Contributors
Suzanne Anker (Biota) is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, MoMA PS1, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her writings have appeared in Art and America, Seed Magazine, Nature Reviews Genetics, Art Journal, Tema Celeste, and M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and The Nature and Technology BioArt Lab.
Anne Beck (Scale) is a curator, educator, and artist working collaboratively and independently in a variety of media, ranging from painting to print- and book-making to public intervention. She holds an M.F.A. in painting from Pratt Institute and a B.A. in Printmaking and Art History from the University of Virginia. Beck lives and works in Northern California where she is director of Lost Coast Culture Machine, a contemporary art space and handmade paper mill that focuses on interdisciplinary sustainable creative practice Beck co-founded the space with Dietmar Krumrey in 2010. Beck's paper will serve as the background for each of Works & Days Quarterly's 2014 issues. Her work may be found online at www.anastomose.net.
Ashley Suzan Beck (Recipes: Tastes of the Shore) was raised in Newport Beach, California, where she inherited her love for the kitchen from her Armenian mother and grandmother. Beck received her B.A. from New York University and most recently worked for the Marcus Samuelsson Group. She is returning to NYU to pursue a Master's of Science degree in Clinical Nutrition. When not studying or testing new recipes, she fancies running along the East River, knitting, reading Fitzgerald, and dining out with friends. She lives in Brooklyn with her Morkie, Coco, and can be followed on Twitter @AshleySuzan.
Sarah Katrina Bland (Calligraphy) pens calligraphy at www.nyccalligraphy.com and holds a dual M.F.A. in writing and performing from CalArts. She does better when she's around people. Small groups, you know. Structure.
Ross Bonfanti's (Concreatures) sculptures of teddy bears and other "cuddly toys" are made from concrete. They create an arresting tension between the expectation of softness and the reality of hardness, between the memory of childhood and the stress of adulthood. Working with found toys (mainly recovered from thrift shops in his native Toronto) and concrete, Bonfanti’s work can be found in several public and corporate collections in Canada, as well as in the Hirschorn Museum at the Smithsonian Institute. His upcoming show at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery will open on July 16, 2014; his work may also be seen at http://www.rossbonfanti.com.
Mia Brownell (The Adventures Of a Reluctant Omnivore) is a New York-based artist who uses the conventions of the traditionally painted food still life as a means to comment on contemporary issues surrounding food. She has had solo exhibitions in major American cities including New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Mia’s paintings are in several private, corporate, and public art collections including Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments, and the National Academy of Sciences. Her work has been reviewed and published in numerous publications including The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, The New York Times, HiFructose, and Artnet Magazine. Mia teaches painting and drawing in New Haven at Southern Connecticut State University. The J. Cacciola Gallery represents her artwork, which may also be viewed online at http://miabrownell.com.
Lauren DiCioccio (Dead Animals) is an artist working primarily in the media of hand-embroidery and soft sculpture. She lives bicoastally in Brooklyn and San Francisco and holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Colgate University. Her work has been exhibited at the Bellevue Arts Museum (Washington), the Laguna Art Museum (California), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (California), and is on view this summer at the SFO Airport Museum. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at The McColl Center for Visual Art, The Workshop Residence, Recology SF, and the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus. DiCioccio is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco and Tomlinson Kong Contemporary in New York.
Nick Didkovsky (Liminophone: The Singing Harbor) is a guitarist, composer, and music software programmer. In 1983, he founded the rock band Doctor Nerve. In 1997, collaborating with computer music pioneer Phil Burk, Didkovsky created Java Music Specification Language (JMSL), a language for computer music composition written in the Java programming language (www.algomusic.com). Nick has composed new music for Bang On A Can All-Stars, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, loadbang, ETHEL, ARTE Quartett, and others. His Black Sabbath guitar lessons on YouTube are enjoyed by metal fans all over the world. More of his music may be heard at http://www.didkovsky.com.
Jamie Asaye FitzGerald (Poems) writes poetry and personal essays. Her work has appeared in journals including Cultural Weekly, Literary Mama, Speechless the Magazine, and Snow Monkey—as well as on public buses. She received an Academy of American Poets College Prize at the University of Southern California and an M.F.A. in poetry from San Diego State University. Originally from Hawaii, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and young daughter, and works for Poets & Writers.
Across the world and back to her native New York, violinist, vocalist, string arranger, writer, and distance swimmer Rachel Golub (Liminophone: The Singing Harbor; The Marina Diaries) defies categorization, performing and recording with artists from Jay-Z and Florence + the Machine to Elliott Sharp, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, and Sting. In January 2009, Rachel became the sixth person in history to cross the formidable Strait of Magellan, a four-mile, two-hour distance in 39-degree water—wearing a string bikini. Solo projects include Go-Ray & Duke: The Yoga Sessions, with her yoga-music collective; and a 2011 solo violin album of Judaica, Songs From My Soul. Recently, she has also begun making short videos concerning the surreality of water. Her work may be found at www.rachelgolubmusic.com.
Katie Innamorato (Growth and Decay) has a B.F.A. in sculpture from SUNY New Paltz and is a professionally trained taxidermist. Her work questions our interactions and relationships with animals, while forcing us to think about our own mortality. All animals used in her work are sourced ethically, through roadkill, donations, other taxidermists, and garment scraps.
Joel Isaak (Ancestral Portrait Series) is a member of the Keniatze Indian Tribe from the Dena’ina region in South Central Alaska. He grew up in a small town on the coast spending summers fishing, being outdoors, and processing large game in the fall. Isaak was raised in a Native Alaskan, Northern European home; his current work reflects this duality. He enjoys combining Native materials and techniques with more modern industrial processes. Through installation including paintings, glass work, bronze casting, woodworking, tanning, and atmospheric-fired ceramics, Isaak strives to communicate and explore the interaction between Alaska Native cultures and Western civilization.
Rebecca Jewell's (Printed Feathers) work is based around two main subjects: the drawing of museum artifacts and drawing the natural world. She has a Ph.D. from the Royal College of Art in Natural History Illustration. Jewell is artist in residence at the British Museum, currently at work on a project based at the British Museum’s ethnographic stores. From 2005-2010, she was artist in residence on the Melanesia Art Project at the British Museum and is also visiting research fellow in the Printmaking Department at Sir John Cass School of Art, London Metropolitan University. Jewell’s work is held in the national collections of the Natural History Museum, the British Museum, the British Library and the National Trust (Chastleton House). Stateside, she has been artist in residence at the American Museum of Natural History and has a show scheduled to open on December 10, 2014 at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery. Her work may also be found online at http://www.rebeccajewell.com.
Lyn Lifshin (Somewhere a Ziplock Of His Massy Hair) published two collections of poetry last year, A Girl Goes Into the Woods (NYQ Books) and For the Roses: Poems After Joni Mitchell. Always a strong advocate of gender equality, Lifshin most recently published Malala (Poetic Matrix), a collection of poems inspired by Malala Yousafzai. The book is available on Amazon. For more information on Lifshin, please visit www.lynlifshin.com.
Seren Morey (Corpuscles/Coral) was born in Massachusetts in 1969 and graduated from Bard College in 1991. Upon graduating, she became an assistant to Kiki Smith and then went on to complete an M.F.A. at Pratt Institute in 1996. Following school, Morey became an instructor for three years at Pratt, teaching "Painting Processes" and "Foundation: Light, Color and Design," a comprehensive color theory course. Morey’s work has been exhibited in numerous shows and reviewed by Barry Schwabsky and Helen A. Harrison of The New York Times. She currently lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and is a partner in Guerra Paint and Pigment in New York City, a specialty resource store for artists.
Polly Morgan (Harbour) was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire in 1980. Morgan moved to East London to read English Literature in 1998. As an undergraduate, she became acquainted with many prominent artists working in the area and, inspired by their example, took up taxidermy and began making sculptural work in 2004. Having studied with Scottish taxidermist George Jamieson, Morgan began to play with and dismantle taxidermy traditions, creating sculptures that brought her work to the attention of many notable collectors and curators both in Britain and internationally. Morgan continues to live and work in London; her work may be seen online at http://pollymorgan.co.uk.
