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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)

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.

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.

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.

Joe Miller

Visual Artist: 3D

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.

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.

Deborah Mills Thackrey

Visual Artist: Photographer, Videographer

Photographer Deborah Mills Thackrey was born in the Texas Panhandle town of Amarillo in 1953. Numerous childhood trips along old Route 66 thru the Southwest instilled in her a wanderlust and love of the passing scenery including dramatic sunsets, old motel signs, roadside attractions like snake shows, desert landscapes, the Navajo Indian reservation, Burma Shave signs, and National Parks like the Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, and the Grand Canyon. Iconic images from the Vietnam War and 60’s cultural protests inspired in her a love of the ability of the photojournalist to capture a meaningful moment in time. She joined her junior high yearbook staff in order to get her hands on her first camera. As the only photographer in high school journalism class she was left alone in the darkroom to develop her skills. This put her on the path of being self-taught and independent most of her career. Thackrey migrated to California at the age of 20, unable to get into regular art classes at San Francisco State she began to study theatrical design. The influence of her makeup and costume design is visible in her projected nudes series. In the next phase of her life she began a career as a graphic designer which gave her an opportunity to work art directing top commercial photographers at major corporations such as Apple. She also spent 30 years studying modern dance with a student of seminal modern dance pioneer Lester Horton. Recent projects include a third collaboration with dancer Ishika Seth at the Theatre Yugen in San Francisco projecting her textural photographs and videos onto dancers who improvised to the content of the images. When her husband Tom returned to photography about a decade ago, she picked up a camera again as well, after more than a 20 year absence. They spent time in the esteemed photographic community of Carmel beginning friendships with photographers such as Edward Weston’s grandson Kim. Within a couple of years of serious immersion in photography, Thackrey was offered her first solo exhibit in Monterey at the Stefani Esta gallery in 2002. She began to regularly win prizes in juried shows in Los Gatos and Santa Clara with curators such as Philip Linhares from the Oakland Museum and the Triton’s George Rivera. Solo exhibits in Los Angeles and Palo Alto followed, as well as being included in more than 50 group shows ranging from the Texas Photographic Society, to galleries in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Monterey. Thackrey has recently become an activist for artists in the South Bay as one of the founders of the Silicon Valley Artists’ Collaborative with the goal of helping to create more recognition and opportunities for local artists. She has been trying her hand as a curator and gallerist founding the Axis Art Gallery in downtown San Jose’s Axis high rise. Thackrey won the coveted 2009 Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship Grant for Photography which included a show in the rotunda of Santa Clara’s Triton Museum. Her work is in private collections from New York to LA and Marin County and in corporate collections such as Adobe.

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.

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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