artist bios

Michelle Arcila was born in New York in 1980. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2002 with a BFA in photography. She is currently living and working in NYC. Arcila has exhibited in Poland, Australia, Belgium, Norway and New York. Her work has been published in Vogue Korea, Time Out NY, Metro Pop, Les Inrockuptibles and Downbeat. She's photographed and served as art director for numerous record covers. Her work also appears in a number of private collections.

Ian Baguskas grew up in Philadelphia and currently resides in Brooklyn. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. After being named a Hot Shot and Ne Plus Ultra in 2006, Ian gained representation by Jen Bekman Gallery. In the spring of 2008, the gallery opened his NYC debut solo exhibition, Sweet Water. His work has also been exhibited at The Ice Box, Philadelphia, PA; Mt. Tremper Arts, Mt. Tremper, NY and Dactyl Gallery, New York, NY. His work has been published in Culture + Travel, Photo Art (Korea) and PDN.

Ian travels extensively to photograph for his projects. Search for the American Landscape brought him to Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Louisiana, and Mississippi over the course of 2004. In 2005, Ian spent two months in South Korea working on his project, Below Line 38, where he photographed the landscape and the people.

Kate Bingaman Burt was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1977. She founded Obsessive Consumption in 2002 and has documented her personal consumption in many different mediums. Her first book, Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?, will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in March 2010.

Bingaman Burt is active in the indie craft and craftivism movements. She provided all of the illustrations for the book Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft and Design, as well as the promotional materials for the documentary of the same name. She lives in Portland, Oregon where, along with being an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University, she also makes piles of work about consumerism (zines! pillows! dresses! drawings! paper chains! photos!). She happily draws for other good people too (IDEO, Madewell, ReadyMade Magazine, The New York Times, Wieden + Kennedy). Kate also conducts zine workshops and spreads the craftivism word. Her first international zine workshop will occur at the American University in Cairo, Egypt in 2010.

Christine Callahan is a native New Yorker. She earned her MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, Atlanta and Derry, Northern Ireland. She is a recipient of the International Center of Photography Director’s Fellowship, the ISE Cultural Foundation Grant and the National Lottery Fund of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is represented by Jen Bekman Gallery.

Christian Chaize, a self-taught French artist, lives and works in Lyon, France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix European Panorama de Kodak for Young European Photographer in Arles, France. Recently, Chaize became obsessed with a small stretch of coastline in southern Portugal while vacationing there in 2004. It gave new life to his on-going personal work, which began to take precedence over his professional ambitions. His commitment to this series has, thus far, garnered Chaize a one-person gallery exhibition in Lyon, and two museum exhibitions in Portugal (Sines and Lisbon).

Among other projects, Chaize continues to photograph in Portugal, to understand (or maybe not!) the ineffable draw of its inviting and mysterious landscape. He also delights in observing the unrevealed narratives of the beach goers who, through his lens, share in its magical spell. He is represented by Jen Bekman Gallery.

Jorge Colombo has worked as a designer, as a photographer and as an illustrator for more than twenty years. He's best known, however, for the iPhone drawings he started doing in February 2009. Four 20x200 editions released in April led to his first cover for The New Yorker, highlighted by the media everywhere as the first magazine cover ever created on a smartphone. Video animations of his drawings appear weekly on The New Yorker's website.

Colombo was born in 1963 in Lisbon, Portugal and moved to the USA in 1989. He lived in Chicago and in San Francisco and has been living in New York City since 1998 with his wife, artist Amy Yoes. He has published three books in Portugal: Fullerton, a retrospective of his 1990s drawings; Of Big and of Small Love, a photographic narrative created in collaboration with novelist Inês Pedrosa; and Lisbon Revisited, a series of tinted photographs inspired by early 20th-century poet Fernando Pessoa. The New Yorker's weekly spot has led him to amass an ever-growing collection of New York landscapes. He has started to expand his finger-painting approach to other cities.

William Crump is a New York-based artist who works in drawing, painting and collage. William's work has been featured in exhibitions at 33 Bond Gallery, The Palais De Tokyo Museum in Paris and the Lehman College Art Gallery. William currently lives and works in the East Village with his wife and two year old daughter.

In his work, Crump seeks to remake our past dreams into a forgiving view of our present circumstances, while offering a glimpse of another world just beyond our reach.

Jessica Eaton is an artist currently living in Toronto. Born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1977, she spent her childhood engrossed in competitive gymnastics and trouble-making. After giving up on high school, she eventually moved to Vancouver, BC, where she first picked up a camera. It was love at first developer bath. She was taken on by Spotty Dog, a B&W professional lab, where she did custom printing in exchange for after-hours darkroom experimentation and lessons from the lab's technician, Mark. In 2000, she was accepted into the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. In 2002, she took a one-year break to work in post-production for film and television, after which she returned to Emily Carr to earn a BFA in photography, in 2006.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries and artist-run centers across Canada, including the LES Gallery, Helen Pitt Gallery, Access Gallery, Blanket Gallery, Paul Petro Projects and Hunter and Cook HQ, as well as featured on numerous photography web logs. Her photography can also been seen in a number of art publications, including Pyramid Power, Patti, The Vancouver Review and the Hunter and Cook #4 Early Fall 2009.

Scott Eiden was born in Tacoma, Washington in 1975. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Clare Grill was born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1979. She has an MFA from Pratt Institute and has exhibited her work at the Bronx Museum, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Sloan Fine Art, Caren Golden Fine Art and Real Art Ways. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and The New Jersey Star-Ledger and was on the back cover of New American Paintings Vol. 68. She lives and works in Queens, New York.

Chad Hagen was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1970. He received a BFA in graphic design from Moorhead State University in Moorehead, Minnesota in 1994.

For the past 15 years, Chad has been working as a professional graphic designer and art director in Minneapolis where he lives with his beautiful and talented wife and daughter.

Nick Hardeman was born and raised in Miami, FL and grew up studying fine art. He received a BFA in graphic design from Florida State University in 2006. He then worked as a Flash web developer in Miami, FL. He is currently living in New York, NY and pursuing an MFA in design and technology from Parsons The New School for Design. He is expected to graduate in 2010.

Joseph Holmes' photos have been exhibited in dozens of shows across the country and are featured in the international survey, Photography Now: One Hundred Portfolios. Joe was one of four photographers in the national print campaign, Stunning Nikon, which appeared in National Geographic, People and many other magazines in 2005 and 2006. As part of Berlin Meets New York, twenty-eight photos from his series, joe's nyc, were displayed on multimedia screens in Berlin subway trains in 2006. For more than three years, his daily photographs of New York City have been syndicated in Charlie Suisman's Manhattan User's Guide. Joe's short stories have appeared in the literary journals Phantasmagoria, The North Atlantic Review, and Pikeville Review. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Jason Jägel was born in 1971, in Boston, Massachusetts. He received a BFA in 1995 from California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA in 2002 from Stanford University. A monograph of his work entitled, Seventy-Three Funshine (2008), is accompanied by a ten-inch vinyl record with music by Madlib and published by Electric Works in San Francisco.

Since 1995, Jägel's work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows in New York, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Milan, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Seattle and New Orleans. His work appears in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The UCLA Hammer Museum and the Portland Museum of Art, among others. Jason lives with his wife and two daughters in San Francisco, CA.

Born in 1980, in Edinburgh, Scotland, Tommy Perman is an artist, designer and musician who works in a variety of media, including drawing, printmaking, sound and music. He has a particular interest in combining new digital technologies with traditional techniques. Tommy is also a member of the artist collective / pop band, FOUND. FOUND's latest project, Cybraphon an emotional robot band, captured the attention of the world's media in the summer of 2009. Google 'Cybraphon' to find out why.

Dutch artist Roel Knappstein and Tommy first met in 2001, when Tommy was on a study exchange at the Academie Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht. The two have been collaborating remotely through the postal service and email ever since.

Gregory Krum was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and studied biology, sculpture and design at Portland State University. After a study abroad program in Italy with the University of Georgia, he relocated to New York where he received his Master's degree in studio art from New York University and the International Center for Photography.

His work has been shown in venues such as the Armory Show, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Soren Christiansen Gallery in New Orleans and Jen Bekman Gallery. He was awarded the Jack Goodman Scholarship for Art and Technology and his work has been written about and published in the Paris-based magazine Purple. In 2007, he was co-curator of an art exhibition entitled The Wrong Store with Kantor/Feuer Gallery in New York and was a Summer 2007 Hot Shot. He is currently working on a group of photographs of smoke and curating a show on the fashion label Rodarte which opens early 2010 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Smithsonian Institution.

Working within the genres of landscape and interior, Krum's work explores diverse themes such as love, failure, commerce, and desire within a larger context of space and organization. His subjects have included dust, devotional offerings, seaside villages and Parisian houseboats.

Liz Kuball was born in Washington, D.C., in 1973 and raised in the same small town in Michigan where her parents grew up. She began photographing in 2006. Since then, her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Detroit. Liz was selected for inclusion in The Collector’s Guide to Emerging Art Photography, published by the Humble Arts Foundation in 2009. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Jeff Lewis was born in La Grange, Illinois, in 1969. He grew up in Nashville, TN. In 1992, he received his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and then moved to New York City to attend Parsons School of Design, where he received his MFA in 1995. He has lived and worked in New York ever since. He regularly travels to India and Europe for research and inspiration.

He has exhibited internationally, participating in group exhibitions at Robert Miller Gallery in New York, Bjorn Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden and in Aspen, Colorado. In 2006, he had a solo show at The Muse, an artist-run gallery in London. His work has also been featured in many magazines and publications including Architectural Digest and The New York Times.

Born and raised in Shanghai, Yijun Liao is a fine-art photographer currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Liao’s photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and China.

In 2009, Liao's work has been recognized by the New York Photo Awards, and New York Photo Festival's National Competition and the Camera Club of New York. She was a 2008 Hot Shot. She has participated in group exhibitions at Jen Bekman Gallery, the Center for Photography at Woodstock and The Center for Fine Art Photography. Liao holds an MFA in photography from the University of Memphis.

Scott Listfield was born in 1976, in Boston, MA. He is known for his paintings featuring a lone exploratory astronaut lost in a landscape cluttered with pop-culture icons, corporate logos and tongue-in-cheek science-fiction references. Scott studied art at Dartmouth College, which was maybe not the brightest thing to do. After some time spent abroad, Scott returned to America where, right around the year 2001, he began painting astronauts and, sometimes, dinosaurs.

Scott has been profiled in Wired Magazine, the Boston Globe, and online at Big, Red and Shiny. Additionally, his work appeared in New American Paintings in 2005 and 2008. He has exhibited extensively in Boston, and less extensively in Los Angeles, New York and Miami.

Paul Madonna’s strip, All Over Coffee, appears every Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle and on SFGate.com. Additionally, Paul produces the rowdy weekly cartoon Small Potatoes, which can be found on TheRumpus.net, where he is also comics editor. In 2007, the first collection of All Over Coffee was published by City Lights Books.

Paul’s drawings and prints are shown in museums, galleries, restaurants and cafes. Paul’s work can be found in various book collections and publications, including Believer Magazine. In 2009, Paul covered the Presidential Inauguration for several international newspapers. Paul received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, and that same year he was the first (ever!) Art Intern at MAD Magazine, which he proudly received no money for. Paul currently lives with his wife in San Francisco.

Sarah McKenzie was born in Connecticut in 1971 and grew up in New Jersey. The daughter of a land-use planner, it is probably not coincidental that she would make paintings about development and construction as an adult. McKenzie received her BA in film studies from Yale University and her MFA in painting from the University of Michigan. After graduate school, she taught painting and drawing at the college level for eight years, including five years as a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art. In 2006, she left her teaching position to pursue her studio work full-time.

