JuanMa Pagán Teitelbaum

Artist Statement

I grew up in a land-occupation settlement in Vega Baja, surrounded by all the tropical fruit trees that my family could dream of. Seeing so much abundance and generosity from nature around us, I wondered how was it possible that Puerto Rico imported over 85% of our food? That question has determined my audiovisual work for almost 20 years. In my masters thesis in Caribbean Cultural Studies, I explored the displacement of farm workers from the fields to construction sites across Puerto Rico and the diaspora, as part of the new colonial vision of “development” for Puerto Rico. Later, with Mariolga Reyes Cruz, we produced 30 short documentaries presenting the new generation of ecological farmers as they embodied a counternarrative dignifying our ability and will to grow our own food. However, we knew that there was more to the story about the pursuit of food sovereignty in Puerto Rico.

Photo still from the film Stewards of the Land with Puerto Rican farmers preparing a new farm for food production.

Bio

JuanMa Pagán Teitelbaum is a documentary filmmaker and ecological farmer. He holds a master's degree in Caribbean Studies from the State University of New York-Buffalo and a wide-ranging experience in the world of cinema, including lighting and sound work, music video cinematography and editing, and work on movies and documentaries. Alongside Mariolga Reyes Cruz, JuanMa has produced over 30 short documentaries on sustainable agriculture in Puerto Rico. His mini-documentary series Harvest Today (Cosecha Hoy) was broadcast on The Puerto Rico Public Broadcasting Corporation and received an Emmy Suncoast nomination. The Stewards of the Land is his first feature-length documentary which showcases the efforts of three Puerto Rican ecological farmers working in the main island of Puerto Rico.

Smita Sen

Artist Statement

As an artist, I work with sculpture, dance-based performance, and advanced technology to research the relationship between the body and memory. I study haptic memory – the memory specific to ‘touch’ stimuli – and consider how the body internalizes its environment and significant life events. With this approach, I study how the human body becomes a living document, storing tension, movement patterns, and emotion over the course of a lifetime. In dance-based performance, I develop ways of documenting the body as its strength and abilities change. I weave together visceral movement with operatic vocalizations to excavate embodied memories. In my sculptural practice, I work with 3D modeling software to create objects that appear slow-moving and soft, shaped by their dynamic surroundings. Working digitally, these sculptures attempt to visualize abstract bodily sensations, like pain and analgesia. Engaging two media that seem diametrically opposed, body and software, I test the limits of both in an attempt to capture the constant push-and-pull between the body, memory, and the force that controls them: Time. Bridging movement research with my sculptural practice, I further examine whether the body can be healed by its surroundings. With installations, I study how designed environments, from temple gardens to hospitals, enable the body to enter states of meditative and energetic healing. With these studies, I create altars. These altars bridge narrative medicine theory with Hindu-Buddhist spiritual architecture not only to honor the body and memory, but also to actively facilitate ease in the body, creating opportunities for somatic healing. In doing so, the altars I create serve to heal the traumatized body. My artwork and research is ultimately an attempt to understand the resilience and malleability of the body, and to find ways to continuously support its inner healing mechanisms.

Offerings of Sleepless Surrender (2021) Dance-on-film. Directed, Choreographed, & Performed by Smita Sen. Cinematography by Juan Matos. Music: Improvisation in Yaman. Trina Basu, violin; Amali Premawardhana, cello. From Karavika's album, Sunrise.

Bio

Smita Sen is an artist working with sculpture, dance-based performance, and advanced technology to research how the body internalizes its environment and significant life events. Sen has had solo exhibitions at Recess (2021) and the Brooklyn Public Library (2022). Sen’s work has been shown internationally in Dubai, U.A.E, and at venues like Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), Flux Factory (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), and ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn, NY). Sen has been in-residence at the Bakehouse Arts Complex (2022), Recess (2021), Mildred’s Lane (2018), and received the Instigator Fellowship from New York University ITP Camp (2018). She is a recipient of the Ellies Creator Award from Oolite Arts (2022) and a member of NEW INC, the New Museum's incubator (2022-2023). She has given talks and workshops at Columbia University, Bard College, NYU ITP Camp, and LRLX NY. An educator, Sen believes in the power of a collaborative classroom and, from 2019 to 2022, was teaching and designing the Emerging Media program as a full-time Faculty member at Choate Rosemary Hall. She currently teaches at the Parsons School of Design, The New School, while leading Miami-based arts education nonprofit, the Manipura Care Network. As a designer, Sen has worked for Discovery Communications, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, and the Urban Design Lab at Columbia University. She was the co-founding Creative Director of Into the Shell, an installation created by a studio collective of artists and engineers. Sen holds a BA in the Visual Arts (Magna Cum Laude) from Columbia University (2016). She is based in Miami, Florida and New York City.

www.smitaksen.com

Genesis Báez

Artist Statement

Genesis Baez makes photographs that consider the fluidity of place, the effects of diaspora, and the intersections of personal and collective histories. Made in both Puerto Rico and the Northeast US, Baez photographs the transitory; light, gestures, and landscapes give shape to fragmented and temporal experiences of existing between worlds.

Genesis Baez, Crossing Time, Archival Pigment Print, 2022, 24"x32"

Bio

Genesis Báez is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Massachusetts, Baez grew up in both the Northeast US and Puerto Rico. She has exhibited her work internationally, most recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ballroom Marfa, the Yale University Art Gallery, Huxley Parlour in London, ARCO Madrid, amongst others. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Detroit Institute of Arts, amongst others. Báez is the recipient of a 2022 NYFA/NYSCA Photography Fellowship, the 2022 Capricious Photo Award, and a 2023 Lighthouse Works Fellowship. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and is an alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Báez currently teaches at Williams College

www.genesisbaez.com

Jan Mun

Artist Statement

As an artist working with digital and living media, I create social sculptures. The landscape has become the framework through which I unfold stories about others and myself using a combination of artistic and scientific processes that manifest as social engagements, interactive installations, photography, and bio-art. I create interfaces to elicit participation as a reflection and critique of our political and social systems. Working with communities, I innovate ideas to be realized through research, chance, and collaboration. My long-term projects include: -ProfileUS: Invasive Species examines the interconnections made by humans and other species that have migrated to the US and are adapting to their new or established environments through the lens of art, technology, and biopolitics. -The Fairy Rings is a series that uses mycoremediation and art to develop and innovate bioremediation practices for residents in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and elsewhere.

Jan Mun_The Fairy Rings: Mycoremediation @ ExxonMobil Petroleum Remediation Site, 2013_(Documentation-Installation detail of pink mushroom jump starting ecology and mycoremediation bags around monitoring well) In Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the ExxonMobil Petroleum Remediation Site, the epicenter of one of the largest oil spills in the US. Mycoremediation bags are installed in a maze of "fairy rings" around the monitor wells that tack the size of the oil plume.

Bio

Jan Mun creates social sculptures with digital and living media. Mun received a MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and BFA from SUNY New Paltz. Her work has been in exhibitions at the Queens Museum, City Museum of New York, The Cathedral at Saint John the Divine, Battery Park, NY; Wave Hill, Bronx; as well as at the ExxonMobil Greenpoint Remediation Project, Brooklyn. She has had residencies at Headland Center for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York Hall of Science, and Newtown Creek Alliance. She is the recipient of awards and grants from Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art, the Harpo Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, A Blade of Grass, and the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund. Mun is on the Newtown Creek EPA Superfund Community Advisory Group, a board member at Newtown Creek Alliance, and a honey beekeeper at the Central Park Zoo.

janmun.com


Prem Krishnamurthy

Artist Statement

Department of Transformation (DT) is an artist-organized group that mobilizes the power of art and design to prototype new formats and methods for collaborative learning. What tools are needed for individual, collective, and structural transformation? How can the notion of the artist become more porous and interdependent? Where can we gather together to change and grow? Engaging with such questions, DT invites artists, thinkers, therapists, and others to explore alternative pathways for art that is responsive to our trying times. DT was founded by designer, author, and educator Prem Krishnamurthy and takes shape through workshops, events, publications, and community-based activities (+ karaoke!) around the world.

“With Distance: Conversation with Kristie La”, as part of *Céline Condorelli: Epilogue*, 2017. P!, New York, US. Curator: Prem Krishnamurthy. Photo: Sebastian Bach

Bio

Prem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) is a designer, author, and educator. His multifaceted work explores the role of art as an agent of transformation at an individual, collective, and structural level. This manifests itself in books, exhibitions, gatherings, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019. From 2017–2021, his experimental electronic book *P!DF* was published by O-R-G. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, *On Letters*. He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design studio, and organizes Department of Transformation, an itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. In addition to leading projects with artists, cultural institutions, and nonprofit organizations across the world, he has curated several large-scale exhibitions. These include *Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows*, the 2022 edition of FRONT International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; *Our Silver City, 2094* at Nottingham Contemporary; and *Ministry of Graphic Design* in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York

premkrishnamurthy.com

Athena Kokoronis

Artist Statement

Beans for soup hover over a Bernina sewing machine in my home studio, branded, Domestic Performance Agency. I make soups like I would improvise a dance. Hospitality I a choreographic rite. I dress performers, although I perform naked. DPA was a way to merge motherhood into artisthood. I’ve worked with indigo for years, keeping a live fermenting culture for over a decade. Blue marked the birth of my daughter, a color intuited into the DPA toolbox.  The materials I work with are usually found, repurposed, gifted. I am interested in life-cycles of everyday materials and the choices we have as artists. My relationship to dance and movement plays out and has an extension in the way I work with textiles “decomposing to recompose” is a choreographic design prompt that is implemented in the way I relate to materials. I’m suspended in process materiality is dictated by a duration.

Photo credit Whitney Browne Word Salad Dance Dressing Judson Church 2022

Bio

Athena Kokoronis is an interdisciplinary artist whose work expands across art, food, dance, pedagogical engagements, and design. Born out of motherhood, her art brand,  Domestic Performance Agency (DPA) is a creative protective container for process, hospitality, and experimentation. Costuming dance is elemental to the DPA. She was 2023 Cynthia Hazen Ponsky and Leon Ponsky Rome Prize fellow with Jasmine Hearn for their design collaborations.  DPA is represented by the Lydia Rodrigues Collection (LRCNYC.ONLINE). Athena Kokoronis published CookBook Domestic Performance Agency with Yonkers International Press (YIP) in conjunction with Dance & Process series at The Kitchen in 2018 and a second book in 2019 in conjunction with The New School. Her performance works have been presented at Danspaceproject in Draftwork series and by Movement Research at Judson. She was a 2019-2022 Movement Research Artist in Resident. Notable work is a 24 -hr Diner performance self produced at Domestic Performance Agency 2022 &2023.

www.domesticperformanceagency.com


Earl Hatley

Artist Statement

Earl is an environmental activist and organizer, who is also a story teller. His stories are about his visions, dreams and experiences.

This is the story of Quechee Bear and how I was accepted into the mountain where I live and met the Chief of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi and became a tribal member

Bio

Mr. Hatley is a co-founder of LEAD Agency, Inc., a grassroots organization in northeastern Oklahoma, and serves as the Board President. LEAD Agency is predominantly of Native American membership. LEAD Agency is a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance, and from 2003-2021, Mr. Hatley served as the Grand Riverkeeper, patrolling the Grand River and feeder streams of the upper Grand River watershed. Earl currently serves as board member for Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition, Building a Local Economy (BALE) and Rural Vermont. He is currently a member of the VT Environmental Justice Network Advisory Committee and President of the board for Ottauquechee Water Protectors Association in Quechee, VT. Mr. Hatley currently serves on the Steering Committee for the Western Mining Action Network, including their Indigenous Caucus. WMAN serves organizations dealing with the impacts of hard rock mining in the US and Canada. In Nov. 2020, Mr. Hatley was elected Co-Chair of WMAN and Chair of WMAN’s Indigenous Caucus. His degrees include: ABD: Environmental Science Ph.D. Program, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, M.A.: Political Science, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, and B.A.: Human Development, Flaming Rainbow University/Westminister College, Fulton, MO and Tahlequah, OK. Mr. Hatley is an enrolled citizen of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi with Cherokee/Shawnee heritage