2017/18 SITE Scholars
Jesus Avena
Jesus Avena is a student and practicing visual artist; he has seasoned his discipline since the age of eight. He attends the Santa Fe Community College and previously attended Capital High School in Santa Fe, NM. While exercising his skill, he was given the opportunity to intern for the Art and Leadership Boys’ Program at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and was honored by having his work included in Pick, an exhibition curated by SITE Santa Fe’s Young Curators in 2017. Jesus Avena aspires to continue broadening his knowledge of the arts.
Crystal Chronis
Crystal Chronis is originally from Georgetown, Texas, a quiet, suburban town close to Austin. Her high school years were a formative period for her art, during which she competed in numerous art competitions. After graduation, Chronis attended Baylor University for three years where she studied interior design. However, she made a decision to change career paths and ended up moving to Albuquerque, where she now studies studio art at Central New Mexico Community College. She plans to graduate in the spring of 2018.
Davis Craig
As a queer artist, Craig’s discourse revolves around his identity as a gay man and the commentary he has developed from growing up in a heteronormative society. His current work is about growing up between the LGBT and heterosexual community and how we live only in the world we fit in, never both, because we are specific from the molds we come from. This is expressed through the use of wall-hanging ceramic tile multiples arranged and painted in decorative or binary patterns specific to the two social realms; neither tile pattern is made to fit in to the other formation, but to add to the greater collective community they belong to. Craig utilizes the imagery and symbolism of weaponized words used against the LGBT community through time (e.g. the pink triangle appropriated for AIDS/HIV activism and the pansy which is used to demasculinize gay men) to give back power and help others better understand his commentary on discrimination.
Rachel Donovan
Rachel Donovan is currently a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in the department of photography. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Santa Fe in 2004. Rachel has been residing in the northeastern United States where she worked as an antique photographic process printer until moving to Albuquerque in 2016. In her current work she is investigating social implications of the domestic space.
Haley Greenfeather English
Haley Greenfeather English is a visual artist living and working in New Mexico. In the spring of 2018, she will receive a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has taught in youth arts and education for eight years and plans to continue teaching upon finishing her degree. Haley comes from Red Lake, Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, and Irish ancestry and was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Outside of arting and teaching, she is a napping-in-nature enthusiast, Mariah Carey fanatic, and deeply devoted Puggle mother.
Jess O. Evans
Jess O. Evans is an animator and illustrator who enjoys fantasy and whimsy in a variety of mediums (particularly ink and watercolor) as well as putting odds and ends together to make them move. Her work is driven by story, novelty, humor, and the reality of imagined worlds. Jess believes in the philosophy that fictional characters and universes exist, that they matter, and that they can shape other kinds of reality. Jess has done concept art for a few animation studios, spends a great deal of time freelancing, and is currently a graduate student at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Daniel Forest
Daniel Forest is presently a full-time, degree-seeking student at Santa Fe Community College in Santa Fe, NM, working toward an AA with a concentration in Ceramics/Sculpture under the tutelage of James Marshall, Head of Ceramics, School of Arts and Design. His work references oceanic and biological themes with an emphasis on the surreal, which is amply evident in all forms of nature. Currently, he is working on a large-scale installation which will bring attention to the bleaching of the world’s coral reefs.
Erin Galvez
Erin Galvez received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from California State University Sacramento with an emphasis in printmaking. She has worked as a professional, freelance mixed-media artist since 2004. Her work is in the collection at California State University at Sacramento, the City of El Paso, and corporate and private collections worldwide. Currently, Erin is a Research Assistant as a curator for the Inpost Exhibit Space, as well as a drawing instructor at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. She is working towards an MFA in Painting and Drawing at UNM.
Alec Goldberg
Alec Goldberg lives in Albuquerque with his husband, on whose support and inspiration he relies. Spears received a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2013. He is pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Studio at the University of New Mexico. Artmaking is a vent for the feelings of alienation and absurdity that define life today, but which we otherwise try to shove down inside of ourselves. Spears wishes to make work that tries to unify and explore his own feelings about this. As questionable and confusing as reality is, he would at least like to know himself.
Dominic Knight
Dominic Knight, a born Arizona native, grew up with a love of dinosaurs, video games, and books. He was educated on the reservation as well as off the reservation in a private boarding school and public high school. Knight has a close relationship with his family, who will always support him. He had a vast dream that, one day, he would grow up to be like his hero, Dr. Alan Grant, a fictional character from his favorite movie, Jurassic Park. Knight never considered a career in the art world until his junior year of high school when he received a small pack of coloring pencils and a sketchpad for Christmas; after that, his world changed.
Knight is currently living in Santa Fe and pursuing his BFA with an emphasis in Digital art (Digital Painting and 3-D modeling) at the Institute of American Indian Art. With his love of video games, he developed an interest in Concept art, a form of illustration that is used to create digital worlds that are vast and lush. He wishes to be a concept artist for a video game company in order to use his imagination to create worlds that others would love to see.
James Anthony Martin
James Anthony Martin was born in Denver, Colorado. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Washburn University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture and ceramics. He was a Sibberson Award finalist (the highest academic honor given at Washburn University), as well as a Pollack Award recipient (the highest art honor given at Washburn University). He has shown his work throughout the United States and has work in the permanent collection of the Mulvane Art Museum. Martin is currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the University of New Mexico. He is interested in the transformative process of mold-making and casting. Using plaster, porcelain slip, wax, foam, bronze and resin, he creates installations dealing with fragments, the abject, flux and perception.
Hollis Moore
Hollis Moore investigates environmental injustices related to water scarcity with performative field research, printmaking, and installation. Currently, Hollis is a MFA Candidate in Printmaking at the University of New Mexico. Moore was recently awarded a Land Arts International Travel Grant with support of the Lannan Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to complete her MFA thesis on revitalization projects in the Colorado River Delta in Baja and Sonora, Mexico. The project will be exhibited at the Open Space Gallery Visitor Center in Albuquerque, NM. Moore has participated in place-based artist residencies with Land Arts of the American West, LEAP at the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, and Signal Fire Arts. Her work has been included in Emergency Index Performance Publication and in group shows at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Tamarind Institute, and Texas A & M University Islander Gallery. Moore completed her BA at Colorado College in 2013 in Studio Art and Anthropology, and she worked as an apprentice printer for Oehme Graphics Fine Arts Publishing in Steamboat Springs, CO.
Jocelyn Muniz
Jocelyn Muniz is in her second year at Central New Mexico Community College, studying Fine Arts. She will graduate in the spring of 2018 and plans to move to Portland, Oregon in the summer of 2018 to attend Oregon College of Art and Craft (OCAC). Once there, she plans the further her studies in Drawing and Painting. Muniz would like to teach art at a college in the future, because she believes a human’s purpose is to learn and to teach.
Leah Naxon
Leah Naxon creates textile works that focus on process, color and the material itself. She was born in Dallas, Texas and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2014 to study at the Santa Fe University of Art Design, from which she will receive a BFA in Studio Arts in May 2018. Naxon’s original focus during her time as an undergrad was in painting, but she transitioned to fiber art during her junior year.
Mia Olson
Mia Olson is a multi-ethnic, queer, non-binary person from the small southern town of Shawnee, Oklahoma. They are currently a third-year BFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Mia has a focus in both Jewelry/Small Metals and Printmaking, although they are fond of multi-media pieces. Their spare time is spent doing intersectional LGBTQ2s+ activism and gardening. Mia has a love of learning and a love of all living things, so they try to center all work around those values.
Virginia Primozic
Virginia (Ginny) Primozic is originally from Albuquerque but has been nomadic, both in her youth and married life. She is currently a student in Gallery Management at Santa Fe Community College but earned a BA in Philosophy from UNM. She grew up in an artistic and musical home and still loves the smell of oils and turpentine. While her own artistic interests are in paper arts, especially rice paper collage, she enrolled in Gallery Management because she never tires of visiting galleries and museums (her five children can tell stories) and is curious about their inner workings. She is intrigued by the infinite variety of human creativity and also hopes to better understand how the business of art works in the real world. Ginny will graduate in May, 2018.
Elaine Querry
Elaine Querry lives in Las Vegas, NM and is a graduate student at New Mexico Highlands University majoring in Media Arts. First and foremost a photographer, she has been involved with photography for over 35 years. She began her career as a photographer/photojournalist for small town newspapers around the state and, for the past 25 years, has focused on fine-art photography. Querry sees her work as a combination of documentary and fine-art photography. She has looked at the world through the viewfinder of her camera, and her images are the fuel for her work. More than mementos of her international travels, these images make up the journal of a life which she aims to explore and combine in ways that tell stories both real and imagined.
Alexis Reveles
Alexis Reveles’ studio practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and video. Born and raised in Laredo, Texas (a small border town), he moved to Santa Fe to complete a Bachelors of Fine Art at Santa Fe University of Art. Being raised around flea markets and thrift stores, Reveles finds great inspiration in vintage memorabilia and incorporates these recollections into his work.
Rebecca Sprague
Rebecca Sprague is a Junior at St. John’s College where she studies French, calculus, physics, and philosophy. Originally from Rhode Island, she found herself in Santa Fe after studying oil painting and art history at The Marchutz School of Fine Arts in Aix-en-Provence, France. As a student of art, her goal is to develop visual art skills that she can eventually teach. As a student at St. John’s, she has been able to organize weekly figure drawing sessions, Art Seminars, and art-related field trips with school funding. Sprague recently received a Pathways Fellowship from St. John’s to attend a summer class at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) which taught art history and museum curation through the RISD museum’s collection. After graduating St. John’s she plans on returning to the Marchutz school to pursue a MFA. After completing an MFA, Sprague would like to work under her mother, Karin Sprague, a letter-carver and memorial gravestone designer who runs her business out of Scituate, RI.
Peter Stacey
Peter Stacey is in the photography program at Santa Fe Community College. He is relatively recent to photography, having spent the bulk of his career as a professor of Biology and Ecology. In Stacey’s work as a restoration ecologist, it became clear that people often make decisions about the natural environment based upon how they believe it “should” look, aesthetically. As a result, he co-taught a course with an artist at the University of New Mexico that focused on the “Aesthetics of Sustainable Landscapes.” This rekindled an earlier interest he had in photography, and he is now completely engaged in this work. Stacey is interested in the similarities and differences in the languages of science and art, between the personal and universal. Most of his photographs are landscapes at different scales. He is trying to explore how both simplicity and complexity can affect our perceptions and our connections to a place or a thing. Stacey also strongly believes that we take care of the things that we care about and that art can play a powerful role in creating and fostering that affinity.
Aaron ‘Arrow’ Yazzie
Aaron ‘Arrow’ Yazzie was born in Gallup, New Mexico. He attended the University of New Mexico before transferring to the Institute of American Indian Arts in the fall of 2015 to pursue a B.F.A in Studio Arts. Yazzie is an established artist whose primary choice of medium is two-dimensional, which encompasses techniques of drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, screen printing, and mixed media. His additional practices include weaving, writing, ceramics, and photography. By layering intricate patterns, organic forms, vibrant palettes, and gestural mark-making, Yazzie creates dynamic images that are inspired by nature, memory, culture, mysticism, and the metaphysical. Yazzie is currently getting ready to graduate in the spring of 2018 from IAIA.