Mariko Nakatani (Springtime Tsumire-Jiru) is a New York City attorney, a connoisseur of the Midwest's best Japanese restaurants, and a maker of sausage—delicious, delicious sausage. Nakatani hails from Osaka, Japan, and moved just outside of Pittsburgh, PA when she was seven. Her love of cooking began as a child, when she would help her food-obsessed parents chop vegetables and stir miso soup for dinner each night. Nakatani now lives in New York City, where she has cooked in a chili competition, offers kimchi sausage in a Brooklyn food swap, and once, threw an Emergency Ham Party. Mariko also hosts periodic supper clubs in Brooklyn, and is perfecting her secret recipes for a nascent sausage and charcuterie business.
Paola Pivi ("Ok, you are better than me, so what?") was born in Milan in 1971. She lives and works in Anchorage, but is currently in India. Pivi was co-awarded the Golden Lion for the Italian Pavillion at the Biennale of Venezia in 1999. For this venue, which featured five Italian artists, Pivi presented "Untitled (airplane)," an inverted Fiat G-91 airplane resting on its cockpit. Last year, the artist was commissioned to create two original public artworks in New York City: "How I Roll," a project by Public Art Fund, a Piper Seneca airplane rotating on its wingtips, installed near Central Park at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, and "Untitled (zebras)," a striking image of zebras on a snowcovered mountaintop on High Line Billboard at West 18th Street. This past autumn, Galerie Perrotin inaugurated its New York space with an exhibition devoted entirely to Pivi.
Zara Raab (Attachments) has previously published collections of poetry including Swimming the Eel (David Robert Books) and a chapbook, The Book of Gretel (Finishing Line Press). Rumpelstiltskin, or What’s in a Name? will come out early next year. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in Poetry Flash, Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, The Dark Horse, Poet Lore, Redwood Coast Review, and elsewhere. "Attachments" originally appeared in her book, Fracas & Asylum (WordTech), which came out late last year.
Jon Eric Riis (Icarus) is a distinguished fiber artist whose work can be found in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Museum of Art and Design, and the Smithsonian. Riis studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, received an M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and in 1970 went to India on a Fulbright Grant to study double ikat, a highly specialized dyeing and weaving technique practiced in Gujarat. During a career that has spanned more than four decades, Riis has exhibited his work in museums around the world and traces his passion for textiles to time spent as a child wandering Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. In 2011, he was a United States Artists Windgate Fellow and recipient of the Master of the Medium Award in Fibers bestowed by the Renwick Alliance. Icarus is the second in a yearlong curated series of Riis’ art to be featured in Works & Days Quarterly.
Anina Robb (Poems) is a poet living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley with her husband, son, daughter, cat, and dog. She earned her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, both online and print. In her spare time, she likes to run.
Judith Vivell (Spoonbills) was born in California and attended the University of California at Berkeley. After graduation, she spent a year and a half in Colombia, where she studied with Edgar Negret, the great Colombian sculptor, at the University of Los Andes. On her return to the United States, she began work on a master’s degree in Art History at Columbia University, but left after a year to begin studying painting and printmaking at The Art Students' League, where she spent the next three years studying with Larry Poons, Morris Kantor, and Al Held. In 1971, she received a master’s degree in Painting from Hunter College. Since that time, Vivell has exhibited internationally and is represented in many important private and public collections including Yale University’s School of Architecture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. Vivell lives and works in New York. She is represented by Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York and Ann Long Fine Art in Charleston, SC.
West Fourth New Music Collective (Moby Dick: An Oratorio) is a collective of composers and performers dedicated to presenting new live concert music in and around New York City. W4 makes a priority of programming and producing new music events with an eye toward bringing diverse audiences together through innovative concert experiences. Co-directors Matt Frey, Tim Hansen, Molly Herron, and Ruben Naeff met while studying in the graduate program of NYU's Steinhardt School on West 4th Street in Manhattan in 2010. A mutual desire to produce their own work outside of the academic environment and to cultivate a broader audience for new music spurred the formation of W4. Matt Frey is a Brooklyn-based composer. In 2013, selections from his opera-in-progress The Fox and the Pomegranate were selected for performance at Ft. Worth Opera's inaugural Frontiers showcase. Frey’s concert music has been heard in performances by the JACK String Quartet, West Point Woodwind Quintet, NYU Symphony Orchestra, Manhattan Wind Ensemble, Washington Square Winds, and at the 2012 Etchings Festival in France and 2012 Duffy Festival in Norfolk, VA. Tim Hansen is a composer whose work fuses cabaret and music theater with more traditional concert music idioms. His music has been performed in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Mexico, and the United States, as well as in his native Australia. He has composed music for Australia’s Song Company, Sydney Theatre Company, Saffire Guitar Quartet, Guitarstrophe and the Griffyn Ensemble. In America, Hansen has worked with Transit, the JACK Quartet, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, NYU Symphony Orchestra, NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble, and has been a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute. He has been awarded the Frank Ponton Memorial Prize, the Darwin International Guitar Festival Composition Prize, and an ArtStart Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Molly Herron is also a Brooklyn-based composer, performer, and educator. She is a recipient of the Exploring the Metropolis 2012/13 Con Edison Composer's Residency at the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Academy and a fellow at La Pietra Forum in Florence. Herron has collaborated with a variety of artists in theater, dance, and film. Her work with the filmmaker Josephine Decker will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Ruben Naeff is a native of Amsterdam, currently residing in Brooklyn. His music has been performed in seven European countries and across America and was presented by as a part of the Bang on a Can Marathon. In 2008, he released an album De Bètacanon. Naeff was awarded the prestigious HSP Huygens Talent Scholarship to study with Michael Gordon at NYU; previously, he attended the conservatories of Amsterdam and The Hague and also holds a master’s degree in mathematics. To learn more about West Fourth New Music Collective, please visit www.w4newmusic.com.
Eric Wines (Recipes: Tastes of the Shore, Director of Events) was raised in Detroit, Michigan and lives in New York City where he is Director at Skylight Group, NYC's premier event venue collection, and co-owner of Tre, a Neapolitan eatery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In his free time Wines enjoys biking, urban gardening, and volunteering for The Lowline. Follow him on Twitter @EricWines.
Editorial Staff
Luke Cissell (Infinite Progress) is a musician and composer who lives in Lower Manhattan. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he was a fiddling champion at the age of eight. In 2013 Cissell premiered his String Quartet No. 2 with the Hudson Quartet and he released his second full-length studio album, Cosmography. He recently appeared on Tara Hugo Sings Philip Glass (Orange Mountain Music) and performed at the New York premiere of Yves Klein’s seminal Monotone-Silence Symphony. Cissell is currently a Teaching Artist Associate for the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program. Play with his jukebox at www.lukecissell.com.
Sarah Marriage (Leviathan) is a maker of furniture and other fine wooden objects. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Sarah studied architecture at Princeton University and fine woodworking at The College of the Redwoods. She also serves as Art Director, Designer, Programmer, and Calligrapher for Works & Days. Her work was recently featured in Dwell On Design in Los Angeles, "Hand Made/Mind Made" in the Dogpatch district of San Francisco, and at Pritam & Eames Gallery in East Hampton, NY. Learn more at www.sarahmarriage.com.
Cara Marsh Sheffler (Guide) is a writer who lives on Manhattan's Lower East Side. In her past life as an actress, she was featured in Woody Allen's Celebrity and in The Looking Glass Theatre's Off-Broadway production of Much Ado About Nothing. A recipient of the Fagles Prize, she has most recently been working on Our Trespasses, and Guide. She is performing excerpts of Guide in tandem with Luke Cissell's (The Myth of) Infinite Progress around New York City. Sheffler is also providing the libretto for Cissell's adaptation of The Ambassadors. She won the White House Easter Egg Roll in 1986.
contact@works-and-days.com
Suzanne Anker (Biota) is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, MoMA PS1, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her writings have appeared in Art and America, Seed Magazine, Nature Reviews Genetics, Art Journal, Tema Celeste, and M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and The Nature and Technology BioArt Lab.
