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About the Artists

SITA KURATOMI BHAUMIK is an artist, writer, and educator who uses art as a strategy to connect memory and history with the urgent social issues of our time. Her work focuses on decolonization, the hierarchy of the senses, and the impact of migration. Raised in Los Angeles, Tongva Land, and based in Oakland, Ohlone Land, she is Indian and Japanese Colombian American. Sita holds a BA in Studio Art from Scripps College, an MFA in interdisciplinary art and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts.

Sita has exhibited, collaborated, and cooked in the US, Holland, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Mexico. These institutions include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, Southern Exposure, 826 Valencia, Stanford University, Smithsonian APAC, Future Food House in Rotterdam, and MaD Asia. Committed to equity and diversity in the arts, Sita has been the art features editor for Hyphen magazine and a board member at Kearny Street Workshop. She has been a Fellow at the Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo, and an artist-in-residence at Shankill Castle in Kilkenny, Ireland, and Denniston Hill in upstate New York.

Sita is a founding member of the People’s Kitchen Collective in Oakland along with Jocelyn Jackson and Saqib Keval. Together, they produce community meals that narrate our shared struggle and resilience. The goal of PKC is to not only fill our stomachs but also nourish our souls, feed our minds, and fuel a movement.

JANAKI JAGANNATH is the former coordinator at the Community Alliance for Agroecology, a coalition of community-based organizations in the San Joaquin Valley of California that work to advance agricultural and environmental policy towards justice for communities bearing the burden of California’s food system. Prior to this, she worked at California Rural Legal Assistance in Fresno, enforcing labor standards and environmental justice protections such as access to clean drinking water for farmworker communities. Janaki has assisted in curriculum development for the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems degree at UC Davis and has farmed diversified and orchard crops across the state, including conducting training at the Refugee Entrepreneurial Agriculture Project in San Diego County. Janaki holds a BS in Agricultural Development from UC Davis and a producers’ certification in Ecological Horticulture from UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology. She is currently pursuing her JD at King Hall.

Using acrylic, ink, aerosol, and installations, CECE CARPIO tells stories of immigration, ancestry, resistance, and resilience. She  documents evolving traditions by combining folkloric forms, bold portraits, and natural elements with urban art techniques.

Cece has produced and exhibited work in the Philippines, Fiji Islands, Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Italy, Norway, Ireland, United Kingdom, India, Guam, and throughout the United States. She has been awarded the Rockwood Institute Fellowship for leaders engaged in the arts as a critical agent of change. She also received the New York Foundation of Art Immigrant Artist Fellowship, a teaching residency at Café R.E.D & La Botica Espacio Cultural at Xela, Guatemala, and an artist residency with KulArts at SOMArts San Francisco. The City of Oakland, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, UC Berkeley, and Oakland Museum of California have commissioned her work. She can often be found collaborating with her collective, Trust Your Struggle, teaching, and traveling around the world in pursuit of the perfect wall.

ARAM HAN SIFUENTES is a fiber, social practice, and performance artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. Her work has been exhibited at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis); Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago); Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia), Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum (Seoul), and the Design Museum (London).

Aram is a 2016 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, 2016 3Arts Awardee, and 2017 Sustainable Arts Foundation Awardee. She earned her BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

ISHITA DHARAP is an artist, designer, and art educator. She has a Diploma in Art and Design from the Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology (Bangalore, India) and a Diploma in Experiential Education and Practice from Kaveri Institute (Pune, India). She is one of three artist collaborators in Aram Han Sifuentes’ Protest Banner Lending Library in Chicago, with whom she started a Chicago-based publishing project, Cute Rage Press. Ishita has had a solo show of drawings in Pune, India, and has been part of group shows in Pune, Bangalore, and Chicago. She is currently pursuing her MA in Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Assistant Art Director of SAIC’s student-run Fnewsmagazine.

REBECCA GOLDSCHMIDT is a Honolulu-based artist, activist, and cultural organizer whose practice reflects the complex layers of intercultural analysis and research she brings to her engagements with people and materials: growing up in Chicago’s Jewish community, her study of languages and photography, creative entrepreneurship, working as an educator facilitating Las Fotos Project with youth in Tijuana, and seeking out Hawai’i’s Filipino community to take part in Ilokano language and cultural reclamation within the diaspora.

Rebecca received her MFA from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she also chaired Academic Labor United and the Graduate Student Union. She’s co-founder and secretary of Laing Hawai’i Community Language Program and has taught photography workshops in high schools, galleries, and juvenile detention facilities in Hawai’i and California. She’s the recipient of numerous arts fellowships from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and grants from the California Arts Council and the California State Libraries Civil Liberties Public Education Program.

VERO MAJANO is is an artist and cultural worker who was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission district. She was a resident at Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artist program, and has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Media Fellowship, the Puffin Foundation, and the Free History Project. In addition to her found footage work with the Caca Colectiva, Majano is a cofounder of Mission Media Archives, which collects and preserves audio and films shot in San Francisco’s Mission district during the 1970s and ’80s.

NYEEMA MORGAN is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Drawing Center, the Studio Museum, Art in General, Marlborough Contemporary, and the CSS Bard Galleries (New York); the Bindery Projects (Minnesota); South Hill Park Arts Center (Bracknell, UK); and Galerie Jeanroch Dard (Paris); Nyeema’s awards and residencies include an Art Matters Grant, Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, AIRspace Program Residency, Abrons Arts Center, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her works have been included in the Wall Street Journal, Time Out NY and The New York Times. Morgan earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from Cooper Union School of Art.

Referencing familiar artifacts such as recipes, book pages, fables, and canonical artworks, Morgan reflects on personal and cultural economies of knowledge. Her conceptually layered works, ranging from large-scale drawings to sculptural installation and print-based media, raise questions about how we articulate and construct meaning within a complex system of sociopolitical relations.

MIKE CLOUD is an American painter living and working in Chicago. He earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the University of Illinois–Chicago. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Art Review and featured in the publication Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas, published by Phaidon Press.

His awards include the inaugural Chiaro Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, an artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barry Schactman Prize in Painting from the Yale University School of Art, and the Grace Holt Memorial Award in African American Issues from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

KIM NGUYEN is a writer and curator based in San Francisco, where she is the Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute. She is currently completing her first collection of writings.

As an independent curator, Nguyen has co-organized projects for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy; Belkin Satellite gallery in Vancouver; and Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts in Winnipeg.

About the Curators

RELATED TACTICS is a collective of artists, writers, educators, and cultural organizers producing creative projects at the intersection of race and culture, particularly through collaborations and critical dialogues between and for communities of color and the diaspora. Their work has been featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Southern Exposure, Chinese Culture Center (San Francisco), Augusta (Georgia) University, and the Kellen Gallery of Parsons through Museum of Capitalism/Fictilis (New York). They have presented work at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley) and San Art (Saigon). Their publication project, Shelf Life, is published and distributed through Sming Sming books. Related Tactics is MICHELE CARLSON, WESTON TERUYA, and NATHAN WATSON.