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Equal Justice Exhibition
EQUAL JUSTICE EXHIBITION | LOCAL, NATIONAL, & INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTS
Opening September 20th | 530-7PM | SFAI | 1600 St Michaels Dr | On view Mon-Fri September 20-27, 9-5PM
SFAI’s Equal Justice Residents are creative practitioners from all over the world, coming together to investigate how can art be used to engage systems of power and foster social and racial equity. This exhibition will highlight the work of current and local artists in residence. After the exhibition opening, join us for a conversation about art and community action with celebrated artist and designer Mary Miss! Learn more about Equal Justice Residents here.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
PARTICIPATING ARTIST BIOS & WEBSITES
Alicia Marie Rencountre-Da Silva 
A social practice artist, poet and scholar, Rencountre-Da Silva has worked with museum institutions, community programs in public schools, and with educational institutions in Santa Fe, New Mexico and in Rapid City, South Dakota. She’s highly engaged with her local community and works to help design and develop intersectional projects. As part of her creative process. She was the lead designer and producer for the first Water is Life Festival held in partnership with the Santa Fe Botanical Garden in 2017. Academically her passion is shedding a light as to how repatriation and related indigenous understandings around land and place repatriation are valuable and necessary, not only to Indigenous Communities but for larger complex societies as a way to reframe and rethink their infrastructural practices. Rencountre-Da Silva’s families are from Colombia and Guiana. Her lineages are Muisca, Mestizo, and Portuguese.
Cara Levine grew up in Los Angeles CA. She currently lives and works in Portland, OR. Levine is an artist exploring the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic and illusionary through sculpture, video, photography, and socially engaged practice. She has shown work in various places including the Wattis Center for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. She has been a recent artist in residence at The Arctic Circle Residency, SIM Residency in Iceland, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Kala Institute for Art, Vermont Studio Center, and Signal Fire Arts. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Lewis and Clark College and has taught as a lecturer in at UC Berkeley and California College of the Arts. She taught ceramic arts at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland CA from 2013-2015, and was a Sculpture Teaching Fellow at California College of the Arts (CCA) from 2013-2015. She received her MFA in sculpture from CCA in 2012. She has worked extensively with the disability arts community over the last 7 years with organizations including NIAD (Richmond CA), Creative Growth (Oakland CA), UCPLA (Los Angeles), Project Grow and Public Annex (Portland OR). Cara practices yoga and meditation, contemplative and authentic movement. She believes in the human in the body. She lives with her dog and constant collaborator, Pigeon.
Confluence Collective creates Random Acts of Art at the intersection of community transformation, climate, and civil rights. Founded in late 2016 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Confluence convenes art practitioners and curators to co-conceptualize socially-engaged public space projects that extend into the community in urgent ways. We embrace visual, sound, multimedia, choral, film, body, literary, spoken word, theatrical arts to wake-up and shake-up our still somnolent world regarding environmental justice and civil rights; New Mexico’s energy sacrifice zones; the climate crisis; the sixth great extinction; and planet earth careening into oblivion with current fossil fuel and large-scale agriculture practices. We are gathering as alchemists to creatively transform in a positive manner, the texture of civic dialog. Nonviolence in image, word, and movement guides the creative drama of our investigatory approach to art, as we strive to grow the environmental movement. Confluence is guided by the principle that no people should sacrifice their health or wellbeing for the sake of under-regulated, inappropriately located, or climate-ignorant industrial development. We envision a 100% environmentally safe and habitable world for generations to come, and the consciousness required for a nonviolent/nontoxic world. The time for fossil fuels is over. The time for renewable energy is now. Confluence Collective core members participating in the Equal Justice residency include: Ahní Rocheleau (founder), Mayumi Nishida, Alicia Marie Da Silva Rencountre, Bobbe Besold, and Cate Cabot, all involved in visual and performance art. Confluence is the flowing together of separated energies, a merging force reconnecting humanity with biotic communities.
