Fall 2010
This page is under construction as we add all the Artists-In-Residence for Fall 2010 and Spring 2011. Keep checking back for new additions!
Bethany Kalk
Bethany Kalk's artwork moves in and out of realism, graphic design, illustration, pattern and tattooing - often combining multiple media and styles. Her work references nature, both explicitly in landscape painting and subtlety in abstractions and patterns. She was born in Canada, raised in Papua New Guinea, spent high school and college years in the Midwest, worked in Milwaukee & Minneapolis, and now teaches art and design in Eastern Kentucky. She travels whenever possible and periodically returns to New Guinea for multiple projects including education on predatory methods of logging and mining companies in rural tribal areas. Visit Bethany's website.
Bethany Kalk, Cross Currents 2010, 32" x 32" pencil and encaustic on panel
Catherine Chauvin
Catherine Chauvin uses drawing and printmaking to examine what is done to the environment in the name of progress. Trees, stumps, and maps form landscapes, sometimes are based on human activity and sometimes beyond our intervention. Chauvin trained at the Tamarind Institute, earning Master Printer Certification, an MFA in printmaking at Syracuse University, and a BFA from Miami of Ohio, where she studied with Robert Wolfe. As a master printer, she collaborated with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, William Wiley, Enrique Chagoya and Gladys Nilsson in several nationally known printmaking studios. Printmaking and teaching combine at the University of Denver, where Chauvin is an assistant professor.
Catherine Chauvin, Blue stumps, Red trees
Graham Smith-White
Graham has been active in music for most of his life. Beginning at 9 on Violin as a member of the Kalamazoo Youth Symphony Orchestra and moving to Bass and Guitar. His passion for music has led him to such places as the Rocky Mountains, Nashville, Australia and Appalachia. Graham's current compositions fuse Eastern and Western sensibilities with a folk/rock/dance flair. Graham operates a mobile recording service based around solar power, The Sun Time Recording Company, which he uses to capture natural acoustics for music and is involved with Portland, OR based groups including TapWater and Western Aerial. Additionally, he is the head instructor and engineer for Old Library Studio, a non-profit recording studio and school in Portland.
Graham Smith-White
James Bernard Frost
James Bernard Frost is the author of the novel World Leader Pretend, published by St. Martin's Press, and the award-winning travel guide, The Artichoke Trail. His food and travel-related articles have appeared in Wired, The San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He is a regular contributor to the Internet literary nexus, The Nervous Breakdown, and recently founded the online creative writing school, the Basement Writing Workshop. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his two children, his books, and the trees.
Jim Frost
Kelly Herbinson
Kelly Herbinson is a non-fiction writer and MFA student of creative writing at the University of Wyoming. She is a scientist by training with a Bachelor's degree in Ecology, Behavior and Evolution and a Master's degree in Ecology and Systematics. She worked with desert tortoises in the Mojave Desert of California for five years before completing her Master's research on cooperative nesting among queens of the California Seed-Harvesting Ant, Pogonomyrmex californicus. Herbinson's writing focuses on the creative communication of scientific concepts. She hopes to bring science to the public in innovative ways that inspire wonder and excitement about the natural world.
Kelly Herbinson
Lauren Davis
Lauren Carroll Davis hails from the Great Basin desert. She's looking forward to re-hydrating during her early winter stay in Otis. Lauren's interest in land ethics lead her to a M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Recently, she's been developing tribal cultural preservation programs and helping produce regional arts events. Her most recent book is Death Valley and the Northern Mojave - A Visitor's Guide. While at the Sitka Center she'll be working on a book called Salmon East/Salmon West, which explores the culinary, mythical, and spiritual connections this symbolic fish inspires throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
Lauren Davis
Margaret Malone
Margaret Malone's writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, Swink, The Wordstock Ten Anthology, latimes.com and elsewhere, and in January she was awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction from Literary Arts. She is a co-host of the hard-to-describe, bi-monthly artist gathering SHARE, and has been volunteering and facilitating writing workshops with Write Around Portland for the last several years. She is currently at work on two projects, The Year of Travel & Good Fortune, a memoir co-written with her husband, and a collection of stories, People Like You. Visit Margaret's website.
Margaret Malone
Robin Kimmerer
Dr. Kimmerer is a mother, plant ecologist, writer and Distinguished Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, where she is also the Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Robin is an enrolled member of the Citizen Band Potawatomi. Kimmerer's research interests include the ecology of mosses and the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people. She is a dedicated teacher and has developed university courses in aspects of botany, ecology, ethnobotany and Indigenous Issues and the Environment. She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science training for Native students, and to introduce the perspectives of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community, in a way that respects and protects indigenous knowledge. Her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.
Robin Kimmerer
Sid Miller
Sid Miller's poetry has appeared widely. He is the author of two chapbook and two full length collections, Nixon on the Piano (David Robert Books, 2009) and Dot-to-Dot, Oregon (Ooligan Press, 2009). After finishing the graduate program from Portland State University, he went on to found the Portland based, independent literary journal, Burnside Review, in 2004 and remains the editor. He lives in his 105 year old house in Southeast Portland.
Sid Miller
Susan D'Amato
Susan D'Amato is a visual artist deeply connected to and fascinated by the natural world. Her work explores visual and conceptual correspondences between the human body and universal forms as metaphor to contemplate our identity, vulnerability, and mortality. Susan is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, and has exhibited her work extensively in prominent venues throughout the United States. She was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Drawing and the Mid Atlantic Arts Fellowship Grant in Drawing/Works on Paper in 2005. Susan currently maintains a studio practice in Syracuse New York where she is an Associate Professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, School of Art and Design at Syracuse University. Visit Susan's website.
Susan D'Amato Axis, 60" x 42" charcoal on paper
Spring 2011