Carissa Samaniego is a visual artist based in Colorado. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe including the Kidwelley Industrial Museum in Wales, Galerie Klatovy Klenova in the Czech Republic, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the US. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Natural History, CO; Josephine Sculpture Park, KY; and Stevens Point Sculpture Park, WI. Carissa has recently received awards and grants from Forecast Public Art, the McKnight Foundation, and International Sculpture Center. She earned her MFA from University of Colorado Boulder and her BA from Saint Catherine University. Samaniego’s work and research explores the intersection of place and identity through a range of media including sculpture, video, installation, performance, and site-based projects. In her process, she sifts through her own experience of memory, tradition and place as the source material to make artwork that creates a dialogue about growing up mixed – culturally, geographically, and ethnically – and how that shapes the cultural history we are building today. Conceptually-driven, yet object-oriented, her creative projects provide a multidimensional approach to representing the complex experience of having mixed identity.

Matthew Smith grew up in a small town in Indiana. He attended Anderson University where he received a BA in Art Education. After teaching elementary art in public schools for six years, he returned to studying visual art at Syracuse University and received his MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder. He currently resides and creates work in Denver. Through a broad array of materials, processes, and conceptual investigations, Smith’s artistic practice aims to root himself in place. While seemingly established, the notion of place varies greatly as it can be an archival space like the personal history of family rituals or a physical region like the Midwestern United States. His definition of place functions as an opening to explore the natural and cultural phenomena around him in a profound way. Calling upon the intricate histories of distinct people, objects, locations, and ideas, he attempts to extract new and alternative ways of understanding those essential features. The diverse range of ideas he explores dictate the tools and processes he engages in for each project. Performance, video, social practice, installation, and public interventions along with traditional craft-based ways of making objects with wood, ceramic, and fiber are staples of his studio endeavors. The interdisciplinary nature of his art-making infuses the broad mix of his conceptual interests to create an artistic practice that explores his physical surroundings, the people around him, and the historical and contemporaneous context of both.