ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ezra Benus is an artist, educator, and curator whose work addresses a range of themes in his art such as constructions of time, care, pain, and illness/health. Their self is a site where social, political, and spiritual forces collide through reflections on bodily knowledge and social constructions around values of normativity. Ezra’s practice is cradled by embedded Jewishness, queerness, and sickness as purviews and navigational tools in this world. Their practice and projects have been hosted by The 8th Floor, Flux Factory, NYU Gallatin Galleries, Dedalus Foundation, Gibney Dance, The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery at the JCC Manhattan. Ezra has lectured and consulted at universities and art spaces such as Red Bull Arts in Detroit, Hunter College Art Galleries, Eyebeam, SUNY Purchase, CUE Art Foundation, York College, and Princeton University, and UT Austin. Benus was an Erich Fromm Fellow at Paideia Institute in Stockholm and the first Access and Adult Learning Fellow in the education department at the Brooklyn Museum. He is currently a 2020-2021 SHIFT Artist in Residence at EFA Project Space, and works at United States Artists as Program Manager of the Disability Futures Fellowship, along with dedication to educational and curatorial projects. Ezra and Noah Benus founded Brothers Sick, a sibling artistic collaboration on disability justice, illness, and relationships of care. The Shed recently commissioned their Up Close digital artwork Phases and the In-Betweens with collaborators Yo-Yo Lin and danilo machado. Ezra is sick, tired, and forever grateful to be building community with disabled and sick artists around the world.

Barrie Cline (with Workers Art Coalition: Rebecca A. Carlton, Barrie Cline, Ashley DaCosta, Paul Vance). Cline began her scholarship in the NYC subway graffiti movement and the role of class in the spatial politics of NYC led to teaching classes at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies on public art to union construction workers where she is now faculty. Over the years, she developed the course and several public art projects platforming the work, leading to the formation of the Workers Art Coalition (WAC). The Workers Art Coalition (WAC) is a collective of union construction workers and artists who are working collaboratively to increase blue collar presence, cross-class alliance, and cultural expression in the public sphere as well as exploring ways art might have a greater role in the labor movement. Along with exhibitions at the Queens Museum and other venues, WAC’s work has been produced for climate justice/worker justice initiatives with the People’s Climate March, the Fight for 15, The Precarious Workers Pageant in Venice, the International Federation of Global Workers Education Summit in Peru, and a workers oral history project for the Library of Congress among others.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College. His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.

Clarinda Mac Low, was brought up in the avant-garde arts scene that flourished in NYC during the 1960s and ‘70s and now works in performance and installation, creating participatory events that investigate social constructs and corporeal experience. She is co-founder and Executive Director of Culture Push, an organization that links artistic practice and civic engagement and co-founder and co-director of Works on Water, an organization that supports art that works on, in, and with waterways, in response to a changing climate. Recent work and ongoing projects include: “Sunk Shore,” participatory tours of the future rooted in climate change data, made in collaboration with Carolyn Hall, a dancer and historical marine ecologist; “Incredible Witness,” a series of game-based participatory events looking at the sensory origins of empathy; and “Free the Orphans,” a project that seeks to “free” copyright orphans, investigating the spiritual and intellectual implications of intellectual property in a digital age. Residencies include as a Back Apartment Resident in St. Petersburg through CEC (2019), as a MacDowell Fellow (2000, 2016), through the Society for Cultural Exchange in Pittsburgh (2007) and as a guest at Yaddo and Mount Tremper Arts (2012). She received a BAX Award in 2004, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, 2007 and a 2010 Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art grant. Mac Low holds a BA, double major in Dance and Molecular Biology, from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice from CCNY-CUNY, and currently teaches at NYU, CCNY-CUNY, and Hunter College.

Isaac Pool is an artist who works across sculpture, performance, poetry, and lens-based media. Their practice takes its cues from the suburban shopping mall, coded vernacular objects, and the glitzy affirmations promised by the pop diva remix. Pool's work engages feminism with a perverse sentimentality and antagonistic relationship to gender presentation. The work manifests dark humor, joy, glamour, and excess laced with an undercurrent of shame. Pool amplifies the power of fantasy and creates spaces where superficial pleasures can become makeshift sites for social survival. They have performed and exhibited internationally with solo shows in New York, Detroit, and Brussels. Their first full length book of poems in print, Light Stain, is available from What Pipeline, Detroit. Alien She, an ebook dedicated to Mark Aguhar, is available from Klaus eBooks. Isaac has worked on programs and education initiatives with Artadia, Dia Art Foundation, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is currently the Artist Program Manager at Creative Capital.

