Artists | Silicon Valley Artist Laureates

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Terry Acebo-Davis

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.

Shannon Amidon

Visual Artist: Photographer, Videographer

Shannon Amidon was born and raised in San Jose, CA. She is a mixed media artist using alternative process photography, encaustic and paper ephemera as her main mediums. Her subjects often involve objects the artist has found in nature or collected in her travels such as: seed pods, insects, botanicals, fossils, feathers, bones, and vintage paper ephemera. Using these items and mediums, Amidon creates unique pieces that explore the beautiful, repulsive, and mysterious sides of natural history. Shannon’s artwork has been exhibited worldwide with emphasis on the US West Coast. In 2011 she was named the Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Laureate, receiving a Fellowship Grant in photography. She was also the recipient of an Eco Art Grant and studio make-over from the Art Inspector part of the Zero One Art and Technology Network. In 2013 Amidon was one of eight artists chosen to create a large, 400lb, 5ft x 6ft public art heart for San Francisco General Hospital Foundation. Amidon has been an artist in residence at the HerhÃºsid House Artist Residency in Iceland as well as the David and Julia White Artist Colony in Costa Rica. She is active in her local arts community contributing her time, knowledge and art whenever possible. She is also involved in arts education outreach for children and young artist mentoring through the SPARK program.

Kathy Aoki

Visual Artist: Painter, Print Maker

Kathy grew up on the east coast in the small town of Natick, a Boston suburb. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, followed by two years at Washington University in St. Louis for an MFA in Printmaking. Currently Kathy lives and works in the Silicon Valley where she is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Santa Clara University. Past awards include fellowships from Kala Art Institute (1995), the MacDowell Colony (2001), Headlands Center for the Arts (2003), and Djerassi (2006). Her work can be found in major collections across the U.S. such as the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA , the Harvard University Art Museums, and the New York Public Library. Past projects included a 2004 grant from the San Francisco Public Arts Commission for the Art on Market Street Kiosk Poster Project. Her series of linocut prints were transformed into 4 x 6 ft posters entitled “Champions of Market St.” showing Market St. pedestrians dressed in super-hero garb performing random acts of kindness. In January 2012, Aoki completed an interactive “Political Paper Dolls”art installation commissioned by the San Jose Museum of Art for the exhibition “Renegade Humor.”

Diana Pumpelly Bates

Visual Artist: Sculptor

Diana Pumpelly Bates is a sculptor and public artist working in bronze, iron, and steel. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; The Triton Museum, Santa Clara, CA; the Oliver Art Center at California College of Arts and Crafts; the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee; and John Jay College, New York. She has completed several public art commissions for transportation agencies in the region, and a number of Public Art Programs in Northern California. She also exhibits in galleries and has served on numerous consultant teams, advisory committees, and review panels.

Terry Berlier

Visual Artist: Sculptor

“Terry Berlier makes conceptual art of unusual intelligence, humor and sensitivity to the impact of materials.”—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture and expanded media.Her work is often kinetic, interactive and/or sound based and focuses on everyday objects, the environment, ideas of nonplace/place and queer practice. Berlier has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally including the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Catherine Clark Gallery, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery at Stanford University, Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga CA, Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, Babel Gallery in Norway, Richard L. Nelson Gallery in Davis CA, Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, Kala Art Institute Gallery in Berkeley, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Natural Balance in Girona Spain and FemArt Mostra D’Art De Dones in Barcelona Spain. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, SECA nominee, Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, the Zellerbach Foundation Berkeley, Artist in Residence, Montalvo Arts Center, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellow at Stanford University, Recology San Francisco, Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest Hungary, Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco, California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund and the Millay Colony for Artists. Her work has been reviewed in the BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and in the book ‘Seeing Gertrude Stein’ published by University of California Press. Her work is in several collections including the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland Ohio, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin Germany. She received a Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art from University of California, Davis and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Terry Berlier is an Associate Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

Renee Billingslea

Visual Artist: Mixed Media, Photographer

Renee Billingslea is a visual artist whose art practice is a “call for action.” Her artwork addresses profound issues of race, racial violence, trauma, and white privilege. Billingslea’s process most often begins with historical photographs or hidden stories that direct her toward research, which she uses to inform the construction of objects and non-traditional photographs. Billingslea earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Oregon State University and a Masters of Fine Art from San Jose State University. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University, where she teaches photography.

Jaap Bongers

Visual Artist: Sculptor

Jaap Bongers is a practicing artist who has had many solo exhibitions in the United States, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark. He has authored a number of publications and has received many public commissions for his art. Born in Holland, he was educated both there and in Italy. He attended the Stads Academy of Fine Arts in Holland. This five-year, full-time (8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) program provided rigorous training in a broad spectrum of arts. Following this training, Bongers studied for a year at the Acadamia di belle Arti di Brera in Italy. Immediately thereafter he was accepted as a student at the Jan van Eyck Academy of Fine Arts in Holland. This prestigious two year program accepts only eight students out of 400 applicants per year. Following that experience, Bongers was given a grant by the Dutch government to study traditional tribal art and customs, as well as architecture, in Zaire. Three years later he returned to Zaire to study and live with a Pygmy tribe.

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.

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.

Andres Cediel

Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer

Andrés Cediel is known for his work on Rape in the Fields (2013), which investigates the hidden reality of rape on the job for immigrant women, for Frontline, and the Spanish-language version, “Violacion de un Sueno,” for Univision. Andrés Cediel was the Co-Producer on the Emmy-nominated film, “The Judge and the General,” which chronicled human rights cases against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. This film received a duPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast journalism. Cediel was also the Co-Producer on “Post Mortem”, a collaborative reporting project between Frontline, NPR and ProPublica, looking at death investigation in America. Cediel has produced pieces on refugees of violence in Colombia, environmental justice in Ecuador, and Native American burial desecration in California. He worked as a Master Video Teacher in KQED’s Education Network, and was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship by Arts Council Silicon Valley for 2007. Cediel graduated from Brown University and received a Masters degree in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley.

Jonathan L. Clark

Visual Artist: Photographer

Jonathan L. Clark is a multi-faceted artist whose work encompasses photography and the creation of books using letterpress, gravure, and digital printing. Clark is the 2012 recipient of the Oscar Lewis Award for outstanding contributions to the Book Arts from the Book Club of California. He has received two USIA travel grants to Poland and Spain; a fellowship from the Arts Council Silicon Valley; the JGS Foundation Book Award; the Western Books Award of Merit; and Photo-eye’s Best Photography Book Design of the Year Award. His work is included in many permanent collections in the USA, Japan, and Europe. Solo shows of Clark’s photographs have been held in Japan, Spain, and Eastern Europe, as well as the United States. A show organized by the US Information Service traveled to museums throughout Poland. His books and prints have been included in scores of exhibitions at venues including: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco; Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago; Stanford University Library; De Saisset Museum; Center for Photographic Art, Carmel; Photo Gallery International, Tokyo; Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco; San Francisco Center for the Book; George Krevsky Gallery, San Francisco; Gallery 291, San Francisco; and many others. He has lectured or held residencies at: The Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco; Stanford University; The Book Club of California; University of Barcelona, Spain; Institute for North American Studies, Barcelona; Center for Photographic Art, Carmel; University of West Florida, Pensacola; University of South Florida, Tampa; University of Rochester; and the US Consulate and Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, among others. His publications include: Carmine (Artichoke Editions, 2011); Ottawa, Illinois 1967 (Nazraeli Press, 2008); Prospects of Florence (a photogravure album with text); Cut-Paper (with Frederick Sommer; 2006); as well as articles and photographs in various books and journals. He is co-editor of The Hedgehog, an international arts review published in San Francisco. Clark was born in Ottawa, Illinois in 1952, and has spent most of his life in California. He began taking photographs at the age of 14. He studied with George A. Tice at the Aspen School of Contemporary Art, and enjoyed long creative friendships with Wynn Bullock and Frederick Sommer. He received a BA in Photography from UC Santa Cruz and a MA in Humanities from CSU Dominguez Hills.

Marty Coleman

Visual Artist: Photographer

Marty Coleman (me) is the creator of the Napkin Dad drawings. I am a full-time artist and photographer living in Glenpool, Oklahoma (known the world over as the town that made Tulsa famous) with my wife, Linda. Also in cohabitation are wiggle dog, stubby dog, and normal cat. I am the owner and artist behind ‘MAKE Studio’ with a focus on Photography and Design. I maintain an active career as an exhibiting artist with an exhibition of my photo-collage work slated for January 2012 at Living Arts Gallery in Tulsa. I got my start as an artist when my Grandfather, Buck Powell, who was an amateur artist, began teaching me how to draw around the age of 5. From then until now it’s what I do. My mother and father encouraged me and I had gathered 2 degrees in art as I reached young adulthood. After spending 9 years teaching art at the college level I went in the new direction of computer art, eventually spending 14 years in interactive and internet design before moving into my present work as an artist out on my own. During that time I was married and the proud father of 3 daughters (for whom I drew the original napkin drawings). After a divorce I remarried and had the good fortune of gaining a fourth daughter. My four daughters are all up and grown now, living all around the country and making me proud in every way.

Tricia Creason-Valencia

Visual Artist: Photographer, Videographer

Tricia is currently producing a one-hour documentary titled Stable Life, which tells the story of a family of undocumented immigrants who live and work on the backside of a racetrack. She also directed the award-winning short films, Eighty Layers of Me (that you’ll have to survive), a documentary about former cheerleaders turned activists and We Got Next, a narrative about young women basketball players. Both films won numerous awards and screened at festivals throughout the United States. Tricia is the founder of FLACAFILMS, where she works as a director/producer and digital video editor. She has taught film/video production and documentary filmmaking in the Social Documentation department at U.C. Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Drexel University and in collaboration with several youth-related non-profit organizations. Tricia is a PBS/CPB Producer’s Academy Fellow (2008) and a Latino Producers Academy Fellow (2008). She serves on the Board of CreaTV San Jose, a community access television station and traning center. Tricia received her BA from U.C. Berkeley (Psychology and Chicano Studies) and graduated from San Francisco State University with an MFA in Film Production. She lives in San Jose, California, with her husband and two children.

Binh Danh

Visual Artist

Binh Danh received his MFA from Stanford University in 2004 and has emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war, both in Viet Nam and Cambodia—work that, in his own words, deals with “mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality.” His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on the Daguerreotype process. Binh Danh has been included in important exhibitions at museums across the country, as well as the collections of the Corcoran Art Gallery, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the deYoung Museum, and the George Eastman House, among many others. He received the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco, CA and Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ.

Mel Day

Visual Artist

Mel Day’s interdisciplinary work combines new technologies and the virtual with traditional media and experiences. Day has exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, at venues that include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Film Festival, The Berlin Office in Germany, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, ZERO1 Biennale, and Peak Gallery in Toronto. Residencies include Stanford University’s Experimental Media Arts Lab, Headlands Center for the Arts (Alumni New Works Award and UC Berkeley MFA Fellowship), Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Schwandorf, Germany), and The Lab (San Francisco).Honors include San Francisco Foundation’s Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts and the Eisner Prize in the Creative Arts from UC Berkeley. Day currently has a position as Visiting Lecturer at San José State University, and has taught at UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and University of Toronto Mississauga/Sheridan College. She holds an MFA from UC Berkeley and a BFA from Queen’s University, Canada with a year’s scholarship exchange to the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.

Kelly Detweiler

Visual Artist: Ceramist, Painter

Kelly’s work is varied in content and in media. Having started as a ceramist, the mentality creating multiple objects still resonates in his work. The connection to his ceramic past is echoed in subject matter such as vases and vessels throughout the work. The floral and landscape imagery often refer back to his childhood in Colorado and to his extensive travels as an adult. Aside from the obvious influences of his teachers, the work of many European painters informs his work. Picasso and the cubists, Balthus, Bosch, Bocklin, Beckmann and many more can be seen in various pieces. The overriding sense of the work is a fun loving and optimistic approach to making art and experiencing the world around us..

Kathryn Dunlevie

Visual Artist: Photographer

Two-time recipient of Arts Council Silicon Valley’s Fellowship in Photography, Dunlevie is a graduate of Rice University’s Fine Arts Department and studied film at the University of Paris, photography at Madrid’s Taller de Artes Creativas, and painting at California College of the Arts. Dunlevie’s work has recently been featured in Saatchi Art’s BEST OF 2014 and in the US Art in Embassies program in Moscow. She has exhibited her work at Belgravia Gallery and Vertigo in London, Studio Thomas Kellner in Germany, Gallery TPW in Toronto, as well as at Washington DC’s Art Museum of the Americas, the Southeast Museum of Photography, and Claudette Lussier Fine Arts in Los Angeles. She has had solo shows in conjunction with FotoFest since 2002 at Hooks-Epstein Galleries in Houston. Dunlevie’s work has also been included in exhibitions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area at San Francisco Camerawork, the Exploratorium, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Stanford University, the San Francisco MoMA’s Artists Gallery, the San Jose International Airport, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, the De Saisset Museum, the Triton Museum of Art, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art, and Frederick Spratt Gallery. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Camerawork – a Journal of Photographic Art, ArtLies, the San Jose Mercury News, and Artweek, as well as internationally in Spain’s La Fotografia Actual, South Korea’s Photo+, England’s Saatchi Online Spotlight, Art of England Magazine, Germany’s Profifoto, and on Myartspace.com. Additionally, Dunlevie’s work has been the subject of four books: Detectives of Fiction and Women of Mystery, Waverley Press, 2014; Cover Versions, with essays by Gerald Brett and Thomas Leddy, Waverley Press, 2012; Kathryn Dunlevie: Syncopated Spaces, with essays by Cathy Kimball and Geri Hooks, Waverley Press, 2012; and Kathryn Dunlevie: Another Look, with essays by Glen Helfand, Frederick Spratt, and Don Snyder; Waverley Press, 2012.

Chris Eckert

Visual Artist: Sculptor

Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, I worked for a number of years in Silicon Valley designing and building factory automation. While I enjoyed many aspects of this career, I rapidly became frustrated with its necessary emphasis on production. Equipment design has one goal: make widgets as fast as you can. I wanted to explore the artistic potential of factory automation itself. For me, the machinery was more interesting. What the machinery created was inconsequential. Art and engineering have much in common; both center on creation. But the motivation for creation separates these disciplines. Engineers focus on what they are making while artists concentrate on why they are making. For me why has always been some internal struggle, some idea or problem that makes me confused and slightly uncomfortable. I explore this in my art and the resulting sculpture remains as a record. Occasionally I find resolution, but often I emerged even more conflicted. The simplest question often demands a complex, nuanced answer and the resulting object remains open to interpretation and waits for someone to place it in their own context. It becomes a visual parable.

Ruth Eckland

Visual Artist: Videographer

This is a world of visual over-stimulation. Much of it we become inured to and barely perceive. Eckland crafts videos to represent the unconscious synthesis that takes place in each of us as we absorb that endless stream of ambient information, direct and peripheral; her videos equip us to cope with, transform and utilize the bits of information that we are constantly absorbing. By layering, abstracting, and moving freely along the continuum of time, images in her videos dissolve, elide, conflict, develop. Perceptions are brought into focus. In Eckland’s work, the lens becomes a microscope, under which a single subject may be captured to honor the ebb and flow of movement and the subtle inherent changes; or a complex palette of seemingly unrelated images may be edited together in conceptual harmony. No matter what form the videos take, she defuses preconceptions that tired familiarity with the many genres of moving media can engender by bringing the sensibility of painting, altered photography or experimental film to the works. Eckland’s videos are non-narrative pieces in the sense of any linear storytelling. Rather, they have the form and structure of poetry or a music composition. They are metaphoric, almost dreams, with repetition used like a refrain or a chorus. Interpretation, including associative narrative, becomes a collaboration with the viewer. To enhance this experience of collaboration, Eckland designs her video installations as immersive environments, and installs her work site-specifically. Because the allusive nature of these pieces requires the attention, experience and creative imagining of the viewer to make their own connections and devise their own stories, sound is always integral to and fully integrated with the video, much as in music videos or film scores. Eckland collaborates with several composers who create original music for the works, in a process that is an ongoing dialogue with the visuals as each piece is being created. Utilized in a variety of ways, the sound becomes one more carrier of information to the senses, adding layers of subtext to the visual images and creating a more evocative, immersive experience. Eckland has exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally and finds it particularly gratifying to discover the connection that viewers in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, Germany, Singapore, Turkey, The Czech Republic, United Kingdom, and China have made with the work. Some universal language seems to be communicated, some global core touched. Or as Kenneth Baker has said in one of his many insightful reviews of Eckland’s work over the past few years in The San Francisco Chronicle, “Eckland handles video like the medium of collective dreams that we share without knowing it. Apparently she wants us to know it.”

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.

Don Fritz

Visual Artist: Painter

My work has evolved from an early interest in Pop Art and icons of American pop culture expressed through popular imagery and cultural artifacts. I explore visual symbol for what it represents both literally and metaphorically. I am fascinated with the psychological disavowal that is required to live with and accept the pervasive cultural narratives of childhood, power, and gender. Simultaneous acceptance of contradicting information is rooted in these narratives. Childhood, as a concept, is a place charged with fantasies of freedom and innocents. It is addressed in my work by appropriating familiar imagery and reconstructing it on an image surface in a self-reflexive and highly material approach. Through techniques of layering and erasing of visual element conflicting ideas and develop a trace of my psychological process. In reworking the surface, each layer brings me further into the dialectics of the issues being addressed. Toys and children’s books become objects of ritual when in a culture like ours they are imbued with conscious and unconscious meaning. The various meanings are based in cultural constructs of gender and power. To illustrate the construction of childhood imagery, larger-than-life ceramic sculptures of iconic toys and books demonstrate a banality that comes from being oversized and heavy while also fragile; mimicking the duality in childhood mythology. I use humor to juxtapose the underlying presence and psychological consequence of the menacing cultural narratives intrinsic in children’s toys and books. Power is trivialized and becomes symbolica accessible in stylized toys such as guns, jet planes, and rocket cars where the violence is hidden under their glazed surfaces. Fantasies of power are closely linked to gender identities. Gender identities that are formed in childhood depend greatly on visual representation in media images and toys. The toys that seem to reflect the innocence and freedom of childhood are embedded with weighty social contracts dictating gender identities. I incorporate images of toys and children performing gender roles in combination with ghost images into my investigations of American pop culture and its fantasies to show the disparity between our idealized fantasies and our physical based realities.

Jezrael Gandara

Literary Arts; Performing Artist: Producer; Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer

Jezrael Gandara’s work straddles the line between documentary and art, encouraging his subjects to communicate their feelings. “There are parts of San Jose that remind me of El Paso, and it makes it feel like home. I hope my work can make an impact within the community by helping share its stories.”

Terri Garland

Visual Artist: Photographer

Terri Garland is an artist who specializes in photographing the social and cultural fabric of the American South. While not limiting herself to any particular genre,she finds that her most enduring projects have fit solidly into the documentary tradition. She received her BFA from the Art Institute in 1987 and her MFA in 1990. She teaches photography at San Jose City College. As a graduate student at the Art Institute, Garland began an examination of white Supremacist culture that has spanned over two decades, photographing individuals within the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, American Nazi Party and the Christian Identity Movement. Since 2005, she has divided her time between Louisiana and Mississippi. Her current project, Louisiana, Purchased, is a visual study of the ways in which we depend upon and demand, continuous supplies of fossil fuels and the resultant damage and ongoing destruction to coastal communities in Louisiana. Her photographs are included in the collections of The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, The Art Institute of Chicago, The di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Saint Elizabeth College in Morristown, New Jersey, the Bibliotech Nationale, Paris, France and Special Collections at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Among her awards are a WESTAF/NEA Fellowship, Silicon Valley Arts Council Grant and a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship.

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