I am a female maker of cowboy boots who analyzes the historical tangle that locates artisan work within legacies of gendered labor, industrialization, material production, and hierarchies of fine art, design, and craft. I use multiple strategies to provoke awareness of how footwear production profoundly and negatively affects individuals, targeted groups, climate, and our planet. I am an architecture and museum studies graduate, a mother, an artist, a researcher, and an educator. I use my craft-process-as-methodology to parse, communicate, and work to repair legacies of harm. I use the iconography of the cowboy boot as cultural critique in my work as a public artist.

Yasmine Hassan (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges from large-scale carpentry and fine woodworking to physical computing and digital illustration. Through these diverse media, she is interested in uncovering forgotten histories, empowering marginalized people to reshape their own environments, and collaboratively creating “for us, by us” spaces and initiatives where Black and brown youth are able to thrive while still being themselves.

Yasmine has logged nearly as many hours working in the woodshop as she has spent thinking about her family in Sudan these past three years. She believes that Palestine will be free in our lifetime.

David Karoff began making sculpture again after a long hiatus, following a career in the non-profit sector. He principally works with new and recycled steel and cast iron, and seeks to provoke thought and surprise, create unlikely objects in unlikely places, and juxtapose disparate materials and surfaces. He sees his most successful pieces as those that engage viewers with design and craftmanship and, also, provoke reflection about something important. He’s had work in juried shows throughout New England and New York, has been selected for several residencies, and has work permanently installed in a number of public places.

Alyssa Keil (b. 1988, Providence, RI) is an artist from Rhode Island who lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. 

Zachary Vieira Legat is an interdisciplinary artist and designer originally from Seattle, Washington. Inspired by the natural landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, his practice explores the interplay between organic forms, natural materials, and personal narrative. Working across mediums, he integrates traditional techniques with contemporary design to create work that reflects on memory, place, and the human relationship to the natural world. Legat is also the founder of Sunthief Design, a studio that collaborates with local nonprofits and businesses to support community-centered initiatives through thoughtful, accessible design.

Talia LeVine is an anti-Zionist queer Jew studying Visual Art and Political Science at Brown. They grew up in Seattle and Switzerland and spent a revolutionary semester in high school studying in Johannesburg. Their artistic practice initially focused on photography and has more recently expanded to include sculpture. They make art in order to process their emotions and understand the world around them. The pieces made for this show represent two pivotal moments in Talia’s life: The November 8, 2023, sit-in for divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s crimes and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

Alison Orellana Malouf is a landscape architect, painter, and environmental artist from Northeast Ohio, currently based in Brooklyn. Her art practice repurposes the tools used in the profession of landscape architecture to interrogate the relationship between humans and nature as it is mediated by technology. She holds a SB in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has received recognition for both her design and art practices, and exhibited work internationally.

Roger Murff is pretty sure he graduated from Brown. He came to art later in life and works in wood.

Walker Fuchs is a professional maker, teacher, and scientist who runs the makerspace at the University of New Haven. His creative pursuits are based on traditional woodworking techniques/ furniture design and have expanded into digital fabrication techniques. His work celebrates the complexity of the natural world and our place in it. Joseph Smolinski is a multidisciplinary artist and Professor of Art and Creative Technology at the University of New Haven. His practice merges traditional methods of art making with digital fabrication technologies. His work explores how technology reshapes our understanding of the natural environment. 

I am an artist, writer, and art worker living in Providence, RI. My practice integrates archival and art-making techniques spanning photography, pressed and mounted plant matter, print-making, labeling and gridding to examine how we make sense of the (natural) world. As highways criss-cross species ranges and runoff transforms rivers into ocean-bound chemical outlets, the already porous boundaries drawn between wild and human dissolve with unprecedented intensity. I’m fascinated by the legacy structures (herbaria, datasets, archives, maps) offered to order this complexity. How might queering these rigid structures respond to the messy, emotional, human-nature of the natural world today?