Jeannette Rodríguez Píneda is a visual storyteller and educator residing between la islas of Kiskeya y Lenape Matinecock land. Using antiquarian emulsion based processes as a means of remembering soils called home, their work explores the tension of faded past narratives within the present form. Capturing fragments of light that make connections between aqui y alla, they reflect on the closely related subjects of archive and memory They have an intergenerational teaching practice rooted in love ethic that spans across the 5 boroughs.

Stephen Sewell is a Brooklyn-based artist, filmmaker and educator. His research and projects broadly consider sites and processes of knowledge production and acquisition under the conditions of global capitalism. He has presented works at the Harlem International Film Festival, Target Margin Theater and Artists Space and has lectured and participated on panel discussions at the University of Hertfordshire, Queens Museum and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He received his MFA from the University of Washington and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and Art & Law Program. He was a 2020 Emerging Scholar Award recipient for the Fifth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies at the University of Toronto and is currently a resident in EFA Project Space’s 2020-2021 SHIFT Residency.

Río Sofia is a visual artist, organizer, and Programs & Operations Director at Queer|Art, a New York City based organization serving LGBTQ+ artists across generations and disciplines. She has presented her work at The New Museum, Princeton University, and Rutgers University, among others. She is co-founder of Body Hack, a happy hour and fundraising platform for trans and nonbinary people.

Margaret Rose Vendryes is an art historian, visual artist, and curator. She received her BA in fine arts from Amherst College, MA in art history from Tulane University, and Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University. She is Professor of Art History in Performing and Fine Arts and Director of the Fine Arts Gallery at York College, City University of New York. Vendryes is the author of Barthé, A Life in Sculpture, a comprehensive monograph on the late African- American figurative sculptor Richmond Barthé. Her studio practice is centered on the body, its impressions, costuming, and performances in popular media and private moments. Her African Diva Project paintings have had solo exhibitions and appeared in several group shows over the last decade.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION COLLABORATORS

sTo Len (collaborating with Clarinda Mac Low) is a genre fluid artist with interests in printmaking, installation, sound, video and performance.  The cross-disciplinary nature of Len's work has included collaborations with bodies of water, transforming public space into art studios, recycling waste into art materials, and hosting performances at Superfund sites. Len is based in Queens, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions and politics. sTo Len was the first artist in residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Alexandria, VA and is a member of Works on Water, a group of artists and activists working with water in the face of climate change and environmental justice concerns.   

Workers Art Coalition (collaborating with Barrie Cline). Rebecca A. Carlton has worked for Disney as a union scenic artist for the past decade, as well as numerous freelance projects worldwide. Ashly DaCosta seeks making her interests in art, nature, and meaningful organizing actual commitments. Her days are spent as a union sheet metal apprentice with welder aspirations. Paul Vance is a union electrician and artist and longtime member of WAC. He has recently begun a ceramic practice.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Born in Medellín, Colombia, danilo machado is a poet, curator, and critic living on occupied land interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power.

Curatorial Assistant at Socrates Sculpture Park and Producer of Public Programs at the Brooklyn Museum, danilo is the curator of the exhibitions Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text (Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT) and support structures (8th Floor gallery/Virtual), featuring the 2019-20 cohort of Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency. A current Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow at the Poetry Project, their writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, Poem-A-Day, ArtCritical, Art Papers, GenderFail, Long River Review, TAYO Literary Magazine, among others.

An honors graduate of the University of Connecticut, danilo is the co-founder and co-curator of the reading series Maracuyá Peach and the chapbook/broadside fundraiser Already Felt: poems in revolt & bounty. danilo has contributed writing to exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation (Even there, there are stars), Abrons Art Center/Boston Center for the Arts (A Language for Intimacy), Reel Art Ways (Kevin Quiles Bonilla: As the palm is bent, the boy is inclined) and No Longer Empty. As DJ Queer Shoulders, danilo has DJd as a part of programs and fundraisers with The Shed, CultureHub, Connecticut UndocuFund, and Connecticut Students for a Dream.

They are working to show up with care for their communities.