2024 Artblog Art Mkt Catalog

Nancy Agati is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes works on paper, sculpture, site-specific installation, and public art. Agati holds a BFA from Alfred University, School of Art&Design, NY, and an MFA from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She has exhibited her work throughout Philadelphia and nationally, with exhibitions at the Philadelphia Art Alliance; Fairmount Water Works, Philadelphia, PA; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, DC; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island, NY; and The Calandra Italian American Institute, NY. Agati’s work is in several collections including the Pennsylvania Convention Center and Temple University, Fox School of Business. Recent installation projects about nature and the environment were created for the New Jersey Coastal Climate Resilience Project in Atlantic City, FLOW at The Independence Seaport Museum, Philadelphia, and We All Fall Down at The Schuylkill Environmental Education Center, Philadelphia. Her 2024 installation, Aqua Terrace, at DaVinci Art Alliance, was funded by The Puffin Foundation and Hemera Foundation. In 2022, Agati received the Ecotopian Toolmaker Award from the Penn Environmental Humanities Program and an Illuminate the Arts Grant from the City of Philadelphia. Water Table 2021 was commissioned by NOAA and partnered with the NJDEP, NJ Arts, and the Atlantic City Arts Foundation. Agati has been a recipient of two Windows of Opportunity Awards from the Leeway Foundation and has been awarded artist residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico; Lo Studio dei Nipoti, Calabria, Italy; Main & Station, Nova Scotia; the Pennsylvania Horticultural Center at Meadowbrook Farm; and Officina Stamperia del Notaio, Sicily, Italy.

Philadelphia Artist Mary Gamble Barrett’s creative journey includes studies at the University of the Arts (MFA); Moore College of Art and Design (teaching certification); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (4 year Certificate); Florida State University (BA in Art); extensive study with Vladislav Andrejev (The Prosopon School of Iconography); as well as 21+ years teaching high school art. Her mediums include clay, egg tempera, oil, acrylic, and mixed media. Barret has exhibited locally and nationally, and has works in private collections nationally and internationally. Recent works, paintings and ceramic tiles, reach beyond the physical world and lead into the metaphysical, inspired by Sacred Geomtery,

My art practice centers around where we are and where we’re going . The mind and the soul have great possibilities for a complete evolution towards a socially ethically environmentally conscious society. I use my art practice to explore what was and what can be . If we are to move forward we have to recognize the past as problematic to say the least . There are many good humans in the world who want a more diverse inclusion. The universe awaits our decisions.

I’m drawn to and inspired by unlikely and often uncomfortable situations: the natural world and the unnatural; shapes that are clumsy and obvious with those that are controlled or ethereal; color that is bland or saccharine, alongside bitter or ominous; lines that are obtuse and meandering with those that are quick, humorous, and energetic; order and welter; discord and harmony.

Complex, carefully built compositions often revel simply in the aforementioned forms and content, and inspiration is almost always gleaned in part from nature, with its persistence and healing qualities. Printmaking, collage, and paint all have the physical ability to layer, obscure, build, and repeat. The layering and repetition of images speak to the history and resurgence of emotions, times and events.

Jacob C Hammes is an Interdisciplinary artist, arts organizer, and educator based in Philadelphia. Working primarily in sculpture, drawing, and sound, Hammes’ work explores themes of late capitalist anxieties and absurdities, examining how we constitute ourselves as individuals within these networks of culture, labor, and authority. From 2016-2023 Hammes was director and curator of Pilot+Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Philadelphia, and now co-founder of BIG RAMP, a curatorial collective and exhibition space in Kensington, Philadelphia. Hammes teaches at Tyler School of Art and Architecture and Moore College of Art and Design. Hammes holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Tyler School of Art. Hammes has shown at spaces such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Liberty Museum, the Woodmere Art Museum, The Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University, The Hills Aesthetic Center, Temple Contemporary, Moore College of Art, The Hyde Park Art Center, the Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Auckland, Information Space, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Michelle Anne Harris is a Philadelphia based artist and Co Director of Big Ramp, where she is Head of Special Programs and Community Outreach. Her art and teaching practices are rooted in her background as a trauma informed early childhood art educator. Michelle has an interdisciplinary approach to educational programs that combine her studio practice in printmaking, photography, painting, book arts, poetry and sculpture. She received her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Photography and Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Michelle has developed educational art programming for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Cranbrook Institute of Science, the Art Institute of Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, and Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Beth Heinly is a Comic artist for artblog, local artist working in all mediums