Gil Arnold Ngolé Memphis based artist, born in the Republic of the Congo-Brazzaville during the postcolonial era, a social and political environment that is an important source of inspiration. He got a BFA in painting and installation at Rueil-Malmaison’s College of art in France, and he is pursuing a MFA in sculpture and sound installation at the Memphis College of Art, where he is developing a nomadic practice combining sound and sculpture. His works was on display at The Musée du Mac-Val (France, 2008), Crosstown Arts Memphis (2014 and 2015), the Memorial Art Gallery (2014), and the Season Moved Tops Gallery (2015), and since November 3rd 2016 at the MidnightWalks Sumter Art Gallery in South Caroina. Currently collaborating with Oxford University Department of law, on the Border Criminologies project since April 27th 2017. His awards includes The Honenberg Scholarship (2015), The RiverArts Scholarship (2015), The Merit Scholarship (2014), and others private scholarship.
Jacinthe TwoBulls is a weaver of cedar bark, spruce roots, nettles, maidenhair fern, and wool. Her basketry celebrates the subtle beauty of nature. Born in Ketchikan, Alaska, TwoBulls was raised in Hydaburg, Alaska. She is of the Stáas’taas clan of the Haida Nation and her crests include Eagle, beaver, sculpin, and frog. TwoBulls learned the art of Haida basketry from her mother, Vicki LeCornu. At the age of seven she wove her first cedar bark basket with yarn twining. Since then she has completed hundreds of baskets. TwoBulls learned the art of Haida form-line and woodcarving from her father, Adrian LeCornu. She has applied Haida form-line to baskets with paint and false-embroidery. In 2016, TwoBulls received a Rasmuson Foundation Project Award, which enabled her to create an outfit made of cedar bark. She continues to work on innovative and sustainable textiles on her home in Hydaburg, Alaska.
Jackie Munro & La Familia Medical Center
This collaboration is generously supported by La Familia Medical Center (Santa Fe, NM), and aside from Jackie Munro, all artists are patients in LFMC’s Substance Abuse Treatment Program for pregnant women. Jackie Munro is a filmmaker, photographer and educator working at the intersection of storytelling and community engagement. She believes in the ability of intimate documentary work to help us know individuals who seem very different from us as well as more deeply understand ourselves, our place in our communities and our ability to affect change. Jackie produces communication campaigns for mission-driven organizations with her company Stories for Change in Santa Fe, NM. Using collaborative, storytelling-based processes, she co-produces the content for her campaigns with those most affected by a social issue. Her first feature-length documentary, Una Nueva Tierra (A New Land), is currently on the festival circuit. The film traces the struggles of three families living on the Pajarito Mesa, a breathtakingly beautiful but perpetually trash-ridden swath of desert overlooking Albuquerque, NM without access to water or electricity. As a director, Jackie’s work has screened on NoBudge.com, at Cinema Club in Brooklyn, NY and the Ashland Independent Film Festival in Ashland, OR. Jackie has taught photography at the International Center of Photography, New York University, PhotoManhattan and Santa Fe Community College. She holds a BFA in Photography & Imaging from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has studied Spanish through Instituto Cervantes in New York City and Albuquerque, NM.
Israel Francisco Haros Lopez was born in East Los Angeles to immigrant parents of mexican descent. He brings his firsthand knowledge of the realities of migration, U.S. border policies, and life as a Mexican American to his work with families and youth as a mentor, educator, art instructor, ally, workshop facilitator and activist. Even with a 1.59 High school G.P.A., Israel managed to go back to the community college and raise his grades to get accepted into U.C. Berkeley and receive a degree in English Literature and Chicano Studies followed by an M.F.A in Creative Writing. At formal and informal visual art spaces, Israel creates and collaborates in many interdisciplinary ways including poetry, performance, music, visual art, and video making and curriculum creation. His work addresses a multitude of historical and spiritual layered realities of border politics, identity politics, and the re-interpretation of histories.
Nuttaphol Ma is a recipient of the following fellowships and residencies: Dunhuang Projected Artist Fellow, California Community Foundation Fellowship, The Feitelson Art Fellowship, Pitzer College Emerging Artist Fellow and 18th Street Art Center Artist Fellow. Ma received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University, MSc in Architectural Conservation from The University of Hong Kong and his BA in Economics from the University of California San Diego.