McKenzie was the 2006 First-Place Winner of the National Young Painters Competition, hosted by Miami University. Her paintings have appeared in Art in America, New American Paintings, Dwell, Landscape Architecture, the Miami Herald, the Denver Post, and NYTimes.com. McKenzie had a solo show, Building Code, open at Jen Bekman Gallery in February 2009. She is also included in the group exhibition, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, which originated at the Walker Art Center in February 2008 traveled to the Yale School of Architecture. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two children.

Mike Monteiro I grew up in Philadelphia. California's not so hard.

Jane Mount is an artist, product strategist, designer and entrepreneur. She has exhibited work in various U.S. cities, co-founded several companies, and has been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She is obsessed with learning and knows a lot about drawing, the internet, social networks, anthropology, art history, wine, human anatomy, furniture, cooking and golf. When she was little she believed that people kept learning and changing until they knew absolutely everything, and then they would die and move on to something else because they were done here. She is currently still on that mission.

Gary Petersen is a native New Yorker. He holds a BS from Penn State University and an MFA from The School of Visual Arts. He has a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in Manhattan, and lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. His work has been exhibited widely in New York City and throughout the United States.

He has had solo exhibitions at Fusebox Gallery in D.C., Genovese/Sullivan in Boston, and most recently, at Michael Steinberg in New York City. He has participated in group shows at McKenzie Fine Art, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Plus/Ultra (Winkleman) Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, Frederieke Taylor, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Janet Kurnatowski and Lohin-Geduld galleries in New York City, as well as at Geoffrey Young Gallery in Massachusetts, Diverse Works in Texas and The Newark Museum in New Jersey. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Sun, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Partisan Review. Upcoming group exhibitions include Eyeworld at Triple Candie, Casish at Geoffrey Young Gallery and Color-Time-Space at Hofstra University.

Born and raised in Chicago, Colleen Plumb worked as a graphic designer for several years before switching gears to pursue a degree in photography. She holds an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago, where she is currently an adjunct faculty member. She makes photographs about connections—or the lack thereof—between humans and the natural world.

Plumb’s work is in several collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL and Fidelity Investments in Boston, MA. Her photographs are part of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Chicago Project at Catherine Edelman Gallery and are featured online in Photo-Eye’s Photographer’s Showcase. Plumb’s work has been widely published. She was a 2008 First Edition Hot Shot at Jen Bekman Gallery.

Jason Polan is a freelance artist living in New York City. He has exhibited work all over the United States and Europe. He is a member of The 53rd Street Biological Society and Taco Bell Drawing Club. In August 2008, he wrapped up The Drawing Center Project. Polan is currently attempting to draw every person in New York.

Polan's illustrations and projects have appeared in Metropolis Magazine, The New Yorker, and ARTnews and his books have generated wide acclaim. His book Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art is cult favorite. Mr. Polan is from Michigan.

Tyson Roberts studied studio art and biology at UC Davis in Davis, CA. Roberts has painted landscapes in California, Mexico City and Seattle, where he currently lives and works. Living in the Central Valley of California for most of his life was a key element to Tyson's appreciation for both rural and urban environments. The next year will see Roberts focusing on developing and exhibiting his work.

Mike Sinclair is an architectural and fine art photographer living in Kansas City, Missouri.

His photographs are frequently published in the architectural press and elsewhere, including The New York Times, Metropolis, Architectural Record and Interior Design. His work is in several public and private collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, also in Kansas City.

Sinclair was a 2009 First Edition Hot Shot and participated in a group show at Jen Bekman Gallery in the fall of 2009.

Jessica Snow was born in Berkeley, CA and currently lives and works in San Francisco. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Rena Bransten Gallery in SF, the Riverside Art Museum, POST in Los Angeles and Merge Gallery in NYC.

Snow has received numerous honors including the Artadia Award, the Cadogan Fellowship Award, and selection for the American Artists Abroad Program in Montevideo, Uruguay. She studied at Mills College, UC Davis, the Sorbonne, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

A unique mix of commercial and fine art has characterized Trey Speegle's diverse career. A Texas-born New Yorker, he was part of the East Village art scene, designing for art galleries, producing downtown club events and curating various shows. For the past 20+ years, he has also art-directed and designed for many publications including Vanity Fair, Us Weekly and Radar.

