^{photo by Rafael Soldi}

Natalie Krick

Natalie Krick (b. 1986 Portland Oregon) is a Seattle based artist whose work investigates visual perception and pleasure through complicating the act of looking. She holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. In 2015 Krick was a recipient of an Individual Photographer's Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation for her project Natural Deceptions. In 2017 Natural Deceptions was published by Skylark Editions and Krick was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Krick’s work has recently been exhibited at SF Camerawork, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Aperture Foundation, The Museum of Sex, and Blue Sky Gallery. Her photographs has been highlighted in several international publications including BOMB, The New Yorker, Vogue Italia, PDN, Aperture, and Vrij Nederland.

So What
48" x 72" Oil and Latex

-image courtesy of the artist

Barry Johnson

Seattle artist Barry Johnson deeply centers the black body in his figurative work. Through boldness of form and color, he creates space where there has been erasure. Winner of the Edwin T. Pratt Award, smART Ventures award, GAP Award, and finalist for the Conductive Garboil Grant, Neddy Award and Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award, Johnson’s work has been shown and collected throughout the nation. He’s also created multiple permanent artworks regionally, including an immersive mural for Facebook’s Bellevue Office during his Open Arts Residency with them and a large-scale permanent fabrication and sculpture for the Midtown development in Seattle, WA.

^{photo by Brad Curran}

Hanako O'Leary

Hanako O’Leary is a craft based multimedia artist living and working on the ancestral land of the Coast Salish tribes and Dwamish people. She was born and raised by her Japanese mother and American father in the North American Midwest. Until Hanako turned 18, every year, for 2 months during the summer, her mother Sumiko would take her and her siblings back to their maternal home in Hiroshima, Japan. These months were spent learning how to cook, clean, and be a, “proper Japanese woman,” from her four aunts, Nagako, Nobuko, Atsuko, and Masako. This deeply influenced her spiritual beliefs, artistic voice, and feminine ideals.

Building off this personal history, Hanako looks to Japanese folk traditions of the Setonaikai Islands as a basis for her artwork. Through hand made objects, installations, and story telling, Hanako explores this relationship with her matriarchal lineage and the meaning of feminine power.

Hanako is one in a long line of Japanese women to leave home on her own terms. She has studied within institutional walls and beyond. In 2020, she was named a Neddy Cornish Artist Award finalist and received a 2020 MAC Fellowship through the Robert B. McMillen Foundation, in addition to a solo exhibition, Yomi, at Method Gallery. She holds a BFA in Ceramic Sculpture from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an MFA from Seattle University.

^{photo by Jess T Dugan}

Rafael Soldi

Rafael Soldi is a Peruvian­-born, Seattle-based artist and curator. He holds a BFA in Photography & Curatorial Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His practice centers on how queerness and masculinity intersect with larger topics of our time such as immigration, memory, and loss. He has exhibited internationally at the Frye Art Museum, American University Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, ClampArt, The Print Center, Museo MATE, Filter Space, and Burrard Arts Foundation, among others. Rafael has received grants and awards from the Magenta Foundation, Puffin Foundation, smART Ventures, Artist Trust, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and Center Santa Fe. He has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, PICTURE BERLIN, Oxbow Space, and the Bogliasco Foundation. 
 
His first monograph, Imagined Futures / Futuros Imaginarios (Candor Arts), and CARGAMONTÓN (self-published), were both published in 2020. 
 
His work is in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, King County Public Art Collection, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Rafael’s work has been reviewed on ARTFORUM, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Photograph Magazine, The Seen, Art Nexus, and PDN. He is the co-founder of the Strange Fire Collective, a project dedicated to highlighting work made by women, people of color, and queer and trans artists; and co-curator of the High Wall, a yearly outdoor video projection program that invites immigrant artists and artists working on themes of diaspora and borderlands to intervene the facade of a former immigration center building in the heart of Seattle. 

^{photo by Byron Flesher}

Kali Spitzer

"Indigenous femme queer photographer Kali Spitzer ignites the spirit of our current unbound human experience with all the complex histories we exist in, passed down through the trauma inflicted/received by our ancestors. Kali's photographs are intimate and unapologetic and make room for growth and forgiveness while creating a space where we may share the vulnerable and broken parts of our stories which are often overlooked, or not easy to digest for ourselves or society." Ginger Dunnill, Creator and Producer of Broken Boxes Podcast (which features interviews with indigenous and other engaged artists).

Kali Spitzer is a queer photographer living on the traditional unceded lands of the Tsleil-Waututh, Skxwú7mesh and Musqueam peoples. Kali’s work embraces the stories of contemporary queer and trans bodies and BIPOC creating representation that is self determined. Kali’s collaborative process is informed by the desire to rewrite the visual histories of indigenous bodies beyond a colonial lens. Kali is Kaska Dena from Daylu (Lower Post, British Columbia) on her father’s side and Jewish from Transylvania, Romania on her mother’s side. Kali’s heritage deeply influences her work as she focuses on cultural revitalization through her art, whether in the medium of photography, ceramics, tanning hides or hunting. Her work includes portraits, figure studies and photographs of her people, ceremonies, and culture.

Kali’s work has been featured in exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally including, the National Geographic’s Women: a Century of Change at the National Geographic Museum (2020), and Larger than Memory: Contemporary Art From Indigenous North America at the Heard Museum (2020). In 2017 Kali received a Reveal Indigenous Art Award from Hnatyshyn Foundation.

^{Anthony White
FEEDBACK, 2018
PLA (polyactic acid) on panel
49x36 inches
image courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery}

Anthony White

Anthony White (1994) is a Black/Queer artist and curator who lives and works in Seattle, Washington, where is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery. He is a 2018 Cornish College of the Arts Alum, the first in his family to complete four years of professional training, and a board member of the Lillian Miller Foundation, an organization that supports advancing educational opportunities for LGBTQ youth. White’s work is meticulously spun from common polylactic-acid and consists of intimate and intricate portraits and still-lifes that expand on the understanding of culture and identity. White recently closed his first institutional exhibition at Central Washington University, and was named the recipient of the 2021 SAM Betty Bowen Award. White’s work is in the permanent collections of Frye Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, and the Sinegal Center for Science and Innovation. He’s currently preparing for solo exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, Greg Kucera Gallery, and a public installation in Northwest Arkansas.

^{photo by Janette Casolary}

Arielle Simmons

Guest Curator, Arielle Simmons’, current research interests include the ethical praxis of curation and documentary photography as well as the aesthetics and performance of gender. She was raised surrounded by art and artists in South Carolina, with a French mother and American father. From her parents, she adopted the development and programming of a long-running artistic retreat to her family’s home in the Jura Mountains of France. Working as a photographer, Simmons was a Critical Mass Finalist and exhibited in solo and group shows across the country, including: Photo LA, The Light Room, and Magenta’s Flash Forward Festival. She holds a BS in Communications Studies from Emerson College, attended the New England School of Photography, and is an MFA Arts Leadership Candidate at Seattle University.