Tri State Sculptors Association

Full Conference Program can be dowloaded here

Friday Keynote

Michaela Pilar Brown is an image and object maker, a multidisciplinary artist using photography, installation and performance. She studied sculpture and art history at Howard University. Brown’s installations, collage and photographs address issues attendant to the black body. She uses nontraditional materials and their juxtaposition to each other, and or dissimilar objects to make statements about the body and its relationship to larger cultural themes of age, gender, race, sexuality, history, and violence. Her work considers memory, myth, ritual, desire and the spaces the body occupies within these vignettes. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in North and South Carolina, New York, Georgia, Washington, DC, California, Germany and Canada, and participated in 2016 Satellite Art Fair, Basel Miami. 

Brown was the 2011 Harvey B. Gantt Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Art and Innovation, an artist Grant recipient at the Studio Center of Vermont, and an Artist Venture Grant recipient of the South Carolina Arts Commission. She is the 2016 Jasper Projects Artists of the Year, one of the six American artists selected to participate as a Resident Artist for OPEN IMMERSION: A VR CREATIVE DOC LAB produced by the CFC Media Lab, The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and and JustFilms | Ford Foundation, an Inaugural Resident Artist at the 2016 Sedona Summer Colony and a 2016 Artist in Residence, Kunstlerwerkgemeinschaft, Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Saturday Keynote

Allan Wexler has worked in the fields of sculpture, architecture, and design for forty-five years. He works as an investigator using series, permutations, and chance rather than searching for definitive solutions. He makes buildings, furniture, vessels, and utensils as backdrops and props for everyday, ordinary human activity. The works isolate, elevate, and monumentalize our daily rituals: dining, sleeping, and bathing. And they, in turn, become mechanisms that activate ritual, ceremony, and movement, turning these ordinary activities into theater.

Allan Wexler is represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City and has exhibited, taught, and lectured internationally.  Currently, he teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation, and the Leir Prize from the Jewish Museum. His solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Jewish Museum.  The installation Social Contracts: Choreographing Interactions was included in the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture. His monograph, “Allan Wexler: Absurd Thinking Between Art and Design” was published by Lars Muller Publications, Zurich in 2017.