Location: Kingston NY

Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years, and has presented her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and often created in response to specific sites, engaging with the immediate landscape and materiality of the location, its history, use or politics. Arsem was the 2015 recipient of the Maud Morgan Prize at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she presented 100 Ways to Consider Time, 100 different 6-hour performances on the nature of time, over 100 consecutive days from November 9, 2015 to February 19 2016. She is the founder and a member of Mobius Artists Group of Boston. A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was recently published by Intellect Books of the UK.

http://marilynarsem.net

Ann Lewis is a multidisciplinary activist artist using painting, installation, social practice, and participatory performance in our public spaces to explore themes related to American identity, power structures, and justice. Her work interrogates power imbalances such as mass incarceration, police brutality, and the desecration of women’s and trans rights. Ann’s data-driven art uses concept-specific materials to offer fact-based experiences for her participants. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, her career began in the street art world of New York City and has evolved into large-scale public works. Her mural See Her received an Americans for the Arts 2018 Public Art Network (PAN) Award. Ann’s art has been acquired by the New York Historical Society Museum and the US Library of Congress. It has been discussed in Hyperallergic, Artnet, The LA Times, and The Guardian. She has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the US and abroad, including shows at Petzel Gallery in New York, Seyhoun Gallery in Tehran, Iran, and the Obama White House. Her most recent work, To Be Human, commissioned by Duolingo, spans 17,000 sq ft and instigated a dialogue producing a sizable public art grant supporting artists in Pittsburgh, PA.

https://annlew.is

Brian Kaspr is an artist and graphic designer NYC area. Growing up in Milwaukee solidified his appreciation for traditional American craft and the desire to work with his hands. Attending the Maryland Institute College of Art and working as a design professional focused his early influences into a specific aesthetic style that is artfully cognizant, rooted in traditional quality, and full of character. Kaspr’s artistic practice has evolved into energetic and colorful abstract paintings that utilize lettering as a means of mark making and structure. Kaspr creates original lettering, logotypes, patterns, and one-of-a-kind customized objects for his design clients. He strives to honor classic commercial design and elevate it while maintaining an accessible sense of style and craft.

Kaspr’s work is set apart by its ability to adapt seamlessly from conceptually strong two dimensional graphic design into singular installations, activations, and environmental experiences. This integration of skills creates the most original and authentic content for an audience.

Kaspr has worked with a variety of clients, including: Maybelline, Kate Spade, Universal Music, Ban.do, Aldo, Nordstrom, Victoria’s Secret, Ray Ban, North Face, Away, American Express, Urban Outfitters, Pop Sugar, The Infatuation, Nike, MoMA, Refinery 29, Baggu, Bon Appetit, Facebook, Madewell, L’Oreal, Goop, Rebecca Minkoff, Yahoo!, Delpozo, Afar Magazine, Fleur du Mal, & I Love Dust.

Along with his personal work, Kaspr co-founded the critically acclaimed wallpaper and fabric design studio Flat Vernacular.

bkaspr.com

Marielena Ferrer is a socially engaged visual artist and art educator. She serves on the Kingston Arts Commission and Diversity Equity and Inclusion Task Force. Ferrer studied architecture at Central University of Venezuela and later earned a certificate of distinction in “Leadership and Empowerment” from Spain’s Polytechnic University of Valencia and a diploma in “Gender Leadership” through the EQUAL Transnational Cooperation Community Initiative of the European Social Fund. In addition, she earned a University Expert Diploma in “Mental Health, Cultural Processes and Psychological Interventions With Immigrants, Minorities and the Socially Excluded” from the University of Barcelona. Ferrer is currently completing a BFA in sculpture from SUNY New Paltz makes art to “assist people in becoming aware of themselves and their environment as fully as possible.”

marielenaferrer.myportfolio.com

David Najib Kasir is an Artist/Painter/Muralist/Curator who lives and works in Milwaukee WI. His work comprises of personal narratives in life and cultural history or events. In recent years, Kasir’s work draws from stories from his parents’ journey to the U.S. and the current crisis from where they migrated from (Syria-Mother/Iraq- Father). As an American born artists, Kasir reveals his cultural identity in paint and designs to inform the viewers on the recent wars in Syria, in hopes viewers can grow an understanding of the millions of voiceless Arabs now living in chaos and disarray. By using beautiful traditional Arab designs called Zellige to dress the figures in his work, Kasir shows the beauty of a culture and the tragedy as families try to hold on to it and hold on to each other as everything around them falls apart. Kasir has a BFA in painting from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design from 2001 and the proud father of two teenage daughters (one being an artist herself).

davidnajibkasir.com

Stephanie Loveless is a sound and media artist whose research centers on listening and vocal embodiment. Her recent projects include a mobile web-app for geo-located listening, and sound works that channel the voices of plants, animals, and musical divas.

Loveless’ sound, video and performance work has been presented widely in festivals, galleries, museums and artist-run centers in North America, South America, Europe and the Middle East. She currently lives and works in upstate New York where she is a Lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Department of Arts, and Director of the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer.

stephanieloveless.ca

Kat Howard was born in Rochester, New York in 1984. She earned a BA in Creative Writing and Art History from Brandeis University in 2006, and worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art as their first Manager of Interactive Media until 2010, when she left the museum world to pursue two MFAs contingently in Studio Art: Book & Paper Art and Creative Writing: Poetry, which she received from Mills College in 2013. Since graduating, she has been working as an independent artist. Howard’s practice focuses on fiber art. She has been featured in DesignSponge, Houzz, Architectural Digest, and Chronogram. Her work is available through the artist directly, and through Lawton Mull in New York. Howard lives and works in Kingston, New York.

https://www.kat-howard.com/

Elisabeth Motley is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, scholar, and teacher whose work is concerned with neurodivergence, crip theory, and disability as choreographic sites. Motley is a 2019-2021 Movement Research Artist in Residence, a 2020 Dance/NYC Disability. Dance. Artistry. Dance and Social Justice Fellow and was a recipient of the 2018-2019 Fulbright US-UK Scholar Award. Motley teaches choreography at Marymount Manhattan College and is studying toward a Dance Practice-as-Research Ph.D. at University of Roehampton in the UK. Motley has shared her work at Center for Performance Research, Danspace Project’s DraftWork, Gibney Dance, HERE, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Movement Research at Judson, Festival Oltre Passo – Italy, Springboard Danse Montreal, and The Whitney Museum among others.

https://www.elisabethmotley.com/