(29) Artist Talks

Brian Booker’s short story collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For?(Bellevue Literary Press, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2018 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Brian holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and a Ph.D. in English from NYU. His fiction has been published in The Antioch Review, Conjunctions, New England Review, One Story, Tin House, Vice, and other magazines. Brian has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He has taught fiction writing at Iowa, Wisconsin, and the University of Chicago. He currently works as an editor and lives in Berkeley.

Miriam Karraker writes/performs and is currently based in Minneapolis, MN.

Liz McCarthy recently finished her MFA at University of Illinois at Chicago, and received her BFA at University of North Carolina Asheville. McCarthy was nominated a 2017 Chicago Break Out Artist by New City Magazine. She regularly exhibits nationally at venues such as ACRE Projects, Heaven Gallery, Roots and Culture, Mana Contemporary, Gallery 400, and Threewalls. In the summer of 2017 she exhibited for the first time over seas at ExGirlfirend Gallery in Berlin. Her artistic projects have been supported by Joan Mitchell Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and Chicago’s Department of Tourism. She has participated as Artist-in-Residence as Atlantic Center for the Arts, ACRE, High Concept Laboratories, and Banff Centre. Liz has also worked as a curator with ACRE Residency and Slow Pony Project; she was the Co-founder and director of Roxaboxen Exhibitions from 2009-2012.

Yixuan Pan is an artist who was born and raised in the land of fish and rice, Hunan, China. To deal with issues of translation and communication as well as reimagining the western hegemony through a global outlook, her anti-disciplinary practice merges multiple media and modes of presentation such as installation, video, performance, lollipop, music therapy, choral conducting, and more. By dislocating language from its context and form, Pan questions the linguistic structures people learn and unlearn in relation to comfort, temperature, transparency, hierarchy and power dynamics.

Pan is a recipient of the University Fellowship at Temple University, the Laurie Wagman Prize in Glass at Tyler School of Art, the Award of Excellence and the Art Achievement Award at George Fox University. Pan’s work have been exhibited internationally, including: Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Haukijärvi Forest, Finland; Temple Contemporary Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; The Pine Barren Gallery, Whitesbog Village, NJ; Hämeenkyrö, Finland; Asakusa KAMINARI, Tokyo, Japan; ARC Gallery, Chicago, IL; Yin Yang Acupuncture, Portland, OR; Bush Barn Art Center, Salem, OR; CSUFT, Changsha, China. Pan holds a MFA in Glass from Tyler School of Art, Temple University; a BA from George Fox University in Oregon and a BA from Central South University of Forestry and Technology in China.