Artists Archive
V
Anna Vo is a radical educator for 8 years in over 20 countries in Inclusion, Refugee Support, Trauma-Informed Care, and Racial Justice. Editor of an internationally renowned publication for People of Color that has been going for 6 years, and a speaker, artist and musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, Croatia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the States. Anarchist and local festival organizer.
Learn moreCharlotte Vanden Eynde is a contemporary dancer and choreographer, based in Ghent. In 1999, she graduated at P.A.R.T.S., the renowned school for contemporary dance headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Since, she has been creating highly personal choreographies and performances, focusing on the body with a strong sculptural and imaginative sensibility. Her early works revolved around vulnerability, intimacy and femininity. In ‘Lijfstof’ she explored the body as object/matter and in ‘MAP ME’ video images were projected on the body as on a canvas. She pursued her movement research in the solo’s ‘I’m Sorry It’s (Not) A Story’ and ‘Shapeless’, and in various site-specific performances and improvisation solos. Her last work ‘Deceptive Bodies’ displayed an iconography of the theatrical body and was also shown in exhibition spaces. She often collaborates with other choreographers, theatre makers, film makers and musicians. Additionally, she gives advice to other artists and conducts workshops based on her own artistic practice.
Learn moreEdna Vazquez | Photo credit Tania Gómez-Daza
Edna Vázquez is a fearless artist and songwriter whose powerful voice and musical talent transcend the boundaries of language with songs deeply rooted in universal human emotion. She has traveled far and wide spreading her message of light, love and cultural healing.
Learn moreIndira Valey (Portland, OR) is an avant garde multidisciplinary performer and a first generation Latinx Spanish speaker. Her ancient-sounding, resonant voice is a force of nature, and she utilizes looping technology, effects pedals, and a unique palette of instruments to create mesmerizing and memorable live performances that are ever-changing due to her spontaneous improvisational magic. Her debut album Recordar is a bilingual collection of oceanically soothing, powerfully healing songs about memory and finding your own inner power.
Learn moreKurt Vandendriessche is an actor, dancer, performer and scenographer.
He worked for television, the film industry and as an independent stage artist, both as a freelance performer, and in creating work through collaboration.
Together with Charlotte Vanden Eynde he created MAP ME, an intimistic evocation of the cycle of life, which won the choreography award of the SACD and toured extensively through Europe and the United States. With Dolores Bouckaert he conceived several performances and installations, as well as providing the video- and light design and dramaturgical support for her latest piece GALOP. For several productions he joined Troubleyn, the company of Jan Fabre, playing the role of Prometheus in PROMETHEUS: Landscape II a.o. Furthermore, he has worked with Jan Decorte, Emio Greco, and so on. In 2012 he played one of the lead parts in WELCOME HOME, Tom Heene’s debut movie, which was selected for the International Film Festival of Venice. Throughout his career he did puppetry, street theatre, experimental video design and has an overall experience in many fields of the arts, led by a desire to fuse and be influenced by a broad experiential domain.
He invited Sibran Sampers and Jürgen de Blonde in 2017 to join him in a project entitled THE BODY ELECTRIC (referencing Walt Whitman’s I sing the body electric).
The initiative was an attempt to resource his personal experiences both as a spectator, as in being on stage, in need of reduction of context and meaning. Perhaps as a way of liberating the mind from imposing paradigms in order to experiment with shape, matter and definition as the standards of a universal connectedness. Since then they have presented performative happenings, non-voiced audiovisual sensory experiences, that aimed to share the perception of basic phenomenologies, initially starting from simple principles of molecular cooking, later developing to a macro-/microscopic form of land art.
