State: Wisconsin

Bio: Mars (they/them) is an Artist, Master Naturalist, Herbalist, Educator, and Land Steward. As an artist and community organizer based in Milwaukee, they have served as a co-organizer for the Rural Urban FLOW network, a chief land steward at Nearby Nature MKE, a resident and collaborating artist at Wormfarm Institute, and a land steward at Urban Ecology Center and Mount Mary University. Through interdisciplinary art of fiber and eco-mixed media, they explore, highlight, and reflect the phenology of Nature and the human experience with the intent to grow, inspire, and educate

Project: Connecting Place, Plants, People

State: llinois

Bio: Aza (they/she/he/this coalescence) coalesces in performance, psycho-social health, and emergent arts practices. Co-conspiring with Amaya Torres at {/}() {/}∆‡!(){/} (No Nation Tangential Unspace Art Lab), this coalescence soils in dreamscapes, ancestral juke joints, chaturbate masturbation web temples, loose-tooth tanks, and the Heartspace. She tends towards the limits of words while Palestinians and unnamed others persist against dehumanization. The collaborative film screening series, Smudge Smudge Cinema Project is a sometimes effort. Metabolization seems to be what they appear to do, lately.

Project: {/}() {/}∆‡!(){/} is an artist-run disorganization that serves as an artistic platform for experimental cultural production through performance art, language, image making, sound, presentations, screenings, workshops and its Artist-in-residence program founded in 2015. Since its inception by Amaya Torres in 2010, {/}() {/}∆‡!(){} has fostered a local and global arts network while contributing to the accessible exchange of ideas across borders. {/}() {/}∆‡!(){/} is deeply concerned with critical concepts of origin, the affirmation of agency, intimacy, spontaneity and collaboration in how art is created, discussed and experienced. {/}() {/}∆‡!(){} has been a welcoming and supporting space for BIPOC, trans, queer, working-class, immigrant artists and exiled artists, enabling a space in which anyone and everyone can present new ideas, experiment with their practice. All of this has been possible because {/}(/) {/}∆‡!(){} has retained total autonomy during its twelve year history. (Text Credit: Amaya Torres).

State: Missouri

Bio: Cesar Lopez (he/him) emigrated to the United States at a young age, and due to the DACA program is able to work and stay in the US. In the sculptures, he keeps the memory of the motherland alive. Various materials, places and structures inform the sculpture that I design, fabricate and construct. The work is draws from a deep well to create surrogates for an internal state. He received his Bachelors of Fine Art from the Kansas City Art Institute. He has exhibited at Gallery Bogart, Kansas City. The Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City. MDW Fair at Mana Contemporary, Chicago. The Front, New Orleans. Galleria Venenoise, Mexico City, Mexico, Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo.

Project: United Colors (formerly Curiouser KC) is a contemporary art gallery in Kansas City. The program presents a diversity of voices and mediums, the exhibition schedule resembles that of a kunsthalle. Allowing for longer shows and make opportunity for programing to engage the public.

State: Michigan

Bios: Cyrah Dardas (they/she) is a Queer, eco-feminist artist and care worker living in Detroit /Waawiyaatanong, Anishinaabe territory. Cyrah uses her art practice as a tool in remembering the lost relationships between humans and non-human beings because of the extractive nature of capitalism by regulating and healing our collective body to restore interdependency. Their work is informed by their experiences in childcare, gardening, as a member of an artist cooperative, Portal For and through their work with natural fibers, earth pigments, and botanical inks. Their practice is deeply rooted in ritualized art making, using the process as well as the work itself as a tool for grief composition, and collective healing.

Maya Davis is from Lansing, Michigan, currently living and working in Detroit, MI. Through her work she interrogates the ideas of maintenance and care for and of the body through the abstract concept and materiality of skin and protective layers, discussing how one cares, harms, heals, and maintains. With a focus on bio-materials and textiles, Davis has a focus on a series of unconventional portraits, through the concept of sustainability of practice, lifestyle, and material. These portraits each portray a different embodiment of skin as armor for what lies inside. Studying in the College for Creative Studies Fine Arts and Education programs, Maya has exhibited works at Holding House (Detroit, MI), U245 (Detroit, MI), Firecracker Foundation (Lansing, MI), been published by Anhelo Anhelo Press (Detroit, MI), and worked in education and programming at The Studio Museum (Harlem, NY), Wasserman Projects (Detroit, MI), CCS galleries (Detroit, MI), Wing Lake Developmental Center (Detroit, MI), and Project Art USA (Detroit, MI) among others.

Project: Our Craft of Care is a curatorial project uplifting artists whose practices include restorative and regenerative art making, care work and ritual, Portal For: is a women/ non-binary-led creative co-op and workspace centered around deep, long-term community partnerships that offers space to incubate ideas, prototype processes and gather resources.

State: Indiana

Bio: LaShawnda Crowe Storm (she/her) is a mixed media and community-based artist, activist, community builder and occasionally an urban farmer. Whether making artwork or sowing seeds, she uses her creative power as a vehicle for dialogue around topics such as racial and gender violence, social change and justice. At the core of her practice is a desire to create community; any community in which the process of making art creates a space for difficult discussions with an eye towards community healing.

Crowe Storm has received numerous awards for art and community activism including but not limited to: ArtPlace America National Creative Placemaking Award ($200K), DeHaan Artists of Distinction Award, Creative Renewal Award (2011 and 2022), CICF Artist Ambassador Grant, and a three-time winner of the Puffin Foundation Award. She received an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has received training and certification in a variety of community-based dialogue methodologies, racial justice and community development processes.

Project: As a nonprofit art and design organization, Big Car Collaborative utilizes tools of culture and creativity to build community and social cohesion — helping connect people as a way to boost quality of life. Formed in 2004 and based in Indianapolis, Indiana USA, Big Car also works in other communities and collaborates with artists from around the world. Big Car is a creative community builder working to boost livability from an engagement-based arts perspective.

State: Iowa

Bio: Cameron Gray (he/him) is a Birmingham-born artist whose work focuses on Blackness in America. He uses his work to help him decipher his own understanding of self. He believes that Blackness is a universal force. He tries to reveal a small part of its glory through every work he creates. Through his artistic and social practice, he hopes to be a reminder to people of how we got here, with the intention to spark inspiration in Black Futures. Grounded in multimedia practice and employing a community-based focus, Gray’s artwork seeks to raise social consciousness by uniting thinking and making. His current body of work considers basketball as a cultural phenomenon and an expression of lyricism, beauty, and joy. In 2020, Gray founded the Buxton Initiative, an organization that centers Blackness in the realms of art, music, literature, and film. In 2021, he was the recipient of an Iowa American Rescue Plan grant and an Iowa Arts and Culture Resilience Grant. Using these awards, Gray conceived and received permission to installation permanent sculpture in a local Ames, Iowa park. This sculpture, “Black’d Out Books,” functions not only as an artwork but as a Little Free Library featuring books by Black authors, a first in the city’s history.

Project: The Buxton Initiative is an organization that centers Blackness in the realms of art, music, literature, and film.The goal is to bring art and media to underrepresented community in hopes of increasing the quality life to these communities.

State: Minnesota

Bio: Onishona (she/they) is a black, indigenous, trans artist from Minnesota. Her life and artistic practice has been shaped, but not defined, by their experience. Onishona was unhoused for twelve years and imprisoned for four years, dealing with prison violence, and lost a family member to police brutality. Now, they work in harm reduction and do street outreach six days a week. She builds yurts for the unhoused population in Minnesota.

Project: Yurts and Sweatshirts