Next Question: A Slowed Down Practice, A Cleveland Sculptors Network Panel, with visiting artist Michelle Illuminato

Michelle Illuminato is recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Key to the City of Aliquippa and Best Event in Pennsylvania. Most recently her project the Lost & Found Factory was recognized nationally as one of the most compelling public artworks of 2015 by the Americans for the Arts and Public Art Network. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work has been featured on the CBS national radio program The Osgood Files. She has been artist in residence at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2009/2013 and at Internationales Waldkunst Zentrum in Darmstadt Germany. Her project Tripoli Street BakeYard, located in Pittsburgh, is a public cob oven and 70-foot arrow-shaped table that encourages people to get out, make a fire, and bake bread. It continues into its second year with local folks serving pizzas, hosting bake-offs, and providing a place for community to happen. Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she now lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon.

Kelley O’Brien is an interdisciplinary artist working between the American Midwest and Ireland. With her background in Architecture (University of Tennessee ’11) and Design (Cranbrook Academy of Art ’14) Kelley’s work negotiates boundaries defined between humans and the natural world. She has exhibited at the University of the Philippines, National College of Art and Design in Dublin as well as SPACES, Roy G Biv, and Woman Made Gallery in the United States. Kelley has been awarded grants from the Ohio Arts Council and a Fulbright Scholarship to the Philippines. Additionally, she has expanded she skills through residencies at Green Papaya Art Space in the Philippines, the Irish Museum of Art in Dublin, and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden. Her artistic practice extends into her academic and curatorial research through collaborative projects with Francis Halsall under the title “Mapping Systems.” Collectively they have held workshops, lecture courses, and curated residencies in Ireland and the Philippines.

Ryan Dewey’s work is a kind of socially-engaged ecological dreaming that takes shape as installation, performance, research, workshops, and land art to highlight the entanglements between people, places, and land use. He has been a resident at ACRE, the Alps Art Academy, and a visiting researcher in the department of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University where he wrote Hack the Experience: Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science (now available here). He is a member of non//sense collective and founder of the collective Geologic Cognition Society (geocog.org). His work blurs disciplinary lines and often appears in unexpected venues including the British Society for Geomorphology, the American Association of Geographers, Kickstarter, the University of Bern, Concordia University (Montreal), the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, the Annenberg School for Communication (Philadelphia), Progressive Insurance (Cleveland), MONU (Rotterdam), KERB (Melbourne), and living history festivals, as well as more traditional art venues including SPACES, ACRE, and other artist-run spaces.

Elizabeth Emery earned an MFA from Alfred University and a BA in Art History and Italian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in public collections including The Cleveland Clinic, Progressive Insurance, Columbus Metropolitan Library, American Greetings, Rockefeller Collection (Dresden, Germany), Metro Health, Westin Hotel Cleveland, Cleveland Artists Association, Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art.

In 2018 Emery was selected as one of 18 local, national, and international Artists-in-Residence for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. In 2017 & 2015 Emery received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Dave Bown Award of Excellence in 2015.