Under the radar
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...
Jane Shoenfeld
After dropping out of the MFA program at Brooklyn College in her twenties, Jane Shoenfeld stopped painting and using color and spent three years drawing her dreams in black and white. Thus began a process that continues some 40 years later of working from what she...
Deonne Kahler
In the last four years, Deonne Kahler has produced a remarkable series of photographs of the U.S. National Parks system. With an unsentimental but expansive eye, she aims to capture what she calls the “soul and personality” of these wild and often breathtakingly...
Daisy Patton
Daisy Patton’s cheerfully dysfunctional portraits are bound to remind you of pictures from somebody’s attic, those old crinkle-edged Kodak photos or studio shots that commemorate engagements, high-school graduations, and informal family get-togethers. Yet there are...
Photo credit: Joe Fig Self Portrait: Collinsville, 12 ½” x 31 ½” x 21”, Mixed Media, 2013. Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery