Symposium presenters come from a wide variety of media and from all walks of creative life including those in academia, emerging artists, international icons and working makers at various points in their careers.
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Adam Atkinson
Philadelphia, PA, Metals/Wood
I Wanna Be A Cowboy – Heteronormative narratives of the American West became a catalyst for strict gender binaries still experienced today. My work seeks to subvert the masculine western archetype through material histories,queer adornment, sculpture, and the homoerotic gaze, while childhood memories of hunting dens and wilderness campgrounds frame the work.
Bio- Adam Atkinson (he/they) is a metalsmith, curator, and educator. Their work is informed by the visual lexicon of natural history, childhood memories, and material research, linking personal experience to the Politics of representation. Atkinson received an MFA in Metal Design at East Carolina University (2019), and a BFA at Boise State University (2013). Their work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally.
Website- https://adamatkinsonart.com
Susan Beiner
Phoenix, AZ, Ceramics
Next to Nature – My concept of landscape is participation in the environment that we all experience. I utilize multiples, repetition and density to encrust form and build modular units to create a system which allows the viewer visual entry into the landscape. Each project utilizes a new set of forms and a distinctive configuration depending on the content. In relation to object making, I will further discuss references to place with translation of how ideas progress into 3D form and demonstrate how ideas progress into 3D form.
Bio- Beiner is a ceramic artist and professor in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her sculptural installations expose concern about the effects on the fragile ecosystem of humans, animals, and plants. Her objective is to create an ecological balance between the conflict that has arisen between nature and culture. Beiner has exhibited nationally and internationally, has received numerous awards and residencies and her work is included in diverse and prestigious collections.
Website- susanbeiner.com
Natalie Conway
Philadelphia, PA, Painting
The Gesso Garden – My presentation will be based around the processes I’ve invented to create my paintings and the gradual shift I made from playing with colored and textured gesso grounds for oil paintings, to eventually having the gesso grounds be the finished paintings. Along the way, acrylic paint has taken an increasingly important role, as it is highly compatible with acrylic gesso, and is equally suited to receiving abrasive treatments. Nature plays multiple roles in this practice: I collect minerals and shells to incorporate directly into the paintings, and my studio operates as a kind of garden and compost facility. By this I mean that new work is fed by the leftovers and detritus of previous pieces.
Bio- Natalie Conway is a painter living and working in Philadelphia. Born in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1989, she spent her youth dreaming of a career in neuroscience. As an Honors College Fellow at the University of Arkansas, she studied Biochemistry, Psychology, and Philosophy, graduating in 2012. Within a year, she returned to study drawing and painting. In the summer of 2014 she attended the Mount Gretna School of Art, and in 2015 she attended the prestigious Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. Finally yielding to this calling, she packed for the East Coast to pursue an MFA at Boston University, which she completed in 2024.Website-natalieconway.com
Kirk Lang
Seattle, WA, Metals
Looking Up, Looking Down, To See the In-between – Recurring themes in my work include time, space and mythology, in the form of wearable and interactive sculptural objects. Objects surround us at all times. They communicate a deeper, more meaningful conversation about our own personal history and experiences. In essence, objects are able to simultaneously embody both what is tangible and intangible. What is physical and what is incorporeal. This duality has become central to my sculptural work.
Bio- Kirk is an educator and lecturer included in many publications. Collections – several including the Metal Museum, Memphis, TN Website-kirklang.com
Colleen Mullins
San Francisco, CA, Mixed Media
Colleen Mullins Isn’t Interested in Photography Anymore – I will discuss the winding arc of my own multidisciplinary practice and how the throughlines have emerged into a body of work that sometimes seems disparate, but always carries the spirit of curiosity. In addition to photography, my work traverses embroidery, sculpture, and deep archival research. In 2020 I started a collection of photographs made by others that is now part of my practice of visual storytelling. Like a year-long collaboration during the Covid lock-down with three other women to recreate the history of photography utilizing toilet paper as a compositional tool, this is another whorl on the tree of creativity.
Bio- Colleen Mullins is a photographer and book artist. She has garnered numerous grants and fellowships, including two McKnight Fellowships, four Minnesota State Arts Board Grants, and in 2020, she was a nominee for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award for her project “Expositions are the timekeepers of progress”. Additionally, she has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Penland School of Crafts Winter Residency, and a 2023-2024 Project Space Residency at the Visual Studies Workshop. Mullins’ work is in numerous national and international collections.
Website– ColleenMullins.net
Richard Notkin
Vaughn, WA, Ceramics
Approaching Six Decades of Social and Political Commentary in Ceramic Art
For the past five and a half decades, Notkin’s work as a ceramic artist has been focused on social and political commentary. From his artist’s statement for the past 25 years: “We have stumbled into the 21st Century with the technologies of ‘Star Wars’ and the emotional maturity of cavemen. The problems of human civilization are far too complex to be solved by means of explosive devices. If we can’t find more creative solutions to fixing worldwide social and political problems than sending young men and women to shred and incinerate one another’s flesh with weapons of ever-increasing efficiency, we will not survive to celebrate the passage into the 22nd Century. And too many of our world’s nations are now in the hands of ideological thugs and fundamentalist tyrants who are fumbling the planet towards World War III.”