His vast (2,500 and counting) vintage paint-by-number collection functions as raw source material that he combines with text, altering their original meaning, and making good use of the Jasper Johns credo: "Take something; do something to it; then do something else to it."

William Swanson was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1970. He graduated from Rhode Island School Of Design in 1992 with a BFA in painting. Swanson has had recent solo exhibitions at DCKT Contemporary, NY (2009), Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco (2008), and Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles (2007). Select group exhibitions include Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape at The Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY (2008), Back in Black at Cohan Leslie and Browne (2003), New York, NY and Bay Area Now 3 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF (2002). His work has been reviewed and featured in many publications including Art In America, ArtNews, The Los Angeles Times, Anthem, Artweek, Hot And Cold, and art ltd. His pieces are in many collections including The West Collection and The Progressive Art Collection. Swanson currently lives in Oakland with his wife Alena and daughter Elsa.

Amy Talluto is an artist working in Brooklyn. She earned her BFA at Washington University in St. Louis in 1995, then continued on to earn her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001.

She has shown her paintings in both New York and Chicago, and recently finished a solo exhibition at Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago and a 3-person show at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, both in January 2009. Also in 2009, her work was included in a group show curated by Jennifer McGregor at Wave Hill Gallery in the Bronx. Previous shows include a 2-person exhibition at PS 122 Gallery in 2006, and several group shows in 2007 & 2008, including exhibitions at Black & White Gallery and the Abrons Art Center in New York; the Kentler International Drawing Center, Metaphor Contemporary Art and The Brooklyn Arts Council in Brooklyn; and the Kelinert/James Art Center in Woodstock, NY.

Her work has been mentioned in The Chicago Reader, The Brooklyn Rail, PAINTERSNYC Blogspot, The Brooklyn Paper, The Advocate and Antiques & the Arts Weekly. She has also been invited as an artist-in-residence to the following programs: The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, Ucross Foundation in Ucross, WY and The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY, where she was awarded a Pollack-Krassner fellowship and a Ginsberg fellowship.

Matthew Tischler lives and works in New York City. He earned a BA in filmmaking and photography from Sarah Lawrence College.

In 2007, he had a solo show at the bobparsley Galerie in Berlin, Germany. His work has also been exhibited at Real Art Ways, HEREart, Organization of Independent Artists, Viridian Artists and Genart. His photographs have been included in exhibitions juried by Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim Museum and Robert Rosenblum. In 2005, Matthew was a Hey, Hot Shot! at Jen Bekman Gallery. He is also a recipient of a Van Lier film grant from Film/Video Arts and was a finalist for the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Project. His work has been published in Photographer's Forum Magazine and the book Exploring Color Photography. Currently, Matthew is working at PBS on a six part documentary series exploring the history of comedy in America.

Ann Toebbe grew up in Cincinnati, OH and attended 12 years of Catholic school. She played basketball and volleyball, listened to Top 40 radio and had a perm. She arrived at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1992 wearing a hooded sweatshirt and Umbro athletic shorts. She finished art school in 1997 and moved to NYC, wearing combat boots and a thrift-store dress and carrying a stack of Fugazi and Sebadoh CDs.

She moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn and worked as a freelance art handler and then in a Chelsea gallery. During a summer of 2000 fellowship in Skowhegan, she began painting with gouache on paper. She started Yale's MFA painting program in 2002. She won a traveling scholarship and visited France, Germany and Austria. She decided she wanted to live in Berlin after Yale, so she started learning German. In 2004, she moved to Berlin for a year with a DAAD scholarship.

After Berlin, she moved back to the Midwest with her future husband, a German philosophy professor who had decided to go to law school in Chicago. She has lived in Chicago since 2005, teaching drawing and painting at the Art Institute and Northwestern. Her daughter Olive was born in May 2008.