Anne Beck (Scale) is a curator, educator, and artist working collaboratively and independently in a variety of media, ranging from painting to print- and book-making to public intervention. She holds an M.F.A. in painting from Pratt Institute and a B.A. in Printmaking and Art History from the University of Virginia. Beck lives and works in Northern California where she is director of Lost Coast Culture Machine, a contemporary art space and handmade paper mill that focuses on interdisciplinary sustainable creative practice Beck co-founded the space with Dietmar Krumrey in 2010. Beck's paper will serve as the background for each of Works & Days Quarterly's 2014 issues. Her work may be found online at www.anastomose.net.
Ashley Suzan Beck (Recipes: Tastes of the Shore) was raised in Newport Beach, California, where she inherited her love for the kitchen from her Armenian mother and grandmother. Beck received her B.A. from New York University and most recently worked for the Marcus Samuelsson Group. She is returning to NYU to pursue a Master's of Science degree in Clinical Nutrition. When not studying or testing new recipes, she fancies running along the East River, knitting, reading Fitzgerald, and dining out with friends. She lives in Brooklyn with her Morkie, Coco, and can be followed on Twitter @AshleySuzan.
Sarah Katrina Bland (Calligraphy) pens calligraphy at www.nyccalligraphy.com and holds a dual M.F.A. in writing and performing from CalArts. She does better when she's around people. Small groups, you know. Structure.
Ross Bonfanti's (Concreatures) sculptures of teddy bears and other "cuddly toys" are made from concrete. They create an arresting tension between the expectation of softness and the reality of hardness, between the memory of childhood and the stress of adulthood. Working with found toys (mainly recovered from thrift shops in his native Toronto) and concrete, Bonfanti’s work can be found in several public and corporate collections in Canada, as well as in the Hirschorn Museum at the Smithsonian Institute. His upcoming show at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery will open on July 16, 2014; his work may also be seen at http://www.rossbonfanti.com.
Mia Brownell (The Adventures Of a Reluctant Omnivore) is a New York-based artist who uses the conventions of the traditionally painted food still life as a means to comment on contemporary issues surrounding food. She has had solo exhibitions in major American cities including New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Mia’s paintings are in several private, corporate, and public art collections including Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments, and the National Academy of Sciences. Her work has been reviewed and published in numerous publications including The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, The New York Times, HiFructose, and Artnet Magazine. Mia teaches painting and drawing in New Haven at Southern Connecticut State University. The J. Cacciola Gallery represents her artwork, which may also be viewed online at http://miabrownell.com.
Lauren DiCioccio (Dead Animals) is an artist working primarily in the media of hand-embroidery and soft sculpture. She lives bicoastally in Brooklyn and San Francisco and holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Colgate University. Her work has been exhibited at the Bellevue Arts Museum (Washington), the Laguna Art Museum (California), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (California), and is on view this summer at the SFO Airport Museum. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at The McColl Center for Visual Art, The Workshop Residence, Recology SF, and the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus. DiCioccio is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco and Tomlinson Kong Contemporary in New York.
Nick Didkovsky (Liminophone: The Singing Harbor) is a guitarist, composer, and music software programmer. In 1983, he founded the rock band Doctor Nerve. In 1997, collaborating with computer music pioneer Phil Burk, Didkovsky created Java Music Specification Language (JMSL), a language for computer music composition written in the Java programming language (www.algomusic.com). Nick has composed new music for Bang On A Can All-Stars, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, loadbang, ETHEL, ARTE Quartett, and others. His Black Sabbath guitar lessons on YouTube are enjoyed by metal fans all over the world. More of his music may be heard at http://www.didkovsky.com.
