Artist Bios

Wilder Alison (b. 1986, Burlington, VT) is an interdisciplinary artist who creates paintings by dyeing and sewing together large pieces of wool. Driven by the limitations of language to accommodate and build analog forms for transness, queerness, and self-embodiment, Alison’s works build, reassemble, and create vibrant visual constructions. Often presented individually, in diptychs, or triptychs, the work extends the notion of the medium of painting, and questions the idea of what a painting can or should consist of.

Wilder has been included in recent institutional exhibitions at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; DAS MINSK Kunsthaus, Potsdam, Germany; and CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Gaa, Cologne, Provincetown, MA, and New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; Lateral Roma, Rome; KAJE, Brooklyn, NY; and FIERMAN, New York, NY. Alison has also exhibited work with Gordon Robichaux at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY among others. Alison was a fellow at Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany and the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA twice, and has also participated in residencies at the Womens Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY; Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, France; Joya Artist Residency, Velez Blanco, Spain;  Clay Break, Fayetteville, AR; Triangle France-Astérides, Marseille, France; Lighthouse Works,  Fisher’s Island, NY; Fire Island Artist Residency, Fire Island, NY; and Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY. Alison’s work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic and The New Yorker. Alison graduated with a BA and an MFA in Painting from Bard College, and now lives and works between New York, Vermont, and France. Alison performed with Discoteca Flaming Star in activation of Rita MacBride's Arena at Dia: Beacon, Oct 2024. Alison's work is also the subject of a forthcoming book to be published by KAJE.

Yevgeniya Baras (b. Syzran, former Soviet Union) is an artist based in New York. She has exhibited her work at the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY); White Columns (New York, NY); The Landing Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); SOCO Gallery (Charlotte, NC); Nicelle Beauchene (New York, NY); Reyes Finn Gallery (Detroit, MI); Gavin Brown Enterprise (New York, NY); Inman Gallery (Houston, TX); Mother Gallery (New York, NY); Sperone Westwater Gallery (New York, NY); Thomas Erben Gallery (New York, NY); The Pit (Los Angeles, CA); as well as internationally including NBB Gallery (Berlin, Germany); Julien Cadet Gallery (Paris, France); Station Gallery (Sydney, Australia). She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA). Baras' paintings take shape through a process of layering and accumulation, combining oil media with various found and unconventional materials. The resulting objects hover between painting and sculptural relief, with layers that frequently extend onto the sides and supports of the canvas, refusing any definitive boundary. Within these stratified compositions, Baras creates symbolic topographies which address ideas of language, migration, and translation. The material richness of the work serves to generate abstractions that are encoded and deeply personal.

Yevgeniya is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant in 2023 and 2018. Baras was named Senior Fulbright Scholar for 2022/2023. She was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2021 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Baras was selected for the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018 and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014, she was named a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, LA Times, ArtForum, The New York Review of Books, and Art in America, amongst others. Baras co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side (2010-2018). She holds a BA in Psychology and Fine Arts and an MA in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007).

Kerry Cottle is a visual artist based in Sacramento, California. She makes paintings and relief-style works synthesizing the mediums of paper pulp, bioplastics, and pigment. Her work is a process and material-based exploration of cultural inheritance and the interstitial space between destabilization and harmonization. She was born in Houston, TX and received a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Studio Art from California State University, Sacramento, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of New Mexico in 2022. She teaches Painting and Drawing at California State University, Sacramento and Folsom Lake College.

Azadeh Elmizadeh (b. 1987, Tehran, IR; lives and works in Toronto, CA) received an MFA from the University of Guelph (2020), a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from OCAD (2016) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication and Graphic Design at Tehran University (2010). Elmizadeh has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at Tara Downs (New York, US); Frieze London (UK); Sea View (Los Angeles, US); Tube Culture Hall (Milan, IT) curated by Domenico de Chirico; the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, AB) and Franz Kaka (Toronto, CA). Her work has been exhibited internationally at island, Europa and Harkawik (all New York, US); Public Gallery (London, UK); Nanaimo Art Gallery; Winnipeg Art Gallery; Kamloops Art Gallery; The Blackwood (Mississauga, CA). Elmizadeh’s work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Blackflash Magazine, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, the Editorial and Elle Canada and she was the 2020 recipient of the Joseph Plaskett Award in painting.

Yaxkin Fuentes’ paintings represent the space and time known as hypnagogia, the bridge (or purgatory) between the waking world and the ether of dreams and memories. But these dreams are not mere fantastical worlds where imaginations run wild. Dreams imitate life, and in turn memories imitate dreams. With every passing recall, an ever-so-slightly different lens is added, a new detail is lost or added, rendering the original source material obsolete. In  this state of permanent hypnagogia captured forever on oil and canvas we can take a peek into what memories mean to oneself. 

