Martin Krafft uses video, photography, social practice, sculpture and writing to explore boundaries of “otherness.” His work pushes for a democratization of philosophy, sharing reflections from people whose voices are not often heard in the public sphere. He has worked in a Catholic Worker house serving the unhoused and Death Row inmates, as an inner city teacher’s aid, on a ranch with a loving family of conspiracy theorists, and as an alternative preschool teacher, among other jobs. His feature-length documentary, “Ain’t Got Time to Die,” has won awards at film festivals around the world. He currently runs an artist residency, Red Rock Rabbit Ranch, in Schwenksville, PA. He also has roots in Owings, MD; Atlanta, GA; Tucson, AZ; Missoula, MT; Rochester, NY; and Berlin, Germany.

Donald Depuydt s a printmaker living in Northern Virginia. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Mankato State University, Mankato, MN.  Depuydt earned his Master of Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, with a concentration in printmaking. Depuydt is an award winning artist whose work has been exhibited nationally.  Since 1992, Donald Depuydt has been a Professor of Fine Art at Northern Virginia Community College, Loudoun Campus.

Alexander D’Agostino is an interdisciplinary artist and independent researcher based in Baltimore, Maryland. Since graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009 with a BFA in painting, D’Agostino has been reclaiming and reimagining queer histories through visual art, performance, and installation. His work combines archival material from queer histories with myth-making and ritual, creating space to honor past generations and posthumously liberate them. He describes his process as embodying research and being “possessed” by the feelings and stories he uncovers, turning historical marginalization into acts of reclamation and artistic transformation.

I am a multi-media visual and performance artist. The themes I work with include minor obsessions, the bizarre landscape, self-realization, and social justice. I often integrate storytelling into my work through text and spoken word. I hold a BFA in Painting and an MFA in Performance Art, both from Arizona State University.

I have had solo exhibitions throughout the U.S. including at The Cultural Center of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Glazer Children’s Museum in Tampa, Florida. My first solo exhibition, “The Middle of Nowhere”, which consists of 32 B&W photographic prints depicting primarily arctic landscapes, toured 7 U.S. exhibition venues and was then acquired in its entirety by the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California. My follow-up exhibition “Floating Blue”, which features arctic icebergs photographed during the late evening light sometimes called “The Blue Hour”, debuted at the 10th Annual Songzhuang Art Festival at the Czech China Contemporary Museum in Beijing, China, in the fall of 2017, and toured 16 U.S. cities through 2023.

In the summer of 2021, in conjunction with the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, The Cultural Center of Cape Cod invited me to create and exhibit a short film titled “A Final Elegant Gesture” that reflects on that day from my street-level vantage point beneath the Twin Towers, and the unusual and beautiful ramifications that ensued through recurring and evolving dreams over the months that followed. The film later won Best International Experimental Short Film at the Dreamers of Dreams Film Festival, London, England.

In the fall of 2021, The Oakland International Film Festival, Oakland, California, premiered my short film, “Out My Window”, which explores in a unique and beautiful way some of the ramifications that ensued as a result of the protests and uprising following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. The film was also included in the North Dakota Human Rights Film Festival where it screened at the historic Fargo Theatre in Fargo, North Dakota, and then later won Best Monologue Film in the Monologues & Poetry International Film Fest, Vallejo, CA.

I am currently promoting my new solo film and performance exhibition “Tales of Terrible Beauty”.

I live in New York City.

As an aerial photographer piloting my own small airplane throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region, I seek to create the impressions of paintings from the altered landscapes of coal mining and quarried areas, as well as the natural, primitive beauty of the lower Eastern Shore coastal zones. Often in these places I find anthropomorphic figures and spiritual symbols and imagery which inform the narratives of my photographs. My aerial photographs came to embody what I termed “Third Spaces”, between the abstract and the representational, and which was the title of my solo exhibition at the Creative Alliance.

