Faculty

Rory Sparks is a visual artist who uses bookmaking, printmaking, and multiples as a way to engage the moment where the poetic nears abstraction. She often moves beyond her own studio practice to collaborate with artists and publishers to create limited edition works and custom designed artist books. Invested in the hand and honoring age-old skills, Sparks has expanded her craft practice into performance and creating social spaces such as her current project, Working Library in Portland, Oregon.

rorysparks.com

Lenka Clayton is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers, exaggerates, and alters the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd.

In previous works, she has searched for and photographed every person mentioned by name in a German newspaper; worked with artists who identify as blind to recreate Brancusi’s Sculpture for the Blind from a spoken description; and reconstituted a lost museum from a sketch found in an archive.

Clayton is the founder of An Artist Residency in Motherhood, a self-directed, open-source artist residency program that takes place inside the homes and lives of artists who are also parents. There are currently over 1,200 artists-in-residence in 82 countries.

In 2017 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum commissioned a major new work by Clayton and collaborator Jon Rubin, entitled A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York. With the participation of six diverse venues around New York City, the artists arranged for an essential element from each site—referenced in the project’s title—to circulate from one place to the next, creating a six-month network of social and material exchange.

lenkaclayton.com

Laura Glazer (she/her) is an artist whose work is socially-engaged and depends on the participation of other people, sometimes a close friend, and other times, complete strangers. Her background in photography and design inform her social practice, and her projects appear as books, workshops, radio shows, zines, festivals, exhibitions, installations, posters, signs, postal correspondence, videos, and sculpture.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in The New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC. Her book of photographs and interviews, I Want Everyone to Know: The Black History Month Doors at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, was published in collaboration with the Dr Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2022. She was a 2022–2023 Artist Fellow at the New York Public Library Picture Collection.

She holds an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice: Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. Born in northern Virginia, she was a longtime resident of upstate New York and is now based in Portland, Oregon.

lauraglazer.com  @helloprettycity

Caryn Aasness (they/them) is an artist and questioner originally from Long Beach, California living and working in Portland, Oregon. Caryn makes work from what is abundant, available, and inevitable in their life; mental illness, queerness, tropes, language, collections, and the kindness of strangers. The field of social practice provided an opportunity for them to use service, conversation, writing, and noticing as central formats in their work. Caryn has a BFA in Fiber from California State University Long Beach, an MFA in Social Practice from Portland State University, and a snake tattoo.

carynaasness.com

Emily Fitzgerald is a consultant, photographer, artist, educator, and storyteller. Her practice focuses on the intersection of the social, political, and visual in order to inspire dialogue around complex issues and reframe our ways of relating to one another. Emily facilitates conversation and creates site-specific art installations in non-traditional, public, and unexpected places. She is the co-founder of Works Progress Agency, a socially-engaged art studio and consultancy, and from 2016-2019 was a co-curator of MATTER, a storefront space dedicated to social practice exhibitions, workshops, and other happenings. She teaches art, photography, Design Thinking classes at Portland State University.

efitzgerald.com

2023-24 Art + Social Practice Program Coordinator 

M. Michelle Illuminato (she/her) creates events, public exchanges, and artworks that help to reveal the complicated and often contradictory relationship between people, their culture, and the land they live on. She works individually as well as with the collective, next question on projects that have been exhibited nationally as well as in Italy, Poland, Germany, and Serbia.

In 1982, Illuminato began working in the steel mill town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Over the next several years she invited hundreds of artists to collaborate with each other, the towns people and the place. The project received, ‘Best Event in Pennsylvania’, the key to the city for Illuminato, as well as broke ground on new ways that socially-community-driven artworks could receive art funding. After visiting Aliquippa, curator Mary Jane Jacob included her in a year-long project, ‘Points of Entry’, funded by the Three Rivers Art Festival and included Group Material, Ann Carlson, Fred Wilson, Daniel Martinez. Recent work includes: Momentary Monuments for a Wednesday Afternoon, Portland,Tripoli Street BakeYard, Neu Kirche Contemporary Art Center, Pittsburgh, and Lost & Found Factory, Pittsburgh and Denton, Texas, which received a national award from Americans for the Arts. With next question, she created, The Neighborhood Revisited, a trolley tour that used Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood tours as a way to better understand shifting city spaces.

For 2023-24, Illuminato will be the Coordinator of the Art + Social Practice Program and since 2016 has been the Head of the CORE Program at Portland State University. Deeply interested in alternative teaching practices, she received the Master Teaching Award from Foundations: Foundations: Art, Theory, and Education in 2017.

michelleilluminato.com

Adrian Williams (she/her, b. 1979, Portland, Oregon) is a transdisciplinary artist and writer invested in various forms of language. Her practice involves voice, text, sound, video, photography, performance, and the immersive handling of space. Employing conceptual narrative structures, her work revolves in both literal and fictitious arenas, fielding the conditions that determine form to explore the form of the human condition. 

Williams’ work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the 21er Haus, Vienna, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Portikus, Frankfurt, Artpace, San Antonio, Art Production Fund LAB, New York, GAM – Galleria Civica D’Arte Moderna E Contemporanea, Turin, MACBA, Barcelona, the Athens Biennial, Athens. 

Williams received a Bachelors degree from the Cooper Union, New York, and is a Meisterschulerin of the Städelschule, Frankfurt. She resides in Frankfurt, Germany and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Applied Sciences (HFG), Offenbach, writing about voice. 

adrianruthwilliams.com

Alison Heryer is an interdisciplinary artist whose work combines costume, installation, performance, and community engagement. As a costume designer, she is a member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829.  Her design credits include productions at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 59E59 Theaters, La MaMa, The New Victory Theater, Portland Center Stage, Portland Opera, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Artists Repertory Theatre, ZACH Theatre, The Hypocrites, and Redmoon. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, World Stage Design, and The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Awards include a RACC Build Grant, Drammy Award and Austin Critics Table Award for Costume Design, and the ArtsKC Inspiration Grant.  Heryer is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Texas at Austin.  She is a faculty member at Portland State University where she was recently granted the Sue Horn-Caskey & Charles F. Caskey Professorship of Textile Arts & Costume Design.

Alison Heryer’s 2021/2022 projects have been generously supported by a RACC Build Grant.

www.alisonheryerdesign.com

Patricia Vázquez Gómez works and lives between the ancient Tenochtitlán and the unceded, occupied, stolen and colonized lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Multnomah and other Indigenous peoples. Her art practice investigates the social functions of art, the intersections between aesthetics, ethics and politics and the expansion of community based art practices. She uses a variety of media to carry out her research: painting, printmaking, video, exhibitions, music and socially engaged art projects. The purpose and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements in the US and Mexico. Patricia’s work can be explored at patriciavazquez.art.