Anne Beffel
Anne Beffel received her BFA from the University of Michigan and her MA/MFA
from the University of Iowa. A past participant in the Whitney Museum of
American Art Independent Study Program, Beffel is now an assistant professor
at the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. Solo
exhibitions of her work have been held in Iowa City at Gallery 6H, Eve
Drewlowe Gallery, Reservoir Space and The Landing, and at Blake Gallery
in Seattle. She has taken part in group exhibitions at the Urban Institute
for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Art Center of Northern
New Jersey; Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, New York; Maryland Institute
College of Art in Baltimore; The Commons at Cornell College in Mount Vernon,
Iowa; the Fassbender Annex in Chicago; and the Watkins Gallery at Winona
State University, Minnesota. Beffel has received Seattle King County Arts
Commission grants and was recently awarded a Syracuse University Vision
Fund Grant. Her work is in the collections of CIBO Corporation in Seattle,
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.
Beffel explores notions of personal and social equilibrium through interactive
works sited in common institutional spaces, such as public restrooms. By
physically altering mundane objects and juxtaposing them with narratives
gathered from the media, personal conversations and documentary interviews,
Beffel invites us to examine and question social hierarchies and their effect
on our daily activities.
Jane Benson
Jane Benson graduated from Edinburgh College of Art and received a Fulbright
Scholarship to pursue her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
She now lives and works in Brooklyn. Solo exhibitions of her work have
been held at the Chicago Project Room, Karen McCready in New York, and
most recently at the Queens Museum of Art. Over the past four years Benson
has been included in group shows at White Columns and P.S.1 Contemporary
Art Center in New York, Diverseworks Art Space in Houston, the Villa Medici
in Rome, the Bury Museum in England, and the Center for Curatorial Studies
at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Benson has received many
awards including a commission for the Buffalo Bayou ArtPark in Houston.
For her two- and three-dimensional works Benson manipulates commonplace objects
such as books, artificial trees and photographs in order to upset behavioral
conventions and effect subtle interventions in public spaces. Using misdirection
as her guide, Benson blurs already faint distinctions between reality and
representation in works that are both absurd and eerily beautiful.
Curtis Cuffie
Cuffie was born in 1955 in Hartsville, South Carolina and passed away in
September of 2002. Cuffie exhibited his work at the American Museum of
Visionary Art in Baltimore; the Arts Alliance in Haverstraw, New York;
Pace University Gallery in Pleasantville, New York; the Jamaica Center
for Arts and Learning in Jamaica, New York; and at numerous venues in New
York City including TRIBES Gallery, The 4th Street Photo Gallery, Exit
Art, American Primitive Gallery and the 1997 Downtown Arts Festival. He
received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation
for the Arts and Change Incorporated and was profiled by The New York
Times, Art and Antiques, The Village Voice, and New
York Press. In 1995 Cuffie was featured in the NBC special broadcast Outsider
Art.
Cuffie first gained local fame for art he made in the streets of the East
Village from 1989 to 1997. Working in the tradition of rural southern yardshows,
bottle-trees and decorated graves turned urban, Cuffie sited his vibrant
and ultimately ephemeral works on the traffic island south of Cooper Union,
the exterior of Bowery Bar and the "Margin"
just south of Astor Place.
Charles Goldman
Born in San Francisco, Charles Goldman received his BA from the University
of California at Santa Cruz and his MFA from University of Illinois at
Chicago. He has mounted numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at Rare
and Sculpture Center (both in New York), Traywick Gallery in Berkeley,
California, and The Chicago Project Room, and has taken part in group exhibitions
at Exit Art in New York; the Centro Cultural Molino de Perez in Montevideo,
Uruguay; The Living Room in Los Angeles; and the Ottawa Art Gallery in
Ontario. Goldman has lectured widely, most recently at the University of
Chicago and the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco,
and he has taught studio arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and
Rutgers University in New Jersey, among many others. Goldmanís work
is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum
and Microsoft Corporation.
In work that merges conceptual, performance and sculptural traditions, Goldman
explores the reciprocal effects of memory and architecture. Recent works
have included Infinity Walk, a plywood catwalk shaped like a mobius
strip, and Portrait Project, an ongoing work in which Goldman asks
strangers to draw his portrait. Currently, he is making small recreations
in clay of singular, insignificant memories "loaned"
to him by random participants.
Elke Lehmann
Elke Lehmann was born in Trier, Germany. She lives and works in New York.
Lehmann graduated from the Kunstakademie Münster in Germany, received
a DAAD fellowship to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des
Beaux Arts in Paris, and completed the post-graduate program at the Institut
des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris. Over the past decade Lehmann
has exhibited at various institutions and public sites throughout Europe
and the United States. Recently, her work was shown at the Kunstmuseum
Bonn in Germany, the Slusser Gallery at the University of Michigan School
of Art and Design in Ann Arbor, and in New York at the Brooklyn Public
Library, The Clocktower Gallery/ P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Kent Gallery,
Momenta Art and the Sculpture Center. Among other awards she most recently
received a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Art Grant and participated in the
National Studio Program at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. She has lectured
on her work in several venues such as the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten
in Rotterdam, the Brooklyn Public Library in New York and the MIT Visual
Arts Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has been featured in
various periodicals, including Art in America, The Village Voice and The
New York Times.
