Visual Arts

Việt Lê

Artist, Writer, Chair of Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator whose work over the past twenty years examines spiritualities, trauma, representation and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas, as well as intersectional coalitions. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, June 2021). Arguing for an ethics of return, this book is a political-...

Maggie Lawson

ARC Fellow, Artist, and Chef

Maggie Lawson returned to the place four generations of her ancestors called home, Cincinnati, Ohio, in January 2020. She was awarded my MFA from the University of California Berkeley in May 2018. Lawson's artistic practice emerges in parallel with a focused awareness of the historical and sociological context in which she works. As many of her identities lie mostly inside of the dominant culture, Lawson uses her insider status to uncover the cultural markers of whiteness that continue to make themselves known and evade her at the same time....

Tony Labat

Multimedia Artist, Installation Artist, and Former Professor in the Department of Performance and Video at the San Francisco Art Institute

With ironic wit and incisive social critique, Tony Labat's provocative, nonlinear narrative collages confront cultural identity, loss and displacement. Adopting an irreverent, often subversive stance, Labat represents the experience of difference and marginalization from the mediated position of the "outsider," and deconstructs the codes by which the mass media reinforces cultural mythologies. In his idiosyncratic pastiches of performance, appropriated imagery and unexpected visual metaphors, Labat uses disguise, theatricality, storytelling and role-playing as narrative...

Komar & Melamid

Conceptualist Artist Duo

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are Moscow-born artists who emigrated to Israel in 1977 and then to New York in 1978. The two artists first collaborated on a joint exhibition entitled Retrospectivismin Moscow in 1967, and from 1972 started signing all their works with both names, regardless of whether they were made collaboratively. They continued to collaborate until the early 2000s, referring to their work as ‘not just an artist, but a movement’. Komar and Melamid are the founders of Sots-art (socialist art), a critical, nonconformist, conceptual form of pop...

Ava Koohbor

Poet, Visual, and Sound Artist

Ava Koohbor is a native Farsi-speaker poet and visual artist who now lives in San Francisco. Many of her poems have been appeared in various magazines. Her chapbook, Triangle Squared, a fictional conversation among John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Morton Feldman, has been published by Bootstrap Press. She’s now working with poet Patrick James Dunagan on translating Hafez’s poems from Farsi into English. She appreciates whatever art offers to her in any and all forms. She believes that each artist is a medium to transfer the world of possibilities...

Karen Kipphoff

Artist and Professor at the Norwegian Theatre Academy

Karen Kipphoff has been employed as a professor at Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA) at Østfold University College since 2012 (60% position). From 1999 to 2011, she held the position of professor in visual arts with a focus on installation and performance (100%) at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway. Kipphoff is currently the program coordinator for Master in Scenography at the NTA (HiØ).

Kipphoff is an artist educated in visual arts, cabinetmaking, puppetry, and theatre pedagogy. Karen worked at the Hamburger Kammerspiele, Schaubühne am Lehniner...

Grant Kester

Professor of Art History at UC San Diego

Grant Kester is Professor of Art History and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism (field-journal.com). Kester is one of the leading figures in the critical dialogue around socially engaged art practice. His publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of...

Asma Kazmi

ARC Fellow, Artist, and Associate Professor of Art at UC Berkeley

Asma Kazmi is a research-based artist who combines virtual and material objects to explore simultaneity—a tug of more than one time and place. Her work involves long term engagement with cities, architecture, plants, animals, stones, and other matter to locate vestiges of relations forged by the legacies of colonialism and post-colonial contexts.

Combining visual and textual detritus from western and non-western historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixing them with her own fabulations, Kazmi tells intertwining stories...

Leandro Katz

Writer, Visual Artist and Filmmaker

Born in Argentina, Leandro Katz arrived in New York in 1965. As a poet, translator, Conceptual artist, and professor, Katz participated in experimental literary movements in Buenos Aires, Quito, Lima, and New York. Coming to the end of a winding path through South and Central America, in New York he found a thriving community of avant-garde artists and activists. He made the city his home for over 40 years.

During his travels in the summer of 1963, Katz had encountered the monumental ruins of the ancient Maya in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. The...

Erin Johnson

ARC Fellow, Visual Artist, and Filmmaker

Erin Johnson is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her immersive installations and short films explore notions of collectivity, dissent, and queer identity. In her shape-shifting videos, constellations of artists, biologists, and film extras address the imbrication of science and nationalism.

Johnson is a current Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY) and a Winter Resident at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY).

Johnson received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013, attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019, and has...