Peggy Diggs is an artist who, for four decades, has made public work that addresses contemporary social issues such as domestic violence, contemporary life, and race. With a BA from George Washington University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Diggs was trained as a printmaker but in order to reach a broader public, she has utilized forms such as junk mail, flags, milk cartons, and billboards. She often collaborates with specific communities to produce site-responsive, issue-specific projects that are relevant to a unique set of conditions. Through these public works, she has printed on money and then put it into circulation, given collapsible furniture to formerly homeless seniors, and distributed napkins printed with questions about race in college eating facilities.Diggs’ work has been exhibited and collected throughout the United States, featured at institutions such as Mass MoCa, Project Row Houses, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. She has received broad support for her work, most notably from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Creative Time. Diggs has taught at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Williams College and Berkshire County Community College. In 2013 she moved to Galisteo, NM, and plans to stay and work there forever.
Shelbie Loomis is a publicly engaged artist and banker, who focus her time and efforts on socio-economic research and creates artwork about forgotten social groups such as the local Santa Fe elderly, third-world countries that she has traveled to, and as of late a social group called the precariat. She is engaged with the community by working on murals through Keeping Santa Fe Beautiful, sits on New Mexico Professional Business Women of Santa Fe executive board which involves themselves with legislation for equal opportunity for jobs and education for women, and puts forth efforts with small business owners through banking to helping them grow financially. Loomis graduated from Santa Fe University of Art and Design in 2014 with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts Magna Cum Laude after receiving the first Governor’s Scholarship for full tuition in 2010. Since then she has been honored as a 2013 SITE Santa Fe Scholar, President’s Departmental award recipient, and was recently awarded the 2017 Young Professional Business Women of Santa Fe. She hopes to continue conversations about socio-economics, gender, social and financial norms and include more people of diversity through education, artwork, and workshops.
Moving alternately between Colorado and Illinois as a child, Tamara (Inupiat/Kawerak, Swede) jokes she was raised on Interstate 80. As an adult she has lived in Alaska, Australia, Wisconsin and the Chicago area. Tamara also spent several years in New Mexico in a community of other artists where she exhibited her work locally, including a two-woman installation entitled MY LIFE AS A DRESS; inspired by animistic tribal peoples who seemingly dress to reflect their beliefs. Tamara created dresses to reveal what she believed about herself and/or her worldview. After more than a decade in NW Arkansas caring for her elderly mother, Tamara is back in New Mexico with a studio in Santa Fe. Tamara’s regionalist drawings are part of permanent collections at the college and public library in Nome, Alaska and University of Alaska, Juneau. While in New Mexico she worked two years on a project conducted by an internationally recognized artist. Just as important to her art is the library Tamara has established. Books by Joseph Campbell, Gary Zukav, J. Krishnamurti, Paramahansa Yogananda, Carolyn Myss and other metaphysical authors have been strong influences. Tamara’s NATURE CONSCIOUSNESS, a series of 20 oil paintings using three motifs (cloud, hill and trees) explores the kinetic and possible conscious relationships between elements of nature. Her self portrait watercolors, a series of eight, represents a mythological working out of self image through personal, faith related and familial experiences and challenges
Rebecca and Heather (aka Tiger Toe Collective) met at an adult summer camp where they instantly bonded over their love of play, sports and all forms of creativity. While painting each other’s faces, they hatched a plot to make the world a more just and fun place. Rebecca is a creative professional specializing in animation, illustration, typography and visual art that doesn’t take itself too seriously. She is driven by a sense of play and helping others feel permission to let their creative, goofball flags fly. While in Chicago she spent several summers facilitating campouts for kids in their local parks. Rebecca loves helping kids of all ages unleash their messy creativity, learn to trust their instincts, and take responsibility for themselves and the natural environment. Heather is a bounce house of fun dedicated to facilitating play, recreational opportunities and helping people discover their bodies are a joyful place to be. She’s a writer, fitness coach, play facilitator, creator and glue gun cowgirl. Heather is a certified strength and conditioning specialist (CSCS) and earned her master’s in recreation, parks and tourism from San Francisco State University, with an emphasis in encouraging women’s active leisure. She is interested in using the creative process and play to explore physical culture and mind/body/feeling relationships. Rebecca and Heather are a dynamic duo combining sports and art in unique ways. They’re collaborative energies unleash Tiger Toe Collective whose mission is to facilitate empowering play and active creativity.
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