Category: Art

W.A.M.E.R. features Tasha Depp, Erika deVries, Paula Lalala, Eva Melas, Portia Munson, Amy Bay Sono Kuwayama,  Robyn Love, Anne-Marie McIntyre, Fran Willing

Edition 13 is a limited edition art trade and fundraising project. Edition 13, 2023, The Inaugural Edition, is being created by members of W.A.M.E.R.: “Women Artists Meeting, Eating, and Reading” a loose affiliation of female identifying artists exploring art and life. Gathering together regularly since 1996, members include Amy Bay, Tasha Depp, Erika deVries, Sono Kuwayama, Paula Lalala, Robyn Love, Anne-Marie McIntyre, Eva Melas, Portia Munson, Fran Willing. Edition 13 was founded in 2022 by Paula Lalala with the intention of raising funds for worthy causes and facilitating art collecting among peers. Edition 13 celebrates the value and healing power of art, and fosters and strengthens our sense community and interconnectedness.

BIOGRAPHY

Originally from Milwaukee, Darling split her educational years between the Midwest and East Coast. She received her MFA from State University of New York at Purchase College before returning to Milwaukee. Darling has been teaching Foundations and Fine Arts courses at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design since 2006. She is a co-founder of PushPullPress Cooperative and The Healthcare Show (an on-going project including exhibitions, zines, and a blog). Darling also co-founded DIAA Milwaukee (Discussing Intersections: Artists & Addiction), and served several years on the board of A Broader Vocabulary Cooperative (Feminist Bookstore and Community Center). Her work has been exhibited in NYC, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Chicago, Racine, Sheboygan and Milwaukee. Darling is currently working on a memoir entitled Hurry Up, Relax (or how to start your life over).

ARTIST STATEMENT
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The human body has always been central to my work. Specifically, the unrelenting, daily regime of Juvenile (Type 1) Diabetes, which has greatly influenced what and how I create. Numerous pieces have been constructed from diabetic paraphernalia accumulated over the years – in which personal daily rituals are used to illustrate the repetitious narratives that hold everyone’s daily life together. Since 2008, when I launched The Healthcare Show (with a fellow artist/diabetic), leading up to that year’s presidential election, the personal/political divide evaporated for me. The notion of the artist working alone in the studio became problematic. Although my personal esthetic would persist – via printmaking, photography, drawing, sewing, assemblage, artists’ books – being introduced to video projections and interactive performance work allowed me participation in several long-term collaborative projects such as The Healthcare Show, The Yell Room & Hushed Hysteria and #emptypedestals.

https://www.zoedarling.info/

https://www.youtube.com/@zoedarlingmke

https://www.narrativeofprivilege.com/

Grace Lang is a multimedia artist and educator based in the Hudson Valley, where she creates both two- and three-dimensional work to tell stories of triumph and connection. She is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the art education non-profit, Super-Stories, which partners with communities through maker workshops and collaborative public art. Grace holds undergraduate degrees in Illustration and Literary Studies, as well as a Masters in Educational Psychology. She has participated in artist residencies in China, Germany, and the United States. She believes that developing one’s personal visual language helps us better understand our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This attitude informs her goals as an art educator, as she deeply trusts the transformative power a creative outlet can serve to help us express and communicate complicated experiences. Rather than teaching kids to master specific techniques, Grace’s goal is to teach kids how to approach the world creatively, finding joy in the process of making something that did not exist before.

Super-Stories Bio:
Super-Stories is a registered 501(c) 3 non profit that focuses on community storytelling through public art, educational workshops, and artist partnerships. Super-Stories was launched in 2022 by Grace Lang and Ramiro Davaro-Comas, artists and educators located in upstate New York. Our philosophy is: If you know something, teach it!

https://www.super-stories.org/

https://www.instagram.com/grooseling/

Singha Hon is a Chinese American illustrator and artist from NYC. Her work is about creating visual stories set in dream-like places somewhere between the city environment she grew up in and an imagined one bursting with mythical creatures and mega-flora. She is interested in exploring the human-animal relationship as a way to reconnect with and understand the complex beauty of tumultuous and instinctive emotions, a space where longing and loss exist alongside joy, desire, and hope.

As an illustrator and teaching artist, she has worked with organizations such as Womanly Magazine, The American Civil Liberties Union, Abrons Art Center, and The People’s Paper Co-Op to create art that empowers and activates the community around it. She is currently based at The W.O.W. Project as a teaching artist where she works with an intergenerational cohort of artists and activists in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

singhahon.com

Zack Fuller is a DIY dancer/choreographer who lives in Rockland County NY. In 2019 he co-headlined the Boston Butoh Festival with Yuko Kaseki, with his dance/music collaboration Twisted from Constantly Watching Doves. His practice of dance is developed from a lifetime of wide-ranging experiences as a performing artist including fronting the Washington DC post-punk psychedelic metal band Scythian, participating in workshops and theatrical research with Ryszard Cieslak of Grotowskiʼs Polish Laboratory theatre, and working with dance artists such as Eiko and Koma and Poppo Shiraishi. In 1997 he was cast in Min Tanaka and Susan Sontagʼs Poe Project: Stormy Membrane, and went on to perform and train with Tanaka throughout Japan, Europe and the U.S. His own dance works have been presented at Leimay’s Soak Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Asheville Fringe Festival, the Dance Hakushu Festival, and elsewhere. He currently works as a care giver for the elderly at The Rudolph Steiner Fellowship Community, an activity that constitutes his primary form of dance training. His dance has been described by the Boston Globe as “Cryptic… but characterized by astonishing theatricality,” and “Like an angel coming down Jacob’s ladder to play in the garbage” by the Japanese dance critic Hidenaga Otori.

Onaje Benjamin’s photography reflects a passion for social justice and activism. His images capture urban settings and the cultural and artistic tensions which evolve in these rapidly changing environments. His work ranges from images of street taggers and murals, to portraits of street people and the structural and architectural evolution which symbolizes gentrification and the uprooting of disenfranchised communities.

Shirley Parker-Benjamin is an interdisciplinary artist creating across the genres of sculptural mixed media, assemblage and installation. Her work has been exhibited regionally and internationally. In her work, she explores the intersection between ancestral, spiritual, metaphysical, African/African diasporic traditions and the feminine. Her materials include found objects, natural materials, metal, minerals and beadwork to convey her ideas. Shirley Parker-Benjamin is a high priestess emeritus in the Ministry of Maat. Her studio, Ezili Arts is located in the Cunneen Hackett Arts Center in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Shawnee Miller is a self-taught tattooer, artist, and biologist from Northern California. She is of mixed Native American and Italian heritage. Her work mixes traditional and modern folk art with elements of storytelling and personal narrative. She tattooed in Woodstock from Jauary 2021 until May 2022, and opened her own private tattoo studio in Rosendale in June 2022.

shawneemiller.com

Shannon Kenny was born and raised in Trinidad & Tobago and currently resides in Kingston, NY. She received her BA from the University of Tampa and her MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art. In 2013, she was awarded an artist residency in Giverny, France by the Terra Foundation for American Art. And from 2014 to 2016, she was an artist in residence at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, through Chasmama. She has exhibited in shows both nationally and internationally in the United States and Trinidad. Over her career, Shannon’s work has explored the intersection between figure and landscape, and in a sense, she tries to find a connection between humans and nature.

www.shannonkenny.art

S. Leigh Thompson is a facilitator, Theatre of the Oppressed Joker, community organizer, equity strategist and coach, and all around joyful trouble-maker who has worked at the intersections of art and activism for over 20 years. A trans, white and Native queer with disabilities, Leigh works with communities to develop creative tools to address issues of power, privilege and oppression and attend to oppression-based trauma. He also works as an equity and justice trainer and strategist and organizational development consultant.

Ramiro Davaro-Comas is an Argentine/American artist with a background in public art and artist residency management. His passions for painting, storytelling, and community work have pushed him to travel throughout his career, collaborating with artists around the world. He is also the creator and served as a director of Dripped on the Road, a traveling artist residency program from 2016 to 2022.

Ramiro is currently co-directing Super Stories, an organization he launched with artist Grace Lang that focuses on art centered story telling projects in community spaces. Their motto is – If you know something, teach it!

www.ramirostudios.com

www.super-stories.org