Bio- Richard Notkin is a full-time studio artist. His work has been featured in 50 one-person exhibitions, over 800 group exhibitions internationally, and is in more than 75 public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Notkin was a featured artist in the “Landscape” segment of the premier episode of the “Craft in America” series on PBS and received numerous awards and is the inaugural recipient of the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
Website- richardnotkin
Anika Smulovitz
Boise, ID, Metals
The Quiet Power of Wearable Art – As an adornment artist, I am interested in the relationship between object and wearer. For the past 30 years, my wearable artwork has explored concepts relating to the body, loss of innocence, and social action. This presentation will begin by giving context to my artwork, sharing briefly the bodies of work that have led to my current exploration, as well as briefly sharing my Judaica practice (Jewish ritual objects) which has always been and continues to be a separate but related side of my art practice.
Bio- Anika Smulovitz is Professor, Art Jewelry & Metalsmithing, Boise State University. She holds a BFA, University or Oregon (1997), MA, and MFA University of Wisconsin-Madison (2001 & 2003). Smulovitz’ work is exhibited nationally, internationally, appears in numerous publications , and is in five permanent collections including The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, The Jewish Museum in New York, NY, and the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.
Website- anikasmulovitz.com
Terri Warpinski
De Pere, WI, Photography
Restless Earth- lens based mixed media assemblage and installation.
My work reflects a long-term interest in the traces of human activity embedded in the landscape. Recently completed projects include Surface Tension: three landscapes of division; Liminal Matter: Fences a collaboration with Portland poet Laura Winter, Death|s|trip, and Restless Earth. Through my work I seek to make visible a state of mind, a way of perceiving and connecting information and ideas across time and space that are not entirely visual in nature; and in doing so, construct a narrative that is multi-stranded and open-ended addressing various notions related to time, observation, destruction and restoration, the accumulation of knowledge, and the shadow of memory.
Bio– After 32 years of teaching and administrative service Warpenski is now a Professor Emerita of Art dedicated to a full-time practice as a studio artist, curator and art activist. Her creative and scholarly career is distinguished by a Fulbright Fellowship, DAAD Research Grant working in Berlin with the Stiftung Berliner Mauer as her host institution. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship, two Career Opportunity Grants from the Ford Family Foundation and the Oregon Art Commission. She has been awarded artist residencies at Ucross, Playa, and Caldera. She is a member of the Environmental Photography Collective (www.environmentalphotographers.com).
Website- terriwarpinski.com
Bethany Laranda Wood
Cedar Rapids, IA,Metals/Printmaking
(Im)material Translations – I am fascinated by sketched lines as a symbolic link to the chaos of internal life that I can use to highlight personal experiences with mental health, relationships, and identity. As a metalsmith and printmaker, I explore markmaking by translating it from sketch to metalwork, metal to print. This translation interprets the immediacy of pen on paper, slowed to the meditative pace of jeweler’s saw on metal, telling stories through the replication of converging lines. I use metal pierced in this process to produce prints on paper before using it to create art jewelry and metalwork. The works on paper are by-products in a sense, a practice started as a practical means of preserving castoffs and artifacts of making. They now reflect a translation of memory that is both a parallel and counterpoint to my wearable and sculptural work.
Bio- Bethany Laranda Wood was born and raised in West Texas. She earned her BFA in Jewelry Design and Metalsmithing from Texas Tech University and her MFA from the University of Iowa. She is now an educator, studio technician, and working artist in Cedar Rapids, IA. Her work has been featured in national and international exhibitions and is in private and public collections throughout the US, including the Nevada Museum of Art Center for Art + Environment. Website- www.bethanylarandawood.com
Kay Yee
Pasadena, CA, Metals
From Professor to Studio Artist – My work as a metalsmith/jeweler is a culmination of my education, with 30 plus years as an academic, and now, an observer and learner. My interest in metalwork led me to the study of metalsmithing & jewelry at art school and graduate school, but it was through my teaching that I learned and developed a technical vocabulary that I continue to use today. Through the development of assignments for students to solve, and solving student’s problems when issues arose, I gained new skills and techniques. My current work continues to reflect my interest in communicating through small metals techniques. I use the skill set of the jeweler, metal-fabricator and enamellist to convey stories. Sometimes they are family stories that I wish to preserve, other times it is from my observations of nature. Most of all, I try to make work that will engage the viewer’s experiences and thoughts
Bio- Kay Yee is a full-time metalsmith/jeweler and works from her studio in Pasadena, California. She is Professor Emeritus at Pasadena City Collegewhere she instructed Metal, Crafts & 3D design for over 33 years. Yee hold a BFA- California College of Arts & Crafts and MFA- California State University, Long Beach. Her work has been included in many publications, museums and gallery exhibitions nationally & abroad.
Website- freehand.com/artists/kay-yee/