artist bios :: Summer Reading

Thomas Allen is a still-life artist who disrupts the stillness. Carefully selecting from the covers of primarily vintage paperback novels and science journals, he brings the two-dimensional images into three-dimensional space. Using simple lighting and tools (scissors and razor-sharp knives), Allen juxtaposes cutout figures in ways that present the tension and dynamics of staged drama. He achieves a pure sense of humor and defies the original use and ultimate destiny of these materials—to be read once and then retired for eternity on the nearest bookshelf.

Thomas Allen received his MFA from the University of Minnesota and his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit. He has been awarded fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board as well as the McKnight Foundation. Allen has exhibited his work extensively throughout the Midwest, most notably at the Rochester Art Center in Rochester, Minnesota; the Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth, Minnesota; several private collections, including the Target Corporation, and numerous college and university venues.

Kotama Bouabane was born in Saravahn, Laos on New Year's Day, 1980. In 2003, Bouabane graduated with honors from the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, Canada. As part of his text-based Melting Words series, he documents phrases made from ice as they slowly melt. He has exhibited his photo-based works in galleries, including Gallery TPW, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art. Bouabane lives and works in Montreal, Canada.

Kate Bingaman-Burt was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1977. She founded Obsessive Consumption in 2002 and has documented her personal consumption in many different mediums. Her first book, Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?, will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in March 2010.

Bingaman-Burt is active in the indie craft and craftivism movements. She provided all of the illustrations for the book Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft and Design as well as the promotional materials for the documentary of the same name. She lives in Portland, Oregon where, along with being an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University, she also makes piles of work about consumerism (zines! pillows! dresses! drawings! paper chains! photos!). She happily draws for other good people too (IDEO, Madewell, ReadyMade Magazine, The New York Times, Wieden + Kennedy). Kate also conducts zine workshops and spreads the craftivism word. Her first international zine workshop will occur at the American University in Cairo, Egypt in 2010.

Christine Callahan is a native New Yorker. She has taught at the New School University, the Educational Alliance and the 92nd Street Y. An exhibition of her new work, 58 Empress Pines Drive (Or How I Escaped), opened earlier this year. Callahan earned her BFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts and she is currently in the MFA program at ICP/Bard. She is represented by Jen Bekman Gallery. 

Jorge Colombo was born in 1963 in Lisbon, Portugal and moved to the USA in 1989. He lived in Chicago and San Francisco before moving to New York City in 1998 with his wife, artist Amy Yoes. Colombo has worked as an illustrator, a photographer and an editorial graphic designer. He has published three books in Portugal: Fullerton, a retrospective of his 1990s drawings; Of Big and of Small Love, a photographic narrative created in collaboration with novelist Inês Pedrosa and Lisbon Revisited, a series of tinted photographs inspired by the early-20th century poet, Fernando Pessoa. In 2003, he started working on digital videos, initially restricting himself to one-minute movies but has lately moved onto longer projects. 

William Crump grew up in the sticks of Clemmons, North Carolina. He received his BFA from Ringling School of Art and eventually moved to Williamsburg in 1998. After years of not getting it, he up and transplanted his life to the East Village, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He currently longs for the red bricks, green trees and mountains of his youth.

Lauren DiCioccio is an emerging artist living in the Bay Area, an hour south of San Francisco. Born and raised in Philadelphia, DiCioccio received a BA from Colgate University in 2002, where she studied art and art history. Though academically trained in painting, much of her current body of work employs the medium of embroidery, which she learned at an early age from her mother. Since moving to California in 2004, she has worked as the Resident Manager at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where she lives on-site in a cabin overlooking the Pacific Ocean. DiCioccio has shown her work at venues in San Francisco, including Jack Fischer Gallery, Intersection for the Arts, The Lab and the SFMOMA Artists Gallery. In 2009, she will present her work in solo shows at the Clifford Art Gallery at Colgate University and at Lyons Wier Ortt Contemporary Art in New York. 

Lizzie Buckmaster Dove was born in Lilydale, Australia.  She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts in 1993. 

Buckmaster Dove uses the language of the colonialists, who felt compelled to order and name their discoveries, and presents her works in museum-like cases, in complex formations, in miniscule tins and as books on stands, in order to call to mind the framework of scientific illustrations and catalogs of natural history. Buckmaster Dove’s works are intimate. She particularly loves the physicality of books, their texture, density, smell and the way their pages move; she finds it provocative to breathe new life into a mostly redundant but intrinsically beautiful object.

Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California. She grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. Her work exists in a wide variety of media, including photography, sculpture, video and sound. Her work has been exhibited both domestically and internationally, most notably at PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space, SculptureCenter and the Palais de Tokyo. In January 2006, the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland featured a solo show of works made in Finland, and in June 2006, the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published the accompanying monograph, All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of recent video installation works in July 2008. Katchadourian is represented by Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York and Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. 

Gregory Krum was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and studied biology, sculpture and design at Portland State University. After a study abroad program in Italy with the University of Georgia, he relocated to New York where he received his Master's degree in studio art from New York University and the International Center for Photography. His work has been shown in venues such as the Armory Show, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Soren Christiansen Gallery in New Orleans and Jen Bekman Gallery. He was awarded the Jack Goodman Scholarship for Art and Technology and his work has been written about and published in the Paris-based magazine, Purple. In 2007, he was co-curator of the art exhibition The Wrong Store with Kantor/Feuer Gallery in New York. He was a Summer 2007 Hot Shot.

Working within the genres of landscape and interior, Krum's work explores diverse themes such as love, failure, commerce and desire within a larger context of space and organization. His subjects have included dust, devotional offerings, seaside villages and Parisian houseboats. 

Steve Lambert was born in Los Angeles in 1976 and moved to the Bay Area four days later. His father, a former Franciscan monk, and mother, an ex-Dominican nun, imbued the values of dedication, study, poverty and service to others – qualities that prepared him for life as an artist.

Steve Lambert recently made international news with The New York Times Special Edition, a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency and lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art). His work has been shown at various galleries, art spaces and museums, both nationally and internationally, and was recently collected by the Library of Congress. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC and CNN and has been reported on in multiple outlets including the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, The Believer, GOOD, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet and Newsweek. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. Steve studied sociology and film before receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and an MFA at UC Davis in 2006. He dropped out of high school in 1993. 

Michael Mandiberg is a Brooklyn-based artist, programmer, designer, educator and bicyclist. He is known for selling all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg, making perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com and creating Firefox plug-ins that highlight the real environmental costs of a global economy on TheRealCosts.com. His current projects include the co-authored, groundbreaking, Creative Commons-licensed textbook, Digital Foundations: Intro to Media Design, that teaches Bauhaus visual principles through design software; HowMuchItCosts.us, a car direction site that incorporates the financial and carbon cost of driving; and Bright Bike, a retro-reflective bicycle that the website TreeHugger.com praised as "obnoxiously bright." He is an Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. His work lives at Mandiberg.com.

Carrie Marill was born in 1976 in San Francisco, California. She graduated from San Francisco State University in 2002 with a BA in painting. She then moved to Ithaca, New York to attend Cornell University where she received an MFA in 2004. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and featured in New American Paintings, Wired Magazine, Southwest Art, The New York Times, LA Weekly and LA Times. She is the recipient of several awards, including The Contemporary Forum Artist Grant (2005) and was a recent nominee for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant.

Mike Monteiro was born in Philadelphia and now lives in San Francisco. He received his BFA from the Tyler School of Art and his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. He believes that it’s okay to lie when the chance of someone believing you is greater than the chance that they won’t.

Jane Mount is an artist, product strategist, designer and entrepreneur. She has exhibited work in various U.S. cities, co-founded several companies and has been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She is obsessed with learning and knows a lot about drawing, the Internet, social networks, anthropology, art history, wine, human anatomy, furniture, cooking and golf. When she was little, she believed that people kept learning and changing until they knew absolutely everything and then they would die and move on to something else because they were done here. She is currently still on that mission. 

Kirby Pilcher was born in eastern South Dakota in 1977. In 2007, he received an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, where he currently lives with his five-year-old Border-Collie/Husky named Molly. He was a Winter 2007 Hot Shot, participating in a group exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery. Kirby is currently an Adjunct Professor of photography at SUNY Brockport and Wells College. 

Jason Polan is a freelance artist living in New York City. He has exhibited work all over the United States and Europe. He is a member of The 53rd Street Biological Society and Taco Bell Drawing Club. In August 2008, he wrapped up The Drawing Project. Polan is currently attempting to draw every person in New York.

Polan's illustrations and projects have appeared in Metropolis Magazine, The New Yorker and ARTnews and his books have generated wide acclaim. His book Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art is a cult favorite. 

Kent Rogowski's works are often provocative and whimsical manipulations of objects and images that surround us in our daily lives. From teddy bears, to jigsaw puzzles, to self-help books, he uses and alters mass-produced consumer products as a vehicle for self-expression. By transforming the generic into something personal, Rogowski questions what these products communicate and also what role they play in our culture.

In 2000, Rogowski received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design where he is now a visiting critic. powerHouse books published his first monograph, Bears, in 2007. He has had solo shows in New York at both Foley Gallery and Jen Bekman Gallery. In April of 2009, his first European solo show opened at In Focus Gallery in Cologne, Germany. 

Edward Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1956, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. He had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. At the start of the seventies, Ruscha began showing his work with Leo Castelli in New York. He currently shows with the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Beverly Hills and London.  

Ruscha combines the cityscape of Los Angeles with vernacular language to communicate the urban experience. Encompassing photography, drawing, painting and artist books, Ruscha's work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confront us daily. Ruscha's early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach. 

Victor Schrager's still-life photographs are radiant, abstracted images where luminous planes of color interact with sharp edges: objective photographic description collides with pure color and form, transforming everyday objects. A soft focus enables solid color fields to bounce off of and blend into one another, creating a palette of unexpected hues. In the tradition of classical still-life painting, Schrager's compositions are not content driven but are instead, increasingly pure and heroic presentations of simple subjects. Schrager recently responded to a question about the still-life as subject matter with, "A book is an interesting form of a lemon."

A Harvard graduate, Schrager is a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Fellowship and The MacDowell Colony Resident Fellowship. His work has been featured in numerous one-person and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan over the past twenty years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Center for Creative Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Polaroid International Collection, The International Center of Photography, The San Francisco Museum of Art and various private collections. 

Kelly Shimoda’s first camera—a Kodak disc—was given to her in elementary school. She would snap shots on family vacations and around the house but it wasn’t until she was living and working in Barcelona in 2000 that she started taking photography more seriously. She loved the life there and began taking a picture a day to be able to remember it all. The consistency of thinking about, and looking for, images hiding in the everyday helped her to translate her perspective onto film. She also discovered that the camera was a way to ask strangers questions, which satisfied a lot of her curiosities. 

Shimoda completed the International Center of Photography’s Certificate Program in Documentary Photography/Photojournalism in 2005 and co-founded the photo collective/agency, Veras Images, with a group of fellow classmates. Prior to ICP, she spent six years in international education and communications. And before that, she graduated from Brown University with a BA in Latin American Studies and American Civilization. 

Mickey Smith was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1972 and received a B.A. in photography from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1994. Images from her Volume series have been exhibited in New York, China and Russia. Smith has received the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography as well as grants from Forecast Public Art Affairs, CEC ArtsLink and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is represented by Invisible-Exports in New York.

Alec Soth is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the recipient of several major fellowships from the Bush, McKnight and Jerome Foundations and was awarded the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His work is represented in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Soth's photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials. Steidl published his first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, in 2004 to critical acclaim.  Since then, Soth has published NIAGARA (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007) and The Last Days of W (2008). Soth is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis and is a member of Magnum Photos. 

Shaun Sundholm is a new media/old media/no media designer and a native of Portland, OR. He works in advertising by day and takes photographs, plays pianos and makes art by moonlight. Shaun believes in drizzly Oregon beaches, backyard chickens, revving engines and the healing power of tacos.

Zoe Strauss was born in Philadelphia. Strauss is a self-taught photographer, described as the chronicler of Philadelphia's mean streets and the city’s own Diane Arbus. On her 30th birthday, she was given a camera and started taking pictures of life in Philadelphia’s marginal neighborhoods. Shows, awards, acclaim and fellowships soon followed. For the last eight years, she has exhibited her photos in the attention-grabbing annual installation, Under I-95. Strauss has been awarded the Leeway Grant (2002), Arcadia Works on Paper Award (2004), Pew Fellow Award (2005) and Zoe Strauss Night at the Whitney Museum (2006). 

Brian Ulrich was born in 1971 in Northport, New York. His photographs portraying contemporary consumer culture reside in major museum collections, such as, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Ulrich earned his MFA in photography at Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in photography at the University of Akron. An internship at the Akron Art Museum further fueled Brian's research and knowledge of the history of the medium. He later spent considerable time working at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and then the Cleveland Museum of Art, often staying after hours to sift through the vast libraries, collections and archives of photography. It is this understanding of history that informs much of his work, which today addresses social, political and historical issues.

Ulrich lives and works in Chicago. In addition to teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College, he curates exhibitions and is an active member of a community of young photographers and artists, both local and global, through his website and blog.  

Tim Walker’s interest in photography began while working at Condé Nast Publications, where he established the Cecil Beaton Archive. He became a freelance photographic assistant, eventually working in New York for Richard Avedon. Upon winning 3rd Place in the Independent Young Photographer of the Year competition, he launched his personal career. He began working as a documentary and portrait photographer for various UK newspapers, and then for British Vogue, W and Harper's Bazaar. 

Currently, Walker photographs for W, Vanity Fair, British Vogue and Italian Vogue. He has also photographed advertising campaigns for clients such as Yohji Yamamoto, Barneys, Gap and Comme des Garçons. He studied at Exeter Art College, a tertiary college in Oxford.