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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.

Yvonne Escalante

Visual Artist: Jeweler, Sculptor, Visual Artist

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, 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.

Truong Tran

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

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.

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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