For over 20 years, Kraus’s main body of work has been an investigation of concepts of sex, death, and spiritual offerings, executed in a variety of materials. In most recent years, his work has explored these themes via complex sculptural installations executed in glass, encaustic, and marble. Since 2004, he has worked with a group of craftsmen in India using “Pietre Dure”, a technique consisting of marble pieces inlaid with semi-precious stones. Using this technique, he worked on a project focused on his personal DNA, as well as a group of marble pieces, Offerings/Redemption. His most recently completed piece, Roman Wedding, is an installation piece that is part of Sex Death Offerings. Roman Wedding was partially sponsored by the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Using encaustic, he created two and three-dimensional pieces with varying scales. In public and private commissions, he has employed a variety of other untraditional art media as well. For his work Kraus travels internationally, including exhibits in Prague, Lisbon, and London. Since 1985, he has been shown extensively in New York City. He designed a full wall installation of my work Electric Candies for “Design on a Dime”, a benefit in 2013 raising $1.1 million for HIV/AIDs in New York City. Reaching beyond solely visual projects, he has collaborated with American composer Dennis Báthory-Kitsz and in 2011, he created a stage design for his opera, Erzsébet. Publications from both Europe and United States have reviewed his work, including Art in America, which featured his work numerous times.
Barbeito has exhibited his work internationally for the past seventeen years. Solo exhibition venues include 101/Exhibit in LA, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, Basilico Fine Arts and Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York, Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston, Parra-Romero Gallery in Madrid, Charest-Weinberg Gallery in Miami, and Galerie Richard in Paris. He has participated in group exhibits at the Rose Art Museum in Massachusetts; the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, The Netherlands; The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Florida; the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, Salon 94 Gallery in NY, ACME Gallery in LA and Whitechapel Gallery in London among others. His exhibits have been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art on Paper, The Village Voice, Artpulse, Frieze, Art/Text, Art Nexus, Examiner as well as many other publications and periodicals in the US and Europe. His work is in numerous public and private collections.
Peter Ramos’s poems have appeared or will appear in The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Fugue, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online) and other journals. Nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, he is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and three shorter collections: Television Snow (Back Pages Books, forthcoming); Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003). His criticism has appeared in MELUS, College Literature, The Faulkner Journal, The CEA Critic, Mandorla, Verse, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, as well as in the collections The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (Eds. Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. López, 2011) and Critical Insights: The Awakening (Ed. Robert C. Evans, 2014). An associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.
Roberto Carlos Lange works with video, sound and performance Growing up he was surrounded by tropical heat and hurricanes that represented the rich colors of sound and people living in South Florida. The sound of bass and late-night “peñas” in and around his house carved a deep foundation into his interest for sound and the things producing them. His sound work ranges from site specific installation to large performance work. With music he works under the pseudonym Helado Negro, singing and constructing avant-bolero music.
Shelter Serra was born in Bolinas, CA in 1972. He holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MFA in Painting & Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Shelter Serra transforms his ideas into a wide range of media from drawing and print to sculpture and video. His work investigates our culture’s relationship to objects of status and how advertising diversifies consumption, fear and beauty. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries including Marlborough Gallery, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, and Renwick Gallery (New York). Serra currently works and lives in New York.
Svjetlana Bukvich grew up during the wildly active music scene in Sarajevo’s eighties, with Arabian horses and four major religions at her doorstep. An innovator in hybrid electronic sound, and a “force in new music”, she has emerged as a unique figure on the New York music scene. Her genre-bending performances, described as “ecstatic musical experiences” (New Music Connoisseur), often feature video, voice, tuning of her own design, and regularly involve top avant-garde, jazz, and prog rock instrumentalists such as Martha Mooke, Tony Levin, Mari Kimura, Rob Schwimmer, Cornelius Dufallo, Patrick Derivaz, Johnny Reinhard, Leonardo Suarez Paz, Kamala Sankaram, Ha-Yang Kim, Gareth Flowers, Susan Aquila, and Mordy Ferber. A compelling composer-producer-performer mix, Svjetlana draws from the energies of the places she has lived in – Addis Ababa, Edinburgh, Boston, New York City, and Sarajevo – creating fantastical stories with sound. Svjetlana played with rock bands, composed for independent television and theater, and performed as a piano soloist with the Sarajevo Philharmonic. Her flourishing career was cut short by the war. In the US, Svjetlana was awarded a full scholarship to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. She earned an MFA in integrated electronic arts, the first multimedia program of its kind. She has since appeared in venues as varied as the The Kennedy Center, the Tribeca Film Festival, American Festival of Microtonal Music, The Knitting Factory, Brooklyn’s Bargemusic, Music With A View Festival, Serial Underground at the Cornelia Street Café, The Kitchen, The Anthology Film Archives, Rose Studio at Lincoln Center, the Bohemian Hall, (le) Poisson Rouge, ASCAP’s Thru The Walls Series, the [New York] Times Center, and internationally including Beijing, London, South Africa and Copenhagen.
Tim Golden is a writer and journalist who concentrates on national security, foreign policy and criminal justice issues. He is now completing an investigative history of the Guantanamo Bay detention center for the Penguin Press. Golden is the managing editor for investigations and news of The Marshall Project, a new, nonprofit journalism organization focused on the American criminal justice system. He previously a Senior Writer at The New York Times, where he ran the Mexico City and San Francisco bureaus and was a founding member of the newspaper’s investigative staff. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1984, he covered Central America and South America for the Miami Herald. Golden has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He received the 2010 MacArthur Residency at Yaddo. Golden has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize: in 1998 for International Reporting, for articles about the effects of drug corruption in Mexico, and in 1987 for National Reporting for stories related to the Iran-Contra affair.
Timothy Dunne studied composition with Sergei Slonimsky at the State Conservatory of St. Petersburg, Russia. He traveled there on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2002 subsequently earning both a post-graduate certificate and then a Doctor of Musical Arts in Music Composition. He also began PhD work in Musicology at the St. Petersburg State University. His compositions include works for large orchestra, chamber orchestra, voice, solo piano, solo instruments and various ensembles — all of which reveal the combined influence of the Post-War European avant-garde and canon of classical works learned through his lifelong study of the piano repertoire. In the fall of 2014 he will release his first album entirely dedicated to his music for chamber orchestra. As a pianist Timothy Dunne has played piano recitals throughout the United States, in Brazil, the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Bosnia Herzegovina and in Russia, where in 2005 and 2006, he gave the premieres of important late works by Berio and Ligeti. He is a co-founder and co-director of the Mostar Fund, a non-for-profit initiative which saw the implementation of several humanitarian/cultural projects in post-war Bosnia Herzegovina. He was awarded the Prize for Composition from the University of Vienna in 2006 and the 2013 Composition Award prize from the New York Foundation For The Arts.
Wylie Wirth is a professional drummer and a seasoned designer, craftsman and artisan. He’s performed several thousands of shows internationally as a drummer/percussionist, been signed to major record labels and been involved in hundreds of recording sessions making records. Wirth was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1968 and from an early age was exposed to many styles of music – studying violin, mandolin, drums and piano privately. He chose the drums and enrolled at The Berkley College of Music in Boston and after three semesters as a performance major he joined a band, dropped out of school and moved to NYC. One year later, Wirth and his band mates of the Sweet Lizard Illtet were signed to Warner Brothers, and their record was released in 26 countries. After internationally touring and rehearsing, Wirth returned to New York and was introduced to the owner of a Cabinet making shop in Soho, NYC. He quickly learned the trade by devoting days to woodwork and nights to music with his bands: Sexpod (opening act for Joan Jett),The Dope Pages(showcasing for David Byrne)and Vaporhead(featured band for Squeezebox party at Don Hills) to name a few. As a wood worker he has built permanent pieces of furniture for the Guggenheim, Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and numerous other artists, galleries, TV, film, advertising, etc. Currently by day he’s building custom items for clients out of his Sunset Park workshop and playing shows and constantly recording by night.
