Special Event: Panel Discussion

To be uncertain is to be vulnerable. We grapple with unknowns by observing or creating patterns and constructs to provide a sense of continuity and stability that can help us function. Join these distinctive artists as they come together to discuss looking squarely at risk and mystery, probing how uncertainty and continuity can provide pathways to discovery, resilience, and creative progress.

“For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.” ― Barbara Jordan

This in-person event was held on Saturday, September 25th, 2021 at June Kelly Gallery in NYC.


PANEL PARTICIPANTS:

Ana Paula Cordeiro is a creator of hand-made artist books, photographer (with film), print maker and writer. As a maker of books, prints, assemblages and other such garments, she fashions her artistic inquiry from the fabric of personal experience, intrigued by the human mind’s ability to create intricate patterns as it cuts and mends reality to fit our bias. Recent curatorial projects include the multi-media installation Introspective Collective (2018-19). In 2020, she was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation fellowship, and received an Honorable Mention at the International Human Rights Arts Festival Creators of Justice Award. Cordeiro’s artist books are collected privately and institutionally. Originally from Brazil, she does all her work at The Center for Book Arts collective in New York.

Rejin Leys is a mixed media artist and paper maker based in New York. Her layered works intuitively synthesize her interests ranging across social issues, cultural memory, science, the natural world, and the built environment. Leys’ work has been exhibited at such venues as Centro Cultural de España, Santo Domingo, DR; Kentler International Drawing Space, NY; Queens Museum, NY; and Les Ateliers J.R. Jerome, PaP, Haiti. Her work is in the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Yale University, and Rutgers University Caribbean Studies Department. Leys is a recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and co-founder of the Southeast Queens Artist Alliance. Leys is also the creator of the project “Pulpmobile” a community paper-making station on a cart.

Sky Pape has exhibited nationally and abroad in gallery and museum shows for over thirty-five years, and is known for her extensive experimentations with ink and paper. In her recent series of abstractions on paper, titled “Anomalies,” she uses geometry and patterns to focus on themes of structural/systemic instability and resilience. Her work, most recently acquired by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, is in the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, and other museum, corporate, and private collections internationally. Among Pape’s honors and awards are two grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a Canada Council for the Arts fellowship, and fully-funded residency fellowships in Italy from both the Rockefeller Foundation and at the Bogliasco Foundation. Published reviews of Pape’s work include The New York Times, ARTnews, and more.

Werner Sun, Ph.D. is a visual artist who lives and works in Ithaca, NY. Stemming from his training as a particle physicist, his primary concerns revolve around the role of creativity in the bottom-up production of quantitative knowledge. His projects typically start with digital prints which he embellishes with drawing, collage, and paper engineering techniques, transforming them into photographic sculptures that mediate the viewer’s perception of the underlying images. Sun’s exhibition history includes the Islip Art Museum, the Schweinfurth Art Center, the Azarian McCullough Art Gallery. His essays and images have been published in Stone Canoe, SciArt Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. Sun is the 2019 recipient of the Aon-CUE Artist Empowerment Award from the CUE Art Foundation in New York, NY, and he completing a mobile installation for Cornell Botanic Gardens, commissioned as part of an upcoming international climate change conference.

Andrea Arroyo (Moderator) is an award-winning artist, curator, cultural advocate, and lecturer. Her drawings, paintings, public art, and site-specific installations, have been exhibited and collected internationally. Honors include NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, Global Citizen Award Artist, Clinton Global Initiative, 21 Leader for the 21st Century, Outstanding Woman of New York, The United Nations R Lurie Award, Woman of the Week, Women in the World Foundation, Groundbreaking Latina in the Arts and Outstanding Latina of the Year. She has received multiple grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, the Puffin Foundation, the Harlem Arts Alliance and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her artwork has been published extensively, including in on the cover of The New Yorker, The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, and has been the subject of over two hundred features in the international media.


This program is made possible in part by New York City Artist Corps.

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