Co-Founder
Board of Directors

Kari Bell s a contemporary abstract painter, working and drawing inspiration from personal experience, the natural landscape and rich history of New Mexico. Using oil and cold wax, Kari creates spontaneous works that interpret historical and geographical displacement, climate change and lived experiences. Much of Kari’s earlier aesthetic experiences were spent abroad in Spain and France. There Kari immersed herself in the expanse of European and Latin American arts and culture and assembled a mental portfolio, filing away vivid imagery, documenting experience and preserving memory while slowly integrating her own unique painterly framework and artist identity. She traveled and consumed arts, culture and music freely during a time when gendered sociocultural norms dictated that women take a more passive role. Further challenging a patriarchal legacy in academia, Kari served as a university educator and department chair of Modern Language Studies for more than three decades. Kari’s work leans to rejecting limiting societal and academic structures and instead unlocks creative possibility, unpredictability in material and new modes of learning-as-artist. For Kari, pushing boundaries encourages innovation, imagination and a deeper level of creative inquiry.

Co-Founder
Board of Directors

Lauren Dana Smith is an artist, writer and art therapist living in Taos, New Mexico. Smith’s work utilizes sculptural and digital materials to process land and body politics through a feminist lens. Smith studied painting and received her B.A. from Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Smith is a faculty member at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she received her M.P.S. in Creative Arts Therapy and Creativity Development. Previously, Smith was a core organizer and producer of Bushwick Open Studios in NYC; at the time, the country’s largest all-volunteer led arts festival. Smith’s digital and sculptural paintings have been exhibited regionally and nationally, with group shows in New York, Denver, Texas and New Mexico. In 2021 she received a SURFACE: Emerging Artist of New Mexico award from the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque. She has been recognized nationally for her digital art series. Her work has appeared in publications such as Hyperallergic, Art & Cake LA, New Visionary Magazine, ARTWALK magazine and the Santa Fe Literary Review.

Board of Directors

bianca goyette works in layers. She uses overlapping elements and media to erode the distance between the real and the imaginary, working with materials and processes that speak to the strength and fragility of the human condition. She is a multitude of things working in a multitude of media. She was once told that people get confused if you are too many things, but as Nancy Shaver says, “confusion gets a bad rap.” She is a storyteller, a vocalist, a photographer working in still and moving pictures, a writer, a laser etcher, a papermaker, a sculptor, and a designer. Her work focuses on personal experiences that have tendrils in the breadth of society. It is her own racial experience, her own social experience, her own political experience, her own experiences with language, communication, community (or the lack thereof), and a perpetual need to rethink understanding.

bianca has a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has released three studio albums and six singles, has performed in venues across the U.S., exhibited her work in numerous galleries in numerous cities, and is a creative director and copywriter specializing in the fabrication of digital assets and experiences that shift how we interact with and perceive the world.

Board of Directors

Lynette O’Kane is a Taos based artist with an extensive exhibition history. Her works have been shown both nationally and internationally, including exhibits in New York, Los Angeles, Munich and Frankfurt Germany.

She has obtained numerous commissions, both private and public, including a Percentage for the Arts commission in Kodiak Alaska, a public commission from the Center for the Study of Applied Ethnicity at Colorado State University and most
recently, a commission for the private dining area at the Ritz Hotel in Bachelor
Gulch Avon, Colorado.

Lynette was the sole 2018 Artist in Residence at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Reserve.