Lehmann produces site-specific installations and public interventions that
address the physical and historical aspects of the spaces in which they are
sited. Many of her works have focused on the amplification of history and
collective memory. In 1998 the site-specific installation 4(to)5 conceived
for Artists Space in New York marked the beginning of a new series of architectural
installations incorporating live animals and sound.
Pia Lindman
Born in Espoo, Finland, Pia Lindman received her MFA from the Academy of
Fine Arts in Finland, and then as a Fulbright scholar received a Master
of Science in Visual Studies from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She
now lives and works in New York. Lindman has mounted solo exhibitions and
screenings at the Institut Finlandais in Paris, France; Artist-in-Akiya
in Tokyo, Japan; Kluuvi Gallery in Helsinki, Finland; and Galleri FABRIKEN
in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has been included in group exhibitions at Galerie
Gana-Beaubourg in Paris; Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, Finland;
Beaconsfield in London; and The Bronx Museum of Arts and P.S.1 Contemporary
Art Center, New York. She has lectured widely, most recently at the Institut
Française díArchitecture in Paris, France, and the Rhode
Island School of Design and has received numerous awards, including those
from AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture in Finland, FRAME
(Finnish Fund for Art Exchange), the Council for the Arts at MIT and Visek
(The Visual Artists’ Copyright Society). Lindman’s work has been
reviewed in many periodicals and journals including Art Press, The
New York Times, The Village Voice, ARTnews, Technikart, Thresholds and Time
Out London.
Lindman takes the site-specific tradition as a point of departure, while
addressing the cultural, social, political, and economic conditions of a
site. Her art takes the form of architecture, performance, photographs, texts,
or video, which she inserts into social situations. Lindman is currently
working on a series of video "paintings" that draw on the impressionist
painting tradition. Synthesizing clips of footage from a fixed camera position,
Lindman creates moving images that subtly record changes of light and movement
in space and time. The latest series of these videos, Thisplace, is
currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens.
Brian McGrath
Brian McGrath studied at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies
in New York and received his Bachelor of Architecture at Syracuse University
and his Master of Architecture from Princeton University, New Jersey. He
is currently senior faculty at Parsons School of Design and adjunct associate
professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning &
Preservation at Columbia University, both in New York. Solo exhibitions of
his work have been held in New York at the Skyscraper Museum and Parsons
Gallery, and he has been included in group exhibitions at the OK-Centrum
Art Center in Linz, Austria; the Queens Museum in New York; National Building
Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Chapman Gallery at Salford University
in Manchester, UK. Awards and grants include an award of distinction from
Ars Electronica for "Net Excellence," "Best 3-D Animation"
at the Flash Film Festival in New York, a New York State Council on the Arts
Technology Initiative Grant and a National Endowment of the Arts Institutional
Project Grant. McGrath was a Senior Fulbright scholar at Chulalongkorn University
in Bangkok, Thailand, and has authored two books, New Urbanisms/New Work:
Yonkers Nepperhan Valley (Columbia University Press) and Transparent
Cities (SITES Books).
McGrath sees architectural drawing not only as a referent to the built environment
but as an end in itself and has long experimented with extending the fine
art of architectural representation into the digital realm. He has received
international recognition for his moving-image architectural projections
and interactive online projects that merge physical and virtual environments.
Andrea Ray
An installation artist now based in New York, Andrea Ray completed her BFA
at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and her MFA at Cranbrook
Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Ray took part in the Whitney
Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and has been an artist-in-residence
at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center National Studio Program. She has taken
part in group exhibitions in New York at Apex Art, DAC and White Columns
and has exhibited in Ireland, New Zealand, Canada and Spain. A public discussion
of her work was recently held at the Whitney Museum of American Art as
part of the I.P.O. lecture series. Articles on Ray have appeared in The
New York Times, Zing Magazine and forthcoming in ARTnews.
Most recently Ray completed the installation Cope for a solo show
at Cuchifritos in New York.
Using sound and architectural elements Ray creates installations that explore
the schism between modern architecture’s vision of a healthy, hygienic,
efficient society and contemporary paranoia about public spaces. Often conducting
on-site research into what she terms "the invisibilities"
of architecture and their impact on productivity and atmosphere, Ray explores
this disjuncture in work that is intended to offer comfort or respite.
Alex Villar
Born in Brazil, Alex Villar received his MFA from Hunter College in New York
and was a recent participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent
Study Program. He has had solo/two-person exhibitions at the Halle fur
Kunst in Lunenburg, Germany; Galeri Tommy Lund in Copenhagen; Galerie Joanna
Kamm in Berlin; and Art Container and Vacancy Gallery in New York. He has
been included in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and abroad:
New Art Center in Boston; Galeria Arsenal in Bialystok, Poland; Goteborg
Konstmuseum in Gothenburg, Sweden; Bona Fide Gallery in Chicago; Stefan
Stux Gallery, New York; The Brewster Project, New York; Overgaden, Copenhagen;
and The Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida. Villar has received
a Manhattan
Community Arts Fund grant, and articles on his work have appeared in The
New York Times, Tema Celeste and Texte Zur Kunst.
The focus of Villar’s photo and video work is the social use of space.
In humorous and compelling works, Villar intervenes with his body in unused
or marginal areas of the city, reanimating anonymous public spaces and addressing
the social and physical impact of architectural design.
