Under the radar

Tm Gratkowski

As a kid growing up in Chicago, Tm Gratkowski believed he was destined to become a hockey player. “I was on skates at age three and playing hockey by the time I was five,” he says. “We grew up on the lake, and I would put on my skates at the house and walk down to the...

Paula Roland

Though she now lives in Santa Fe, at a safe remove from severe tropical storms, Paula Roland knows a thing or two about hurricanes. “All my life it was ‘Hurricane’s coming! School’s out!’” she recalls of her childhood in Biloxi, MS. “You cover the windows, pile up the...

Donald Martiny

Donald Martiny’s earliest memory of being mesmerized by paint comes from kindergarten, when he lived in Schenectady, NY, and had “a teacher who was really stingy about art supplies,” he recalls. “She would give us only two jars of poster paint, and I remember being...

Judy Gelles

“Everything I do follows my life and what I’m doing with my life,” admits Judy Gelles, whose many projects, mostly in photography and video, document not only her personal and family history, but touch on the larger social issues of our times. Gelles has been around...

Grace DeGennaro

For many years now, Grace DeGennaro has been looking for ways to combine the sacred and the secular through “simple” geometry that turns out not to be quite that simple once you become seduced by the mesmerizing patterns and understated colors. “My work is the kind of...

Brenda Zappitell

Raised in south Florida, Brenda Zappitell studied dance from the time she was three through high school, but seemed inevitably destined for a career as a lawyer. “I come from a family of lawyers and after getting my degree from the University of Miami, where my dad...

Krista Svalbonas

By the time she was in high school, Krista Svalbonas knew that photography would figure importantly in her future work as an artist. Born in King of Prussia, PA, and raised mostly in nearby Bethlehem, she recalls taking every art class she could in high school. “I had...

Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton

One of my all-time favorite video works is housed in an elegant little box, lined in pink satin and measuring only about seven by eight by eight inches deep. Inside, like an animated tondo, is a round screen showing dancer-choreographer Rulan Tangen performing a...

Raphaëlle Goethals

As a child in Belgium, Raphaëlle Goethals had the good fortune to be exposed to the great museums of Europe and to the Late Gothic and Northern Renaissance masterworks in her native city of Brussels. “My mom would take us all over the place and whether you like it or...

Carol Hepper

In 2011-2012, Carol Hepper spent a year-long residency at Park Avenue Armory, the venerable 19th-century building on New York’s Upper East Side that once served as home to an elite military regiment. The landmark was undergoing extensive renovations as part of its...

Arlene Rush

“I always liked the physicality of sculpture,” says Arlene Rush, who grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives and work in what denizens of the outer boroughs still refer to as “the city”—Manhattan. The daughter of Depression-era parents, the second generation in...

Brandon Graving

As Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans in late August 2005, Brandon Graving, whose studio was in the uptown Riverbend area, calmly thought to herself, “Well, I’ve lived through hurricanes, so I’ll survive this one.” By that Saturday, though, it was clear that...

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Photo credit: Joe Fig Self Portrait: Collinsville, 12 ½” x 31 ½” x 21”, Mixed Media, 2013. Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery