ALUMNI FEATURE: CANDACY TAYLOR

TAYLOR MADE CULTURE
Candacy Taylor (MA Visual and Critical Studies) is anything but the stereotypical scattered artist. Indeed, her calendar already has days booked well into 2010: a maze of book tour dates, interviews, bullfights, grant application deadlines, and more. “I spend about 50 percent of my time actually working on my projects,” she says half-jokingly, half-ruefully, “and the rest of the time doing things that prevent me from having to get a day job: marketing, fundraising, consulting.” Although really, for her it’s all of a piece, and definitely a labor of love.

Taylor was part of the very first incoming class in the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies. A book version of her 2002 thesis project, Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress, is coming out in September from Cornell University Press. It contains not only Taylor’s soon-to-be iconic photographs of coffee-shop and diner waitresses, but also 50,000 words of her own writing, organized into themed chapters such as “The Regulars,” “Ketchup in Her Veins,” and “Counter Intelligence.”

“To qualify for this project the waitresses had to be at least 50 years old, and they had to have been doing this for at least 20 years. It’s a vanishing subculture. The younger generation has a different work ethic; they think of waiting tables as something temporary, on their way to starting their ‘real’ careers.

“When I began this, I expected to meet women who felt overworked and underappreciated, but that’s not what I found. All but a few said they loved their jobs and, even if given the opportunity, wouldn’t do anything else. For them it pays well, it gives them a sense of community, and it has enabled them to support themselves and their children, oftentimes as single mothers. A lot of them say if it wasn’t for waitressing they’d be at home, lonely, maybe even crippled with arthritis from lack of physical activity. One waitress I talked to even has an urn with the ashes of one of her favorite regulars on her mantel at home.”

The book retails for just $19.95. “I worked hard to get the price point down to something I felt the waitresses could afford.”

Taylor got the idea for Counter Culture while she herself was employed as a waitress, working her way through CCA. A survey of existing published material revealed much about American diner architecture, but almost nothing about the women who bring these places to life. Her project grew to include not only the book, but also three radio episodes that aired on NPR and a traveling exhibition of oral histories and photographs. A documentary film is in progress; she has made a trailer and is now looking for funding. She envisions it airing anywhere from the Food Network to Sundance.

And she’s already knee-deep in two new projects: one looking at San Francisco’s longest-running ethnic beauty shops, and another looking at female bullfighters and bull riders. “I was surprised to find that very little has been published on women in bull sports. Women have been fighting and riding bulls for centuries—the stories go back to ancient India, Greece, Rome—and yet I’d never heard anything about them. But it’s actually a growing subculture in California. I went to my first bullfight, in Stockton, a year ago. A friend invited me, and I was very hesitant but she said it was totally bloodless. And I ended up completely captivated by the experience, especially by the female bullfighter. Everyone was speaking Portuguese. I am hoping to get some funding to make a documentary for HBO.

“About the beauty shops, there have been photography projects on the subject, but the material wasn’t handled in the way I’m planning to do it. I went to the same hairstylist in Hayes Valley for years, and I was devastated when she retired. Getting my hair done there was a total, immersive experience: I’d be there for four or five hours, and everyone in the shop would be engaged in one big conversation. It was like going to a diner.”

Taylor’s jam-packed schedule was suddenly stalled about a year and a half ago when she had to have emergency surgery; the waitress project had literally broken her back. Lugging cameras and other equipment in and out of a car trunk for six years and 26,000 miles herniated one of the disks in her spine, and after weeks of intense pain and warnings from her doctor that letting it go might mean never walking again, she finally relented to going under the knife. They said she might be needing a cane forever, but she’s no longer even limping.

That same stubbornness and perseverance, she says, got her through graduate school. Taylor got her undergraduate degree in painting and drawing from San Francisco State University and she worked for several years as a scenic artist for film, television, and theater productions. “I was doing what most of my undergraduate classmates aspired to do, but I just wasn’t fulfilled,” she recalls. “I wanted to go back to school to do something different, but I didn’t know what. CCA’s Visual and Critical Studies Program was the first of its kind. It liberated me from being tied to the medium of painting and helped me transfer those same skills and concepts to other forms of art. It’s intensely academic but it isn’t elitist. It encourages projects that could potentially reach the public, which is crucially important to me.

“The program really helped me articulate what I wanted to do with my life. All the reading, all the theory, it was so hard! Many of my classmates had already been published, and I just didn’t have that background. So many times I felt I was in way over my head, but somehow I pushed through and finished, and my thesis committee told me I’d come further than anyone else in my class. Now, no matter what I do, even when I have to tailor my projects to make them commercial enough to be accessible to a wide audience, they still have substance behind them. They have strong theoretical legs to stand on. At CCA I learned how to be a critical thinker, and then I grew from there to become a critical photographer, a critical artist, a critical interviewer.”

Taylor invites anyone with knowledge of a long-running beauty shop in San Francisco, focusing on any ethnicity, to get in touch at candacy 'at' taylormadeculture.com. She is also seeking an intern.

She will speak at the Oral History Association’s annual meeting in October and the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta in November. Taylor’s book tour begins on September 3 at Modern Times in San Francisco and will cover the county.

She is also organizing a series of workshops on grant writing; producing, exhibiting, and marketing independent multimedia projects; and documenting regular people, places, and events. She will lead a workshop at CCA on Saturday, August 22 “Producing Multimedia Projects on a Budget." If you are interested, please get in touch at candacy 'at' taylormadeculture.com by August 14.

Email candacy 'at' taylormadeculture.com to subscribe to her mailing list and receive regular updates.

Candacy A. Taylor
Visual and Critical Studies, 2002
Born in Gary, Indiana, in 1971
Lives and works in San Francisco
Artistic influences: Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Mary Ellen Mark, Bill Owens, Jeff Brouws, Studs Terkel, Ira Glass, and David Isay
Influences at CCA: Lydia Matthews, Mitchell Schwarzer, Mark Bartlett, Mabel Wilson, Barry Katz, John Laskey, and David Goldberg
Website: www.taylormadeculture.com
Blog: counterculturewaitress.wordpress.com

By Lindsey Westbrook

ALUMNI

Shana Agid (2005)
Shana Agid is a writer, visual artist, and activist. Her work challenges ideas of race, gender, and sexuality in the post-Civil Rights Era United States and reflects an investment in building new language to address new ideas and possibilities for undoing relationships of power in the 21st century. His visual art has been shown at The New York Center for Book Arts and Southern Exposure and is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, DePaul University, and the University of California, Irvine, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Southern California libraries’ special collections. Her essays have appeared in Flow Magazine (flowtv.org) and Clamor Magazine, and as catalog text for You Can Have It All, New York (ychia.com/newyork.htm). He also has a chapter addressing the role of the prison industrial complex in Hurricane Katrina in Through the Eye of Katrina: Social Justice in the United States, published in 2007 by Carolina Academic Press. Agid has given talks on transgender representation and deconstructing “hate crime” in queer politics at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York, Yale University, and Oberlin College. He is currently the Director of Academic Projects at Parsons the New School for Design and is a contributing editor and art director for Radical Teacher.

Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez (2003)
Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez has worked as a cultural worker, writer and curator in the San Francisco Bay Area for over the past decade. She began her involvement with MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in 1994 and currently serves as the Associate Director & Curator. Anjee earned a BFA in pictorial studies from San Jose State University and holds a MA in Visual Criticism from California College of the Arts. She has served as a nominator, juror and panelist for projects with Creative Capital, Alliance of Artists Communities’ Visions from the New California project, and ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge. At MACLA she’s institutionalized the organization’s commitment to commission one significant new work by an artist annually. Anjee has played an integral role in MACLA’s community development work, which uses art as a vehicle to bring people of various socio, economic and cultural backgrounds together to promote neighborhood-based social change. In 2007, she was the guest curator for the Oakland Museum of California’s annual Days of the Dead exhibition, Ancient Roots/Urban Journeys. Anjee lives in San Jose, CA with her husband Enrique and daughter Lourdes. (anjee at maclaarte.org)

Jen Banta (2009)
Jen Banta, a San Francisco native with roots in NYC, studied at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY and graduated with a BA in Art History from Mills College, Oakland, CA. Her current work involves re-framing the life and times of Abstract Beat artist, Bernice Bing. Her interests include the dharma, Anusara Yoga, relational art as practiced in the everyday, the space of memory, a fascination with the aesthetics of mid-century, and the importance of those who came before.
This Spring, she hosted a roundtable conversation at CCA amongst a number of artists and scholars who knew Bing and have been elemental to her primary research. Additionally, she will be coordinating her fourth annual multi-disciplinary United States of Asian America Festival with the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center. She has previously worked with La Pocha Nostra as administrative coordinator and personal assistant for MacArthur Fellow, Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Dan Bollwinkel (2007)
Dan Bollwinkel holds a BA in Modern Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. As a freelance writer and journalist, he has worked as a columnist, correspondent, contributor, editor and editorial researcher for numerous publications including the Contra Costa Times Newspaper Group, MetroNews, Boulevards New Media and the web and print based organization Not For Tourists, for whom he recently served as arts and entertainment editor to the company’s 2009 San Francisco guidebook. His CCA master's thesis project was based on field research he conducted over several years in Southern Thailand, where he focused on the post 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami tourist landscape. Mr. Bollwinkel’s thesis has recently been acquired by Lambert Academic Publishing of Germany, and will be published as a monograph in the summer of 2010. Amongst other local visual artists and writers, Mr. Bollwinkel has recently worked closely with activist and author Rebecca Solnit on her post-disaster study “A Paradise Built in Hell” (Viking).

Nensi Brailo (2010)
Nensi Brailo was born and raised in Dubrovnik, Croatia. She came to the U.S. for college and forgot to go home. She earned a B.A. degree in Spanish Language and Literatures from UC Berkeley, and a Master’s in Library and Information Studies from San José State University. Her interests include destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage affected by wars, and the role of the artist during time of war. She wrote a thesis “Librocide: Destruction of Libraries in Croatia, 1991-1995” and co-published an article in Visual Resources on protection of cultural heritage. Over the years she has worked at various libraries at UC Berkeley, CCA, and Oakland Public. She is pursuing an M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies at CCA on a part-time basis, and is writing a thesis on the 1990’s wartime art in the Old City of Dubrovnik.

Ramsay Bell Breslin
Ramsay Bell Breslin is a poet, a freelance art writer and academic editor. She holds an undergraduate degree in English from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Writing and an MA in Visual Criticism from California College of the Arts. Her thesis, Reinscribing Loss in New (Old) Harmony, examines death as configured in the art and architecture of an historic tourist town in Indiana. A former student of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, her self-portrait was featured on the cover of Women's Studies; An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her published writing includes catalogue essays and introductions to artist's books, including Squeak Carnwath: Lists, Observations, and Counting (Chronicle Books). Her art and book reviews have appeared in the Threepenny Review, the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Express. She works as a book editor and print publicist for Kelsey Street Press, which produces books of experimental poetry and fiction by women. Her prose poem, "Paros, Fragments," will appear in an upcoming issue of Slurve. She is currently writing an experimental biography of the sculptor Stephen De Staebler. Her essay "Mourning in the Sculpture of Stephen De Staebler" has been accepted for a collection of essays, Examined Lives: Self-reflections in Psychobiography.

Michele Carlson (2007)
Michele Carlson was born in Seoul, Korea and Seattle, Washington.  She is currently completing an MA in Visual & Critical Studies and an MFA in Printmaking from CCA. Before moving to San Francisco, she earned her BFA in Printmaking and BAs in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts and American History from the University of Washington. As a practicing artist and writer, she spends most of her time thinking about other makers, the failing of history and memory, hip hop, pop culture, MTV “reality,” Puff Daddy (Diddy not included), music videos, body builders, appropriation, representation, transnational adoption and racial melancholia.  Her work often examines the intersections of these ideas and images.  She has exhibited at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco along with Tinlark Gallery and the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles.  She has upcoming shows at Giant Robot San Francisco and Junc Gallery in Los Angeles. www.michelecarlson.com (info at michelecarlson.com)

Crow Cianciola (2011)
Crow Cianciola is an artist and scholar living in the Bay Area. His research and art are both situated within areas of American studies, communication and critical queer race theory. Crow is currently  writing about text to film adaptation focusing on the appearance of Billy Budd and Melvillian Atlantic sea narratives in mass media. His project further investigates the organizing structure of race in queer sexual subcultures.
Cianciola prefers making art with others. His work often involves his background in woodworking, drawing, tattooing, figurative sculpture and casting in rubber, candy and encaustic wax. Cianciola most recently exhibited at The Ghetto Biennale, Festival of Visual Arts/Port au Prince, Haiti in December 09. Other recent projects have taken place in San Francisco at Million Fishes Gallery, 111 Minna Street Gallery, The LGBTQ Archive, Alphonse Berber Gallery and the CCA MFA Exhibition 2009. Crow received a BFA in Sculpture and a Minor in Art History from Maine College of Art.  He formerly taught figurative drawing and sculpture at the Cathedral Middle School in Portland, Maine. Crow owes his focus on arts education to the participants of Outright, Maine. He is a 2007 Jack Kent Cooke Scholar and is pursuing an MFA in Media Arts and an MA in Visual + Critical Studies from California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Emily Clark (2005)
Emily Clark is currently doing a Phd and Tutoring in Critical Studies for the Department of Visual and Material Culture at Massey University, New Zelaand. Recently giving papers in Sydney and Auckland, she is writing on the existence of Empathy in Medical Image Perception.
She also regularly contributes Art writing for New Zealand publications and has also been published on www.materialworldblog.com. an International blogsite for academic Anthropological and Visual Cultural writing. She is currently interested in exploring issues surrounding Transhumanism. www.objectresistance.blogspot.com

Liu Congyun (2009)
Liu Congyun was born and raised in Shanghai, China. After two years at CCA to complete her MA in Visual & Critical Studies, she returned to her hometown. Her writings focus on contemporary Chinese art, photography and new media. A recent essay, which gres out of her MA thesis "Cultural Identity and Innovation: The Contemporary Chinese art and Cultural Tradition," was selected as one of the finalists for the Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award of 2009. Prior to studyiing at CCA, she has worked at Oriental Morning Post as a Picture Editor and received the Best Picture Editor of 2003 awarded by All-China Journalists Association. She now works at the Himalayas Art Museum, preparing for its reopening at new site next year.(congyunliu 'at' gmail.com)

Gretchen Coombs (2006)
Gretchen Coombs' interests include art and social criticism/activism, specifically recent art practices that challenge social structures within an urban context. Her PhD at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco explores socially engaged art practices in the Bay Area. Gretchen is currently a Research Assistant at the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, and a Tutor in the Art Theory department at Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, Australia.

Duane Deterville (2009)
Duane Deterville (VCS 2009) is a visual artist, writer and Co-Founder of Sankofa Cultural Institute. A former Contra-Mestre of the African Brazilian martial art known as Capoeira, Deterville’s primary interest is in African and African Diasporic cultural expression. His independent field research includes trips to Haiti and Brazil to research sacred ground drawings and altars. He co-authored the book entitled Black Artists in Oakland, published by Arcadia in 2007. He is a columnist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s online critical publication, Open Space. His visual art practice focuses on drawings that address the intersection between symbols and ritual in African Diasporic religions. Deterville received his BFA in Drawing (1982) and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies (2009) from the California College of the Arts. His thesis titled “Drawing Down Ancestors: Defining the Afriscape through Ground Drawings and Street Altars” maps African and Afri-Diasporic presences through art that accesses African ritual.

Andrea Dooley (2006)
Andrea Dooley received her BSS in Interdisciplinary Studies at San Francisco State University in 2003, where she wrote a senior thesis focused on 1990s New Urbanism architectural strategies and spatial segregation. She completed an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts in 2006. Andrea’s master’s thesis entitled “It Seemed the Earth Could Not Hold Them: Public Genocide Memorials in Rwanda” interrogated emerging strategies of memorialization and public discourse. Her thesis focused on the politics of representation, personal narrative and the dialog between place and trauma. Andrea conducted field research in Rwanda 2005, which included interviews with genocide survivors, non-governmental organizations and memorial site visits. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Cultural studies at the University of California Davis where she was awarded the Presidents Pre-doctoral Multi-year Fellowship by the Davis Humanities Institute. At UC Davis, she plans to further investigate such issues as multivalent memorial space, implicated geographies marked by historical trauma, place and reconciliation and the language of the unimaginable in the context of genocide.

Victoria Gannon
(2008)
Victoria Gannon lives in Oakland and works as a writer and editor. She has worked in either one or both of these capacities for KQED, Chronicle Books, California College of the Arts’ Center for Art and Public Life, the Present Group, and a few other arts organizations and individual artists. She was accepted into Intersection for the Arts’ 2009 Interdisciplinary Intergenerational Writers Lab, a workshop for writers and artists interested in experimental forms of expression. She volunteers through the Oakland Public Library as an adult literacy tutor and makes (and sometimes sells) stuffed felt basset hounds. In addition to her writing-related aspirations, she harbors dreams of one day opening a rescue facility/ retirement home for wayward hounds somewhere on the northern California coast. If you have any tips on how she may achieve this, or tips on anything really, please write her at victoriagannon [at] gmail.com. Samples of her writing can be found at www.85wpm.wordpress.com.

Camellia George (2009)
Camellia George began her design career developing identities and websites, back when teenagers seemed to be the only ones who understood the internet. She earned a BFA in Communication Design from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA in Design from California College of the Arts. In 2004 Camellia co-launched Fastback Creative Books with Powis-Parker Inc., where she developed photobook products for Kodak, Shutterfly, Apple, HP, and others. Her design work centers on the use of design research to explore (and create) product experiences in culture, business, technology, and the arts. Camellia is currently pursuing an MA in Visual and Critical Studies; her thesis research analyzes the role of futurism and science fiction in developing new approaches to product design. Camellia teaches design at the University of San Francisco and CCA. www.camelliageorge.com (camelliageorge 'at' mac.com)

Meredith Goldsmith (2006)
After graduating from CCA in 2005, Meredith taught as a Visiting Instructor in Art History at University of Texas at Tyler, and then moved to Houston to participate in the Core Program as a Critical Studies Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts from 2006 - 2008. Since March she has held the position of Curatorial Associate at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where she is proud to be organizing a solo exhibition of Stephanie Syjuco's work in December.

Berin Golonu (2003)
Berin Golonu, is a doctoral candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester. As Associate Curator of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco from 2003 to 2008, she curated and co-curated more than a dozen exhibitions, including The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres (fall 2008); The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics (spring 2008); Bay Area Now (2004 and 2008); The Zine UnBound (2005); a series of exhibitions highlighting collective activity titled Peer Pleasure (2006), and Underplayed: A Mix-Tape of Music-Based Videos (2006). Her feature articles and reviews have appeared in numerous national and international arts publications, including Afterimage, Aperture, ArtinAmericamagazine.com, Art Nexus, Art on Paper, Art Papers, Contemporary, frieze, Sculpture, and Zing Magazine. Golonu holds an MA from the Visual and Critical Studies Program at CCA, where she wrote her master’s thesis on the arts publication as a curatorial site.

Analisa Goodin
(2008)
Analisa Goodin, native to the Bay Area, is a practicing artist and writer entering the throes of her thesis in the Visual and Critical Studies program at CCA.  Having lost her home in the Oakland Hills Fire of 1991, Goodin is currently exploring the loss of objects, spaces, and ideals as the subject for her thesis dissertation.  Looking at broader themes of of loss, memory, and recovery, Goodin engages these themes through the contemporary work of such artists as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Whiteread, Rebecca Horn, and Bill Viola. These are each artists whose work is, in some way, working to give a voice to the unspeakable, a language to the inarticulable, and a form to the otherwise unseen. Analisa Goodin's writing on such themes can be found in forthcoming issues of ALARM magazine, and her essay On Borders appears in the catalogue for the 2007 exhibition, "Through the Eyes of Strangers." (agoodin at cca.edu) www.analisagoodin.com

Rolan Gregg (2006)
Rolan Gregg is a writer from New York. He completed his undergraduate studies at Pace University in English literature and poetry. His most recent work explores the intersection of the transgender identity with the medical, academic and legal communities. His writing has appeared in projects for the San Francisco Performing Arts Museum, HarperCollins Publishers and Coddington Designs. His first publication, at age 10, was a widely distributed and highly acclaimed weekly neighborhood gossip column that was promptly canceled after his mother found out.

Guinevere Harrison (2008)
Born and raised in Hawaii, Guinevere Harrison relocated to the Bay Area to pursue a BA in the History of Art at University of California, Berkeley. Upon graduating in 1998, she was awarded a fellowship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and lived in Italy for two years. Her long-standing interest in art and design has inspired her to pursue a career that often blurs the boundaries of these two fields: she has worked at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, and *Surface magazine. From 2003 to 2005 she was the publicist for the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum of Art, and was a contributing writer at Providence Monthly magazine. Her current work explores the intersections of technology and culture, and her thesis examines interactive mapping practices and the emergent field of neogeography. When not researching the latest trends on the Web, Guinevere moonlights as a copywriter at Chronicle Books, where she blogs about pop culture, art and design, and the publishing industry.(guinevere.harrison at gmail.com) enewetak.wordpress.com

Sarah Hromack (2007)
Prior to completing her MA in the Visual and Critical Studies program at California College of the Arts, Sarah Hromack received a BFA in Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, MD, where she focused on curatorial and museum studies. She began writing about contemporary art and culture for the Internet in 2002 while working on the 54th Carnegie International exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and continues to publish online and in print. Sarah currently lives in New York, and is the Web editor of Art in America. She may be reached at: shromack@brantpub.com

Julia Kim (2004)
Julia Kim is a New York–based writer/designer.  She is currently working as a freelance designer for Graj+Gustavsen, a creative firm specializing in brand strategy in New York City. In 2005, she lived in South Korea where she worked as a news editor for KBS World Radio and wrote features for the Korea Herald newspaper. In 2003, she was a recipient of a writer-in-residence position at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where she worked with art critic Dave Hickey.  In 2001, in an effort to create a hub for artists in the Japantown community where she grew up, she co-founded and directed the nonprofit arts organization Locus Community Arts, a performing arts venue, which has collaborated with organizations and artists in the US and internationally. She holds a BFA in textile design from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MA in Visual Criticism from California College of Arts and Crafts. www.sixfingerscribe.com (julia at sixfingerscribe.com)

Maya Kimura (2008)
Maya Kimura holds a BA in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the University of Washington. Her master’s thesis at CCA addressed issues of Japanese postwar and contemporary anxiety as reflected through the highly cultivated narrative and image of the Japanese schoolgirl, particularly in the depictions of Japanese artist Makoto Aida. For her research, Maya traveled to Tokyo and LA to correspond with the artist, his gallery (Mizuma Gallery), and various scholars and curators involved with Aida and postwar Japanese art. Maya presented her thesis work at the 2008 Brooklyn Museum symposium, entitled, “Love and Pop: Visual Cultures in Japan and Beyond” in conjunction with the museum’s Takashi Murakami retrospective. Maya is currently living in Rome to be closer to family and to possibly teach. She hopes to quickly improve her Italian. (mkimura at cca.edu)

Bruce King-Shey (2005)
Bruce King-Shey is a Senior Associate at Jump Associates, a growth strategy firm that creates and reinvents businesses for Fortune 500 companies through a hybrid approach integrating social science, design, and strategy. At Jump, Bruce leads teams and clients in expressing ideas for food & beverage, retail, non-profit, sustainability and technology companies whether it's a performance metric, product concept, or strategic plan. He is a designer of information and ideas, equally comfortable in the worlds of management consulting, critical theory, and industrial design. Bruce has written articles for publication and presented at numerous conferences around the United States and internationally about the impacts of culture on the production of design. Previously, Bruce was a public outreach consultant, most recently with Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked with federal agencies in both Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. He holds a B.F.A in industrial design and an M.A. in visual criticism from California College of the Arts. He also earned a B.S. in civil engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Katie Kurtz (2007)
Katie Kurtz is a 2007 graduate of California College of the Art’s Visual & Critical Studies program. Her thesis, "Global Warming is Hot: Branding 'green' in the age of climate change," explored how the recent marketing-driven “green” is severed from the radical, ideological roots of the early green movement and is more invested in better consumerism than environmentalism. She has written extensively about visual art for publications such as the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Stranger (Seattle), Art Papers, and CMYK, among others. In August 2009, Katie gave a public presentation on her "Proposal Toward a Visual Ecocriticism," a methodology to perform an ethical reading of both environmental and non-environmental art in the age of climate change at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin. She was recently selected to be a panelist at "New Grounds: Ecocriticism, Globalization and Cultural Memory," a conference at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands in January 2010. Katie is currently a development officer with the Student Conservation Association (SCA), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating the next generation of environmental stewards.

Eleanor LeBeau (2007)
Eleanor LeBeau holds BAs in Magazine Journalism and Art History from Kent State University, with concentrations in art criticism and North American indigenous art.  After a five-year detour into the field of marketing research--an experience that helped her gain deeper insight into the cogs of capitalism and fundamentally shaped her political views--LeBeau took on a public relations internship at The Cleveland Museum of Art. She then began working as the visual arts writer and editorial administrator for Cleveland Scene, an alt-weekly, before moving to the Bay Area. Her feature articles and critical art reviews also have appeared in Northern Ohio Live (a regional monthly magazine), The Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio's largest newspaper), and more recently in Contemporary and Art Papers. After completing her MA in Visual & Critical Studies, Eleanor plans to research and write a monograph on artist James Luna, as well as focus her writing practice on the work of contemporary indigenous visual artists, writers and theorists. A Cleveland, Ohio native, Eleanor has conducted extensive field research in Alaska, Arizona, California, New Mexico, Washington, D.C., and Washington state in order to further her understanding of indigenous cultures at the interstices where they collide and coalesce with the juggernaut called "American culture." (eleanorlebeau at yahoo.com)

Aimee LeDuc (2003)
Aimee Le Duc received her BA degree in philosophy from St. Mary's College. Soon after graduating, she lived and worked in Salt Lake City as the Assistant Visual Arts Coordinator for the Utah Arts Council, managing a traveling exhibitions program and various statewide, juried exhibitions as well as facilitating a career resource center for artists. Le Duc has hosted a weekly radio program about contemporary arts issues and taught art history, creative writing, and media literacy in high schools across the country. Her critical writing appears in publications such as Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, Sculpture, Artweek, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Aimee began her graduate studies at California College of the Arts by completing her MA in Visual Criticism in 2003, in which she completed a project titled, The Frame around the Photograph – The Photo inside the Frame, a series of essays dealing with the relationships we create and represent with the personal photographs on display in our homes. She then spent the following year earning her MFA degree in CCA's Creative Writing program, which culminated in a collection of short stories entitled, Her Hair was a Beautiful Mess. Since graduating from CCA, Le Duc has worked in a variety of San Francisco's leading nonprofit arts organizations including New Langton Arts, SF Camerawork and Southern Exposure. Currently, Aimee is the Gallery Manager at the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Ace Lehner (2010)
Ace Lehner is an Artist, writer and Art Educator living and working in the Bay Area. Lehner has exhibited as well as produced events, projects and exhibitions internationally including London, New York and Montreal and has taught Art through the San Francisco Boys and Girls Club, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Oakland School for the Arts and California College of the Arts. Lehner primarily uses photography, drawing and installation but has also worked with web based projects, intervention and other strategies of Artistic production. Lehner's work often deals with the act of looking in relation to misreading, disidentification and illegibility within visual culture. Lehner is currently persuing an MFA in photography and an MA in Visual + Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. In 2009 Lehner was a recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts and is participating in the recipient exhibition Immediate Future: The Murphy + Cadogan Fellowship in the Arts, in October 2009 at San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Recently Lehner had work in the group show Looking Forward Feeling Backward at PPOW gallery in Chelsea, curated by Tammy Rae Carland and Capricious magazine. www.acelehner.com (acephotoz 'at' gmail.com)

Elyse Mallouk
Elyse Mallouk is an artist and writer living and working in San Francisco. She maintains an interdisciplinary practice, working in painting, video installation, and sculpture. She holds a B.A. in Studio Art and English from Boston College, and is currently pursuing a dual MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies at
California College of the Arts. www.elysemallouk.com

Mariana McConnell (2007)
Mariana McConnell is a third generation biracial Los Angeles native who grew up in Mar Vista, California, and currently lives in Berkeley, California. She attended the Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences where she was a member of the Writer's Club and spent the summers performing musical theater for disadvantaged youths. She received a BA in Cinema-Television Critical Studies and Art History from the University of Southern California in 2004. In 2006 she interned at San Francisco's International Latino Film Festival and wrote copy for the exhibition catalogue. Though her current work focuses on architecture, McConnell is interested in returning to her roots as a critical film writer, as well as examining the nuances of biracial identity, pop culture as generational warfare, and the internet as a revolutionary tool. She is also focusing on the culture surrounding role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons in terms of their ability to create authentic, imagined spaces for social interaction. Post graduation she plans to take some time to travel the world, learn French and Hebrew, write music criticism, and play drums in a rock band. (mariana.timony at gmail.com)

Dacia Mitchell (2003)
Dacia Mitchell is currently a Ph.D. student in American Studies at New York University. Prior to attending NYU, Dacia earned her MA in Visual Criticism from CCA where she studied racial formations in advertising and popular culture. Earlier educational endeavors include research in postcolonial studies at the Sorbonne and a BA from Carleton College where she studied art history, biochemistry, and art practice. Dacia is currently studying theories of racial formations in 18th and 19th Century American political lithographs. Other research interests include: race and the enlightenment, representations of the Western royal body, postcolonial science, and the politics of reproduction.

Molly Mitchell (2009)
Molly Mitchell interlaces her training as a dancer, artist, and visual critic to create performances that engage their immediate physical environment, making visible the intangible forces that both constrain and enable the performers’ bodies. Her work reflects on the art of movement as an intersection of complex cultural values, as well as a means of crafting a new identity for oneself through bodily ways of knowing the world. After completing her thesis on representations of femininity in American Tribal Style belly dance, she has taken a more immersive approach to her studies, teaching and performing fusion belly dance locally and nationally. Molly holds masters degrees in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies from CCA, and is presently the assistant director of Deshret Dance Company. www.unsinkablemollymitchell.com (unsinkable.molly 'at' yahoo.com)

Ekta Ohri (2005)
Ekta Ohri is an architect from India who completed her undergraduate studies at Sushant School of Art and Architecture, New Delhi in 2002. In her short career span in India, she has worked both as an architect on projects ranging from the MRTS (Metro Rail Transit System) to housing development and private residences, as well as in the editorial department of the Architecture and Design Magazine, which features articles on various design facets such as architecture, arts, furniture, products, and even fashion. As an architect and a visual critic, she is interested in investigating the links between human cultural behavior (social and cultural practices) and design. She intends to pursue a career as an ethnographer/qualitative researcher in the design industry or in corporate or non-profit settings involved in social science research. Recently she has been admitted to PhD programs in Anthropology, emphasis on South Asian studies, at both Northwestern University (with full scholarship) and Temple University (with full scholarship); she will be attending Northwestern this fall.

Hanif O'Neil (2007)
Hanif lives in London and works as a writer and editor for alarm:clock.  He also directs EMEA goals for sister site alarm:clock euro, covering venture capital funds and private equity financing for clean energy, high technology and life science companies across each region.  A Philadelphia-native, Hanif earned his BA in Finance from Temple University Fox School of Business, before working several years in commercial, music video and television production.  During his time at California College of the Arts he operated as sales director for a web usability research firm based in San Francisco.  With a range of interests including economics, law, policy, media literacy and interactive art Hanif has led a cross-disciplinary professional life, and has been published in both web and printed publications. (goodobservations at gmail.com)

Rory Padeken (2009)
Rory was born and raised in Hawaii. He received his B.A. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. Before graduating from Berkeley, Rory spent a semester abroad at the University of Auckland, New Zealand studying contemporary Pacific art history. It was during his last undergraduate art history class at Berkeley however, that he was first introduced to FLOH, a photo-book by British artist Tacita Dean. This work would eventually become the subject of his Master’s thesis in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. In addition to holding various museum positions, Rory has conducted collections archiving and research at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, respectively. Among his many interests are contemporary Pacific art, the history of photography, Matisse, Cézanne, de Kooning, Kara Walker, and Tacita Dean. Rory would like to pursue a Ph.D. in art history and live in New York for a while. He would also like to swim in the waters off of Capri and travel to Japan in the spring. rory.padeken 'at' gmail.com

Lee Pembleton (2008)

Lee's art and music are dependent on collaboration and appropriation. Hence, his focus in VCS was the history and consequences of information as property, from the seventeenth century to today. Lee is the founder of the nonprofit arts collaborative 23E Studios, an international group of artists, musicians, architects, designers and filmmakers.
The 23E project he wants to mention in his bio today is Earthbound Moon (EbM), a noncontiguous sculpture garden -- discrete parcels of land spaced across the face of the Earth, each parcel the home to a publicly accessible artwork. Each artwork is imagined, built and installed by an artist engaged with the site and the community's experience of the work. EbM uses the aura of art to create public commons in the face of expanding privatization. The first two sites, Bledsoe, Texas & Portland, Oregon will install in 2010. In 2011, EbM will install in Chania, Crete; San Francisco, CA; Cairo Egypt; and Baja, Mexico.
More information about this and many other artworks, plus a great deal of music, can be found at
www.23estudios.com www.vime.org www.earthboundmoon.com

