Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib have worked as artistic collaborators since 2008. Their installation After Provisional Monument for the New Revolution, a panoramic moving image, was recently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. They currently reside in Philadelphia.
Hironaka’s films and video installations have been exhibited internationally in PULSAR (Venezuela); Rencontres Internationals (Paris/Berlin); The Den Haag Film and Video Festival (The Netherlands); The Center for Contemporary Arts (Kitakyushu, Japan); The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Morris Gallery; The Black Maria Film Festival, The Donnell Library (NYC); The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia); The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia); The Galleries at Moore College of Art (Philadelphia); and Vox Populi, (Philadelphia). Hironaka’s second solo museum exhibition The Late Show was recently presented at Arizona State University Art Museum.
Suib has exhibited installations, video/sound works and photographs internationally at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Kunstwerke Berlin; Mercer Union (Toronto); The Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.); P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (NYC); The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia); and the 2007 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. His 2006 project Purified By Fire has been commissioned for exhibition in Miami, Chicago, Toronto and Paris. In 2011, Suib was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
Shirley Alexandra Watts is an artist and designer, principal of sawattsdesign an award winning design build firm that creates gardens all over the Bay Area. She is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, studied at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris and Tyler School of Art in Rome. Watts has done installations at the San Jose Museum of Art, The San Francisco Flower and Garden show and the :Late Show Gardens. The work has been featured in many publications including Garden Design magazine, Sunset, the SF Chronicle, New Garden Design by Zahid Sardar , the New Low Maintenance Garden by Valerie Easton and Stephen Orr's Tomorrow's Garden.
Since 2007, Shirley has been working as an independent curator with Paul Licht, Chris Carmichael and Mary Anne Friel at the Botanical Garden at the University of California at Berkeley (UCBG) to develop the ideas and programming for ‘Natural Discourse: Artists, Architects, Scientists & Poets in the Garden’. Shirley is committed to fostering a cross-disciplnary dialogue between artists, writers and scientists inspired by the wonderful collection at UCBG.
Nami Yamamoto, a native of Nagoya, Japan, is a visual artist who lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music; Aichi, Japan, and MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art / Mount Royal Graduate School of Art; Baltimore, MD. Through her drawings and installations, Yamamoto explores transitory states in the natural world, both structural and phenomenological. Fascinated by moments of “in-between”, her work calls attention to states of flux or transitions from one state to another, translated through a variety of diverse materials.
Yamamoto’s work was exhibited recently in “Paper Work in 3D” at Shelburne Museum (Shelburne, VT), and “Amicale” at Museum of Contemporary Arts (Siegen, Germany)
She was recipient of grants and awards, includes:
Pew Fellowship in the Arts from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (Philadelphia, PA), Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Award from Joan Mitchell Foundation (New York, NY), and Pola Art Foundation Fellowship Award from Pola Art Foundation (Tokyo, Japan)
She has attended residencies at: International Studio & Curatorial Program (Brooklyn, NY) and Bemis Center for Contemporary arts (Omaha, NE)
Yamamoto’s Project at UCBG is funded by the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund (Washington D.C.) and generous donations from friends and supporters through USA Project.
Hazel White grew up on farms in the southwest of England. After finishing undergraduate degrees in philosophy and literature at Warwick University, she studied crop agriculture at Bridgwater College Center for Land Based Studies, and then, through University of California, Berkeley, Extension, landscape architecture. She’s the author of eleven gardening books, published by Sunset Books and Chronicle Books, and for several years wrote a monthly column, “Living in the Landscape,” published by the San Francisco Chronicle. White graduated from the MFA Writing program at California College of the Arts in 2005. Her poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky (online), and VERSE.A chapbook, Richter 14, was published in 2010 by Deconstructed Artichoke Press. Her most recent book of poetry Peril as Architectural Enrichment was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2011. She lives in San Francisco.
Gail Wight is an artist based in Berkeley, CA. She is an Assoicate Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Art and Art History. Wight has exhibited her work internationally, including venues such as the Natural History Museum of London, Ars Electronica (Austria), Exit Art (New York), Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, WI), the Physics Room (New Zealand), and Cornerhouse, Manchester. She has worked for a research project on cognition at MIT, in the Exploratorium's Performance Program, and has held residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, at Capp Street Project, the Exploratorium, the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, and Headlands Center for the Arts.
Wight investigates issues of biology and the history of science and technology. Her work engages the cultural impact of scientific practice, and plays with our constant redefinition of self through our epistemologies. Historical frameworks express themselves in concepts about the nature of existence as well as upon the tools that emerge out of scientific research. As an artist, Wight traces the ways in which those tools carry their ideologies with them, moving from the scientific to the social sphere and impacting the art-making process. Recent projects often involve other living organisms, inviting them to become co-authors in the finished work of art.
Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, partners in Rael San Fratello Architects, established in 2002 in Oakland CA, is an internationally recognized award-winning firm whose focus on emerging technologies and ecological design lies at the intersection of architecture, art, culture, and the environment. As practitioners and academics, we seek to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of ecological thinking through design and are committed to innovation through research, analysis and artistry. We utilize the most sophisticated technologies available, from rapid prototyping, computer-aided manufacturing and 3D modeling, analysis and visualization to help our clients realize their visions.
Deborah O’Grady’s photography encompasses a diversity of styles and approaches. Her landscape photography explores the varying degrees in which the history of a particular place is in evidence, often employing text or text/sound installations to enrich the context of the image.Her photo montages couple original photographs with found snapshots to extend the reach of a single photographic image beyond the frozen moment. In this way, time and space are stretched to provide an enriched contextual resource for these vernacular images.
O’Grady’s work has been exhibited internationally and nationally, most recently at the Public Policy Institute of California, The Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., the International Fototage in Mannheim, Germany and as a video projection for live concert performance at the world premiere of “Enemy Slayer” at the Phoenix Symphony.
Denise Newman is a poet and translator. She is the author of three collections of poems, The New Make Believe, (The Post-Apollo Press, 2010), Wild Goods (Apogee Press, 2008), andHuman Forest(Apogee Press, 2000). Her translation of The Painted Room by the Danish poet Inger Christensen is distributed by Random House (United Kingdom), and her translation of Azorno, also by Christensen, was published by New Directions, 2009.
Her poems, collaborations, and translations have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Volt, Fence, New American Writing, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. For the past decade, she has been collaborating with composers, providing lyrics for choral works. She lives and works in San Francisco.
Andrew Kudless is an architect based in San Francisco where he is an assistant professor at the California College of the Arts. Andrew has taught design studios, workshops, and seminars at The Ohio State University, the Architectural Association (London), Yale University, and Rice University. In 2005 Andrew was the Howard E. LeFevre Fellow for Emerging Practitioners at OSU. He earned a Master of Arts with distinction from the Architectural Association’s Emergent Technologies and Design graduate program and a Master of Architecture with honors from the Tulane University School of Architecture. In 2004 he was the recipient of a Design Merit Award in the Far Eastern International Digital Architecture Design (FEIDAD) competition and in 1998 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to research architectural design and urbanism in the Kansai region of Japan. He has worked as a designer for Allied Works Architecture in Portland and New York and as a digital design, modeling, and fabrication consultant for Expedition Engineering in London. Andrew’s work has been exhibited in the US, England, France, Japan and China.
Mary Anne Friel is a visual artist engaged in individual and collaborative modes of studio and curatorial work. She lives in Providence where she is an assistant professor at Rhode Island School of Design. Friel served as Project Coordinator and Master Printer at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) for over two decades where she was responsible for developing and producing new works of contemporary art and related exhibitions with visiting Artists-in-Residence in a context of interdisciplinary collaboration. Projects include Ed Ruscha, Industrial Strength Sleep; Chris Burden, L.A.P.D. Uniform and Doug Aitken, Interiors. She established and directed a studio for FWM in Oakland, CA, 1990-99.
Her curatorial work includes Relatively Related: Solo of Xiang Yang at SZ Art Center (Beijing); Close at Hand with Ruth Fine, Virgil Marti and Marion Stroud at FWM (Philadelphia); and Blur: Six Artists, Six Designers in Contemporary Practice with Mark Campbell at The University of the Arts (Philadelphia). She is currently working on Natural Discourse: Artists, Architects, Scientists, and Poets in the Garden with Shirley Watts in collaboration with Paul Licht and Chris Carmichael at The University of California Botanical Gardens at Berkeley.
Todd Gilens was born in Los Angeles and raised in a standard-issue middle-class suburb, his work focuses on deepening experience through a robust understanding of places. Botany has come slowly into his work, at first through a graduate program in landscape architecture and later with excursions in California’s wild parklands and occasional collecting and propagating work. Active across genres and materials as artist, curator and landscape designer, his public works include projects for civic, non-profit, historical and educational institutions, including the Richmond Art Center, the Delaware Art Museum, San Francisco Zen Center and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He was recently scholar in residence at the Long Term Ecological Reflections program at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in central Oregon and holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He lives and works in San Francisco.