EILEEN S. KAMINSKY FAMILY FOUNDATION
Anka Mierzejewska
XY Anka Mierzejewska is a European artist working on conceptual ideas and executing them as a large-scale expressionistic painting. She combines the big surfaces of pure, vibrant colors with the lines suggesting the figures in motion. She reaches for different fabrics and materials as a background to her paintings that makes each of her series a unique concept.Aware of global social and political issues she reacts in her artistic way to bring up what is important to the whole humanity now.
XY Anna Mierzejewska participated in prestigious exhibitions such as 'Polish Painting XXI' at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, and cooperated with several respectful cultural institutions like City Museum of Wroclaw or National Forum of Music. XY Anna Mierzejewska has had over a dozen solo exhibitions including: "Vaccinated with Art" in 2021, "Second DeEnA" in 2016 and r. at the Wroclaw City Museum, "Body of Thoughts" at the Eklektik Art Foundation in Wroclaw in 2020. "The World Is Changing From Doing Nothing" in 2018 at Gallery M Odwach "I am just ready to be me" in 2017 at the National Forum of Music”, "To bee" at the Design Gallery in 2016, "Direct Painting" in 2014 at the City Gallery.
She has participated in dozens of group exhibitions: “Color Fields” at Maison10, NY in 2023, "Chaos and Stillness" in 2023 at Van der Plas Gallery in NY. She has presented her work at the artists residency Mothership NYC in Brooklyn in 2022, was a part of exhibition NEOEX in the Czech Republic at Dolu Michal Gallery in 2021, " Change of Image", Hotel Mond Gallery in 2020 in Berlin, "Handle With Care" in 2015 in Dresden, " Brainwashing" in 2010 in London, And many others, including "Made in Poland", in Roten Rathaus in Berlin, Krakauer Hausund Turn, "Museum Schwarzes Ross" Hipoltstein, "Stadtgalerie" in Bielefeld, in "Schloss Rapperwill" und Palais de Nation in Geneva, Switzerland.
Her work has been the subject of numerous publications and interviews in professional magazines: LYNX Magazine 2020, Format, ArtLuk, Sztuka.pl, Rynek i Sztuka, Art. Biznes, and many other magazines Dom i Wnetrze, Villa, Dobre Wnętrze, SRWO. XY has also had appearances in the media: TVP, TVP Wrocław, Radio Ram, Radio Wrocław, Radio Luz.
XY Anna Mierzejewska's works can be found in the collections of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the City Museum of Wrocław and the Collection of the Mayor of Wrocław, Krupa Gallery and many private collections.
She has received a comprehensive artistic education at Polish and American universities and has received grants from Zacheta National Gallery, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage and the Self-government of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship.
She is a blogger and animator of creative activities. Anna Mierzejewska has also realized several non-profit murals in Wrocław, involving passers-by in these actions. Together with ET BER Warlikowska, she is also co-founder of the Old Banana artistic group, which has been active since 2006 and creates happenings in the urban space to bring awareness of women-artists role in the society.
Ann Vollum
Ann Vollum is a New Jersey fiber and mixed media artist with an international background, born in Africa, she has lived in England, France and the USA and has travelled widely. She studied to be an architect and then worked as an art director and graphic designer in London and New York City. Ann’s artistic journey has progressed through painting, line drawing, book making, fantastical and detailed “paper cuts” to hand stitched textiles and fiber sculptures. Ann is honored to have been juried into the 2023 and 2022, New Jersey Arts Annuals; the 2023 and 2022, 14C Art Fair Showcase, Jersey City and in 2020 The Gold Standard of Textile and Fiber Art, Westbeth Gallery, New York. Her work has been exhibited widely and featured in various publications. In September 2022, she was interviewed by Canvas Rebel. Ann is a member of a number of professional organizations and has served on the board of The Textile Study Group of New York.
Rachel Holguin
Rachel Holguin was born in Yonkers, New York and raised in Manhattan. She attended Adelphi University in 2023 earning a BFA in studio art. She is a mixed media artist, based in New York. Holguin’s current body of work reflects her immigrant family's matriarch. She works with photobooks and large scale photographs. These photos are an intimate look into her family’s past, present, and future.
Dede Bandaid
Dede Bandaid is a Tel-Aviv based, multidisciplinary urban artist, who utilizes various mediums to communicate within the public arena. He started creating his works after finishing his military service, over a decade ago and continued to develop and elaborate them while completing his undergraduate studies at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
Dede’s inspiration stems from the urban landscape, and from the social and the personal questions it evokes. As he gathers stories and structures hidden within the ever-changing city streets.
Outdoor locations and found objects often serve as a point of departure for the pieces he creates. The techniques he later applies, such as assemblage, collage, painting, photography and installation, are chosen based on their ability to highlight the original sources of inspiration and the stories they carry. This essence is usually elaborated due to Dede’s tendency to work in ongoing series that allow him to expand and deepen his messages. Wooden planks, newspapers and found cardboard, alongside man-made leftovers, constitute Dede’s pool of materials.
Dede’s works are always site-specific, both in the theoretical and the practical aspects: they facilitate a solid relationship between the concept that generates them, the specific location where they appear, and the materials and methods used to create them.
Dede is motivated by the deep need to leave something after him, by the need to be meaningful and to gain meaning: his art is, for all intents and purposes, a statement of Existence.
Nowadays his works can be viewed at galleries, exhibition spaces, various art events and in the streets of art capitals around the world, such as London, New York, Berlin and Tel-Aviv.
Nitzan Mintz
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Nitzan Mintz is a visual poet based in Tel Aviv. She began working a decade ago in the streets of Tel Aviv, where she would create visual poetry for specific locations in the city. She later continued to create studio pieces as well.
The public sphere has a central role in Mintz’s artistic process, as it is her main source of inspiration. As a Tel Aviv native, her personal growth and change has been echoed by the dramatic changes Tel Aviv has undergone in recent years. In her poems, Mintz attempts to verbalize personal and collective emotional struggles. Her poems are later developed into her visual pieces. She mainly uses leftovers from the public sphere, industrial materials, paint and letter stencils. Her final pieces facilitate a unique connection between text, form and color, allowing a new experience for the viewer. In her pieces in the public sphere she often considers the history and nature of the location, along with its visual aspects, thus deepening the meaning in her final piece.
Mintz has created pieces in the public sphere and has exhibited her work in different art venues and events in many cities in the world – New York, Miami, Montreal, London, Paris, Prague, Vienna, Berlin and more.
Jon Levi
"I was born in New Jersey in ‘68. I picked up a polaroid in ‘74. I did painting and darkroom work in HS. I shot my first nude when I was 15 and started painting figurative works. I started as an artist in earnest as a young man in my late teens, a painter, a photographer, and a steel sculptor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photography has been my constant in the last 40 years. I didn’t really see photography as a viable direction in itself until well into college, back then I used photography as a tool to capture images that I would later draw, paint and sculpt. I couldn’t afford the models so I’d shoot them instead. I would print the images, paint from the images, even include the actual prints into the paintings and paint over them. That was 35 years ago. In the intervening years photography was my drive to keep my passion as an artist alive.
Playboy magazines in my house as a kid were all the rage, mad magazine too. Nudes combined with the Mad Magazine ethos, now that I think about it, shows up in my photography.
Photography can only get you so far because the media can be intangible however transcendental. I miss the tactile feel of painting, the process. And firing up a part of my brain allowing myself to think of painting again. Today, I begin again painting, mixing with photography at ESKFF picking up where I left off from when. I’m excited to see where this leads me."