Rae Quigley
(2008)
Rae Quigley grew up in the state of Maine. She earned her BA—a double concentration in Spanish and Art—from Hamilton College in New York. After moving to San Francisco, Rae interned at XLR8R, the electronic music and culture magazine. For two years, she worked at the architectural and urban planning firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where she most enjoyed writing new project narratives. Rae's interests include cultural geography, challenging the politics of identity, and the craft of writing. Her current work investigates food festivals and the agri-tourist economy of northern California. Rae's writing will appear in forthcoming issues of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts and Out of the Kitchen. She lives on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. (raequigley at gmail.com)

Matthew Rana
Matthew David Rana is an artist and writer living in Oakland. His current research is focused on socially engaged art practices and their relationships to government and policy making. Matthew is a featured writer for Art Practical and has contributed to the books There is No Two Without Three and I’m a Park and You’re a Deer. He is also co-director, with Michelle Blade, of The Living Room, a storefront project in Oakland. Matthew is in the final year of a dual MFA/MA in Social Practice and Visual & Critical Studies. He holds a BFA in Art Studio from the University of New Mexico. matthewrana[at]gmail[dot]com
www.artpractical.com http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/there-is-no-two-without-three/2786274 http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/im-a-park-and-youre-a-deer/5502278 http://livingroomoakland.wordpress.com/

Boyd Richards (2005)
Boyd Richard
http://www.boydrichard.com
Boyd Richard is a Bay Area Artist, Writer, and Designer.

Adrienne Skye Roberts (2009)

Adrienne Skye Roberts is a writer, curator, and educator. Adrienne attended the University of California, Santa Cruz where she earned her bachelor degrees in Studio Art and Feminist Studies. She has spent her time in the Visual and Critical Studies Masters Program at CCA studying representations of belonging in urban neighborhoods, culminating in her thesis project "Homesick: The Search for Belonging in New Orleans's Landscape of Loss." This project considers themes of home, mobility, whiteness, and the myth of the American frontier through an examination of the volunteers in post-Katrina New Orleans. In January 2009 Adrienne presented a portion of her thesis at the University of Toronto's Annual Graduate Symposium. Past curatorial projects include "For Lovers and Fighters" at the Spare Room Project, "I thought this was a math class: High School Students Explore Geometry through Art" at the Oakland Museum of Children's Art, and "Between Memory and Invention" at PLAySPACE Gallery. In the fall of 2009 Adrienne will curate an exhibition called "Home is something I carry with me" featuring work by local artists that interrogate the concept of home and will transform three homes in San Francisco's Mission District into exhibition spaces. Adrienne is most excited about teaching, social justice activism, dance-parties and potlucks. www.thememoryincubator.com (adrienneskye 'at' gmail.com)

Lacey Jane Roberts (2007)
Lacey Jane Roberts holds a MFA in Fine Arts and MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts.  She completed a BA in Studio Art and a BA in English from the University of Vermont. Her studio practice primarily consists of large-scale site-specific knitted installations created with children’s toy knitting cranks.  Her installations occasionally include guerilla actions.  Her work has been shown most recently in The Bedford Gallery, The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art, Fresh Meat in the Gallery, Little Tree Gallery, The Headlands Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure and Naomi Arin Contemporary Art.
Lacey Jane also maintains a critical writing practice that bridges craft and queer theory.  Her writing can be found in the forthcoming anthology Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture in Contemporary Art published by Duke University Press.  She is the past co-chair of the Queer Caucus for Art, an affiliate of the College Art Association.
Lacey Jane was the past recipient of the Ian Crawford Memorial Award, The Ora Mary Pelham Poetry Prize, the Toni Lowenthal Memorial Scholarship, a Murphy Cadogan Fellowship, the Dennis Leon Award, a Craft Research Fund Graduate Grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design, and a 2008 Searchlight Artist Award from the American Craft Council and was a 2009 Smack Mellon Hot Pick Artist. Lacey Jane was 2009 Artist-in-Residence at The Museum of Arts and Design in New York City and at Leake and Watts, a non-profit in The Bronx.  In the fall of 2010 she will begin a fellowship at Virginia Common Wealth University as the Emerging Artist-in-Residence in the Craft and Materials Studies Department. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, she currently resides in Brooklyn, NY More information can be found at www.laceyjaneroberts.com

Paola Santos Coy (2009)

Paola Santoscoy (b. 1974) is a curator and writer on contemporary art currently living in San Francisco. Originally from Mexico City, she is an MA candidate in the Visual and Critical Studies Program at the California College of the Arts. She holds a BA in Art History from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, where she has worked in different exhibition spaces and museums since 2000, such as La Panadería, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. In 2005, together with artist and curator Willy Kautz and artist Sebastián Romo, cofounded the curatorial project 111 (one artist, one work, one night) in Mexico City, an informal and domestic ongoing presentation of artists’ projects and discussion forum. Recent exhibition projects include: Todo va a estar bien [Everything will be all right], 2004; Jesús Rafael Soto. Vision in Motion (co-curated with Tatiana Cuevas), 2005; Asterism. Artists living in Berlin, 2006. (paola.s 'at' mac.com)

Erik Scollon (2008)

Erik Scollon was a dual degree student in the MFA Fine Arts program and the MA Visual & Critical Studies programs at California College of the Arts. He completed a BFA in Studio Art from Albion College. His current critical writing examines the overlap of Art, Craft and Design with a focus on function. Erik's Visual & Critical Studies preliminary thesis work was presented at the 2008 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. His studio practice consists of blue and white porcelain objects that mix historical references and blend functional concerns with aesthetic ones. Recently his work has been seen in venues as diverse as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, the design blog Cool Hunting, and The Eagle Tavern. Originally from Michigan, he currently resides in Oakland, California. (eskull at aol.com) www.erikscollon.net

Doreen Schmid (2005)

Doreen Schmid, an editor, writer and curator, is also a partner in Subject Matters, a traveling exhibition service for socially conscious art. She has edited art and photography books for Chronicle Books, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Freer Gallery of Art and the Museion in Bolzano, Italy, and curated exhibitions at San Francisco Airport Museum, Napa Valley Museum, the Center for Photographic Art and the Bolinas Museum. Schmid holds a BA and MA, both in English/Emphasis in Creative Writing, from San Francisco State University and her writing has appeared in various arts, culinary culture and lifestyle publications, including Gastronomica, the Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and exposure. She is currently editing three photography books – on the death of the Aral Sea, seventeenth-century Brittany and Normandy dovecotes, and the social and cultural taboos on women’s gray hair – and an architectural monograph. Following her CCA Visual Criticism thesis on the deconstruction of period photographs of Anglo-Irish colonial wives in Rhodesia, she spent several months in 2007 in Zimbabwe, and will return there in 2009 for additional research and as an adjunct lecturer.