In 2023 I discovered the island of Cuba and began making underwater photographs while snorkeling and scuba diving. The undersea realms hold a fantastic visual world of shapes, forms and textures which are both similar to and extraordinarily different to the terrestrial world. I have returned to Cuba many times to explore and learn about the coral reefs and marine life. As the language of my experiences in Cuba is Spanish, I use the term “fotografía submarina” to define my work, and have exhibited them as a series entitled “Coral Gardens of Cuba”.

In both my aerial and underwater photography I approach my subjects primarily as an artist. But my work has also become a process of research about the history, culture, geography and environmental issues of the Pennsylvania Coal Region, as well as the beauty and diversity of coral reef ecosystems, and the importance of their preservation.

Julia Justo (b. 1963) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Argentina of Indigenous-Italian ancestry. She currently makes her home in New York.

She works across mixed media, textiles and social practice.

She has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad including Asheville Art Museum, Hunterdon Art Museum, Smack Mellon, Bric Media, WhiteBox, American Folk Art Museum and Museo de Buenos Aires.

She has been granted numerous awards and residencies including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant, LMCC Grant, Su-Casa Artist-in-Residence, Trestle Gallery residency, SVA Art Residency, Creative Capital Taller artist, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant among others.

Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, News NY1 and Memoir Magazine among others.

Dulce Pinzón was born in Mexico City in 1974. She attended the Universidad de Las Americas in Puebla, Mexico where she studied Mass Media Communications and earned a MFA in photography from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In 1995 she moved to New York where she studied at The International Center of Photography. As a young Mexican artist living in the United States, Dulce soon found new inspiration for her photography in feelings of nostalgia, questions of identity, and political and cultural frustrations.

Pinzón’s work has been exhibited internationally including group and solo shows in Mexico, the United States, Australia, Argentina, and throughout Europe. Her images have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian UK, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and others.In 2001 one of her images was used for the cover of a reprinting of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Pinzón has received various grants including the prestigious Jovenes Creadores Grant in 2002 and a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship grant in photography. “The Real Story of the Superheroes” series was recognized with an Honorable Mention in the Santa Fe Project Competition in 2006. Pinzón currently resides in Brooklyn.

I am a filmmaker and performer named one of Brooklyn Magazine‘s Top 50 Most Fascinating People. Out of love and masochism, I regularly collaborate with Aaron Gold. Find my films and videos on YouTube @StoddardSays and YouTube @DontMindTheShow.

​In a past life, I wrote for books and magazines, so I’m damn good with words. I also have a background in visual art, which informs my eye as a director. Kickstaring my career as the founder of Quail Bell Magazine bagged me awards, friendships, and life lessons I’ll never forget. These days, I’m focused on making movies and TV through Quail Bell Press & Productions. I’m also interested in on-screen opportunities with fabulous clients.

I make anything that I can until I can’t anymore.
I try to make things that delight me, and hopefully they sometimes delight others too.
I also love to make awful things that are sometimes somehow beautiful.
Sometimes they’re just awful though and delight nobody.
I like to learn new things but also get better at old things.
I feel it is important to practice looking closely, critically, but also joyfully; to treat sight as you would listen to music or learn an instrument.

In an attempt to learn to see better, I earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in InterMedia and Digital Arts and a BFA from Radford University. Originally from and still missing the Appalachian Mountains, I can now be found in or around Baltimore, Maryland and rather like it here.

Mary McCoy is an environmental artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work includes both indoor and outdoor installations, sculpture, artist’s books, drawing, and painting, often with the inclusion of text and with an emphasis on found natural materials. Her solo work and collaborations with Howard McCoy have been exhibited in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand, notably at Adkins Arboretum, Ridgely, MD; Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD; Loyola College, Baltimore, MD; Cardigan Heritage Center, Cardigan, Wales; Spirit Square Arts Center, Charlotte, NC; C.A.G.E., Cincinnati, OH; Brody’s Gallery, Washington, DC; Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY; Gallery 10, Ltd., Washington, DC; and the International Sculpture Conference, Dublin, Ireland.

Her writings have been published in Orion Magazine’s Place Where You Live, Gargoyle Magazine, From Whispers to Roars, Bay to Ocean 2021 and 2022, Pen in Hand, and Salisbury University Art Galleries Here/Not Here–Art and Poetry of Place. Her artist’s books include four printed books, My Covert Home, The Turning Year, Iceland and Tree Tales, and numerous handmade artist’s books. She is a former art critic for The Washington Post, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, American Craft, and The Washington Review and currently writes for The Chestertown Spy and The Talbot Spy. She is the recipient of a 2022 Independent Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Maryland State Arts Council.

I believe that art-making draws creative energy from unconscious processes.  As an abstract painter I am interested in exploring the use of paint, fabrics, and other materials with differing textures and light-reflecting qualities to capture the sometimes fleeting, visual and mental images that people experience as well as their feelings and emotional struggles.  Color and texture are central aspects of my work.  While I am especially drawn to fabrics like satin that reflect light and velvet that absorbs it, their interaction with traditional art mediums such as oil paint and oil pastels as well as the new polymer mediums and industrial products such as cement and sandpaper offer a rich field for investigation.

For several years my mixed media pieces have centered around images of landscape and water.  Sometimes these images are fragmentary, such as light shining on water; sometimes they bring to mind an actual landscape though no such place exists.  More recently my mixed media pieces have dealt with issues of mortality, war, security and insecurity. Both my earlier work and my current pieces are often multi-layered, for example, cement covered  fully or partially by fabric, then covered by paint and charcoal.  As I work the surface of a piece with various media, I often de-construct and re-construct it by tearing, sanding, and re-working it so that underlying layers can be uncovered, almost in an archeological sense.  My working process is both rough and delicate. Serendipity plays an important role, so that discovery is a constant ingredient of working. As hidden marks and images emerge and are built on, I try to use them to express a range of emotions and to generate a sense of light, place, object, and environment.

Andrew Flanders is a sculptor whose works trasnsition between object, furniture, installation to explore the deliriously masculine, and idiosyncracies within craft and trade psychoses.  He received his BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), studied woodworking at Craft Schools such as Arrowmont School of Crafts and Penland School of Crafts, attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the National Youngarts Foundation in Paris, France.

Andrew has exhibited in numerous locations in Maryland, Texas, and other national galleries such as  Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, MD, National Youngarts Foundation in Miami, Fl,  Delaplaine Arts Center in Frederick, MD, Penland School of Crafts in Penland, NC and many local Baltimore galleries and institutions such as Terrault Contemporary, the Creative Alliance, and Maryland Art Place.

Gaylia Wagner is a mutlimedia visual artist from the mid-Atlantic region, currently living in Washington, DC. She holds a BFA in Product Design with a minor in Art History from Parsons School of Design, and a BA in English Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University.

She recently completed a series of insectoid puppets for the Expressionist opera Red Flag of the Future, currently in production. In 2022, Gaylia participated in her first two-person exhibition, and her piece Warp + Weft (west window, February 2020) was purchased by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for its Art Bank Collection.

Susan Hensel’s new innovative artwork, which blends commercial embroidery processes with sculptural concerns, is gaining attention and awards. Her knowledge of materials makes it possible for her to create small to large-scale hard-edge sculpture from soft fabrics that paradoxically keep their crisp form with minimal armatures. Her knowledge of the physics of color allows her to create shape-shifting displays employing the special reflective characteristics of embroidery thread with the goal to create opportunities to experience awe, rest and renewal in daily life.

Hensel’s artwork is known and collected nationwide, represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute with major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts , University of Washington, Baylor University and University of Colorado at Boulder. Archives pertaining to her artists books are available for study at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle.

Susan Hensel received her BFA from University of Michigan with a double major in painting and sculpture and a concentration in ceramics. She has a history, to date, of more than 300 exhibitions, 35 of them solo, twenty + garnering awards. In the coming two years, Susan has solo and 2-person and group exhibitions scheduled in Ellicot, MD; Bloomington, MN ; Hopkins, MN; Duluth, MN and the Garrett Museum of Art, Garrett, Indiana. In recent years Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Art to Change the World and Ragdale Foundation.

Hensel’s curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery in Minneapolis. The Susan Hensel Gallery continues on Artsy.net as an online project promoting Midwest artists with a particular interest in materiality. Hensel has curated over one hundred exhibitions, and supporting events, of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.

I use high and low-quality art historical, archaeological, and personal references to understand the desire to connect ourselves to the ultimately unreachable past and unknowable future. Peripheral influences like ancient graffiti, universal collapse theories, and common mourning practices all elicit the allure of half-knowing something while feeling intimately close to it. I am interested in the impulses, nervousness, and other guiding forces that cause us to seek relationships to history, and how they inform our present-day interactions.

Membranes that divide types of transition states appear frequently in the work, to speak about time, death, and the “ushers” that move freely between states. Sea birds act as one kind of usher or harbinger, due mainly to their Jurassic heritage. Layered textures and other devices of obstruction slow the act of viewing and induce cathartic sensations of digging, burying and magnifying. Material shifts, symbols and looping of imagery are used to create visual formats for describing time as organized within personal relationships. The work takes form in fiber, installation, and sculpture, which often involve drawing, painting, and sometimes audio.

I was born and raised, through my teenaged years, in New Orleans. It framed my vision of life. It was and continues to be a place of extremes: beauty and decay, religion and ritual, custom and iconoclasm. From that experience, I acquired an excitement for visual matters: colors, forms and even artifacts. Having lived on the border with Mexico for ten years changed my view of contemporary culture and our collective social responsibility.

At the time of the “9/11” bombing of the Twin Towers, NYC, my sojourn as a professor at the University of Texas in Brownsville on the Mexican border altered my aesthetic. Viewing the ambient drug wars, the desperation of immigrants, and the collapsing Mexican democracy due to endemic political corruption and perceiving the curious lack of commitment for dialogue to offer solutions for the growing racial division, wealth inequality, and environmental decline in my own nation, I changed my insular focus of my art to embrace more topical issues.

I taught art in four colleges and universities in various parts of the US for thirty-three years. During that time, I also aggressively pursued the development and exhibition of sculptures designed and produced at those venues.

Caitlin Gill (Caidy Lynn)  is a mixed-media artist living in Baltimore, Maryland. She has a B. A.  in Drawing and Painting from Towson University and an MFA in Curatorial Practice and Art Criticism from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Gill uses printmaking, sculpting, drawing, painting, collage, and fiber to create artwork that explores ideas of identity, femininity, and domesticity.

Tali Margolin is a visual artist working in acrylic, oil and mixed-media. She uses non-traditional materials, bringing a wide range of associations and emotional and psychological moods. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York and a Masters in Art from Lehman College, New York City. Margolin has had solo exhibitions and participated in group shows across New York and the United States.

Meghan Wilbar received her BA from Knox College and her MFA from the New York Studio School. The Studio School was founded on principles of abstract expressionism and gave her the opportunity to work with renowned New York painters. She has been awarded several fellowships for artist residencies and has her work in private and public collections. She currently lives and works in Denver.

Kieun is a ground breaking, creative artist and performer. Featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Kieun’s work has been highly acclaimed as being truly unique and innovative, one of the very few artists today with a tremendous passion and gift for fusing artistic expression with technology.

Her work displays interactive art, installation, physical computing, soft circuits, vital signs and wearable technology. This creativity also demonstrates self-portraits, emotional expressions, and the human connection. She aims to focus on interactive healing effects between people on a variety of projects. Kieun believes her art is expressed in everything she touches. As her portfolio illustrates, her passion for art is interdisciplinary and expressed across diverse media.

She experimented and presented in various forms of multimedia installation. Her representative project, Revealuxion was invited to exhibit at Artrooms Fair Roma 2019, Roma, Italy, School 33 Art Center 2018, MD, USA., Space in Art New York Gallery 2016, NY, USA., Governors Island Art Fair 2016, NY, USA., and World Maker Faire 2016, NY, USA..

Kieun received Master of Fine Arts degree in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in 2015. She is currently working as a New York based new media artist and a visual designer.