Category: 2023 Artist

Elizabeth Herring (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is an artist working in photography and installation living and working in Ojai, California. Her practice often investigates the intersection between social networks and community building, leading her to develop a practice also rooted in curation and arts organizing. Herring’s 2020 solo show Ojai City Gift, began her para-fictional exploration of places of business as agents for cultural shifts, which led her to build an installation project titled Cappuccino Cafe: Outpost for her CalArts MFA thesis project. Cappuccino Cafe: Outpost was a temporary room full of artworks created to further unpack the relationships between image production, aesthetic subcultures, and human connection in the current era of peak social media usage. Additionally, Herring’s photographs have been published in The Editorial Magazine, Zweikommasieben, Sleek Magazine, Esquire, and Vice.

Elizabeth J. Wenger is a queer writer from Oklahoma. Wenger is currently an MFA student at Iowa State University’s program in Creative Writing and Environment. She is at work on a collection of essays, but still manages to pump out the occasional short story. Wenger is interested in exploring various ideas and definitions of ‘The Natural’ in politics, culture, technology, and the built environment. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Hopper, orange peel literary magazine, Utah Lake Anthology, Litbreak, and more.

Writing Sample: http://www.hoppermag.org/cutting-a-tree

Rebecca Vaughan was born and raised in Denver, CO. She has lived in the Netherlands and Canada. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and BFA cum laude in Sculpture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. To more fully pursue her art career, she departed working in non-profits and has instructed part-time for the Kansas City Art Institute, MWSU and RMCAD. Rebecca is a member of ArtNauts, an art collective which exhibits only in countries experiencing conflict and contention. She previously served as the Artistic Director of PlatteForum, a non-profit which hosts artists-in-residence from all over the world. While in residence, the artists are paired with under-resourced youth to create artworks which address topics of social justice and community. She recently served as the Program Director for the Art Students League of Denver and was the Chair of Fine Arts and Head of Sculpture at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. She held a residency as a Resource Artist at Redline Contemporary Art Center from 2011-2013. Previously she worked as the project manager for Ann Hamilton’s 2008 Circles of O performance, and assisted in other projects in Dialog: City, a city- wide arts event for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Dana Fritz uses photography to investigate the ways we shape and represent the natural world in cultivated and constructed landscapes. She holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Arizona State University. Her honors include an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, a Rotary Foundation Group Study Exchange to Japan, and a Society for Photographic Education Imagemaker Award. Fritz’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and also in Canada, The Netherlands, France, China, South Korea, and Japan. Her work has been published in numerous exhibition catalogs including IN VIVO: the nature of nature, Encounters: Photography from the Sheldon Museum of Art, Grasslands/Separating Species, and Reclamation: Artist Books about the Environment, and was featured in print magazines Harper’s, Orion, Border Crossings, Studio, and Photography Quarterly. University of New Mexico Press published her monograph, Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass, in 2017. Her second book, Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape, was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2023. Fritz is currently Hixson-Lied Professor of Art in the School of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Cody Norton is an Elgin, Texas-born and raised artist. He is currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture and Post Studio Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. As an interdisciplinary artist, he is exploring the ways humankind has disrupted and intervened in ecosystems across North America. With specific insight into the hunting industry here in the United States; he investigates how marginalized groups such as queer people are intervening and disrupting heteronormative white male-dominated spaces. Cody received his BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of North Texas. He has exhibited internationally and nationally in cities including London, New York, Toronto, Glasgow, São Paulo, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Denver. He recently was published in The Museum of Americana Issue 26 based in Washington D.C. And just completed a month-long residency in Pratt Kansas, with the Kansas Fields Arts Forum. He was named one of Dallas-Fort Worth’s top 30 emerging artists in 2020-2021.

Alex Myers is Associate Professor of Interaction Design in the Department of Computer Science, Design, and Journalism at Creighton University. Often interrogating issues of immersion, affect, violence, and interactivity, Alex’s new media work has been widely exhibited in international venues across North America and Europe. His work has also received numerous grants and awards, including the Provincie Groningen Kunst en Cultuur Prijs in 2009 and 2014; the Electric Objects Artist Grant in 2016; and the “Best Interactive” Award from the Austin Music Video Festival in 2017. As a visual artist, he explores the use of video game technologies in media art. In his work, Alex interrogates the critical roles which technologies familiar from mainstream media contexts can play in experimental art practices.

Vidya Giri is an artist from Houston, TX. Her art is reflective of her background: balanced between cultures, environments, and disciplines. Her work has spanned between online spaces, printed media, projection, and painting on physical and digital canvases. Her explorations revolve around collecting from one’s surroundings as a form of reflection and the parallels between natural and human-made identities and the environments they encompass.

Sandra was born in Sedalia, MO but spent most of her life in the southwestern desert regions of Arizona, then the open spaces of east Texas. Having come full circle, she is thrilled to experience the Midwest as an adult. Sandra gained basic sewing skills on her mother’s antique Singer. Later, she found the detail and quiet rhythm of hand stitching soothing. The twists and turns of life have steered her to explore textiles as an art form. From an early age, her interest in personal stories expanded to Black history during her college years. As an adult she discovered the treasures of slave narratives. These people living through our nations dark period, Sandra calls “The lesser-known lights in the vast heavens of Black History.” Her growing compilation of historical fiction weaves color into the white spaces of their accounts, granting access into likely events and conversations. Sandra’s process is uncomplicated. While reading a narrative, a particular scene sparks a creative idea. Imagination and prayer lead the way in fabric choice and creation of appliques which are hand and machine stitched. She has learned to relax and flow with the inspiration, especially since fabric is a forgiving medium. Just as life can be wild, sometimes the edges are left raw and strands dangling.

Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel work at the intersection of socially engaged art and urban ecology. Always collaborative, their practice utilizes art as territory for collective imagining and exploring new ways of being together in the world. Their practice exists at the scale of everyday life; the home, the neighborhood, and the city. They currently reside on the Llano Estacado in Lubbock, Texas where they are working with their neighbors to address social and environmental resilience.

Emmy Lingscheit is a visual artist working in printmaking, installation, comics, and zines. Across recent bodies of work, she explores our entanglements with the non-human world: interdependencies between beings and across time, and from a microscopic level up to the scale of our global economy. Signs and semiotics, deep time, and holobionts are among the lenses through which she examines these relationships. Social justice and ecological justice are inextricably intertwined. In the teeming strangeness, cooperation, and competition of the biological world, rigid categories such as individual, species, and sex are increasingly understood to be porous and dynamic. Binaries break down. Emmy embraces the mutability and variance inherent in printmaking as a celebration of the resilient Other, ecosystems both literal and symbolic, and the inherent queerness of nature. Emmy grew up in South Dakota, holds a BFA in painting from St. Cloud State University, and an MFA in printmaking from University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She currently lives in Urbana, IL, where she is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.