Jamie Asaye FitzGerald (Poems) writes poetry and personal essays. Her work has appeared in journals including Cultural Weekly, Literary Mama, Speechless the Magazine, and Snow Monkey—as well as on public buses. She received an Academy of American Poets College Prize at the University of Southern California and an M.F.A. in poetry from San Diego State University. Originally from Hawaii, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and young daughter, and works for Poets & Writers.
Across the world and back to her native New York, violinist, vocalist, string arranger, writer, and distance swimmer Rachel Golub (Liminophone: The Singing Harbor; The Marina Diaries) defies categorization, performing and recording with artists from Jay-Z and Florence + the Machine to Elliott Sharp, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, and Sting. In January 2009, Rachel became the sixth person in history to cross the formidable Strait of Magellan, a four-mile, two-hour distance in 39-degree water—wearing a string bikini. Solo projects include Go-Ray & Duke: The Yoga Sessions, with her yoga-music collective; and a 2011 solo violin album of Judaica, Songs From My Soul. Recently, she has also begun making short videos concerning the surreality of water. Her work may be found at www.rachelgolubmusic.com.
Katie Innamorato (Growth and Decay) has a B.F.A. in sculpture from SUNY New Paltz and is a professionally trained taxidermist. Her work questions our interactions and relationships with animals, while forcing us to think about our own mortality. All animals used in her work are sourced ethically, through roadkill, donations, other taxidermists, and garment scraps.
Joel Isaak (Ancestral Portrait Series) is a member of the Keniatze Indian Tribe from the Dena’ina region in South Central Alaska. He grew up in a small town on the coast spending summers fishing, being outdoors, and processing large game in the fall. Isaak was raised in a Native Alaskan, Northern European home; his current work reflects this duality. He enjoys combining Native materials and techniques with more modern industrial processes. Through installation including paintings, glass work, bronze casting, woodworking, tanning, and atmospheric-fired ceramics, Isaak strives to communicate and explore the interaction between Alaska Native cultures and Western civilization.
Rebecca Jewell's (Printed Feathers) work is based around two main subjects: the drawing of museum artifacts and drawing the natural world. She has a Ph.D. from the Royal College of Art in Natural History Illustration. Jewell is artist in residence at the British Museum, currently at work on a project based at the British Museum’s ethnographic stores. From 2005-2010, she was artist in residence on the Melanesia Art Project at the British Museum and is also visiting research fellow in the Printmaking Department at Sir John Cass School of Art, London Metropolitan University. Jewell’s work is held in the national collections of the Natural History Museum, the British Museum, the British Library and the National Trust (Chastleton House). Stateside, she has been artist in residence at the American Museum of Natural History and has a show scheduled to open on December 10, 2014 at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery. Her work may also be found online at http://www.rebeccajewell.com.
Lyn Lifshin (Somewhere a Ziplock Of His Massy Hair) published two collections of poetry last year, A Girl Goes Into the Woods (NYQ Books) and For the Roses: Poems After Joni Mitchell. Always a strong advocate of gender equality, Lifshin most recently published Malala (Poetic Matrix), a collection of poems inspired by Malala Yousafzai. The book is available on Amazon. For more information on Lifshin, please visit www.lynlifshin.com.
Seren Morey (Corpuscles/Coral) was born in Massachusetts in 1969 and graduated from Bard College in 1991. Upon graduating, she became an assistant to Kiki Smith and then went on to complete an M.F.A. at Pratt Institute in 1996. Following school, Morey became an instructor for three years at Pratt, teaching "Painting Processes" and "Foundation: Light, Color and Design," a comprehensive color theory course. Morey’s work has been exhibited in numerous shows and reviewed by Barry Schwabsky and Helen A. Harrison of The New York Times. She currently lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and is a partner in Guerra Paint and Pigment in New York City, a specialty resource store for artists.
Polly Morgan (Harbour) was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire in 1980. Morgan moved to East London to read English Literature in 1998. As an undergraduate, she became acquainted with many prominent artists working in the area and, inspired by their example, took up taxidermy and began making sculptural work in 2004. Having studied with Scottish taxidermist George Jamieson, Morgan began to play with and dismantle taxidermy traditions, creating sculptures that brought her work to the attention of many notable collectors and curators both in Britain and internationally. Morgan continues to live and work in London; her work may be seen online at http://pollymorgan.co.uk.
