Gina Voelker Bobrowski creates sculptures and installations where form & surface are created simultaneously and found objects are incorporated as acts of preservation and memory. Functional pots celebrate and enhance daily life through use. Direct wall painting and works on paper and board celebrate materials, processes, and unscripted narratives with endless curiosity and invention. Her community projects embrace a similar sense of play while empowering others to use their innate creativity as a vehicle for positive change. She hopes to create work and facilitate community projects that edify and inspire across generations, like the laughter of children, the touch of a heartbeat, the radiant shift of light as the seasons change. Her process reflects the tenets of craft, and is like those of children, a visionary, or outsider artists.

Gina Voelker Bobrowski is a studio and community artist. A native of New Orleans, her formal education includes Penland School of Crafts, Louisiana State University, University of Georgia Athens and Cortona Italy, and the New Mexico Center for Montessori Education. Awards include two NEA Fellowships, Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship, Young American Award, and Museum of Art and Design. She is currently Associate Professor of Ceramics at the University of New Mexico.

Kevin Umaña’s recent works, “hybrid paintings,” combine glazed ceramics on painted canvas and fuse together conflicting styles—mess and order, biomorphic and geometric, thin and thick, matte and sheen. These abstract representations evoke specific places from his childhood, memories of nature, beaches, plants, construction materials, food and religion.

Kevin Umaña is the co-founder of The Ekru Project, an artist-run Kansas City gallery focused on contemporary, emerging, and underrepresented artists. In 2017, he created a permanent installation at The United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Residencies include The Center for Book Arts, New York City; Plop Residency, London, England; and SIM Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland. His work was featured in “Pattern Recognition,” curated by Amy Lincoln at Sperone Westwater in 2022.

Influenced by man-made environmental catastrophes, emotional landscapes, and ecological systems, Kate Rusek assembles highly tactile sculptures transmuting these themes into abundant maximalism. Engaging with history-laden excess, they shape scenes that interrogate the binary between the living and manufactured worlds. Particular interest is placed on synthetic and highly processed elements as an action to transmute urban ruin into an anti-economic act of rebellion. Rusek’s work is a method to posit a regenerative future and pose questions about psychological perception, socially constructed value, and a broad care ethic through a lens of desire and abundance.

Kate Rusek earned dual B.F.As from The University of Miami and MA from Savannah College of Art and Design. She is a sculptor and textile artist who was named a Socrates Annual Fellow for 2023 and a recipient of a Windgate Distinguished Fellowship for Innovation in Craft. Residencies include The Bray, Chulitna Lodge, Vermont Studio Center, Willapa Bay AIR, The Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, and Western Montana Creative Initiatives. Additionally, Rusek is a Daytime Emmy-winning designer and builder of costumes, puppets, and props and brings her process-based curiosity to work with The Jim Henson Company, NBC Universal, and the broader television and film industry.

Tamara Murphy’s aesthetic focus on playful, brutalist design allows her to explore forms intuitively while highlighting the surface area and materials she builds with. She defines her color palette with consideration to visual themes of the 1960s California Light and Space movement with a contemporary sensitivity regarding material and form. She incorporates local materials such as wild clay, sand, and agricultural waste products into her work to develop a connection with local ecology- connecting each artwork to the habitat it is surrounded by. Functionality is an ethical choice- a decision to prioritize the energy used to create an object that is as useful as it is beautiful.

Tamara Murphy received her BFA from Chico State University in ceramics and glass while sustaining a 3-year neon apprenticeship with artist Patrick Collentine. She is currently teaching at Chico State University and Butte Community College while exhibiting work around California including a solo show at 1078 Gallery in Chico.