ALISON ZAPATA

ZAPATA STUDIOS

Alison Zapata is a Pittsburgh-born, second-generation Mexican-American visual artist and art educator. She works in oil, acrylic and watercolor. Her expertise lies in painting, portraiture, murals, collage, and sign painting. She is the owner/ lead artist of Zapata Studios. She has studied fine art/art education at Carlow University and is currently in the process of obtaining a teaching artist certificate at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She recently exhibited her work with Aqui, the Latino visual arts collective, in the Capitol Building, Education Department and the Vault Gallery at Susquehanna Museum of Art in Harrisburg PA through the invitation of State Representative Leslie Acosta as a part of Latino Heritage month. Her Sea Turtle painting was the featured image for the children’s tents at the Three Rivers Arts festival. She assisted on the mural, Lend Me Your Ears, in East Liberty. Alison has developed engaging arts programming in classrooms throughout Pittsburgh over the past eighteen years. Yearly, she leads several visual art residencies for students, including an Autism Support Classroom. Alison has received art education training through Gateway to the Arts, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Lincoln Center’s Aesthetic Education, and Wolf Trap Institute. She is a resident artist in the Lifetime Arts and the Artists in Education program through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She was awarded participation in the Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad Art and Society: Brazil/U.S. Educational Partnership. She has professional experience in educational leadership. She is inspired to make art to build community and start conversations about identity and heritage.

AMBER EPPS

HOLLYHOOD A.K.A. DR. HOOD

Amber Michelle is a multidisciplinary artist that creates using various found and discarded objects from nature and other unexpected places such as thrift stores. The work that she creates is inspired by spirituality, humanism, and the occult. Amber also creates word art, developing pieces based on writings drawn from raw emotion, current and past life personal experience, and the things she sees through her "other eyes."

In the last few years Amber participated in the Pittsburgh Filmmakers Flight School Fellowship program and was a resident artist at Most Wanted Fine Art. She is also a member of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council's Learning and Leadership Committee which serves to examine racial equity in arts funding as well as the Pittsburgh Arts Research Committee that takes a look at trends and provides feedback on arts research.

Amber is also known as HollyHood, the "mom of Pittsburgh hip hop", producing events, DJ'ing, writing songs, and performing at venues and events both inside and outside of Pittsburgh. As the founder of LOCAL 412, Holly strives to promote the fact that hip hop is an art and that artists and works created in this genre should be taken seriously and treated with respect. Holly has curated various art shows and hip hop events in the physical space where LOCAL 412 was housed. This space is now Arts & Crafts: Botanica & Occult Shop, of which she is co-owner.

CAROLINALOYOLAGARCIA.NET

Carolina Loyola-Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. She works primarily in media arts, including single-channel video art, video installations, video design for theater, digital printmaking, documentary, and has ventured into performance through theater and dance.
Through her work she has explored topics related to social justice, the dislocated identity that results from colonialism and migration, and questionings around issues related to complex aspects of human existence such as relationships, memory, and the tense interaction between economy and the environment.
Her work has been shown in the United States and abroad, and has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, and the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, among others. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is currently Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University.

FRANFLAHERTY.COM

Fran Flaherty is a deaf artist living in Pittsburgh for over 25 years. As a first generation immigrant from the Philippines, her work is centered in issues surrounding migrant family relations and assimilation, maternal feminism, disability aesthetics, and social work. Her work is inspired by the care paradigm. A premise that human beings cannot survive alone and the progress of human beings, as a species, flows from our identity as social animals, connected to one another through ties of love, kinship, and clanship. It is the prospect of this harmony that inspired her to create Anthropology of Motherhood, an ongoing project which elevates the act of care-giving through fine art by transforming mundane objects of caregiving to into valuable art pieces such as paintings, sculpture, and mixed media pieces. She also transforms busy public spaces into immersive installations that serve as places of respite for young children and their caregivers.

A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh Studio Arts Program, Fran's work has been shown nationally and internationally. She was recently named in Art 511 Magazine’s “Top Ten NYC Artists Now”

She currently resides in Allison Park with her husband Tim, their sons, Liam, Sean, and Lucas, and her hearing dog Olympia.

MGGLNTCREATES.COM

A SWPA native & Vassar College alum, I am a multidisciplinary artist and designer specializing in illustration, zines, and hand-lettering. My work explores femininity, community, and the occult with aesthetics influenced by 19/20th century illustration, psychedelia, and my heritage of printers. An important part of my practice is as an educator, focusing on elevating youth voices and promoting civic engagement through zines, drawing skills, and typography.

Currently, I am a freelance teaching artist having worked as the Education Coordinator at the Brashear Association as well as providing programming for MGR Youth Empowerment, Neu Kirche and many other Pittsburgh based institutions. Additionally, I have coordinated events for the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council and sit on the organizing board of the Pgh Zine Fair.

MARITZAMOSQUERA.NET

Maritza Mosquera is a visual artist, poet, painter, and cook whose creations often accompany dialogues with community. Her visual works are installation “diaries” about relationships and ideas referencing personal and public desires such as the earth’s healing from fracking, sexual intimacy, criminal justice, the story of skin, the end of racism, home recipes, and the power of voice.

Mosquera received her MFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Massachusetts. Her written and visual work
has been presented regionally and nationally, as well as in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ireland, and Chile. Her work has been funded by the Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative of the Pittsburgh Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, Americans for The Arts, The Buncher Foundation, The Snow Foundation and Arts Midwest.

