Support Page Content
Hello Stranger Artists
Artist Bios
Julia Couzens
Julia Couzens’s textile-based constructions take shape between the disciplines of craft and the expressive character of abstract painting and sculpture. Working with rapid intention, her hybrid forms are intuitively determined and seek enchantment in a provisional world. Reflecting the imperfectly beautiful and unapologetically flawed, collapse, malleability, and ragtag engineering coexist with speculations on feminist theory, cognitive uncertainty, and what Couzens refers to as “unzipped abstraction.”
Couzens has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. She has been recognized with a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship; a Roswell Artist-in-Residence grant; and an Art Matters Visual Artist Fellowship, among others. Notable public collections include the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts; Berkeley Art Museum; Butler Institute of American Art; Crocker Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Weatherspoon Art Museum; and Yale University Art Gallery. Couzens has widely taught and lectured, most recently presenting a paper on contemporary textile practices at the 2019 Cheongju Contemporary Craft Biennale, South Korea.
Born and raised in Auburn, California, Couzens received her M.F.A. in 1990 from U.C. Davis. She divides her time between the Sacramento River Delta community of Clarksburg and Los Angeles. Her work is represented in SF by Patricia Sweetow Gallery.
Chris Daubert
Chris Daubert is an artist, teacher and curator who lives in California’s Central Valley. He has exhibited his drawings, paintings and large multi-media installations locally, nationally, and internationally for many years. He has organized and curated over one hundred exhibitions in non-profit, college, and university art galleries. He served as the chairman of the exhibition committee at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, and as the Director of the Gregory Kondos Gallery in the Department of Art and Art History at Sacramento City College, where he taught, for twenty years.
Esther Marie Hall
Esther Marie Hall is a Filipino American multidisciplinary currently based out of Sacramento, CA. Through the use of fiber, textile, and sculpture, she is contantly exploring themes within the sociopolitical climate, such as climate change, human rights, and mental health. These themes are illustrated through bright color and heavy line work with references to spirituality, her Filipino heritage, California upbrigning, and consistent use of smiley faces.
Robin Hill
Robin Hill is an artist whose work focuses on the intersection between drawing, photography, and sculpture. Her recent work takes on a collaborative sensibility, where objects and materials which have been rejected by others have served as starting points for acts of transformation. Hill is a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellow, a two time Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grantee, a NEA Fellow, and a two time Anonymous Was a Woman nominee. In addition to solo exhibitions at Lennon-Weinberg, Inc., JayJay Contemporary Art, Art Space 1616, and Another Year in LA, Hill is the founder of S.E.E.P. (Society for Education and Exchange with Potluck) which showcases the research of critically engaged peers in the arts. She is a contributing writer for Two Coats of Paint and co-curated, with Ulla Warchol a 3 month long living exhibition entitled Going to the Meadow, with 16 artists in residence, for ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ.
Hill is a Professor in the Art Studio Program, Department of Art and Art History, at the University of California-Davis.
Kara Maria
American, Bornin Binghamton, New York / Lives in San Francisco, California
Kara Maria is a visual artist working in painting and mixed media. Her recent work reflects on Earth’s biodiversity crisis and the place of animals in our increasingly unstable environment. She borrows from the broad vocabulary of contemporary painting, blending geometric shapes, vivid hues, and abstract marks, with representational elements.
Maria received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows throughout the United States at venues including the Neveda Museum of Art; the Cantor Center at Stanford University; the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas; the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; and the Katonah Museum of Art in New York; among many others.
Her work has garnered critical attention in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Art in America. Maria has been awarded artist residencies at the Montalvo Arts Center, Recology Artist in Residence Program, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and at the de Young’s Artist Studio. She has been a recipient of many awards and honors, including a grantfrom Artadia, an Eisner Prize in Art from UC Berkeley, and the Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly.
Maria’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive(BAMPFA); the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation); the San Jose Museum of Art; and the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University; among others. Artwork is available throughGail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, ID; and Mark Moore Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA. For more information please visit www.karamaria.com.
Rebecca Morris
Rebecca Morris, b.1969 in Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in Los Angeles, California. BA, Smith College; MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is a Professor in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Solo exhibitions include: Bortolami, NYC (2020); Blaffer Art Museum, Houston TX (2019); Mary Boone Gallery, NYC (2017); 356 S. Mission Rd, Los Angeles (2015); The Bonnefantenmuseum, The Netherlands (2014); Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany (2013); Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2017, 2013, 2009, 2006); Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago (2016, 2013); Harris Lieberman, New York (2012, 2010); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2005); and Santa Monica Museum of Art (2003); forthcoming a survey exhibition at ICALA, Los Angeles (2022).
Group exhibitions include: “Made in LA” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Whitney Biennial, NY (2014); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; David Zwirner Gallery, NYC; Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna, Austria; The Hessel Art Museum at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, NYC; The Pit, CA.
Morris was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Tiffany Foundation; The California Community Foundation; The City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Award; The Durfee Foundation; Art Matters; and the Illinois Arts Council.
Michelle Ott
Michelle Ott makes artworks focused on observations of our physical and social world. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally most recently at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her illustrations have appeared in the New York Times T Magazine online and are featured throughout The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee (2012) and Candy Is Magic (2017) both published by Ten Speed Press. Ott has given visiting artist lectures at both UC Berkeley and Stanford University and has recently taught in the Art Practice department at Berkeley and at California State University, Chico. Michelle is the recipient of several awards including a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2013), an exhibition and grant from The Institute for the Future (2014), a travel grant and exhibition at the College Art Association Conference (2015), and the Eisner Prize in Art Practice with a post-graduate fellowship residency from UC Berkeley (2015). For her service over four summer seasons at McMurdo Station in Antarctica she has received the Antarctica Service Medal. She holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Michelle works at The Bookstore and is currently the Artist in Residence at the Gateway Science Museum in Chico, California.
Lordy Rodriguez
Lordy Rodriguez was born in 1976, the Philippines, raised in Louisiana and Texas, and currently lives and works in Benicia, CA. He obtained his B.F.A. degree from School of Visual Arts, New York and his MFA at Stanford University. For several years he has been working on a series of ink drawings that critically look at the effect visual languages have on culture and identity through the use of mapping and cartography. His recent exhibitions include, “Tahoe: a Visual History”, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV (2015), “The Map at Art”, Kemper Museum, St. Louis, MO (2012), “Code Switch” and "The Map is Not the Territory", Hosfelt Gallery New York, New York (2013 and 2011 respectively), “Surface Depths”, Nevada Art Museum (2009), “States of America”, Austin Museum of Art (2009), “Optimism in the Age of Global War”, 10th Annual Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, (2007), “The California Biennial”, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2006), as well as public art projects with the San Francisco Arts Commission at San Francisco International Airport and the Federal General Services Administration at the Land Port of Entry in New Mexico on the border.
Leah Rosenberg
Based in San Francisco, Leah Rosenberg’s art spans painting, installation, sculpture, printmaking, and food, while focusing on the role of color in our lives and its emotional orpsychological impact. Her work has been presented in solo and two-person exhibitions nationally and internationally.
In the Bay Area, she was a recipient of the Irvine Fellowship through the Lucas ArtistsResidency Program at Montalvo Arts Center, the Kala Fellowship at Kala Art Institute, Recologyand most recently completed a residency at Villa Lena in Italy. Past residencies include theVermont Studio Center, Project 387, Facebook, Google, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and McColl Center for Art & Innovation in Charlotte, NC, where she inaugurated their gallery with Color for the People, a site-specific installation serving color and flavor. Her commissioned mural, Everywhere A Color, is permanently installed in the International Terminal of SFO, and her book, The Color Collector’s Handbook, published by Chronicle Books (2018), invites everyone from all over the world to connect through color. Rosenberg received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, BC (2003) and an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA (2008).
Lauren Ruth
Lauren Ruth is a sculptor and performance artist who playfully unravels familiar iconographies and social rituals to reestablish meanings. Her work anthropomorphizes insentient objects and plays with the opposition of seeing and being seen. Ruth has exhibited at the Pensacola Museum of Art (Pensacola, FL), Practice Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Coop Gallery (Nashville, TN), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), and The Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE). She has been artist in residence at Arteles Creative Center (Haukijärvi, Finland), ACRE Projects (Chicago, IL), Cannonball (Miami, FL), Ox-bow (Saugatuck, MI), and the Recycled Artist in Residency (Philadelphia, PA). Ruth holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Ruth is Assistant Professor of Art at the California State University, Chico and lives and works in Chico, CA.
Cathy Stone
Cathy Stone lives and works in Los Angeles where she is the co-director of Another Year in LA, (a primarily conceptual art gallery). The gallery has featured exhibitions by Peter Frank (curator), as well as historic surveys of artists such as Stephen Kaltenbach and Barbara Zucker, which were an educational inclusion in the gallery Program.
Cathy’s personal accomplishments include being the recipient of the College Art Association, Readers’ Digest, Artist in Giverny Residency in Monet’s Gardens in Giverny, France and Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for The Arts in Sausalito, California; is included in the Crocker Art Gallery, CSU, Sacramento University Collection and the Akademie Der Kunste in Berlin, Germany collections as well as many private collections.
Ms. Stone attended CSU, Sacramento where she received a Bachelor of Arts Degree. She later returned as an Adjunct Professor for 8 years before re-locating to Los Angeles in 2004. She considers this one of her most prestigious accomplishments; to have been a student of the brilliant faculty and to return as a peer. Cathy also received a Master of Fine Arts degree from UC Davis during a period of time in the late1980’s at which time the Program was extremely challenging and rigorous. Because her art practice evolved, she sought out further educational opportunities to learn neon fabrication at the Academy of Art, San Francisco, where she became proficient at neon fabrication and installation.
She has been a teacher/professor, spanning a range of students from elementary, middle and high school; culminating in being an Adjunct Professor for decades.
Her education and experience created the opportunity to mentor and guide students through their creative journeys. It has been her honor and she considers herself incredibly lucky to have done so.
Internationally she has shown in Berlin, Germany at the Zweiter Berliner Kongress Fur Performance Und Visual art in Berlin. She has been included in select shows, including a solo exhibition in New York at Pierogi where she also has work in the flat files and has been included in exhibitions emanating from Pierogi at Vassar and Bard Colleges and at the Kunster Haus in Vienna. She exhibited again with Pierogi in a traveling exhibition that began in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Post Gallery in Los Angeles and culminated at the Kansas City Art Institute. Ms. Stone has been a mentor for Transart Institute, an MFA program based in Austria, where she has worked with students individually from Los Angeles.
Ms. Stone has created numerous private commissions as well as three public commissions; one in Lacey, Washington and two in Sacramento, California.
David E. Stone
David E. Stone lives in Los Angeles where he works as a conceptual artist and the director of Another Year in LA (formerly occupying a physical space and online art gallery featuring work by artists who are using the internet as the medium as well as time-based live performances online).
David was born and raised in Sacramento, CA. He is a graduate of CSU Sacramento with a BA degree in Fine Art. Stone also attended the San Francisco Art Institute before graduating from CSUS. After graduating in 1975, he opened the ACME gallery in Sacramento showing artwork by local artists and featured film showings and performance art.
In 2004, Stone moved to Los Angeles to undertake an ambitious exhibition project, One Year in LA, where he held 12 monthly solo exhibitions of his own work as a metaphoric “cradle to grave” experience. Following that year, David, along with his wife, Cathy, started Another Year in LA showing work by artists throughout the US and the world including solo exhibitions of work by Stephen Kaltenbach, Barbara Zucker, and Robert Nelson.
Stone’s art has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento), Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Gas Works (London, England), San Francisco Art Institute, Pierogi Gallery (Brooklyn), Outpost (Queens, NY), Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Gallery SoToDo E.V. (Berlin, Germany), La Mamelle (San Francisco), Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles), Bert Green Fine Art (Los Angeles), MorYork Gallery (Los Angeles), Shoshanna Wayne Gallery (Bergamot Station, Santa Monica), Gallery Revisited (Los Angeles), Bert Green Fine Art (Chicago), Verge Center for the Arts (Sacramento), Art Company (Sacramento), Open Ring Gallery (Sacramento), Michael Himovitz Gallery (Sacramento), Memorial Union Art Gallery (UC Davis), Nelson Gallery (Davis), Center for Contemporary Art (Sacramento), 750 Gallery (Sacramento), Davis Art Center (Davis), Pence Gallery (Davis), American River College Gallery (Sacramento), Izzy’s Van Go Gallery (Sacramento).
David has curated exhibitions of art by Stephen Kaltenbach at Marlborough Chelsea (NYC), Pierogi Gallery (NYC) and The Boiler (Brooklyn).
Summer Ventis
Summer Ventis' work uses the printed surface to address internal and external landscapes and their intersections; the imprints we leave on each other and our surroundings and the imprints that our surroundings leave on us. She received a BA in Art from Grinnell College and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work has appeared in national and international exhibitions, and is held by collections including those of the Denver Art Museum and Proyecto ’ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a member of the Colorado-based collectives Hyperlink and ARTNAUTS and of Sacramento-based Axis Gallery and is Assistant Professor of Printmaking at California State University Sacramento.