Barbara Weissberger

Barbara Weissberger was a participant in The Drawing Center’s inaugural Open Sessions, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Residencies include Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Camargo Foundation (France), Ucross, Ragdale, Hambidge Center, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Montana Artists Refuge.  In addition she makes collaborative installations with the artist Eleanor Aldrich.

Play is central to Barbara Weissberger’s process. Her images grow out of improvisation and the pleasure of working with materials. The writer Sherrie Flick described the idiosyncratic mix of elements in her work as “stacked and wrapped -- harmoniously, improbably, united in their disparity.” 

Weissberger’s photographs – and related photo-objects – contain familiar things and things that are confounding enough to sow doubt about the nature of those that are most identifiable. She is trained as a sculptor and makes many of the things in the photographs, which mingle with so-called found objects that she alters, or leaves as is, as well as miscellany found in the studio. She is interested in the studio as a site of eccentric invention and possibility.  

Eleanor Aldrich

Eleanor Aldrich has had solo shows in Boston, Nashville, Knoxville, Flagstaff, AZ, and at the University of Alabama. Her work has been shown at Saltworks Gallery and White Space (Atlanta, GA), the Drawing Center (New York, NY), Grin (Providence, RI) and Ortega y Gasset (New York, NY). Her work was chosen for 1708 Gallery’s ‘FEED 2013’ (Richmond, VA). She has been awarded an Endowment for the Arts through the Whiteman Foundation, and the Herman E. Spivey Fellowship. Her work has been included in New American Paintings, and reviewed in Art in America and on Artforum.com.

Aldrich’s work is about the places where the concerns of modernist painting meet her own experiences and the physical reality of the body. Sometimes the encounter is in the application – paint is combed, piped, squished, and sprayed, and paper transfers are rubbed off; playing with ideas of femininity and the purity of paint. The material squeeze invites the empathy of the body and is at times funny, beautiful, revolting, and satisfying. The grid appears as a support- a resist that molds the material as it presses through. In this way the material is metaphoric of conformity and issues of control over one’s body.

Kelly Hendrickson

Kelly Hendrickson is a media fluid artist living and working in Tallahassee Florida. She has shown her work up and down the east coast and in Germany. She is Co-Director of Tallahassee Zine Fest and a founding Member of LadySpace Collective with Chelsea Dobert-Kehn.

Carolyn Henne

Carolyn Henne’s work is largely informed by anatomical studies – from simple school-house diagrams to NIH’s Visual Human Project. Her work ranges from large, complex interactive installations and performances to more straightforward, discrete objects. Suspended Self Portrait is in the permanent collection at the National Museum of Health and Medicine and was featured in the NIH’s exhibition and catalog, Dream Anatomy. She is co-Director of Comma.

Judy Rushin

Judy Rushin exhibits her paintings, sculptures, and textiles in museums and galleries across the US. Her multiples projects vvvvv and CommaBox are in eleven private collections including Vanderbilt University, University of Wisconsin, MassArt, University of Pittsburgh, University of Southern California, Cal Poly University. Her project ViV traveled to individuals who engaged her paintings on their own terms and turf, and sent them back bearing the imprint of the places they had been. She has been featured in Burnaway, Modern Art Notes, The Washington Post, and has completed residencies at MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hambidge. Rushin is founder and co-director of Comma.

Rushin claims a practice that is fiercely gendered but that has roots in both working class and garden variety middle class values. Glossy car finishes, wood panels snapped by force, and textiles like thick animal hides proclaim a femininity based on the hardened hands of her working class grandmothers. Yet, in rueful acceptance of her whitewashed middle-class upbringing, she speaks the visual language of consumerism. Her projects include panels pigmented with furniture lacquer that come flat-packed to one’s home for DIY assembly (instructions not included); contemplative color panels fabricated by auto body painters; and rag rugs that display wage gap infographics.

Erin Belieu

Erin Belieu was born and raised in Nebraska and educated at the University of Nebraska, Ohio State University, and Boston University. She is the author Infanta, winner of the National Poetry Series in 1994, One Above & One Below, winner of the Midlands Poetry Prize and Ohioana Poetry Award, and Black Box, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, all of which were published by Copper Canyon. Her poems have appeared in places such as Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and Atlantic Monthly,. Belieu co-founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts with poet Cate Marvin.

Belieu's fourth collection, Slant Six, is an inundation of the humor and horror in contemporary American life—from the last saltine cracked in the sleeve, to the kitty-cat calendar in an office cubicle. With its prophecies of impending destruction, and a simultaneous flood of respect for Americans, Erin Belieu's poems close like Ziploc bags around a human heart. Slant Six was honored as one of "10 Favorite Books of 2014" —Dwight Garner, The New York Times and as a "Standout Book of 2014" —American Poet magazine