Born in Missoula, MT in 1976, Amanda Browder received an MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York producing large-scale fabric installations for building exteriors and other public sites. She works primarily with the community, and sources all of her material from donations. She has shown nationally, and internationally including at the New Museum, Ideas City Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, FAB Fest in New York City; The Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn; University of Alabama at Birmingham AAHD, Birmingham, AL; Nuit Blanche Public Art Festival/LEITMOTIF in Toronto; Mobinale, Prague; Allegra LaViola Gallery, NYC; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo; White Columns, NYC; No Longer Empty, Brooklyn. She has been published in books such as Unexpected Art: Chronicle Books and Strange Material; Arsenal Pulp Press. This year she will create a large-scale work as part of Art Prize: Project 1 and was named a Transformation Fellow at UNLV. In 2016, she received her first National Endowment for the Arts grant and worked with the Albright Knox Art Gallery to drape three buildings in Buffalo, NY. Photos and reviews have appeared in New York Times to Fibers Magazine and she is a founder of the art podcast, badatsports.com.
Lynne Thompson
Sandra Lapage
Sandra Lapage got her MFA from the Maine College of Art in 2013. Sandra has participated in collective and solo exhibitions in Brazil, Europe and the United States, notedly at the Brazilian Embassy in Brussels (2007), at the Ribeirão Preto Art Museum for the 2006 exhibition program, at the Centro Cultural São Paulo in 2012, at the Gowanus Loft (NYC) in 2014 and 2015, at the Blumenau Art Museum and Aura Arte Contemporânea (Sao Paulo) in 2018.
Sandra has resided at various institutions such as the Fondation Château Mercier (Switzerland) and NARS Foundation (NYC) for 6 months in 2014, Elefante Centro Cultural (Brasilia) in 2015, Camac Art Center (France) and Paul Artspace (USA) in 2016, and Massachussets Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017. She will be in residence at Monson Arts in September.
Sandra was a visiting artist at the Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia) and Maine College of Art (Portland), United States.
In addition to her solo work, she develops a collaborative work in the collective Eclusa and runs, with ten other artists and designers, the independent art space Vão: a workspace, with classes and experimental exhibitions, in São Paulo, Brazil.
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The books mentioned during the interview are for her work in the collective duo Eclusa, they’ve been departing from Cyrano de Bergerac’s original 1657’s “Comical History by Mr de Cyrano Bergerac including The States & Empires of the Moon”, Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play “Cyrano de Bergerac”, Carlo Rovelli’s “7 brief lessons on Physics” and “The order of time”. And also not mentioned was Italo Calvino’s “Cosmicomics”
She’s also been reading the Documents of Contemporary Art books by the MIT Press (Failure, Nature, Materiality, Sexuality), and rereading Borges’ “Book of imaginary beings” where she find titles for her assemblage pieces.
Darren Hāper
Darren’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, has been showcased in the national publication New American Paintings, and was named “artist to watch” at the Dayton Visual Art Center. He has had solo exhibitions at Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH; Green Line Projects, Philadelphia, PA; Divisible Gallery, Dayton, OH; Cochran Gallery, Dayton, OH; and a two person show at Pratt MWP School of Art Gallery, Utica, NY. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Art Access Gallery, Columbus, OH; Hite Gallery, Louisville, KY; Kelsey Projects, Dayton, OH; Dayton Visual Art Center, Dayton, OH; and was the recipient of the MCACD Fellowship. Upcoming shows include a solo show at Dana L. Wiley Gallery, Dayton, OH, a group show at Art Access Gallery, Columbus, OH and a two person show at Gallery 110, Seattle, WA. His work is included in numerous collections both nationally and internationally including the permanent collection of Montgomery County Public Library. Darren received a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting from Miami University and is represented by Art Access Gallery, Columbus, OH. Darren currently lives in Southwestern Ohio with his wife and two young children.
Linda Francis
I studied painting with Tony Smith at Hunter College but started out studying biochemistry and physics. I really thought of these fields as philosophy: as an illumination of limits and the backdrop for a discussion of humanity’s striving to overcome them. This is not meant to describe an interest in myth, be it social or political, but rather an involvement in the elements of thought and the operations that give rise to the structure of understanding.
I have exhibited nationally and internationally, and have had many solo exhibitions: Nicholas Davies Gallery, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Hal Bromm Gallery, Minus Space Gallery, University of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences, and others in NY and abroad. A recent exhibition at the J.P.Najar Foundation in Dubai resulted in the purchase of a large work. Likewise a painting shown at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in NYC resulted in a purchase award. Some group exhibitions have been in the Leubsdorf Art Gallery/ Hunter College, Sydney Non Objective/ Australia, Stavanger Kunstmuseum/ Norway, Non- Objectif Sud/ France, American Drawing in the Louisana Museum in Denmark, Stadtishe Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Germany, the MIT List Center in Boston. This year there have been drawings in ‘Flat Out” at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City and “Strange Attractors” at Seton Hall’s Walsh Gallery in NJ. I have received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts (CAPS). The work has been written about in Art Forum, Art in America, The NYTimes, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtSlant and others.Yve Alain Bois has written the catalog essay, “Atoms”, for the exhibition “Linda Francis, Drawings” at Wm Patterson University in 1996.
The two books I mentioned during our interview were : “ The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa, and My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausguaard.