A Creative Excuse

Kate Wood

Kate Wood (voted most likely to have bangs for her entire life) is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in painting/illustration, and paper mache sculpture. Kate considers herself a play-based artist whose works explores themes of relationship, body language and communication, family, and the point at which personal experience transcends identity and becomes collective consciousness. The daughter of a school teacher and an archaeologist, story and artifact became loci for Kate’s experience of and orientation to the world beginning in early childhood. Using a cast of glyphs rooted in archetype and mythology, Kate constructs visual narratives that invite and encourage viewers to have fun finding and experiencing themselves within the work. Kate grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and currently lives with her family in a rural mountain village on the High road to Taos.

Juana Estrada Hernández

Juana Estrada Hernández is a Mexican artist and Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. Born in Luis Moya, Zacatecas, Mexico, she moved to the United States at the age of seven and grew up as an undocumented immigrant — an experience that became central to her artistic practice. She received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of New Mexico and her BFA in Printmaking from Fort Hays State University.
Estrada Hernández's work draws on Mexican folklore, Hispanic cultural traditions, and her family's intergenerational migration stories, with a particular focus on the social and political realities facing Hispanic migrant communities. She is a DACA recipient and self-described "DACA-mented" artist, and her prints speak with both intimacy and urgency to the experience of living, creating, and belonging across borders. Her printmaking — primarily lithography and intaglio — is luminous, narrative, and dynamic, with a touch of the surreal.
She has exhibited across the United States, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Her work is held in several collections including the Janet Turner Print Museum, Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, Zygote Press Archives, Laval University, and Engramme, National Library and Archives of Québec.

Julianna Kirwin

Printmaker and educator Julianna Kirwin presents a window installation combining hand-pulled prints with the woodblocks used to make them. Informed by her experiences along the Camino Real, the work highlights printmaking as a bridge between cultures, revealing process, lineage, and Pan-American identity through image and material.

Moira Garcia

Moira Garcia is a New Mexican-Chicana multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural practitioner whose work bridges ancestral knowledge and contemporary visual language. A native of New Mexico, she holds a BFA in Studio Arts with a focus in printmaking from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MA in Latin American Studies with concentrations in Art History and Indigenous Studies from the University of New Mexico. Garcia’s art draws deeply from Nahuatl language, Mesoamerican cosmologies, and personal experiences, using symbol, color, and metaphor to explore themes of identity, memory, and cultural continuity. Her practice moves fluidly across printmaking, painting, fiber art, and mixed media, creating multilayered narratives that honor ancient visual traditions while engaging present-day concerns. Recent work, including her exhibition Xochiyotl: Florescence at Hecho a Mano, probes the essence of floral life as a metaphor for transformation and resilience. Garcia also teaches, advocates for art as social change, and champions indigenous and borderland perspectives in contemporary art.

Sam Hawley, Oskar Petersen & Pearl Hesselden

Sam Hawley and Oskar Petersen artists live and work in their hometown of Albuquerque. They describe their way of living as a process of constant collaboration: "We both end up living among our work, for better or worse, talking about it over dinner and coffee and as we watch TV," they write. "We are very fortunate to spend our time discussing whether or not a goose should have teeth in a painting or what a certain palette is evoking."
Pearl Hesselden is the founder of the Ranch Residency in La Madera, NM. The Ranch Residency offers a distinctive opportunity for artists to immerse themselves in the unique landscape of the La Madera Mountain Range and their own art practices. "Our mission is to offer a respite where artists can explore, experiment, and devote time to their practice in a setting that is both inspiring and nurturing.” www.ranchresidency.com

Alfonso Barrera & Mirel Fraga

Mirel Fraga and Alfonso Barrera are a creative couple based in Oaxaca whose practices intersect across drawing, printmaking, and independent publishing. Barrera, originally from Mexico City, works in graphite, charcoal, oil, and printmaking, weaving together human–nature relationships, art history, and fantastical imagery; his work has exhibited in Mexico, the U.S., and Japan. Fraga, from Puebla, moves fluidly between illustration, graphic arts, and mural painting, often centering nature, cosmos, and feminist themes. Together they co-founded Polvoh Press, an editorial project dedicated to small-edition artist books and printmaking, reflecting their shared commitment to experimentation, community, and the handmade.

George Rodriguez

Born and raised in the border city of El Paso, TX, George Rodriguez creates highly ornamented, figurative ceramic sculptures, often underlined by a connection to the sociopolitical issues the artist explores. Rodriguez holds a BFA from the University of Texas El Paso and an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington, Seattle. His world curiosity grew as a recipient of a Bonderman Travel Fellowship where he traveled the world through most of 2010. George was featured on PBS Craft in America "Storytellers" episode and has created a large public sculpture for the new Kansas City Airport which opened March 2023. George currently resides in Philadelphia and teaches at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.

Sound & Vision with Kat Kinnick, Eliza Lutz, & Martha Traer

This episode is with curator Martha Traer of our current exhibition Sound & Vision and two artists in the show, Kat Kinnick & Eliza Lutz. They talk about the process of turning a song into a piece of visual art and the influence of music in their creative lives. 
For this show, each artist was asked to choose a song and create an 11 x 14-inch piece of work inspired by the music. With artists working in a wide variety of media and styles, Sound and Vision is a kaleidoscope of memory embedded in music. 
Listen to the playlist of all the songs chosen here.

b. brown

b.brown grew up in Los Angeles and New York City, and is currently settled in Santa Fe. Her work history includes dance, film, design and production ceramics. Dance formed her early years as an artist; she began studying at age 5 and continued a rigorous practice over the next 17 years. Although her serious aspirations to make dance her life's work led to enrollment and training in some of New York’s most prestigious institutions, she did not feel at home within the narrowly defined criteria for "fitting in” that was de rigueur at the time.When she turned her attention to clay, her love of honing technique and experiencing communion via somatic “dialoging” led to discovering an innate understanding of the material, and a propulsion to know more. Like dance before it, clay afforded brown a means to explore and experiment - to investigate seemingly-at-odds pairings such as discipline and rule-breaking, methodology and abandon, refinement and elaboration.Now, some 30+ years later - and having ridden the many and various rides that life has thrown her way - brown’s unwavering studio practice is both prolific in creative articulation and rich with offerings.

Daniel McCoy Returns!

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and surrounded with the arts from an early age, Daniel McCoy (Muscogee Creek/Potawatomi) was welcomed into a household of Artisans, Farmers, Music and Subculture.
McCoy began entering Native Art Competitions at age fifteen under the direction of Cherokee Artist, Mary Adair while attending boarding school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He received his formal Art Training at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At the Institute, Daniel McCoy jr. was able to study and work with some of the best Native Artists in the field.