haptic/optic

Miriam Ancis is a  woman with many identities (former rabbi, mother, Caucasian, Californian.) Much of the personal experiences that drive her work involves boundaries – breaking through, or negotiating the periphery. Drawn to symbol and metaphor, her academic interest in Judaism focused on identity markers of daily life – particularly clothing and hair – for insight into views on sexuality, beauty and modesty.  Now as a full-time artist, she applies her understanding of symbol and meaning making to art. Miriam Ancis received her MFA in sculpture from Parsons School of Design. She currently lives and works in New York City.
 

Fred Bendheim, an Arizona native and now Brooklyn resident apprenticed with  pioneer surrealist painter, Philip Curtis. Bendheim’s work has been viewed and collected world-wide including such institutions as The Museum of Art & Design, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Montclair Art Museum; The National Gallery of Costa Rica; The Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, Italy; The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, The Plotkin Museum, The Brooklyn Public Library, NY; Denise Bibro Fine Art, NY; Jason Mccoy Gallery, Bradley International Airport, Los Angeles, CA; The Mayo Center for Humanities, Scottsdale, AZ. His commissions include sculptures for Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and paintings for the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.  
 

Emily Berger lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of Brown University, attended the Skowhegan School, and received an MFA at Columbia University. Berger has been awarded several art residencies and exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, Colombia, and the National Academy Museum in NYC which awarded her the John Hultberg Memorial Prize for Painting. Her work has been reviewed in many publications and included in several private and public collections. Solo exhibitions include Rhythm and Light, at Walter Wickiser Gallery, and New Paintings, at Norte Maar, both in New York City in 2017.
 

Hovey Brock is an artist, writer, and educator who lives and works in Brooklyn. His preferred medium is painting, but he also works in performance, and video. His work focuses primarily on the nature of awareness and subjective experience.
 

Karen Nielsen-Fried was born in Binghamton, NY. She is a graduate of Pratt Institute (Master of Professional Studies in Art Therapy). She did postgraduate work at The Institute for Expressive Analysis and at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.  Her training in art therapy and in expressive analysis are the underpinnings of her exploration of ephemeral states of emotion, observed and realized through painting. The desire to apprehend the inchoate, to synthesize thought and feeling into a language of abstraction, and to make a record of process are what drive her work. Her work is held in numerous private collections both nationally and internationally. She lives and maintains a studio in Montclair, NJ.
 

Wendy Letven is a New York area visual artist who received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from Hunter College. Letven has been teaching at Parsons School of Design in New York for over ten years. She has been an artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, at Gallery Aferro in Newark and at Dieu Donné in New York. Her work is represented by galleries in New York, New Jersey and Michigan and has been exhibited at The Bronx Museum, The Montclair Art Museum, Aljira Gallery and other well-known museums and institutions. Letven has been commissioned to create a number of public sculptures and installations for venues including Summit Public Art, Activate Market Street in Newark and Playtime New York at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan.