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Past Visiting Artist

Nancy Mintz

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In my recent work I have been examining the diversity of natural biological communities, and the processes of growth, decay, and succession. I am especially interested in the forms of memory: the husks, pods, and shells left behind by the relentless fecundity of life. The structural forms are made of fine gauge brass wire, manipulated in a manner that implies movement or growth. While the structures incorporate intricate geometric patterns, the overall physicality of each piece reflects the organic imperfections found
in nature. I cover most sculptures in a soft Japanese Gampi paper, forming a tactile surface that both filters and deflects light, giving the work an ethereal presence. This nearly translucent material draws the viewer to the interior spaces, while evoking a fragility that contradicts the earth-bound metal work. Certain pieces are only partially covered, visually exposing the insides of the structures, creating a sense of discovery as the viewer changes perspective. This intimate interaction reflects my larger studio practice, which is rooted in the act of discovery and a sense of wonder.

Carmel Buckley

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I have a background in sculpture, and I now primarily work in the mediums of sculpture and drawing. In both of these, I’m interested in the slightest transformation or repetitive mark that might give an unexpected reading to an otherwise prosaic object or geometric form out in the world. I have a particular interest in working with diverse materials and objects, often in reference to plants, to explore histories and the role of imagination.

In my drawings, I explore both the artefacts and the vegetation found in various locations I inhabit as a starting point for developing a series of works. I have an ongoing series of “drain drawing” works that I have made from urban drains/sewers/manhole covers in locations including Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, New York City, along with London, England, and Otranto, Italy.

Another series of drawings come out of my interest in native plants. The leaf silhouette drawings explore my interest in fairytale narratives, nature, and location. The silhouettes are made from the tracings of leaves in particular local settings.

I am fascinated by the detail of pattern and design found in urban and natural environments, which I recognize as one way that we become entranced by things in the world. My drawings are often made with accumulations of repeated marks that create optical fields within an image. This mode of representation as a sign of entrancement was certainly recognized by some early-twentieth-century illustrators, including Harry Clarke and Kay Nielsen, as a way to evoke thresholds of magical or psychically transformative experiences. I have used these processes for a series of plant drawings based on the beach/maple virgin forest that surrounds my house in Cincinnati.

Mark Harris

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I’m an artist and writer working in several media depending on the ideas addressed. Paintings, drawings, videos, sound, conceptual, and written works have looked at how individuals and groups use language, imagery, and music to show the remarkable qualities of everyday experience. In the past, these works have concerned intentional communities and avant-garde groups that include Fourier’s 19th-century phalanstery, Surrealist writers, 1960s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, and musician milieus,
including Caribbean singers and UK punk bands. All of those examples feature in different parts of “Sonic Wilderness,” a book I published in 2022. One preoccupation driving that book was the proposal that unusual, often outsider, records form an obscure sonic resistance that exposes fault lines masked by conventional popular music and the ideologies that hold it in thrall.
Recent drawings, videos, and essays are part of a research project into colonial Caribbean botany and the African plant diaspora, the more than 30 fruits, vegetables, and grains transported to the Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade. As part of that project, I am writing on the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite in relation to concepts of West Indian folk traditions and paradigms of sound and silence in the Caribbean histories.

Cheri Owen

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Cheri Owen produces mixed media ceramic sculpture, functional wares, and prints. With a penchant for tactile mediums like ceramics and printmaking, she aspires to share her work with a world she can no longer see, as a means of touching people emotionally, through deep, piercing, poetic phrases, through the beauty of trees, birds, and the natural world, all of which she can still hear, deeply and fully. Owen is a blind artist and USAF veteran who works in Goleta, CA, where she lives with her wife and guide dog.

She is excited to be in a space for an extended period to be mindful and intimately aware of her creative practice, as well as to learn an unfamiliar environment through a touch-centered practice and to take in this new place and allow it to percolate into her work through bark, branches, trees, wind, deer, the warmth of the sun, grasses, the dew in the morning, the silence of the evening, the songs of the birds, and to inhale and listen to all of nature’s universe speaking to her. She is excited to be open to feel, taste, hear, and touch the region’s history.

Jenni Sorkin

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Jenni Sorkin is Professor and Chair of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Departments of Art, Feminist Studies, History and Media Arts, and Technology. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. Her books include Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women Artists, 1947–2016 (Skira, 2016), and Art in California (Thames & Hudson, 2021). She has contributed scholarly essays to major recent exhibitions and books that seek to reconfigure the received histories of twentieth century art, including Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College (ICA Boston, 2015), Outliers and American Vanguard Art (National Gallery of Art, 2018), Among Others: Blackness at MOMA (MOMA, 2018), Groundswell: Women of Land Art (Nasher, 2023), and the forthcoming Postwar Reader: A Global History, 1945-1965 (Okwui Enwezor and Aytreyee Gupta, eds., Duke University Press, 2025). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Craft, the University of California Press Editorial Board, and currently serves as Co-Executive Editor of Panorama: The Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Linda Tien

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The Im-ple-ment Archive is an evolving collaborative exploration of tools, utensils and other pieces of equipment used for a particular purpose between visual artists Ellen Kleckner and Linda Tien. Applying an intuitive consideration to the familiar visual vocabulary established by a lineage of makers, through process and material, the archive calls question to the commonplace or recognizable through the investigation of form, textures, composition and materials. Through altering familiar materials and forms, the archive acts as a documentation to share the evolution of utility, form, function and maker through the employment of cooperative play and exploration paired with traditional practice and material.

Linda Tien is a visual artist, curator and exhibition producer of Vietnamese heritage. Linda has a studio background in metalsmithing & jewelry design but has always worked across media and formats including sculpture, performance, installation and video. She received her BFA in 2011 at Texas Tech University and her MFA in 2016 from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. In addition to her studio practice, Linda has many years’ experience in curation and gallery work.

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