Former Studio ARTISTS
Raashan Ahmad
Raashan Ahmad is a musician, poet, community worker, and DJ. He has released six critically acclaimed albums which have taken him to over 35 countries around the world. This, in turn, has led him down a path of collaboration across artistic mediums, borders, and cultures. He has lent his music industry expertise to workshops with young people from Paris to Dakar to Los Angeles to Santa Fe. Beyond his music career, Raashan is passionate about building connections across barriers that can divide communities. He hosts, DJs, and supports events designed to offer shared space where people can explore their connections to one another.
MOLLY BOYLE
Molly Boyle writes about books, restaurants, art, and more cool stuff for The Santa Fe Reporter, Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico magazine, and other outlets. She has taught creative writing and literature at the New Mexico School for the Arts, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and Luna Community College, and holds degrees from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and Brown University. She is a former editor of mystery fiction at Penguin Random House and a veteran employee of five bookstores, now at work on her own book and grateful to be a part of the Vital Spaces community.
Enrique Figueredo
Enrique Figueredo is a Venezuelan-American artist who immigrated from South America at a young age. Working primarily with woodcuts, Enrique creates outdoor public installations and hand-printed works on paper that respond to current events. He studies the origins of the New World and the technologies of ancient cultures from the Americas to visually amend his ancestral history. Enrique follows closely the Venezuelan diaspora and he spends most of his time trying to make sense of Latin America–United States relations. Enrique is naively optimistic that through endless research he will find the connections and answers that will help heal a complex western hemisphere. enriquefigueredo.com
Ana gallegos y reinhardt | warehouse 21
Ana Gallegos y Reinhardt, a local Santa Fean, is the former Executive Director of Warehouse 21 (W21), an arts and entertainment center in the Railyard. She stepped down in October 2017 following 21 years of service. In the summer of 2019, she was asked to develop a summer youth program. In December 2019, she played a critical role in W21’s transition out of their city-owned facility. She has been assisting with the new W21 2020 HUB Sites, one at Vital Spaces and one in Eldorado. Ana has also co-founded other non-profits in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. She currently has a new theater company, ReinART Productions and produced False Witness, The Trial of Humanity’s Conscience at the Swan Theatre in September 2019.
GOOD MOOD STUDIO
Good Mood Studio is a quarterly print and digital magazine that promotes style as self love and conscious consumerism. The magazine aims to create a guide to support small businesses and emerging artists, especially those from marginalized communities. Darnell Thomas & Mariah Romero are co-editors of this publication. Darnell Thomas is from New Orleans and has a background in theater, production management, and art direction. Mariah Romero is a graphic designer from Stockton, CA who is a seamstress and painter in her spare time. goodmoodcs.com.
OSIEL GONZALEZ
Hi, my name is Osiel Gonzalez. I was born and raised in Miami, went to school in Boston for filmmaking, floated and traveled for a bit afterword, and now I’m here in Santa Fe. I work within the mediums of painting, sculpture, filmmaking, and design. My curiosity currently takes me to a space which lies in between the functional and the non-functional — think of a sculpture, that serves as a piece of furniture, which may also contain other functional and non-functional elements. The goal is to ultimately create an object that can elicit a different point of view or way of seeing.
Freedom hopkins
Freedom Hopkins is an analogue filmmaker specializing in 16mm film. He graduated from Santa Fe University of Art and Design in 2014. Freedom takes his inspiration from Japanese anime and the French New Wave, creating and synthesizing genres to communicate unfamiliar feelings and challenge the status-quo for how films tell fictional narratives. Freedom is also a local projectionist, working for many of the eclectic venues in Santa Fe such as CCA, Violet Crown, and The Screen. Freedom is currently learning Japanese, lives in Santa Fe, and loves karaoke.
ISOLDE KILLE
Isolde Kille is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in painting, photography and video. Born in Welver, Germany, she studied visual communication at the art academies in Berlin and Dresden, finishing her studies with a master’s degree in fine arts (Meisterschüler) at the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. Isolde has shown domestically and internationally at venues such as: Kunstwerke and Kunsthaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany; John Gibson Gallery, John Weber Gallery; Lital Mehr Gallery, Chelsea, New York, NY; Bass Museum, Miami Beach, Florida, among others.
LAYLI LONG SOLDIER
Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award and the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
NICOLA LÓPEZ
Born in Santa Fe, Nicola López lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at Columbia University where she has been working with undergraduates and MFA students as part of the full-time Visual Arts faculty since 2013. Nicola’s work in drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture, and video examines and reconfigures our contemporary, human-built landscape, engaging architecture and urban structure as ever-accumulating, physical evidence of our human aspirations and failures. Drawing on anthropology, architecture, urban planning, and historical and fictional explorations of utopia/dystopia, the work points to deep connections between our human-constructed world and systems and cycles of nature. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at museums including MoMA in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in LA, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and the Denver Art Museum in Denver, CO and featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Nicola’s site-specific work “Un-building Things” is now on view the Balcony Lounge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. She is currently finishing a four-channel, stop-motion animation video focusing on the idea of ‘Place’ as explored through representations of urban landscape, and will be a Michael I. Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2020.
ERICA LORD
Erica Lord is an interdisciplinary artist who explores concepts and issues shaped by her contemporary Indigenous experience and how a rapidly changing world effects culture and identity. Erica draws on her background growing up between Alaska and Upper Michigan and her mixed-race cultural identity. In order to address a multiple or mixed identity, Erica uses a variety of mediums to construct new, ambiguous, or challenging representations of race. Erica received her BA from Carleton College and MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, the Musée du Quai Branley in Paris, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. Erica teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Ericalord.com
ANDRES MACHIN
Andres graduated from California Institute of the Arts with his MFA in 2016. His work speaks to the contemporary moment where technologies, identities, and aesthetics are colliding and merging and ideas of “place” are harder to pin down or articulate. Andres creates art to hold this complexity and harness the sociopolitical acts of exposure that result from its superficial incongruities. His practice combines painting and technique with digital tools resulting in what he calls “channels for responsive aesthetic engagement.” While his works can be viewed as purely formal, they maintain a conceptual depth rooted in queer theory and the ethics of visibility. Andres has shown his work locally as well as across the country and is in several private collections. He has been published and has given public lectures on performance, disability, and censorship in the arts, and on the ethics of minority visibility in the arts and in the classroom. He is currently a Visual Arts Instructor at New Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe, NM. http://www.andresmachin.com
E. Oscar maynard
Elizabeth “Oscar” Maynard has a self-designed B.A. in Visual Art, Psychology, and Gender Studies from Antioch College. They have an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in Printmaking. Their work has been shown at Somarts, Mission Cultural Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and in National Queer Arts Festival shows. In 2016, they curated You Are Enough, a visual arts show looking at mental health and survival through a queer lens. They were a fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the cohort responding to the question “Why Citizenship?” Other residencies and fellowships include: Blue Mountain Center, the Equal Justice residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, Kala Art Institute, and A Studio in the Woods. In their spare time they nerd out about gender, feed wild animals in local parks, make paper-cuts, print letterpress posters, and carve gourd luminaries. You can see more of their work at: www.countrycounterculture.com
Kayo Muller
Kayo is a multidisciplinary Brazilian/American artist who first came to the US, with a plan to learn english and go back to Brazil's theatre and film industry, where she was already building a solid career in the early 90's. As the world turns around and plans change constantly, her life took a different turn and she started creating roots in America.
As a queer, non conforming latinx, Kayo's world of exploration expands from circus and theatre performance art; to mixed media paintings, sculpting, set and costume designs. She feels that her experience of belonging (and NOT) in two very different worlds, have given her ways to not entirely define her art as one style or genre. She enjoys a bit of absurd, unexpected and surprising details when creating her pieces.
YUKI MURATA
The geometry and structure of Murata’s work is an artifact from her training and practice as an architectural and product designer. She channels this history into her painting practice by exploring lines, bands, and grids as well as using materials normally associated with building construction and domestic housewares. The linear repetition and quiet color palette are a meditation on the restoration and repair she seeks for our suffering world. The square formats honor stability and order in our modern world of chaos and disruption. Often, she documents time and place by using materials gathered from the properties around where Murata is working. Her goal is to capture the essence of a place and to foster a visual contemplation on nature and our relationship to it.
Currently, she lives and works in Santa Fe. She uses New Mexico micaceous clay slip, pencil, paint, natural pigments (such as walnut ink, India ink, homemade paprika and turmeric ink), dirt and watercolor on undyed linen canvas and wood panels. yukimurata.com
YESHE PARKS
Yeshe Parks grew up in rural Maine running around in the woods and blueberry farming. Parks attended the University of Maine and Maine College of Art where he studied painting. Drawn to cultural intersections and easy access to nature, he and his partner have landed in Santa Fe, where he continues to explore and be influenced by his natural surroundings.
Patience Pollock
Patience Pollock is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Eastern Long Island, New York who combines image making techniques from photography. She mimics picture making and translates photo processes into collage and sewing to create abstract portraits, landscapes and sculpture. She has a BFA in photography from SUNY Purchase. She owns and operates a small by appointment design studio, “Aunt Patience” that incorporates using retired fabrics and out of date fashion into one of a kind up-cycled unisex garments as well as being a small curated vintage shop. www.patiencepollock.com
www.etsy.com/shop/AUNTPATIENCE
justin rhody
Justin Clifford Rhody (b. 1984, Flint Michigan) is a fine art photographer currently based in New Mexico. His work has been seen widely through exhibitions, publications, and traveling slideshows, as well as online. Rhody also organized a public slideshow series of found 35mm photo slides called Vernacular Visions 2013-2018 and is a co-founder of the White Leaves Artist Residency in El Rito, New Mexico. In 2018, Rhody exhibited work in Brooklyn, London, Oakland, and Santa Fe, presented talks in Los Angeles, Oakland and at the Northern New Mexico College and was an artist-in-residence at LATITUDE in Chicago.
KEITH RYAN RIGGS
Keith Ryan Riggs is a projection-based, sculptural installation artist. He unifies the ancient, constant elemental qualities of the earth with the ever-evolving technology that has become such a part of our human existence. His work explores the veil between worlds and the shift that exists in the place between light and shadow. He’s interested in the multi-dimensional experience that assists in the evolution of the soul, and is enchanted by the seemingly insignificant moments that whisper expansiveness from their depths. His goal as an intermedia artist is to create environments that make the viewer look at the world around them from a different perspective and question all that they assumed was a given.
Justin Skillstad
Justin Skillstad earned his BA in Fine Arts & Arts Administration with an emphasis in sculpture and printmaking at Humboldt State University and has taught at multiple institutions and universities across the US. He currently resides in Santa Fe where he works with various non-profits to foster the city's arts communities while also continuing his own art practice in glass, bronze, silver, earth, and most importantly cardboard. His work focuses on the internalized human narrative and its relation to our perceptions of space and time.
Sarah spengler
Sarah Spengler (b. 1972, Cambridge, Massachusetts) earned her Master of Fine Art in Photography from the University of New Mexico and holds a BA in cultural anthropology from Bates College. Her artwork often examines culture and technology through the use of antiquated optical devices and emerging media. She feels equally ecstatic when viewing stereoscopes from the 1800s as she does immersing herself in a virtual reality headset. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States including: Galleri Urbane in Marfa, Texas; Red Eye Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island; Tamarind Institute and the Albuquerque Art Museum in Albuquerque; and Form and Function and Currents International New Media Festival in Santa Fe. Sarah has also taught art at colleges and universities throughout California and New Mexico. Sarah served as the Lennox Visiting Young Artist at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas for the 2004-2005 academic year. From 2011 through 2018, she developed and led the digital art curriculum at New Mexico School for the Arts. Her goal as an artist and educator is to encourage others to “make the familiar strange” by focusing on their visual perception and questioning societal norms. www.sarahspengler.com
Mi’Jan celie tho-biaz
Mi’Jan Celie Tho-Biaz, Ed.D., is an oral historian and documentarian who works with communities across the themes of sovereignty, transformation, healing, and equity to honor their past, make meaning of their present, and vision loving and liberated futures.
A 2019–2020 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow and Santa Fe New Mexican 2017 “10 Who Made a Difference,” Mi’Jan Celie designed and led the Steinem Initiative's public policy digital storytelling pilot at Smith College, was a Visiting Scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics at Columbia University, and recently keynoted at Stanford University’s “Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and the Arts” conference, as well as the Create Justice Forum at Carnegie Hall. mijancelie.com
ANDREA VARGAS-MENDOZA
Andrea was born and raised on the California coast. Urban environments rich with murals and diversity influenced her early palette and affection for community histories and social justice. After she received her BA from the University of California at Berkeley in pre-law she was able to commit to her purpose in the arts. As a Chicana, she found home in Santa Fe - a place that values multiculturalism, multilingualism and cultural heritage. To date, she produces artwork and installations that focus on ecological relationships, and aspects of transformation. She is represented by King Galleries and uses bold mark making to proclaim her reverence for the lands and elements of the southwest.
John Vokoun
A child of the personal computer era, John Vokoun has been fascinated with the computer as an art medium since he attended programming camp at age nine. From his first green and black CRT drawings on an Apple II to his present-day interaction with a variety of computerized machines, the computer’s influence on his work is only matched by the color field paintings of Albers, Itten, Kelly, and Rothko. With computer data and geometry, he seeks to channel the chaos of the Information Age into simple forms. Vokoun resides in Santa Fe. His work has shown at David Richard Gallery, William Siegal Gallery, and he recently exhibited at the New Mexico Museum of Art. johnvokoun.com
Gregory allen Waits
Waits Studio Works employs a multimedia practice interconnecting architecture, art, fashion, and the environment to create performance objects and spaces. The studio thus aligns with design strategies that participate in a dialogue of private and public space within the social fabric. Patterns of movement in our daily life are investigated from an interdisciplinary perspective, creating a cross-pollination that produces deeper meaning in the design of objects and spaces like: how patterns might generate more sustainable architecture, art products, and lifestyles; or how patterns, as markings of a historical process, might lead to the development of broader, more cooperative terms for the individual and community.
JESSI T. WALSH
Jessi T. Walsh is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who works in botanical, live/sensory, and image-based artforms. For 20 years, she has brought arts integration practices to K-12, college, and adult students in the urban wilds of Chicago, Austin, Brooklyn, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. She has exhibited, performed, and has been an artist-in-residence around the US and in London, Berlin, and México. Her work researches connection, tension, and thresholds of horror and tenderness between human, plant, animal, and earthen realms.
The daughter of a painter and a potter raised in a coastal town in Florida, she spent much of her time in the Gulf of México learning from the marine domain. She is currently living in the prehistoric ocean of Santa Fe.
RJ WARD
RJ Ward’s video works employ cinematic tropes as their raw working material, which are then transposed into various forms of real-time digital abstraction. Often alluding to lost horizons, targets, and vortexes, Ward's images appear to be in dialogue with painting and the moving image in equal measure. Playing with the erasure of many itinerant plot points, Ward's interventions harken back to experimental work done in the late 1960s and early 1970s that relied on manipulating celluloid images frame by frame. Only Ward has updated this approach to match the processes of the digital age, making his remediated montages a self-referential play of memes that have trafficked in the world of fine art and avant-garde cinema over the course of the last century.
Ward’s single channel and installation works have been exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Laguna Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Torrance Art Museum. He has taught media art at UC Irvine, UC San Diego and Foothill College. Recent Exhibitions
Todd ryan white
Todd Ryan White is a product of subcultural collusion: contemporary art born of youthful, useless interests like skateboarding and heavy metal. Marginalized and stupid ideas are given introspective and illustrative forms. Todd was born in Orange, California in 1984 and has been a recovering Californian ever since. He graduated from Tufts University and The Museum School of Fine Arts Boston in 2008. Show highlights include the Torrance Museum of Art, The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and The Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe. His first solo exhibition, Rainbow Eater, appeared at Form & Concept in Santa Fe, NM in 2019.
Karina culloton wilder
Karina Culloton Wilder is a dance artist interested in creative process, improvisation, and dance education for humans of all ages and abilities. She has performed with Stephan Koplowitz, Jolene Konkel, and Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater among others. Though born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, Karina spent the past eight years performing, creating, and teaching in Minnesota including setting choreography on Collectivus Dance Company, Zenon Dance Zone, and Jagged Spoke Dance. Karina moved to New Mexico in August and currently teaches at NDI, Dance Arts Los Alamos, and Dance Space Santa Fe. She is beyond excited to be exploring a new community of dancers and artists!
ROBERT WILDER
Robert Wilder is the author of two critically acclaimed books of essays: Tales From The Teachers' Lounge and Daddy Needs a Drink. His debut novel, NICKEL, was called “A humorous, poignant, and formidable debut” by Booklist (starred review).
He has published essays in Newsweek, Details, Salon, Parenting, Creative Nonfiction, Working Mother, and numerous anthologies. He has been a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, The Madeleine Brand Show, On Point, and other national and regional radio programs. Wilder's column, Daddy Needs A Drink, was printed monthly in the Santa Fe Reporter for close to a decade.
An award-winning teacher for over twenty-five years, Wilder has co-taught workshops with Natalie Goldberg and was awarded the inaugural Innovations in Reading Prize by the National Book Foundation. Wilder lives and teaches in Santa Fe.