Announcing the 2018 Makers Muse Artist Awardees!

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski grew up moving from city to city in the American East Coast, South, and Midwest. Spending her most formative years in a constantly shifting landscape has tethered her art practice to interests in multiplicity, magic, bewilderment, and being liminal af.

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.  She is currently attending the Yale School of Art for an MFA in Painting and Printmaking.

Andrew Quilty travelled to Afghanistan in 2013. He planned to stay for two weeks. This December will mark five years since that first trip. In that time he has travelled to more than 20 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces as a freelance photojournalist. Rather than  depicting those conducting the war, his work, while always tinged with it, has primarily focussed on the civilians who have lived with conflict for nearly four decades and continue to today.

Beth Hill “The Mad Framer” is a fine art framer and precision woodworker. She has designed custom frames for the Georgia O’Keeffe museum and countless fine artists both local and worldwide. She has recently closed her shop to expand her woodworking ventures towards her own art practice and furniture/object making endeavors.  Grounded in her early years working for Greenpeace Action, she has been an attentive activist and fundraiser for environmentalist causes. With her partner, Bett Williams, they run Madrid General, an online and pop-up store based in Madrid, NM that sells psychedelic themed silk-screen designs and inventions created to tweak the machinery of quantum reality.

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 mushroom’s interconnected web that bears the fruit of a mutually shared vision.

(photo credit: Melodie McDaniel)

Chip Thomas, aka “jetsonorama” is a photographer, public artist, activist and physician who has been working between Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon in the Navajo nation since 1987.  He coordinates the Painted Desert Project – a community building effort which manifests as a constellation of murals across western Navajo Nation painted by artists from all over the world.

Thomas’ own public artwork consists of enlarged black and white photographs pasted on structures along the roadside on the Navajo nation.  His motivation is to reflect back to the people in his community the love and elements of the culture they’ve shared with him over the years.

George Ferrandi is an American artist originally from Baltimore, Maryland whose performance, installation and participatory projects address issues of vulnerability, impermanence, fallibility and spectacle, often through experimental approaches to narrative. Employing a unique humor and a deep sense of humanity, her work stimulates a rethinking of cultural assumptions. Her long-term project Jump!Star unites artists, musicians and scientists with communities to invent cultural traditions now that can be celebrated when our current North Star rotates out of position and our next pole star moves into place.

Sundus Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi-Canadian multimedia artist. She was raised and educated in Montreal, where she earned a BFA in Studio Arts and Art History and a Masters in Media Studies. Her work critically engages current crises in the Middle East through subversive and sensitive reflection, using manipulated photographic imagery, mixed-media painting, artist books and sound. Her most recent work is a self-authored illustrated book titled “Shams” about trauma, transformation and healing. Complimenting her studio practice, Abdul Hadi also curates exhibitions  and hosts radio. She is the co-founder of The Medium, a multidisciplinary artist collective.