“I’m an artist with a multimedia praxis, I mean, practice. (old joke)

I’m an anti-institutional artist by proxy not relation.

I’m trying to make the world a better place fully knowing I only care about myself.

I’m a maker.

I’m process oriented (I read).

I’m into art history, but not explicitly.

I’m postmodern.”

Mary Henderson is a visual artist living and working in Philadelphia. She received an AB in fine arts from Amherst College, and an MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joseph Robert Foundation, the Center for Emerging Artists, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; she has also completed residencies at Pouch Cove, Soaring Gardens, the Jentel Foundation and the Hambidge Center (where she was the Nena Griffith Distinguished Fellow). Her work has been shown throughout the United States at venues including the Delaware Contemporary Museum, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, the Muskegon Museum of Art, the Michener Museum, the Woodmere Museum, Marcia Wood Gallery, Lyons Wier Gallery and Wilding Cran Gallery. Her paintings have been featured in Artmaze, Harper’s Magazine, L’Espresso (Italy), New American Paintings, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Art in America. Selected collections include the Rockefeller Foundation, the Muskegon Museum of Art and the West Collection. She is the former co-director of the Philadelphia site of the nonprofit network of artist-run spaces, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and currently works as a project manager for Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Oli Knowles is a Philadelphia-based cartoonist and storyteller. Their work consists of watercolor paintings and comics; both fictional and autobiographical. Their current stories discuss vexing and absurd moments in modern-day commercialism, while also touching on surveillance, relationships with loved ones, and personal identity. Their watercolor paintings marry outdated computer graphics with objects, faces, and plants to describe a collective moment, or a series of events over time.

Brown boy representing the duality of both Latin and American culture and experiences through masks that can either misconceive or stereotype perceptions.

“I learned most everything I know about miniatures from my Mom, Linda; she started making minis when my siblings and I were young. When she passed away, I started sculpting miniatures and I felt like she was making them with me. Each piece is handcrafted in Philadelphia, made with love and humor just like my Mom would have done.”

Mackenzie McAlpin was born in Ohio, she went to college at Ohio University where she got her Bachelors of Specialized Studies in Fine Art Photography and Retail Merchandising. She currently resides in Philadelphia, PA where she works with clay and continues to document life through the lens of a camera.

Born in Mexico City, Alexis Nutini received an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art in 2005, a BA in Fine Art from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2000 and completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Barcelona, Spain in 2001. Alexis runs Dos Tres Press, a printshop in south Philadelphia where he maintains a print publishing business and develops collaborative print-based projects. He focuses on rigorous experimentation with relief printmaking techniques through hand-carved, reduction woodblock printing and the digital technology of platemaking with Computer Numerical Control(CNC) routing.

“I make sculptures & videos of quotidian moments from a pile of scraps I have been hoarding for years.”

Lydia Ricci has a messy desk and a clean desk—one for her work as an artist and one for her practice as a graphic designer. But she’ll never tell which is which.

She spends most of her time making tiny sculptures of everyday objects “from scraps” of daily existence. Her fragmentary 3-D collages, which evoke a sense of wonder and hazy nostalgia, have been widely published and exhibited at galleries in New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Ricci teaches courses in branding, design, and storytelling at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Lydia is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and has studied in St Gallen, Switzerland, and Cortona, Italy.

Philadelphia-based fine and commercial artist. BFA Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA and MFA University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Marta Sánchez was born in San Antonio, Texas. As a child, she lived in poverty and faced discrimination for her Chicana heritage. As a result, she turned to art as a defense against what she faced. Ultimately, Sánchez used art as a means of social activism.[4] She later went on to acquire a BFA in art education at the University of Texas at Austin. Motivated by the opportunity to study abroad in Italy, Sánchez joined the MFA program at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Marta has an upcoming solo exhibition at Brandyworkshop and Archives, opening Oct. 17, 2024, 6-8pm. More here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marta_S%C3%A1nchez_(artist)

Melinda Steffy (she/her) centers her creative practice around information and translation – looking at diverse ways humans communicate and pass along information over time. She develops her own systems for converting music or spoken language into abstract geometric artworks, encoding the data in color and shape. Her artwork has been exhibited at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia & New York), Woodmere Art Museum, InLiquid, Philadelphia City Hall, 20*20 House, Rowan University, Villanova University, Finlandia University, and the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, among many others. She was commissioned by Eastern Mennonite University to create 100 paintings based on a Mennonite hymn in honor of their Centennial, by Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church to create a series of works based on J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, and by Manheim Township Middle School to create a large-scale artwork based on their school song. Melinda currently serves as Co-Executive Director of CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia and runs her own consulting practice, Concentric Strategy.

Todd Stong (b. 1991, Trenton, NJ) is an artist, educator, curator, and writer based in Philadelphia, PA. He received a BA in Visual and Literary Arts from Brown University in 2014 and an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and Temple Rome in 2022. He has held fellowships at Yaddo, The Lighthouse Works, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was an Apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Group and two-person exhibitions include spaces such as the Woodmere Art Museum and Commonweal Gallery, both in Philadelphia, PA; Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, DE; and SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, New York, NY. His first Philadelphia gallery solo exhibition, Becoming Hole, showed at Peep Projects alongside a concurrent solo exhibition, Preamble, at Second State Press, where he was the 2023 Cindi Royce Ettinger Fellow. He is an adjunct instructor of printmaking, drawing, and design at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and Delaware County Community College, a contributor to Title Magazine, and a Co-Director at Fjord Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

Anthony Torcasio was born and raised in South Philadelphia, where he currently lives. A 32 year veteran of the local graffiti culture, his passion for leaving ‘tags’ and ‘pieces’ on buildings and walls in this city haven’t always garnered favorable public attention. After the birth of his daughter, Anthony refocused his creative energy to protect his relationship with his family, moving from marking property to constructing canvasses prepped with help by his 5 year old daughter, Adrianna. Anthony’s passion for visual texture and mastery of his medium are abundant, each piece including familiar and unfamiliar palettes of color and compositional elements that abstractly engage and reference graffiti culture. Layers of contrasting lines challenge the most flat and linear aspects of traditional graffiti.

born: year of horse (Virgo)

early adolescence: settled into middle child syndrome

adolescence: ran wild in forests late adolescence: discovered how to read poetry

at present: utilize and express above subjects (and others) through art

Recipient of and rejected for artist residences, major solo exhibitions, Awards. Born in Pittsburgh and based out of Philadelphia for the last twenty five years.

Born 1984 in New York, NY, Sophie Cooper White has lived and worked in Philadelphia. PA since 2009. Since adolescence in a rapidly transforming NYC at the turn of the Millennium, she has made small, representational paintings from life of familiar places at various stages of becoming unfamiliar. Colorful paper mache sculptures and experimental sound and performance work sometimes accompany her paintings, mimicking the environment in which the paintings were made and inviting the viewer into the work. Sophie’s paintings focus on the uncanny details of a neighborhood disfigured by over-development, from the perspective of a resident feeling a bit lost.

Misha Wyllie is an artist and a house painter living and working in Philadelphia. Her work critiques capitalist value systems through absurd and perceptual transformations of everyday objects. She has exhibited locally and nationally including the New School for Social Research, Woodmere Museum, Space 1026, Commonweal Gallery and New College of Florida.

Accra Zuberi is an artist, storyteller, and lover of dwarf planets. They are Inspired by the heart of Pluto, and the intentions of poorly named Dysnomia.