Zachary Royer Scholz (2009)
Zachary Royer Scholz is an artist living in San Francisco California. Through his artwork Scholz explores ignored intersections of material and meaning by working collaboratively with pre-existing objects, sites, and cultural structures. In 2008, Scholz was a finalist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA award, the Kala Art Institute Fellowship, and had solo exhibitions at David Sallow Gallery in Los Angeles, Swarm Gallery in Oakland, and the Lab in San Francisco. Scholz’s exhibitions in 2009 included, solo outings at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary in Oakland and NOMA Gallery in San Francisco, as well as inclusion in Stowaways at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, the Present Tense Biennial at San Francisco's Chinese Cultural Center, and Deadpan Exchange IV at the K2 Contemporary Art Center in Izmir Turkey. His artwork has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, ZYZZZYVA, and Whitefish Review. In addition to his making practice, Scholz directs the ephemeral installation art space project 7, is a regular contributor to the online journal Art Practical, and has authored several catalog essays. He is represented by David Salow Gallery in Los Angeles. www.zacharyscholz.com

Shane Aslan Selzer (2004)
University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2004, she received an M.F.A. in Sculpture and an M.A. in Visual 
and Critical Studies from California College of Arts and Crafts.  Her work has been exhibited 
internationally at venues including The Bag Factory in Johannesburg, SA. In 2009, Selzer had a solo 
exhibition at The Suburban in Oak Park, IL. Group exhibitions include Andrew Kreps Gallery in New 
York, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; The Poor Farm Contemporary Art Center, Manawa, WI; 
Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL.; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. In 2010 she developed a new 
project for Jamaica Center for Art & Learning, in Jamaica, Queens. Her work has been reviewed in 
Artforum, the NYTimes and regional publications. 
Selzer teaches a graduate seminar in Contemporary Art at The State University of New York, Albany. 
She has organized lectures, zines and symposium in collaboration with institutions such as 
Stellenbosch University, South Africa, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, California, and TICA program 
at The Art Institute of Chicago. In 2008 she was based in Johannesburg, South Africa at The Bag 
Factory Residency and is a recipient of the 2007 Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture 
Park.  She will be a Visiting Artist in the summer of 2010 as part of Mary Jane Jacob's program titled, Studio Chicago. www.shaneaslanselzer.com   
 

Karin Smith (2007)
Karin Smith received her BFA in Fiber and Material Studies from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 2004. She came to the Bay Area curious about the relationship between what we humans produce and what those "things" in turn say about our society. Her Master's thesis A Taxonomy of Jonestown was a recipient of MISSION 17's Visual/Cultural Criticism Residency, which supports an emerging cultural critic in the realization of a writing project, and culminates in an exhibition and publication. Through her thesis studies, Karin became aware of the Food Justice Movement which seeks to raise awareness of the lack of affordable healthy foods in America’s urban, poorer communities. She works as a landscaper and gardener in San Francisco.

Stephen Smyth (2007)
Stephen was born and raised in Marin County, California. He currently lives in Palm Springs (in keeping with a life-long fascination with the desert and desert communities). Stephen graduated with honors from CCA’s Bachelor of Architecture program in 2005, after which he entered the Visual and Critical Studies graduate program. Stephen worked in lighting, furniture and interior design while completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees. Among the more prominent projects he’s consulted on include the LGBT Communinty Center, The Four Seasons Hotel and the Orpheum Theater, all in San Francisco. His academic interests have and continue to focus on issues of perception and representation, particularly as these pertain to the built environment and mass media. As a result of his Master’s thesis research Stephen developed a strong interest in film, particularly science fiction films, television and other media. He plans to focus on these subjects in his PhD studies. stephenPsmyth.com (ssmyth1 at mac.com)

David Spalding (2002)
David Spalding is a curator, critic and educator living in Beijing. Since fall 2006, Spalding has been Curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), the first international art center of its kind in China. Recently curated exhibitions include: To Allow the Light, a site-specific project by Lawrence Weiner (with related film program); the Chinese premiere of House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, Paris-based artist Huang Yong Ping's traveling solo exhibition (organized by the Walker Art Center); Introspective Cavity, a solo exhibition by Beijing artist Yin Xiuzhen; 24 Seconds of Silence, a major solo show of new work by Los Angeles artist Won Ju Lim; Mona Hatoum: Measures of Estrangement; and Liu Gang: Merlin Champagnetown & Regalia. Spalding is currently working on a site-sensitive solo project with Thai / Indian artist Navin Rawanchaikul for UCCA and the exhibition Even in Arcadia…for SF Camerawork, both opening in spring 2009. Past independent curatorial projects include Ghosts in the Machine (2006), which grew from Spalding's VCS thesis research and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Award for Artistic Excellence and, with Pauline J. Yao, The Amber Room (2006), an exhibition featuring newly commissioned sculptures and installations by artists working in Los Angeles and Beijing, including Liu Ding, Shirley Tse and Wang Wei. An active art critic, Spalding is a Correspondent / Contributing Editor for Flash Art (Venice), Contemporary (London) and Art Papers (US) and a China correspondent for Artforum. His writing has regularly appeared in these and many other publications, including Artweek, ART Asia Pacific and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. Spalding has been living in Beijing since the fall 2005, when he received an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship to research contemporary art in China. Prior to this, he was adjunct Professor at the California College of the Arts and Mills College, where he taught contemporary art, critical theory and writing at the graduate level. In addition to an M.A in Visual Cultural Studies, Spalding received a B.A. in classics and philosophy from Saint Mary's College of California in 1994, and has studied at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Keble College, Oxford University; the Monterey Institute for International Studies and the Beijing Language and Culture University.

Cicely Sweed (2004)

Cicely J. Sweed is an Oakland-based curator, writer, arts entrepreneur/educator.  In 2004 she launched ÀSEstudio (Art_Social_Enterprise_Studio), a social practice/creative enterprise project where she curates exhibitions and events to philanthropically support arts education and social enterprise as intrinsic and vital foundations for ecological and economical sustainable communities.  Her recent projects include: 2 x 2 Solos: Elisheva Biernoff, Pro Arts Gallery, Oakland (2010); Geo-Frequencies: Eco-Arts In Action, San Francisco Green Festival (2009); Metamorphosis: New Works by AbbaYahudah, Minna Street Gallery, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) (2009); Mi Tierra, Mi Corazon: A Diasporic Offering To The Ancestors, Storefront Gallery, Oakland (2009).  From 2005 - 2009 she served as the Associate Public Programs Curator at YBCA where she curated public programs, community events, and site-specific commissions including Ritual and Redemption:  Under a Full Moon - 30 Years of Perpetual Indulgence (2009); Imagining Our Future:  The Art of Slow Food Nation (2009); BAN 5 (Bay Area Now 5): The RBI Annex Projects (2008); Bay Area Guide To Independent Fashion Festival (2008); The Missing Peace: The Big Ideas Thangka Project (2007); and Black Panther Rank & File: Soul Salon 10 - 10 Mo' (2006).  She holds bachelor degrees in Creative Writing, Black Studies, and French from San Francisco State University and a masters degree in Visual Criticism from California College of the Arts.  Her writing has appeared in Exposure: Journal of Photographic Education, Essence Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and SF Weekly.  She currently divides her time between the Bay Area (where she is pursuing a GreenMBA in Sustainable Enterprise from Dominican University of California, Class of 2012) and the Hi Deserts of Southern California, where she is conducting research on the Superadobe Earth Art & Architecture movement and the impacts of suburbanization on the Mojave Desert landscape and water systems.  In her extra time she enjoys being an avid jeweler and honeywine maker.

Candacy Taylor (2002)
Candacy A. Taylor is a visual anthropologist, photographer and writer. Her project, COUNTER CULTURE: THE AMERICAN COFFEE SHOP WAITRESS has been awarded several grants and featured in over 20 publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, AARP, BUST and NPR, among others. Photos have been exhibited at San Francisco’s City Hall, the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and at Copia. Southwest Airlines listed the exhibition on their top ten-list of things to see in the country. Taylor has presented the project nationally at conferences and universities. Cornell University Press will publish the waitress book in the Fall of 2009. Her most recent project examines the beauty shop as a cultural institution, including its role in developing and maintaining community among women. The beauty shop project is partially funded by the California Council for the Humanities and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Taylor also runs a freelance photography and consulting business for companies and artists in the Bay Area. (candacy at taylormadeculture.com) http://counterculturewaitress.wordpress.com/
www.taylormadeculture.com

Weston Teruya (2007)
Weston Teruya was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai'i and lived in Los Angeles for a number of years before relocating to his current home in the Bay Area. He received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from CCA in addition to his degree in Visual Criticism. His studio practice is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco and he is currently planning for a new body of work growing out of an interest in the politics of settler colonialism in Hawai’i. While in Los Angeles he worked with a number of community and youth arts projects in conjunction with organizations including Public Allies, Little Tokyo Service Center and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. In addition to his studio practice, Weston currently works for the San Francisco Arts Commission's Cultural Equity Grants program where he is developing an obsession with Filemaker Pro. Weston's artwork has been shown at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Intersection for the Arts, the de Saissett Museum and the di Rosa Preserve. He was the recipient of a 2009 Artadia award and the inaugural Oliver Ranch Studio Artist Residency. The Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo Arts Center recently awarded him a residency.www.westonteruya.com (wteruya at msn.com)

Hank Willis Thomas (2004)
Hank Willis Thomas, the winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph “Pitch Blackness” in 2008, is a W.E.B. DuBois Institute, resident fellow, at Harvard for 2010. He received the 2007 Renew Media Arts Fellowship (Rockefeller Foundation), and is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award. He also won an Artadia Fund for Art and Dialogue award (New York, NY) and an Investing in Artists grant from the Center of Cultural Innovation (San Francisco, CA). He has been awarded artists residencies at John Hopkins University, Blatimore, Md, Acadia Summer Arts Program, Desert Island, MN, Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, France, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, Art Omi, Omi, NY, Light Work, Syracuse NY, and the Vermont studio Center, Johnson, VT, and received a participant fellowship from the Skowhegan School of Painting in Skowhegan Maine.
 
Thomas received a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a MFA in photography and MA in visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including PS1, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Zacheta National Museum of Art in Warsaw, Poland, Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas, The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian; Anacostia Museum, Washington, D.C., the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and in the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. . He has done public art commissions for Oakland International Airport, Oakland, CA, The Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY, and The University of California San Francisco.
 
His images have been published in numerous books and publications in addition to his monograph including: Reflections in Black: A History of African American Photographers (W.W. Norton 2000), The Spirit of the Family  (Henry Holt and Publishing, inc.), 25 under 25: American Photographers (Power House Books 2003), Black: A celebration of a Culture  (Hylas Publishing 2004), Winter in America (self-published in 2006 with Kambui Olujimi), Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. Crown Publishers Inc., and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890’s to the Present.
 
His work is in the public and private collections of The Martin Margulies Collection, Miami, FL, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, The Sir Elton John Collection, Atlanta, GA, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA , The Eileen and Peter Norton Family Collection, Santa Monica, CA, The Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, The International Center of Photography, New York, NY, The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX, The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.

Emma Tramposch (2006)
Emma Tramposch graduated from Visual and Critical Studies in 2006. She moved to San Francisco from New Zealand, where she completed a BA in Cultural Anthropology. Following graduate school, Emma started working as editorial and archival assistant to performance artist and writer Guillermo Gomez-Pena with a joint role as arts administrator for his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.  She is a freelance arts writer and has written for ArtPapers, Clamor, Alarm and Camerawork Journal.

Michael Victoria (2009)
A San Francisco native Michael focuses his artistic and architectural explorations applying them into social practice. While receiving his undergraduate degree at UCLA in political science & public policy, he along with team of others, organized contract workers to obtain a living wage and health benefits. Returning back to the Bay Area he worked as a freelance videographer and film production coordinator for various independent and commercial projects. In the Summer of 2007 he volunteered his architectural education in the rebuilding effort of New Orleans and Mississippi. He hopes to utilize his academic endeavors in architecture and visual studies at CCA to affect and adapt to the changing socio-political trends. His current thesis exploration examines the rehabilitation of the Pacific Northwest salmon population through architectural and perceptual interventions. i(it....filming "at" gmail.com)

Mary C. Wilson (2004)
As a filmmaker, author and visual critic, Mary C. Wilson's work explores the cultural components of historic landscapes. In support of her writing on the ancient Australian conifer, Araucaria bidwillii, Wilson recently returned from a research trip to Southeastern Australia, where she studied with noted Aboriginal plants historian and Aboriginal cultural affairs liaison, John Lennis. She will present this work at the National Coalition for Independent Scholars' annual conference in October.
Wilson is the co-director of a non-profit gallery near Savannah, which she represented at the 2008 Southeastern College Art Association conference in New Orleans with a presentation on rebellious art practices.
She writes grants for artists and arts organizations around the country and contributes exhibition reviews to the Bay Area art journal, Shotgun Review. Wilson obtained both her B.F.A.(Individualized) and M.A. (Visual Criticism) degrees from the California College of the Arts. (marycwilson at mac.com) B.F.A., Individualized, California College of Arts and Crafts, 2002
M.A., Visual Criticism, California College of Arts and Crafts, 2004 Athens, Georgia