
Announcing the 2018 Makers Muse Artist Awardees!
This year we broke the good news to:
- An activist, physician, muralist, impresario of public art, and community builder who has been working on Navajo lands to organize collaborative public art works since 1987.
- A die-hard photographer who has tenaciously brought images of hope and grief from Afghanistan to the world.
- A printmaker and painter who tinkers with rainbows, ancestral magic, and the femme myth.
- Two proprietresses of a hedonist survivalist enclave who create story, taxidermy, and ritual about justice, psychedelics, and the wild.
- The co-founder of a global multi-disciplinary artist collective whose work poetically and subversively takes a deep dive into Middle East politics and culture.
- A multimedia artist, restorer of religious icons, and orchestrator of public spectacle who is co-creating a tradition to mark the transition of the North Star 13,000 years in the future.
We congratulate this year’s crew who join the legacy of 57 other Makers Muse Artists from the past decade. The legacy lives on!
In 2014 she exhibited with MoCADA in Brooklyn, and that was really cool.  DeJesus Moleski has also exhibited work in New Orleans, New Mexico, LA, Miami, and the Bay  Area. Her work has been featured in HyperAllergic, the Huffington Post, and Momma Tried Magazine.
DeJesus Moleski uses culturally classed materials to practice the integration of multiple art forms as a way to make myth and tell a truth. Â She is currently attending the Yale School of Art for an MFA in Painting and Printmaking.
Bett Williams is the author of The Wrestling Party and Girl Walking Backwards, recently named by Vogue Magazine as one of the top ten queer young adult books. Her recently completed memoir, The Wild Kindness, is about her 7-year experience of growing psilocybin mushrooms in New Mexico. She was a featured speaker at the Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics Conference 2018 in NYC.  On her radio show Planet Juniper (KMRD Madrid Community Radio,) she interviewed poets she has hosted at her desert retreat, such as Ariana Reines, CA Conrad and others. With Beth Hill, she continues to support artists and writers through hosting retreats and events in keeping with the metaphor of the mycelium, the mushroomâs interconnected web that bears the fruit of a mutually shared vision.
(photo credit: Melodie McDaniel)
Thomasâ own public artwork consists of enlarged black and white photographs pasted on structures along the roadside on the Navajo nation. Â His motivation is to reflect back to the people in his community the love and elements of the culture theyâve shared with him over the years.
Abdul Hadiâs work has been exhibited in Palestine, Canada, United States, United Arab Emirates, France, United Kingdom and New Zealand. She has given workshops in Australia, Iraq and Kuwait, and has been a speaker at Dar Jacir (Bethlehem), Nuqat (Kuwait), the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, Telfair Museums in Savannah, GA, the Aga Khan Museum and multiple universities in Canada and the US. Abdul Hadi is a two-time recipient of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec (CALQ) Vivacite grant, and received the Makers Muse award from Kindle Project (2018 and 2023). Her work is part of the Barjeel Art Foundation collection.