2011 Current Planing Committee Members
Jen Delos Reyes
Crystal Baxley
Harrell Fletcher
Lexa Walsh
Mack McFarland
Ally Drozd
Ariana Jacob
Sandy Sampson
Sara Rabinowitz
Katy Asher
Garrick Imatani
Stefan Ransom
Jason Sturgill
Bios:
Crystal Baxley
Crystal Baxley is a firm believer that everything will be ok. In 2010 she helped to organize Shine A Light at Portland Art Museum and Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse at Portland State University. She will graduate with a BFA from Portland State in 2011.
Sandy Sampson
Sandy Sampson has been: painter, shop owner, risk analyst, shopping mall clown, paper girl, ship steward, bar tender, teacher, interviewer, gardener, hitch hiker, maid, ski lift operator, warehouse worker, slide librarian, fast food worker, box packer, direct care provider, among other things and in no particular order. Right now parenthood and casual pedagogy are her main occupations.
Sara Rabinowitz
Sara Rabinowitz is a cultural worker whose practice is shaped by collaboration. Her work often results in an invitation for new relations to emerge through interactive furniture, installations, symposiums, and performances. Most recently, Sara has taken up archery in preparation for a midwestern hunt of the Osage Orange tree. Sara currently resides in Eugene, Oregon where she is the Visiting Professor in Fibers at the University of Oregon. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ally Drozd
Ally Drozd wants to do and make things that help people relate to and respect one another and therefore not hurt each other. Ally believes that in a world that often seems dominated by cynicism, apathy, and fear, demonstrating and representing how to be nice to people and take care of one another is really important!
Mack McFarland
Mack McFarland is an interdisciplinary artist and curator for the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He works in many mediums, with a particular focus on video and drawing. Characterized by humor, mysticism, chance, dissent aesthetics, and repetition, his projects invite the viewer to experience the intersection of the aesthetic and the cognitive.
Ariana Jacob
Ariana Jacob makes artwork that uses conversation as medium and as subjective research method. Her work explores experiences of interdependence and disconnection, questions her own idealistic beliefs, and investigates how people make culture and culture makes people.
Recent works include a conversation space inside a tent for people to discuss the American tradition of breaking with tradition, a series of original serenades made by musicians in conversations with selected visual art, and an interactive poster project inviting and illustrating public dialogues. She collaboratively produces Portland Stock, an ongoing public dinner party and democratically awarded artist grant, with Katy Asher and Amber Bell.
Ariana holds an MFA from the Art & Social Practice Program at Portland State University. She has exhibited work and organized events at apexart in New York City, Betonsalon in Paris, France, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Arts Festival in Portland, OR, The Portland Art Museum in Portland, OR, Gallery Homeland in Portland, OR, SEA Change Gallery in Portland, OR, The Department of Safety in Anacortes, WA, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA ; and in many public places.
Harrell Fletcher
Harrell Fletcher received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from California College of the Arts. He studied organic farming at UCSC and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990’s. His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, The Wrong Gallery, Apex Art, and Smackmellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture show in Houston, TX, PICA in Portland, OR, CoCA and The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, Signal in Malmo, Sweden, Domain de Kerguehennec in France, The Royal College of Art in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMoMA, The Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July. A book version of LTLYM was published in 2007 by Prestel. Fletcher is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. His exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and traveled to Solvent Space in Richmond, VA, White Columns in NYC, The Center For Advanced Visual Studies MIT in Boston, MA, PICA in Portland, OR, and LAXART in Los Angeles among other locations. Fletcher is an Associate Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
Katy Asher
Katy Asher investigates how audiences create shared meaning around ideas of place through her work in groups, and facilitation of participatory events. She recently co-founded Portland Stock, a monthly public dinner event and presentation series which funds small to medium-sized artist projects in the Portland area. Past collaborations include work with art groups Red76, The M.O.S.T. and The Committee.
Katy holds a MFA from the Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University and a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She has exhibited work and organized events at apexart in New York City, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, OR, and the Melbourne International Arts Festival in Melbourne, Australia, as well as at the Melbourne Contemporary Art Fair and Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, Pomona College Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA, the Portland Art Museum in Portland, OR, Reed College in Portland, OR, and Igloo Gallery, in Portland, OR.
Jen Delos Reyes- Assistant Professor, Art and Social Practice/MFA Art and Social Practice Coordinator
Jen Delos Reyes is an artist originally from Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Her research interests include the history of socially engaged art, group work, and artists’ social roles. She has exhibited works across North America and Europe, and has contributed writing to various catalogues and institutional publications. She has received numerous grants and awards including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant. Jen is the founder and director of Open Engagement, a conference on socially engaged art practice and herself speaks widely on Art and Social Practice at conferences and institutions around the world. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Portland State University where she co-directs the Art and Social Practice MFA concentration with Harrell Fletcher.
www.jendelosreyes.com
Lexa Walsh
Lexa Walsh was born near Philadelphia as the youngest of 15 children. She has lived, worked, exhibited and toured in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, the Pacific Northwest as well as across Europe and Asia. Her work is situated in performance and direct engagement, investigating everyday activities as tools for community and relationship building. The work is informed by her upbringing, extensive travels, community work and experimental music and performance projects. She is currently an MFA candidate in Art and Social Practice at PSU. For Open Engagement 2010, Lexa was a special projects coordinator; in 2011 she is managing food and special events.
Garrick Imatani
Garrick Imatani is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores connections between the physical and cultural within movement, landscapes, and history. His most recent collaborative exhibition at the University of Oregon involved floating the Willamette River in a transparent hand built canoe and constructing an island monument between the cities of Eugene and Portland as means of paralleling myths in national popular folklore with artistic legacy. Garrick resides in Portland, Oregon where he is as an Assistant Professor of Art at
Lewis & Clark College. He received his MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and is the recipient of several grants, awards and fellowships, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Payson Governors’ Fellowship.
Jason Sturgill
Jason Sturgill is an artist whose creative trajectory spans the worlds of music, graphic design and commerce. He creates work that straddles these areas in a way that makes viewers confront ideas of empathy, philosophy, production, and their daily lives. Jason is currently a candidate in the MFA Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