Linda Geary is a California-based artist whose work merges abstraction with material processes to explore shape, distortion, and the interplay between visibility and camouflage. She earned a double major in Studio Art and English from the University of San Diego and an MFA from the University of Delaware. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, San Francisco Chronicle, Squarecylinder, KQED, Huffington Post, and Art Practical. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation, Alma Shapiro at Yaddo (2017), and Kent Fellowship at MacDowell (2022). Her public mosaic River (2021) is permanently installed in the International Terminal at SFO. She is faculty in Painting and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and lives and works in Oakland.

Rema Ghuloum (b. 1978, North Hollywood, CA) received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach (Long Beach, CA) in 2007 and her MFA from California College of the Arts (San Francisco, CA) in 2010. Rema Ghuloum’s recent and upcoming solo and group exhibitions include “Atmospheres,” and “The Sky Has a Thousand Windows,” Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); "When the Day is Done," David De Boer, (Antwerp, Belgium); “Color Fields,” Long Beach Museum of Art (Long Beach, CA); "Shaping Gravity: Art Beyond the Picture Plane," Forest Lawn Museum (Los Angeles, CA); Et al. (San Francisco, CA); Emma Grey HQ (Los Angeles, CA); Edward Cella Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Five Car Garage (Santa Monica, CA); Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY); Contemporary Art Matters (Columbus, OH); Hawthorn Contemporary (Milwaukee, WI); Jacob’s (Los Angeles, CA); Sonce Alexander Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); The Pit (Los Angeles, CA); Make Room (Los Angeles, CA); La Loma Projects (Los Angeles, CA); Odd Ark LA (Los Angeles, CA); Part 2 Gallery (Oakland, CA); Harris Gallery, University of Laverne (Laverne, CA); Nathalie Karg (New York, NY); Mother Gallery (Beacon, NY); Taymore Grahne Projects (London, UK); Meyer Reigger (Berlin, Germany) and Baik Gallery (Seoul, Korea). Ghuloum’s work is included in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Works on Paper Collection at the Legion of Honor Museum (San Francisco, CA). Ghuloum’s work has been reviewed in Art Forum, Hyperallergic, CARLA, the Los Angeles Times, Fabrik, and LA Weekly. Ghuloum lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles.

Rebekah Goldstein has shown widely across the US. She has been awarded residencies at the Golden Center for the Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Arad Arts Project. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Fidelity Collection, Google, as well as many notable private collections. Her work has been featured in Artforum, SquareCylinder, and New American Paintings. Goldstein received an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012 and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2004. Goldstein currently lives and works in San Francisco.

Felicia Griffin (b. 1963) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans printmaking, ceramics, painting, and fiber art. A recurring theme in Griffin’s work is the circle–a shape that connects her sense of self with the outside world. She is well known for her pom-poms, which she enjoys gifting to her loved ones. Several of these soft sculptures were included in Don’t mind if I do, a trailblazing and accessible installation curated by artist Finnegan Shannon. Griffin has worked at NIAD Art Center since 1985 and is among the longest tenured artists still practicing today. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Oakland Museum of California Art, and Christie’s Auction House, San Francisco. Griffin’s artworks are housed in the permanent collections of the Graphic Arts Collection at UC Berkeley and at the Mission Bay Campus at UCSF.

John Lees (b. 1943, Denville, NJ) received his BFA and MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA.  He has been exhibiting in New York since 1977 and has been an instructor at the New York Studio School since 1988.  He lives and works in upstate New York. Lees is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund Award; the Francis J. Greenburger Award; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant; and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant.  John Lees is represented by Betty Cunningham Gallery in New York. His work can be found in a host of public institutions, most notably the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Kemper Collection, Kansas City, MO; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and The New Museum, New York, NY.

Padma Rajendran (b. 1985, Malaysia) is an artist based in Catskill, New York. Primarily working in a textile-based practice, Padma paints dye and resist onto silk in order to craft representational paintings that reflect on immigrant storytelling, womanhood, and the concept of home as a tended space. Padma’s work contains forms that are personal translations of shrines and monuments, these forms evoking a greater symbolic narrative that hold universal resonance.

Leah Tumerman redirected her painting practice to prioritize art’s accessibility, after completing an MFA with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. Through public art and mural making she continued telling stories while engaging with communities on site-specific and neighborhood projects. Her first public bid with the 49th Ward of Chicago was the beginning of a now twenty year career in public art. Leah has recently expanded her practice to include grant writing, and curriculum and program development supported by a Bachelor’s degree in Arts Education and Master’s in Creative Writing. She has served as a guest artist and mural facilitator for cities and institutions across the country. Leah maintains a studio practice in Vallejo, California.