Mariko Nakatani (Springtime Tsumire-Jiru) is a New York City attorney, a connoisseur of the Midwest's best Japanese restaurants, and a maker of sausage—delicious, delicious sausage. Nakatani hails from Osaka, Japan, and moved just outside of Pittsburgh, PA when she was seven. Her love of cooking began as a child, when she would help her food-obsessed parents chop vegetables and stir miso soup for dinner each night. Nakatani now lives in New York City, where she has cooked in a chili competition, offers kimchi sausage in a Brooklyn food swap, and once, threw an Emergency Ham Party. Mariko also hosts periodic supper clubs in Brooklyn, and is perfecting her secret recipes for a nascent sausage and charcuterie business.
Paola Pivi ("Ok, you are better than me, so what?") was born in Milan in 1971. She lives and works in Anchorage, but is currently in India. Pivi was co-awarded the Golden Lion for the Italian Pavillion at the Biennale of Venezia in 1999. For this venue, which featured five Italian artists, Pivi presented "Untitled (airplane)," an inverted Fiat G-91 airplane resting on its cockpit. Last year, the artist was commissioned to create two original public artworks in New York City: "How I Roll," a project by Public Art Fund, a Piper Seneca airplane rotating on its wingtips, installed near Central Park at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, and "Untitled (zebras)," a striking image of zebras on a snowcovered mountaintop on High Line Billboard at West 18th Street. This past autumn, Galerie Perrotin inaugurated its New York space with an exhibition devoted entirely to Pivi.
Zara Raab (Attachments) has previously published collections of poetry including Swimming the Eel (David Robert Books) and a chapbook, The Book of Gretel (Finishing Line Press). Rumpelstiltskin, or What’s in a Name? will come out early next year. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in Poetry Flash, Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, The Dark Horse, Poet Lore, Redwood Coast Review, and elsewhere. "Attachments" originally appeared in her book, Fracas & Asylum (WordTech), which came out late last year.
Jon Eric Riis (Icarus) is a distinguished fiber artist whose work can be found in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Museum of Art and Design, and the Smithsonian. Riis studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, received an M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and in 1970 went to India on a Fulbright Grant to study double ikat, a highly specialized dyeing and weaving technique practiced in Gujarat. During a career that has spanned more than four decades, Riis has exhibited his work in museums around the world and traces his passion for textiles to time spent as a child wandering Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. In 2011, he was a United States Artists Windgate Fellow and recipient of the Master of the Medium Award in Fibers bestowed by the Renwick Alliance. Icarus is the second in a yearlong curated series of Riis’ art to be featured in Works & Days Quarterly.
Anina Robb (Poems) is a poet living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley with her husband, son, daughter, cat, and dog. She earned her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, both online and print. In her spare time, she likes to run.
Judith Vivell (Spoonbills) was born in California and attended the University of California at Berkeley. After graduation, she spent a year and a half in Colombia, where she studied with Edgar Negret, the great Colombian sculptor, at the University of Los Andes. On her return to the United States, she began work on a master’s degree in Art History at Columbia University, but left after a year to begin studying painting and printmaking at The Art Students' League, where she spent the next three years studying with Larry Poons, Morris Kantor, and Al Held. In 1971, she received a master’s degree in Painting from Hunter College. Since that time, Vivell has exhibited internationally and is represented in many important private and public collections including Yale University’s School of Architecture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. Vivell lives and works in New York. She is represented by Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York and Ann Long Fine Art in Charleston, SC.
