Artists on Coping: Deanna Lee

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Deanna Lee was born in Putnam County, New York, to parents from China and Taiwan, and raised in suburban Boston. She grew up spending time in her mother’s biology lab and taking classical music lessons on several instruments for 14 years. Comprising drawings, paintings, site-specific installations, and public artworks, her art interprets everyday traces of transformation in natural systems and the built environment. Numerous venues have shown her work, including Robert Henry Contemporary, Wave Hill, the Drawing Center, and the New York Hall of Science. Among her honors are awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Asia Society, National Academy, Millay Colony, and Saltonstall Foundation. In addition to her visual art practice, Lee is a member of the Balinese ensemble, Gamelan Dharma Swara.

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Artists on Coping: Rhonda Dee

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Photo credit: ZakiP

Rhonda Dee is from Texas and currently resides in Australia. She holds a BFA, (CCA, Seattle), and MA, from Sydney College of the Arts. Her layered works explore the body as a site of transformation between human, animal hybrids and supernatural forces. Her works are in permanent collection at Macquarie University, Australia-China Arts Foundation, and Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, Sao Paulo, Brazil.  Recently, she’s begun creating public artworks with disadvantaged communities. She features in Artist Profile, The Art Life, Torrens University Blog, Arts Hub Australia and is currently designing podcasts with Casula Powerhouse Art Centre, in response to COVID19.

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Artists on Coping: Robin Holder

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Robin Holder

Robin Holder is a 2020 Clark Hulings Fund For Artists Executive Fellow. Her recent exhibit “Access and Inequities. I Hear You. Do You See Me?” featured works exploring identity conflicts. She has presented one-person exhibitions at the Mobile Museum of Art, The NCCU Art Museum, The Labor Museum, and The Spelman College Museum. She was awarded an Individual Artist Grant by The Brooklyn Arts Council as well as a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Artist As Catalyst Residency. Holder has completed 5 public art commissions, and her work is included in significant collections including the Library of Congress and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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Artists on Coping: Rosa Valado

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping

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Rosa Valado, Corona Scroll in progress – home studio during COVID-19 PAUSE; 2020; mixed media and graphite on paper; 16”X120”; photo courtesy of Rosa Valado

Rosa Valado creates immersive installations, multilayered sensory experiences, utilizing diverse approaches, from the smell of burning wax and music to architectural elements and engineering problem solving. Throughout her body of work which includes architectural elements, drawings, paintings, and sculpture, she explores notions of space and time, and elements of light. Valado has created public art projects and been in solo and group exhibitions in Austria, Germany, and Holland, and exhibits regularly in New York City. She has received many grants and fellowships, including a Pollock-Krasner, Sharpe-Walentas, Yaddo, Jerome Foundation, and has been featured in the New York Times, Art Forum, Art in America. Juries and panels include Hamilton College and Jerome Foundation.

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Artists on Coping: Renee Robbins

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Renee Robins in her studio

Renee Robbins is a Chicago-based visual artist who layers biomorphic forms to create detailed otherworldly environments. She has been awarded public art commissions with Chicago Public Art Group, Wabash Arts Corridor, and Illinois’ Art-In-Architecture program. She has exhibited widely, including exhibitions at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago, IL; Lois Lambert Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL; Firecat Projects, Chicago, IL; and the Alden B Dow Museum of Science and Art, Midland, MI. Her work has been featured in the Chicago Gallery News, PBS WTTW, and Ahtcast. Robbins has been working in Chicago for over a decade.

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Artists on Coping: Liz Jaff

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Liz on the street

Liz Jaff creates installations, objects, outdoor interventions and drawings using formal structures, pattern and repetition to talk about permanence and impermanence, perceptions of time and the role of memory in shaping experience. Poetry, storytelling, Flamenco, Butoh theater and personal narrative are important influences. She lives and works in New York City.

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Artists on Coping: Elisabeth Condon

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Elisabeth Condon in front of Urban Idyll at Ditmars Blvd., Queens, in 2019. Photo Phillip Reed

Informed by scroll painting and 20th century abstraction, Elisabeth Condon’s landscapes intersect nature and décor. While the overlap of New York and Florida inspire the majority of her compositions, Condon frequently travels to numerous residency fellowships from Shanghai and Mexico City, to the Grand Canyon and Florida Everglades. She recently completed Urban Idyll, thirty-six laminated glass panels for the NYCT Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. Station in Queens, commissioned by MTA Art & Design. Her work has been recognized by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, and State of Florida Individual Fellowships.

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Artists on Coping: Mary Mattingly

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Swale, Concrete Plant Park 2018, Photo: Subhram Reddy

Mary Mattingly works with photography and sculpture. She is currently artist in residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2016, she founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge to circumvent New York City’s public land laws, and in 2018 dismantled a military vehicle and deconstructed its mineral supply chain with BRIC Arts.  Her work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Storm King, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palais de Tokyo. It has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Le Monde, New Yorker, NPR, Art21, and included in books such as MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art, and Henry Sayre’s A World of Art.

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Susan Luss at the Museum of Art & Culture in New Rochelle

Artist in Residence Susan Luss highlights her installation in House 4 MAC Gallery and windows.

Partial installation view, today, I am…Photo credit: Susan Luss

In 2019 Artist Susan Luss was invited by the New Rochelle High School to be their first visiting artist working on site responsive installations. The school has its own museum and cultural center on its campus, called The Museum of Arts & Culture, which is the only Regents-chartered museum inside of a school in the state of New York. This collaborative project became a formative experience for the artist. Susan Luss describes the ways she formed her ideas, her collaborative work with students and faculty, as well as her takeaway from this multi layered project overall. The exhibition runs through Feb 13th.

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Natsuki Takauji: Sensuous Abstractions

Natsuki Takauji, String, stainless steel, aluminum, hydraulic oil, pigment, steel base, H72″ W40″ D40″, at WHA, Williamsburg, photo by Etty Yaniv

Natsuki Takauji sculptures create a stimulating tension between the monumental and the minute, the calm and the stirring. They are grounded yet flow, at times literally with fluids, and range from intimate indoors sculptures to large scale outdoors interactive structures. The Japanese born artist who draws upon Japanese culture and Buddhist philosophy share with Art Spiel some of the origins to her imaginative work, her process, and her projects.

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