Learn moreMariana Valencia | Photo credit Ian Douglas
Mariana Valencia, (creator/performer) has held residencies at Chez Bushwick (2013), New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013-14), ISSUE Project Room (2015) and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2016-18). Nationally, she has held residencies at Show Box LA and Pieter Pasd (2014) in Los Angeles; and was part of PICA’s 2018 Creative Exchange Lab. Valencia is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists grant recipient (2018), a Jerome Travel and Study Grant fellow (2014-15), a Yellow House Fund of the Tides Foundation grant recipient (2010-13) and a Movement Research GPS/Global Practice Sharing artist (2016/17). Her ethnographic research has taken her to Belize, Mexico and the Balkans and she has performed in works by Jules Gimbrone, Elizabeth Orr, Kate Brandt, AK Burns, Em Rooney, robbinschilds, Kim Brandt, Fia Backstrom and MPA. Valencia is a founding member of the No Total reading group and she has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence (2016-17). She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (2006).
Learn moreMaya Vivas is a multidisciplinary artist working in a variety of mediums, such as ceramic, performance, painting, and installation. Maya has exhibited work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops throughout the United States, including venues and institutions such as The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, Louisiana State University, and Yale. Vivas is also co-founder of Ori Gallery. Whose mission is to redefine "the white cube" through amplifying the voices of Queer and Trans Artists of color, community organizing and mobilization through the arts
Maya is a 2022/3 Golden Spot Residency awardee.
Learn moreMona Vatamanu (Romania) and Florin Tudor (Switzerland) live in Bucharest, Romania, where they have been working together since 2000. Their practice spans film, photography, painting, performance, and installation, and reflects the social upheavals of post-communist Eastern Europe. The duo has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, and has been featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Vatamanu and Tudor have had residencies at Basis Voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht, AIR Vienna, and Project Room at Ludwig Museum in Budapest, among others. They received first prize in the 2006 Fair:Play Video Festival in Berlin. Vatamanu and Tudor are represented by Lombard Fried Projects, New York.
Peripheries
Moscow's Poplar Curse, New York Magazine, April 17, 2011.
Learn moreMx Justin Vivian Bond is a singer, painter, performance artist, and author of the Lambda Literary Award winning memoir TANGO: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels and Susie Says…, a collaboration with Gina Garan. V’s debut CD, Dendrophile, was self-released in 2011 and was followed by Silver Wells in 2012. In 2011 Justin Vivian’s art exhibition The Fall of the House of Whimsy was presented at Participant Inc. in New York City. Mx Bond was nominated for a Tony Award for Kiki and Herb Alive On Broadway in 2007. Other notable theatrical endeavors include starring as Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis in Scott Wittman’s production of Jukebox Jackie: Snatches of Jackie Curtis, originating the role of Herculine Barbin in Kate Bornstein’s groundbreaking play Hidden: A Gender, touring with the performance troupe The Big Art Group and appearing in John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus. Other films include Sunset Stories (2012), Imaginary Heroes (2004), and Fanci’s Persuasion (1995). Mx Bond is a recipient of The Ethyl Eichelberger Award, The Peter Reed Foundation Grant, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award for Performance Art/Theater, an Obie, and a Bessie.
Selected Press
Justin Vivian Bond Preps 'Snow Angel' Show For New York's 54 Below, Curtis M. Wong, Huffington Post, December 7, 2012.
"Justin Bond: 'I think everybody's trans'," Hermione Hoby, The Guardian, June 28, 2011.e
Learn moreBorn in 1970, Philippe Quesne received his education in Visual Arts. For 10 years he designed sets for theater, operas and exhibitions. In 2003, he created the Vivarium Studio Company, and directed his first show, La Démangeaison des ailes, based on the acts of taking off and falling down. Philippe Quesne hunts the marvelous, the tiny, and pushes to the extreme experiences of our daily lives as well as the relationship between mankind and nature. As he did as a child, collecting insects, he now works and studies small communities under his microscope. The scenography is used as an ecosystem in which he immerses his actors into. His shows, such as La Démangeaison des ailes (2003), Des expériences (2004), D’après nature (2006), L’Effet de Serge (2007), La Mélancolie des dragons (2008), Big Bang (2010), Swamp Club (2013), Next Day (2014), compose a repertory that tours all over the world. In addition to his work for the theater, he creates performances and interventions in public spaces or natural sites, and displays his installations in the context of exhibitions. Since January 2014, he has been serving as the co-director of Nanterre-Amandiers, National Dramatic Center. In 2016, he will create Caspar Western Friedrich at Kammerspiele in Munich and Welcome to Caveland! at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels
BIO PAGE IMAGE/S:
La Mélancolie des dragons 1 @ Martin Argyroglo
La Mélancolie des dragons 5 © Pierre Grosbois Learn moreMs. Davis has hosted and curated for 8 years the performative film mega event Rising Stars, Falling Stars at Arsenal Institut für film und Videokunst in Berlin. She has taught her spiky brand of performance art as a guest professor at Lund University-Malmo Art Academy, Sweden, Justus Liebig Universität Gießen, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Harvard, and NYU. Originally from Los Angeles, California, where she never learned to drive a car. She has been living in stylish exile in Berlin since 2005.
