ON VIEW: A Common Thread

Katie Shanks is a Los Angeles based fiber artist. Since receiving their BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University Long Beach in 2010, they have made it a point to connect with and emphasize community and connection They are also a founding member of the art collectives Somewhere in LA, Level Ground, and Acceptable Risk Los Angeles. Over the years, they have enriched their practice taking scenic byways through millinery, fashion, installation, and performance—embracing the multifaceted nature of the work and always pursuing new mediums to best communicate feeling and convey meaning. Their work has long been inspired by the landscapes—natural and urban—that surround them in their vast and varied home-state of California. Accepted into Tulane’s MFA Program in Sculpture in the Fall, it will be necessary to close this chapter to open and explore the next.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Amabelle Aguiluz is a Filipina American multidisciplinary artist, weaver, and teacher. Her work is deeply rooted and connected to the body, nature, and the healing power of plant medicines. She uses both traditional and unconventional textile techniques to transform various fiber materials into sculptures and site-specific installations. Her work is a reflection on themes about impermanence and everyday moments in life.
Amabelle lives and works in Los Angeles County.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Chloe Cusimano is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist working with photography, cyanotypes, weaving, and sewing. They are pursuing portraiture as a process of documenting and reconfiguring body parts into whole images and structures. Their art practice is grounded in queer play, which they define as simply being non-reflective of idealistic, heteronormative aesthetics and values. Through playful methodologies, they intend to uphold subjective experiences and subvert predominant normative assumptions about play. Chloe is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Laura Brody sculpts for the human body and its vehicles. She developed and curates Opulent Mobility, a series of exhibits that re-imagine disability as opulent and powerful. Her art has been shown at the Ikouii Creative, ACE/121 Gallery, Brea Gallery, the Charles River Museum of Industry, Westbeth Center For the Arts, California State University Northridge, Gallery Expo, the Dora Stern Gallery at Arts Unbound, and The World of Wearable Art.
Ms. Brody works as a professional costume maker and designer, an artist, and as an educator. She is passionate about reuse, sustainability, and re-imagining disability.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Marie-Jose (b. 1992 San Francisco) is a contemporary visual artist based in Los Angeles. Along with painting, collage & mixed media are some of the vehicles utilized for exploring the multiplicity of the Black femme experience. They employ surrealism as a tool for inspiring a previously indiscernible future and occasionally reimagining the past. Influenced by artists such as Rene Magritte, Kerry James Marshall, and the artist’s Nigerian heritage, many scenes offer Black figures among dreamlike cloudscapes and thematic metaphors that refer to the intricacy of life, the consequence of introspection, and emotions of vulnerability, hope, and courage. Marie-Jose has participated in several exhibitions and fairs nationwide, including the LA International Art Show in 2020, the Affordable Art Fair in New York and Aqua Art Miami in Miami Beach in 2022. They were also a recent 2022 Artist in Residence participant in Albuquerque, NM and Fukuoka, Japan and made their international debut with a two-person exhibition with Studio Kura in Itoshima.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Aneesa Shami Zizzo is an artist and arts-based researcher in Los Angeles upcycling materials to create fiber art. Her work references the sublime and world mythologies to evoke a sense of the collective unconscious within her imagery. Zizzo’s work has been exhibited nationally in galleries and museums, including the Torrance Art Museum, the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, and the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum, among others. She is also the co-owner and director of Studio 203, an artist-run space in Los Angeles promoting fiber art, craft-based work and social practices.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Debra Disman is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her work inspired by the book, which traverses tapestry, installation and sculpture to push familiar forms into works that arrest and baffle, while simultaneously offering places of contemplation and solace. As a maker and teaching artist she invites altered ways of viewing the world and how we inhabit it.
Disman was the featured artist for the Big Read in LA in 2016, and was commissioned by LA’s Craft Contemporary Museum to create an interactive book for their 2017 exhibition, “Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California”. She is the recipient of a 2016- 17 WORD Artist Grant / Bruce Geller Memorial Prize and a 2021-22 Santa Monica Artist Fellowship.
A 2018 Studio Resident at the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Santa Monica, she is currently an artist-in-residence at 18th Street Arts Center and the LA Department of Cultural Affairs.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Los Angeles-based artist Carolyn Mason works primarily in sculpture using a variety of materials from wool to pinecones to expandable foam. Her work reflects a fascination with botanical and regenerative forms. Born in Walnut Creek, CA, Mason received her MFA degree in Sculpture from Mills College in 2005. She has exhibited at Torrance Art Museum, Mt. St. Mary’s University, Tufenkian Fine Arts as well as in a solo exhibition at Winslow Garage (all Los Angeles, CA). She has curated an exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum and is a recipient of the Fellows for Contemporary Arts (FOCA) Curator’s Lab.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Carmen Mardónez (1988) is a Chilean textile artist living in Los Angeles, California, since 2017. Her artwork seeks to radically reimagine intimate spaces of memories, dreams, and discovery, exploring variations around traditional embroidery by combining oversized formats, textile sculpture and the recovery of textile waste.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Michelle Montjoy lives in Oceanside, California. Her art practice encompasses installation, sculpture, embroidery and socially-engaged projects. A past recipient of Creative Catalyst and California Arts Council grants, her work has been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Art Produce Gallery, ICA North (formerly Lux) the San Diego International Airport, Oceanside Museum of Art and more. Her recent project is Breathing Room, a space for quietness and reflection at the New Children’s Museum in San Diego. She and her spouse have three adult daughters, a new puppy, and her 92-year-old mother lives nearby.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Doris Bittar’s interdisciplinary art maps and researches patterns from shared and overlapping heritages, which she calls a form of “cultural DNA.” Bittar has shown widely in solo and group exhibits in the US and abroad. Her publications include opinion pieces and essays on art. Performative poetry and fiction recently entered her artistic practice as an extension of Colonial Colonnade, her current project that intertwines Arabic and English texts. Bittar’s art is housed in public and private collections in the United States, Europe, and the Arab World. An immigrant from Lebanon, Bittar received a BFA at the State University of New York and an MFA from the University of California San Diego. Bittar’s teaching career includes the University of California San Diego, California State University San Marcos, the American University of Beirut, among others, and was a visiting scholar at NYU.

Exhibition: A Common Thread