Current — Vital Spaces

Studio ARTISTS

ileana alarcon

Ileana Alarcon is a Colombian-American artist who grew up feeling out of place in Fairfield County, Connecticut. A first generation child of two immigrants, she spent her childhood eager to make her parents’ decision to move to the States worthwhile. She sought relief from this burden by creating fantasy environments to play in. Ileana’s path eventually led her to get her BFA in Ceramics at Maine College of Art and shortly thereafter move to Santa Fe in search of a community where she could feel more at home. Though her material of choice is clay, she uses any media necessary to create objects and environments where one is free to feel okay being the “other.”

Morgan barnard

Morgan Barnard is a digital artist and designer working in the areas of public art, interactive media, immersive installations, and live cinema. His work offers audiences unique moments of observation and reflection through the use of lighting and projection. He creates environments that combine interactivity, data-visualisation, and experimental digital techniques. With a background as a director, editor, and educator, Morgan brings a broad multidisciplinary skill set to the projects he works on. His work includes the public art lighting project “Tilikum Light” in Portland, Oregon that uses data from the Willamette river to control the color of lights on the Tilikum Crossing bridge and “Sublimare” at the San Diego airport where a dynamic lighting installation is controlled using real-time data from a wave buoy off the coast. His work has been displayed in galleries and installed in urban environments across the US and internationally in New Zealand, Australia, Italy and Canada.

Amelia Bauer

Amelia Bauer graduated from The Cooper Union in 2001 and is a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, at galleries including Aperture Foundation, Black Ball Projects, Capricious, and Invisible Exports in New York, De Soto Gallery and Aran Cravey Gallery in Los Angeles, Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, BC, and RBContemporary in Milan, IT. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including The Walker Art Center, CoCA Seattle, CCA Santa Fe, The Museum of New Mexico, and the National Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Bauer's work has been published in Time Magazine and Vice, and she has been profiled on Refinery29. Bauer's work was included in Lindsay Howard's top seven list of works at Pulse art fair in Miami in 2014, as well as Artsy's list of Women Artists to Watch. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Albuquerque Museum and SFMOMA.

SHAYLA BLATCHFORD

Growing up in Long Beach, California, Shayla had little exposure to her Native heritage; this sparked a curiosity that continues to propel her work today. Her mother’s genealogical investigation was a launching pad that started her journey to establish a connection with her ancestors and their ways of life. Often we don’t know how to share our stories. It can be difficult to take a vision from paper to finished project. Shayla has the ability to help people tell their stories, cultural or commercial, and sees providing that service as a way to share instances of beauty with the world. Photography is about capturing moments. It is about seeing the smallness in the bigness of the world. She wants to subtly craft these moments into art while allowing the images to speak with their voice and not her own. shaylablatchford.com

Cristina González

Cristina González (Chicana, b. 1971 San Antonio, Texas) is an artist and educator whose studio practice is grounded in drawing and painting. Her work explores how personal, cultural and ancestral memory shapes present identities. Cristina has artwork in the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, the Carlsbad Museum of Art, the New Mexico Capitol Art Foundation, the New Mexico Department of Transportation, the City of Santa Fe, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center. She received fellowships from Skowhegan, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program and theSam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. Cristina was a USA Fellow Nominee in 2016.

Cristina also envisions and builds programs and projects at the intersection of studio practice, community practice and arts education. She has taught and lectured widely and currently serves as Arts Education Coordinator for Santa Fe Public Schools. In 2021, Cristina was named Arts Administrator of the Year by the New Mexico Art Education Association. She holds an M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Washington, Seattle and a B.A. in Art from Yale. Cristina lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. www.cristinagonzalez.com

David-alexander Hubbard sloan

David-Alexander Hubbard Sloan is a member of the Diné (Navajo) tribe. Bringing contemporary graphic styles into painting, printmaking, digital design as well as jewelry, David aims to learn about, honor, and remember the language and culture of his mother’s indigenous family; language and culture that was suppressed throughout the 20th century. “I make art for many reasons, sometimes because I paint a funny cartoon sheep because my family used to be sheepherders, sometimes a coal mine or nuclear facility to examine the military, resource extraction, and financial industrial complexes we are all enslaved to.” David received his BA in 2D Studio Arts with a minor in Environmental Science from the University of Arizona in 2003. He has worked as a self-employed artist since 2009. He helped establish Santa Fe Community Screen Printing in 2018 and has been a Board Member for the Santa Fe Indian Center since 2017.

Tintawi Kaigziabiher

Tintawi Kaigziabiher is a writer, potter, and crochet designer. She migrated to New Mexico from the NYC Metro area seven years ago. Tintawi is married to a scientist, and together they live in the high desert with their five children, five chickens, two doves, a kitten and a leopard gecko named Milo. As a woman of African descent, she writes to give a voice to the African presence and experience in the Diaspora. She is currently pursuing a Creative Writing major with a Ceramics minor at Santa Fe Community College.

Oriana lee

Mother, educator, student, well-being coach, writer, recording artist, director—these are just a few attributes to describe Oriana Lee. Both a great gift and a mighty force, Oriana’s voice as an MC and activist over the last few decades has led her to the human rights leading-edge. She blends seamlessly together limbs of Hip Hop, the written and the spoken word, the visual arts, and musical components—somewhere between what once was and what should be the direction of culture—to find the refreshingly cool warmth of an artist on the pulse. Oriana’s knowledge of self and worldly wisdom bleed through her art into the cracks of the culture. Oriana is a teaching and performing circus artist, theatrical director, and currently the Co-Executive Director of Education, Outreach and Employee Relations for Wise Fool New Mexico. She is also the co-founder of All the Things Art Collective, a group committed to creating outlets and opportunities for PoC artists of all types to thrive in creatively.

Linda Lomahaftewa

Linda Lomahaftewa is a Hopi-Choctaw printmaker, painter, and mixed media artist, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Linda has traveled and exhibited throughout the United States, Canada, Germany, and Latin America, as well as New Zealand, United Kingdom, Russia, and China. Besides traveling throughout Europe, China, and Siberia, she has traveled to hundreds of pre-contact Indigenous sites in the United States as part of her ongoing research into ancient Native cosmology and history.

Linda was listed in Who’s Who in American Arts and twice in Who’s Who in American Indian Arts. In 2001 she won the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Power of Art Award. After earning her high school diploma from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Linda received her BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Prior to teaching at IAIA, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and Sonoma State University. She has taught painting, drawing, color theory, and 2-D design at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Ehren kee Natay

Ehren Kee Natay (Diné/Kewa) is a multimedia artist who works as a painter, jeweler, printmaker, ceramicist, musician, and dancer. His current work combines visual and performative mediums to provide multi-sensory experiences that call attention and awareness to issues of social justice specific to his tribe of the Diné Nation. He maintains a connection to his community through storytelling, music, and creative workshops. Ehren aims to deconstruct educational paradigms by emphasizing Indigenous knowledge and methodologies which promote equity for his people. He currently resides in his hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

AMy Pilling

The environment, and the scientific exploration of it, inform Amy’s creative practice. We live in, interact with, and are surrounded by natural forces and fields that we are often unaware of yet that support and contain us. Curiosity about these hidden forces and fields drives her choice of physical materials, phenomena, and forms she explores in her work. Amy is currently focusing on perception and optics, making structures from invisible fields, plastics in the environment, and alternative intelligences in nature, especially in smaller, often ignored, life forms such as insects and microorganisms. Having trained and worked as a permaculture designer, environmental sustainability and ethics inform her creative process.

Amy is Program Director of SciArt Santa Fe, an educational non-profit working at the intersection of art and science, and is the laboratory instructor for the BioArt & Design course at University of New Mexico. The BioArt & Design course interfaces with the Biohack Academy, den Waag, Netherlands, and the BioDesign Challenge in New York, NY, both of which seek to make science education accessible to all while fostering critical inquiry into the ramifications and ethics of contemporary scientific methods and processes. Amy has also served the community through AmeriCorps VISTA, creating opportunities for STEAM education, and making STEM + Arts accessible to underserved students in New Mexico.

Jenjoy roybal

JenJoy Roybal is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and editor with a passion for community-based efforts that address some of the most challenging issues of our time, such as sustainability, resiliency, gender-based violence and social equity. She has been active in these areas in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York and Internationally. Her personal art practice is informed by her travels, experiences in nature and ritual. JenJoy has a Master of Urban Design and Planning from The Bernard and Anne Spritzer School of Architecture, City College New York; and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was born and raised in Santa Fe, NM.

Jesse Wood

Jesse Wood is an artist and single parent who has lived in NM for the last two decades. He is pursuing a career in painting and collaborative printmaking. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and later Savannah College of Art and Design. After returning to New Mexico, he applied to the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque and was accepted with seven other students. After graduating from Tamarind in May of 2019, he worked as a teaching assistant at The Institute of American Indian Art and also as a private assistant to two Native American artists in Santa Fe and Corrales. It is his vision to publish work by contemporary Native artists, teaching both printmakers and other visual artists about the edition process.