She currently works with elders and youth who face special challenges such as dementia, incarceration, Alzheimer's, poverty, sexual victimization, and regular life. Mosquera was born in Ecuador and is a citizen of USA. She resides at 9 Pines, Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania.

DRAW ME IN

Sara Tang is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, and creative facilitator who uses reclaimed and discarded materials and creative processes to illuminate the mystical and sacred deeply embedded in our lives and surroundings. Sara’s creative practice and process is mindful of drawing people in to a deeper empathic encounter with themselves, with their communities, and with what is strange and beautiful about humanity and existence.

Sara is proud and honored to be a member of the #notwhite Collective, JADED PGH Asian American Pacific Islander collective, the Digital Content Curator for Anthropology of Motherhood, a member of the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators, and a co-founder of the creative collaborations community Sip n’ Sketch Pittsburgh. She identifies as a multicultural woman with Appalachian Pennsylvanian and Maine roots and is second generation and third generation immigrant. Her familial and cultural roots reach to northern Thailand, Guangdong in China, the Tuscan region of Italy, Bavaria in Germany, Scotland, and Wales. Deep faith traditions from both the West and East have been a part of her life. Mountains, stones, the sea, the forests, the land have all formed and continue to form her. Her creative workshops, projects, and collaborations often explore multiracial and multicultural identity, the power of knowing and shaping our stories, and understanding the complexities of our health and wellbeing.

Sara has participated in and co-curated exhibitions at 🅢🅔🅐🅕🅞🅐🅜 creative space, SPACE Gallery in Pittsburgh, ¡Buen Vivir! Gallery for Contemporary Art, Carlow University Art Gallery, the Brew House, Imagebox, Assemble, Level Up Studios, Black Forge, and UnSmoke Systems Artspace. She has been featured with the Carlow University Art Gallery, Luxe Creative, Local PGH, Mindscapes, folkLAB, Inside Our Minds, the sidewall project, the Abstractions Conference, Our Clubhouse, the National Council for Behavioral Health, and Festival of Friendship.

SARIKA GOULATIA

SARIKA-GOULATIA.COM

@sarika.goulatia

The video was made for the Carol R Brown Award I was awarded in 2015. https://pittsburghfoundation.org/video/goulatia

credit: Treehouse Media for The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments

Sarika Goulatia is an Asian America artist. She was born in 1973 in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India and immigrated to the United States in 2002. As a Textile Designer, with a masters in Textiles Design and Development (printing, surface embellishments and weaving), she pursued extensive residencies and worked in rural India, England, Hong Kong and the United States. In 2004 she changed her career path and received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University where she successfully completed her bachelors in two years instead of four. As a diaspora artist her work stems from the intersection of her dual national identity; the synergy of this distinctiveness allows her to break through cultural barriers. Goulatia is a visual artist best known for her large-scale sensory sculptures and installations.  Her extensive practice touches on the frailty of human experience, often drawing on personal challenges and socio-political and cultural issues affecting our community and our country at large. Her work ranges from sculpted ceramics to cast bronzes and aluminum, fabricated acrylic panels, digital prints to extensively drilled/nailed wood to assemblages using found objects.

Goulatia has had solo exhibitions at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and was named the Emerging Artist of 2016. She has exhibited work in group and solo shows through the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for the International Society of Sculptors Conference (2016) and as part of the India in Focus Festival (2015). Important group exhibitions include shows at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art (2016/2019), The Mine Factory (2013 and 2015), the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s Annual at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2016), and Double Consciousness at the Mattress Factory Museum (2007).

Goulatia was the recipient of the prestigious 2017 Carol R. Brown Award Creative Achievement Award, provided through the Investing in Professional Artists grants program, a partnership of The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation.  She is also the recipient of the Sally Gehl, Samuel Rosenberg and Elizabeth Jones Award in Humanities and Art at Carnegie Mellon University (2006). She has been awarded residency/exhibition opportunities at Neu Kirche, the Alloy at Carrie Furnace and The Facebook.

Her site-specific public works include Shade-Sail- a community-based project done through Neu Kirche and The Children’s Museum in Deutchetown. Sculptures inspired by the stories of the steel workers related to their life at the mill installed at the Carrie Furnace. Her work “a million marks of home, revisited'' is installed at the Tryp hotel in Pittsburgh. Goulatia recently completed a Facebook residency and installed a large-scale installation at their Pittsburgh office that alludes to displacement, gentrification and references our industrial past. Her ongoing community-based project prosecutrix, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Education focusses on telling the stories of sexually assaulted victims without victimizing them. 

Goulatia has been on the Pittsburgh Art commission since 2017 and she is on the board of the Pittsburgh Cultural trust and the Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition and a proud member of the #notwhite Collective. Her mission is to create works that elevates and makes visible the stories of others.

Veronica Corpuz is a first generation Filipina American poet and multimedia artist. The former director of the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, Penn., she has previously served as the program assistant for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City; as adjunct professor at Naropa University and Chatham University; and as guest speaker and poet at New York University and the Kelly Writers House at University of Pennsylvania. She has co-authored with Michelle Naka Pierce a book-length series of experimental poems exploring gender, sexuality and identity entitled TRI/VIA (Erudite Fangs/PUB LUSH, 2003). She is currently working on a memoir of prose poems about her late husband, Michael Grzymkowski, and his battle with brain cancer. Ms. Corpuz received her BA in English and American Literature with Honors in Creative Writing from Brown University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She resides in Wilkinsburg, Penn., with her two sons, Nico and AJ, and husband Alex Thomson.