Learn moreValeriya Berezhynska spent two decades on basketball courts across eight countries, learning exactly how her body was supposed to move. She has spent the years since relearning that. Born in Ukraine and professionally formed in France, she now lives in Portland where she works in global product by day and immerses in pole dancing by night—exploring the other side of movement.
When she is not performing in spaces that make her nervous, she is sewing her own clothes, tending her plants, and plotting to move to the Netherlands, which is either very brave or a pattern.
Learn morevanessa german is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. The artist’s practice proposes new models for social healing, utilizing creativity and tenderness as vital forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of structural racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, resource extraction, and misogynoir.
A visual storyteller, german utilizes assemblage and mixed media, combining locally found objects to build protective ritualistic structures known as her power figures or tar babies. Modeled on Congolese Nkisi sculptures and drawing on folk art practices, they are embellished with materials including beading, glass, fabric, and sculpted wood, and come into existence at the axis on which Black power, spirituality, mysticism and feminism converge.
Based in Homewood, Pittsburgh, german’s artistic practice is intertwined with and inextricable from her dedicated role in activism and community leadership. In 2011, german founded the Love Front Porch, an arts initiative for the women, children, and families of the local neighborhood that began after she moved her studio practice onto the front steps of her home. Three years later, in 2014, german opened the ARThouse, which combines a community studio, a large garden, an outdoor theatre, and an artist residency.
Upholding artmaking as an act of restorative justice, german confronts and begins to dismantle the emotional and spiritual weight imposed by the multi-generational oppression of African American communities. As a queer Black woman living in the United States, german has described this as a deeply necessary process of adventuring into the wild freedom that the inhabitation of such identities demands. This activist instinct emerges in german’s work to postulate powerful narratives of freedom and love.
german has been awarded the 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, the 2017 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2018 United States Artist Grant and, most recently, the 2018 Don Tyson Prize from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Her work is held in private and public collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the West Virginia University Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Figge Art Museum, Flint Institute of Arts, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, David C. Driskell Center, Snite Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. german’s fine art work has been exhibited widely, most recently at the Figge Art Museum, The Union for Contemporary Art, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Flint Institute of Arts, Mattress Factory, Everson Museum of Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Studio Museum, Ringling Museum of Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Learn moreVanessa Gidden is a former professional basketball player, business executive, entrepreneur, and nonprofit founder whose life’s work is centered on the belief that sport has the power to transform lives far beyond the game. Over a 14-year professional basketball career, she competed throughout Europe and Africa, playing professionally in Turkey, Finland, Romania, Italy, Israel, Spain, Poland, and Angola, while proudly representing the Jamaican National Basketball Team in international competition and gained experience within the WNBA, experiences exposed her to diverse cultures, strengthened her passion for leadership, and inspired a lifelong commitment to helping athletes maximize their impact both on and off the court.
Following her playing career, Vanessa transitioned into global business leadership, where she now serves as a Lead Merchant for one of the world’s leading sports brands. She draws on her experiences as both an athlete and executive to help shape the future of basketball through innovation and global product strategy while bringing a unique perspective on leadership, resilience, and the evolving role of athletes in shaping culture, business, and communities.
Vanessa is the founder of Athlete 4 Athletes, an organization dedicated to empowering athletes throughout every stage of their journey. Through Athlete for Athletes, LLC, she consults with professional athletes on career transitions, leadership development, personal branding, strategic partnerships, and building purpose beyond competition. Through the Athlete 4 Athletes Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, she leads initiatives that connect athletes with opportunities to serve communities through mentorship, humanitarian relief, youth development, and global outreach. She is also the founder of Veez Hoops, a platform that helps to fosters the growth of young athletes.
Whether in the boardroom, on the court, or serving communities around the world, Vanessa is passionate about helping people discover that leadership is rooted in purpose, service, and the courage to create opportunities for others. She believes sport is more than competition—it is a powerful vehicle for building leaders, strengthening communities, and creating lasting change.
Learn moreBorn in Harlem in 1986 to Dominican-Ecuadorian parents, Venus X grew up in Washington Heights and has recently made a name for herself in NYC’s underground music and art scene. She’s been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vibe, ArtForum, Modern Painters, V Magazine, and Fader for her multi-faceted sounds. She performed at various New York Fashion Week after-parties and composed soundtracks for runway shows (earning the title of “Fashion Week’s Most Extreme DJ” from Rolling Stone for her Gerlan Jeans set), scored a performance by K8 Hardy for the Whitney Biennial, and has performed various times at MoMA, the New Museum, and other similar institutions. She has toured with Gang Gang Dance and Theophilus London, starred in music videos for A$AP Rocky, and worked as a researcher and consultant for Shakira.
Selected Press
Venus X: I don't like pretending to be stupid,
Sampling Rap, Salsa, and Al Jazeera, Alex Hawgood, The New York Times, April 18, 2012.
The X Factor: Meet Venus, Fashion Week's Most Extreme DJ, Colleen Nika, Rolling Stone, September 19, 2011.
Learn moreVideotones is a neurodiverse digital media collective that employs homegrown, collaborative editing practices, exploits the hidden potential for accessibility in cheap consumer technologies, and adheres to a vision of filmmaking that privileges improvisational experimentation and nonlinear play over predetermined outcomes to make their idiosyncratic brand of music and video art. Since its inception in 2018, the project has yielded three full-length albums of experimental music as well as countless short video works. In the Videotones universe, authorship is dispersed—each project born out of a process of equal participation and nonhierarchical decision making, resulting in work that is discordant, polyvocal, awkward, hilarious, mysterious, fragmented, joyful, and deeply affecting.
Since 2020, Videotones has been sustained under the auspices of Elbow Room, a 501(c)(3) community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Elbow Room provides art materials and mentorship in painting, drawing, creative writing, sewing, digital media, music, hand tool woodworking, ceramics, and many other forms of artmaking.
Joel Stotesbery is a multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. Over the past decade, he has explored a process of making abstract video diaries he calls Videotones. This process eventually merged with his role as a caregiver in Portland’s intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) community, and was incorporated into an ongoing collaboration with a group of neurodivergent artists. Today, Videotones is a loose collective of artists working out of Elbow Room, a nonprofit art studio and gallery space Joel helped found in 2020 that is dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They meet online and in-person to create hybrid works encompassing abstract video collage, narrative shorts, animation, electronic music, and sound design.
Andy Louie is a multimedia artist from Portland, OR. He uses digital drawing software and traditional drawing materials to capture what he sees in the world. Recurring subjects include people, animals, and environments. His videos, animations, and digital art have been exhibited at Gallery 114, Portland; Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College, Portland; 1122, Portland; and the Hollywood Theatre at Portland International Airport, Oregon. He has been a central collaborator in Videotones since its inception in 2018.
Endale Abraham's off-kilter, often surreal drawings are distinguished by their soft touch, attention to detail, sinuous line work, and hybrid subjects. He has been honing his rendering skills for many years, and has developed a talent for capturing wonky and humorous likenesses, which he often endows with farcical or mocking handwritten names. Boldly taking on new subject matter with focused goofiness and versatility, Endale captures perspective space, charming details, and striking contours with his signature linework and style. In his work with the Videotones collective, Endale’s curiosity and quietly absurdist humor are able to shine. His meandering curiosity and quietly absurdist humor have become vital ingredients of Videotone’s leftfield digital stew.
Mohamed Omar was born in Somalia and moved to Portland, OR when he was five years old. By his own account, his work is rooted in a deep concern for color:
“I get inspired by the colors of the sky, bright sunsets, primary colors, bold colors. I really wanted to use certain greens, so I painted the Statue of Liberty. I think of colors and different shapes, sometimes words. When I’m out in the community, I feel OK and special and I see different things like cars, trucks, and bricks. When I see paintings like yellow, black, red, and blue, and red cars, I choose those colors. Or the sunset. And I like different colors.”
While his early paintings exhibit a meditative simplicity, over time he has been drawn increasingly towards figurative gestures and has developed a playful, expressive style all his own. In his loosely rendered scenes, quilt-like images of cartoon characters and jungle cats are cobbled together from discrete blocks of color. He augments his patchwork scenery with words whose rainbow lettering resembles train car graffiti and refrigerator magnets in equal measure. Like the bright sunsets he reveres, his works invite you to bask in their warmth. In addition to his work as a visual artist, Mo is a member of the audiovisual collective Videotones and records music under the name M. Omar. His debut album Mo’s World was released on cassette via Cityland Tapes in 2023.
Chanel Conklin has a deep interest in pop culture and current events that she merges with images from her personal life, altering and distorting them through the use of digital collage, sculpture, and video. In her work, figures from current events, horror movies, pop music, the New Testament, and her own life are recast in an epic and surreal struggle between the forces of good and evil. In 2023, she published Love Chanel, a full color art book showcasing her prolific collage practice. Chanel is a longstanding collaborator in Videotones, where her horror-inflected provocations add a lurid edge to every project she works on.
Jamond Williams brings his works on canvas and paper to life with fluid lines and breathtaking color palettes. Portals, faces, and ghostlike creatures that collide, layer, and intersect are recurring images in his work. Dots, grids, and squiggles create visual staccatos that bounce along his landscapes and bring an astoundingly bright rhythm to his scenes. He regularly uses familiar line patterns and repetition to achieve his effects, but just when you think you have become acquainted with his aesthetic, he mystifies you with a new and brilliant cacophony of vibrant color, composition, and character. Jamond is often compelled to draw windows, covering entire canvases with layers of portals, each providing a fractured glimpse into one of his surreal and magical worlds. In addition to his 2D work, Jamond has made forays into video, performance, sound design, and music as a member of the Videotones collective. His first album, Flat on the Sides, was released on cassette by Cityland Tapes in 2023. Learn moreVishal Jugdeo (b. 1979, Regina, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist. His work across video, installation, performance, sculpture, and text experiments with narrative, blurring fiction and truth. His artworks emerge from what he considers archive oceans, amassments of intimately-gathered video and sound, often captured with interlocutors he meets during his research in places like Guyana and India, sites of his familial lineage, and Los Angeles, where he lives.
Jugdeo's recent experiments with collaborators working with game-engine software (Miljohn Ruperto, chris velez, and cielo saucedo) utilize the technology to imagine an otherwise, in a moment of escalating crisis. Jugdeo is Assistant Professor of New Genres in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Find more information here.
Learn moreAlthough the Magnolia Housing Projects have long been demolished, a light post still stands at the corner where youth like Vockah Redu (Javocca Davis) gathered to rap and create beats. The light post marks one of the birthplaces of Bounce music, a genre of rap specific to New Orleans that has invigorated crowds throughout the South. Vockah Redu and the Cru animate the stage with their dynamic revival of dance, music, and art from the street corner to the club. More than your typical hip-hop act, this theatrical performance sets the stage for a sweaty, hands-down, booty-up good time, transforming any party, bar, or dance floor in your neighborhood.
The original Cru formed in 1997 and was composed of the Ave Girls: Joi Jadah (Joi Denise Sessions), Teedy Booh (Tasha Marie Butler), Ninny (Shanita Davis), and Grahonda Pooh (Madonna Melissa Oliver). Currently the Cru is composed of Shortee Whop (Glendell Weir), Energyzah (Clarence Mosley), and Taveion Rodeo (Donte Brown). The Cru dominates the stage with electrifying choreography, costumes, skits, and superb street style.
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