West Fourth New Music Collective (Moby Dick: An Oratorio) is a collective of composers and performers dedicated to presenting new live concert music in and around New York City. W4 makes a priority of programming and producing new music events with an eye toward bringing diverse audiences together through innovative concert experiences. Co-directors Matt Frey, Tim Hansen, Molly Herron, and Ruben Naeff met while studying in the graduate program of NYU's Steinhardt School on West 4th Street in Manhattan in 2010. A mutual desire to produce their own work outside of the academic environment and to cultivate a broader audience for new music spurred the formation of W4. Matt Frey is a Brooklyn-based composer. In 2013, selections from his opera-in-progress The Fox and the Pomegranate were selected for performance at Ft. Worth Opera's inaugural Frontiers showcase. Frey’s concert music has been heard in performances by the JACK String Quartet, West Point Woodwind Quintet, NYU Symphony Orchestra, Manhattan Wind Ensemble, Washington Square Winds, and at the 2012 Etchings Festival in France and 2012 Duffy Festival in Norfolk, VA. Tim Hansen is a composer whose work fuses cabaret and music theater with more traditional concert music idioms. His music has been performed in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Mexico, and the United States, as well as in his native Australia. He has composed music for Australia’s Song Company, Sydney Theatre Company, Saffire Guitar Quartet, Guitarstrophe and the Griffyn Ensemble. In America, Hansen has worked with Transit, the JACK Quartet, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, NYU Symphony Orchestra, NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble, and has been a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute. He has been awarded the Frank Ponton Memorial Prize, the Darwin International Guitar Festival Composition Prize, and an ArtStart Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Molly Herron is also a Brooklyn-based composer, performer, and educator. She is a recipient of the Exploring the Metropolis 2012/13 Con Edison Composer's Residency at the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Academy and a fellow at La Pietra Forum in Florence. Herron has collaborated with a variety of artists in theater, dance, and film. Her work with the filmmaker Josephine Decker will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Ruben Naeff is a native of Amsterdam, currently residing in Brooklyn. His music has been performed in seven European countries and across America and was presented by as a part of the Bang on a Can Marathon. In 2008, he released an album De Bètacanon. Naeff was awarded the prestigious HSP Huygens Talent Scholarship to study with Michael Gordon at NYU; previously, he attended the conservatories of Amsterdam and The Hague and also holds a master’s degree in mathematics. To learn more about West Fourth New Music Collective, please visit www.w4newmusic.com.
Eric Wines (Recipes: Tastes of the Shore, Director of Events) was raised in Detroit, Michigan and lives in New York City where he is Director at Skylight Group, NYC's premier event venue collection, and co-owner of Tre, a Neapolitan eatery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In his free time Wines enjoys biking, urban gardening, and volunteering for The Lowline. Follow him on Twitter @EricWines.
Editorial Staff
Luke Cissell (Infinite Progress) is a musician and composer who lives in Lower Manhattan. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he was a fiddling champion at the age of eight. In 2013 Cissell premiered his String Quartet No. 2 with the Hudson Quartet and he released his second full-length studio album, Cosmography. He recently appeared on Tara Hugo Sings Philip Glass (Orange Mountain Music) and performed at the New York premiere of Yves Klein’s seminal Monotone-Silence Symphony. Cissell is currently a Teaching Artist Associate for the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program. Play with his jukebox at www.lukecissell.com.
Sarah Marriage (Leviathan) is a maker of furniture and other fine wooden objects. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Sarah studied architecture at Princeton University and fine woodworking at The College of the Redwoods. She also serves as Art Director, Designer, Programmer, and Calligrapher for Works & Days. Her work was recently featured in Dwell On Design in Los Angeles, "Hand Made/Mind Made" in the Dogpatch district of San Francisco, and at Pritam & Eames Gallery in East Hampton, NY. Learn more at www.sarahmarriage.com.
Cara Marsh Sheffler (Guide) is a writer who lives on Manhattan's Lower East Side. In her past life as an actress, she was featured in Woody Allen's Celebrity and in The Looking Glass Theatre's Off-Broadway production of Much Ado About Nothing. A recipient of the Fagles Prize, she has most recently been working on Our Trespasses, and Guide. She is performing excerpts of Guide in tandem with Luke Cissell's (The Myth of) Infinite Progress around New York City. Sheffler is also providing the libretto for Cissell's adaptation of The Ambassadors. She won the White House Easter Egg Roll in 1986.
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