This artist talk is part of the Group Exhibition Survival Tools for the Age of Ultra Anxiety held at Culture Lab LIC at Plaxall Gallery. Share on Facebook.

Amy Fung-yi Lee makes work to stitch her experience between the personal, historical, and social. She is interested in abstracting her experience through the body, materiality, and visual scale, often working on paper. Lee was born in New Jersey and grew up between the US and Taiwan, China, and Saudi Arabia. She completed her MFA at Hunter College and BA at Stanford University, and has exhibited her work in New York and California. She is currently living in New York. 

Keun-Young Park was born in Seoul, South Korea, where she received her BFA and MFA Degrees in Sculpture at Seoul National University. Since 2005, Park has lived in New York and has developed her unique photo-collage work reflecting upon the astatic character of existence in the flow of time and attempting to capture the tremor of unstable presence. She had twelveth solo exhibition in 2019 and has had numerous group shows in the United states, Europe and Asia. Park received awards from A.I.R. Gallery, Artist Talk on Art, and the New Jersey State Council of the Arts, as well as residencies with Vermont Studio Residency Program and Triangle Arts Workshop.  

Sana Musasama received her BA from City College of New York in 1973 and her MFA from Alfred University, New York in 1988. Sana received the 2018 Achievement Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts for her years of teaching and her humanitarian work with victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia. Sana is the coordinator of the Apron Project, a sustainable entrepreneurial project for girls and young women reintegrated back into society after being forced into sex trafficking. In 2016, she was a guest speaker on “Activism through Art” at ROCA. A recently published article by Cliff Hocker, “If I can Help Somebody: Sana Musasama’s Art of Healing” appears in the International Review of African American Art. In 2015, the Museum of Art and Design in New York selected four works from The Unspeakable Series for their private collection; Sana was awarded the ACLU of Michigan Art Prize 7 and Art Prize 8. In 2002, she was awarded Anonymous Was a Women and in 2001, Sana was featured in the 2001 Florence Biennial. Her work is in multiple collections such as The Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina; The Museum of Art and Design in New York, New York; the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, New York; the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York; Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio; and in numerous private collections. Sana lives and works in New York. 

Stacy Bogdonoff is a NYC and CT. based, mixed media artist.  She creates two- and three-dimensional art using a wide range of materials and techniques: used craft and 100% rag paper, industrial and vintage textiles, wire, flax, rust, and  digital printing.  She works with single strands of embroidery silk, and foot long steel upholstery needles.  Her tools include a wooden table loom, a commercial clothes rack, and a 96 lb. metal rolling mill. She divides her time between her small tabletop studio in NYC and a larger ‘mess’ of a studio in northwest Connecticut.  She is an active member of TSGNY (Textile Study Group of New York) and the SDA (Surface Design Association) and exhibits regularly in New England, NYC, Westchester, and Hudson Valley galleries. Bogdonoff’s art explores concepts of loss, vulnerability, illness, aging, and downsizing.  Her current work explores the theme of “Home and Shelter” and, she says, “I am struck by how both fragile and resilient our homes are; how we are born into one and how our definition of it changes as we age, lose people, and alter relationships.” She says, “I’ve never wondered about my identity.  I am an artist and I live to make art.  This certainty has always been with me and, except for family and friends, the most constant and rewarding part of my being.”

SiSi Chen (b. 1987) is based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from Laguna College of Art and Design (CA, 2012) and an MFA from Hunter College (NY, 2021) where she presented her thesis exhibition Some Greater Sum in March, 2021. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Ox-Bow (MI, 2014), The League Residency at Vytlacil (NY, 2016), and currently in the ceramics department at Hunter College. She is the Director of Trestle Gallery where she most recently curated Choreography for an Unfamiliar Here and Not Just Another Anthropocenic Love Story. She was awarded the inaugural Eva Hesse Prize for Excellence at Hunter College in 2021.

Pauline Galiana was born in Algiers and grew up in Switzerland and then France. She received her MFA at ESAG in Paris in 1984, and has a Christie’s Art Business Certificate. Her work has been exhibited at the New York Public Library; Memorial Sloan Kettering Gallery Brooklyn; Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn; the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; Drawing Rooms Art Center, NJ; Durham Arts Council, NC; Islip Art Museum, NY; New York Institute of Technology; Chashama Gallery, NYC; Robert Henry Contemporary Gallery, Bushwick; Baron Boisanté Gallery, NYC; and the Ramis Barquet Gallery, Mexico among others. Pauline Galiana works simultaneously on distinct bodies of work, from collages to paintings and drawings, from ephemeral installations to small-scale sculptures. The work often addresses the broad theme of deconstruction versus reconstruction and of hybridization. It combines noble and mundane materials; it expresses instinctive states of mind with formal compositions, using obsessive and meditative processes, meticulous planning, and patient execution, sometimes with rigorous grids.