed media textiles. Borders and barriers are the vocabulary she uses to describe and celebrate the lives of migrant workers and indigenous people who are marginalized and downtrodden. Underwood taught at San Jose State University. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Diego State University and M.F.A. from San Jose State University. Her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of Art.

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

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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