tether me to the ground or let me float

Prerna is a multidisciplinary artist born in Mumbai, India. In her most recent works she engages with familial archives and government documents to discern the overlapping elements of bureaucracy and superstition. Prerna is interested in her relationship to being the subject and being subjected, using the materials and language found in government buildings, airports, classrooms, and other spaces where the body undergoes categorization and evaluation. She has been awarded several global opportunities and residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Artists for Artists Edition 4: Language Is Never on the Ground, Artists’ Cooperative Residency & Exhibitions (ACRE), MCAD X Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Early Career Artists, and the Studios at MASS MoCA. She is currently a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.

Colin Martinez is a visual artist and urban designer living and working in Chicago, IL. He was born and raised in Ohio, where he earned a B.S. in Landscape Architecture from the Ohio State University in 2021. Photography is an essential tool that he uses to understand the built and non-constructed environments. Employing printed images, installation, video, and collaborative projects, Martinez interrogates how familial history, ecological change, and capital investment interact in the landscape. His work often pictures the precarious unison of the natural and human-made.

yétúndé ọlágbajú is an artist, cultural strategist, adorner, and earthworker living and creating in Kashia Pomo (Mendocino County). Their practice is anchored by a single guiding question: What must we reckon with as we build a future, together? In pursuit of answers to this question, they approach artmaking as both inquiry and offering. Inspired by the divine and the everyday within the Black diaspora, they work with sound, sculpture, ceremony, and collaboration to illuminate our interdependence in the wake of these confrontations.

Holding an MFA from Mills College, they are the recipient of multiple awards including a Headlands Center for the Arts fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts award and LACE Lightening Fund award. They are the Founder + Director of àjìjà space, the Education and Public Programs Manager at Mendocino Art Center and consult as a cultural organizing strategist and facilitator.

Lars Shimabukuro (b. 1991, Honolulu, Hawai’i) is an artist whose work expands ideas of homelands, family, and memory to include the queer landscapes that raised them. They earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Yale University in 2013, an Associate Degree from Haywood Community College (NC) focusing on weaving in 2019, and completed the Core Fellowship program at the Penland School of Craft in 2023. Lars has shown nationally and internationally, and teaches weaving at craft schools. He is currently pursuing a Design Studies MFA at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology in Madison, on unceded Ho- Chunk land.

Ian John Solomon (b. 1997) is an Emmy award winning interdisciplinary artist, journalist & organizer from Detroit, Michigan. Ian's lens-based practice explores themes of identity, ancestry, community, land and ecology. Deeply motivated by environment, Ian’s practice asserts a relationship to the natural world as a necessary vehicle to personal and communal actualization, utilizing space and place as foundation for urgent community conversations spanning the spiritual to the political.

Shirin Towfiq is an Iranian-American artist whose work addresses cultural memory, legacies of trauma, migration, and translation. Towfiq completed her Bachelor in Art Practice from the University of California Berkeley and a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University.

Towfiq has presented solo exhibitions at Spill 180 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; The Mingei Museum, San Diego, CA; 1078 gallery, Chico, CA; City Gallery, San Diego, CA; and has been included in group exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; The De Young Museum; Minnesota Street Project. She has won various awards, such as the Rydell Award and Harpo Award in 2024.

Gemma Kim is a curator, arts administrator, and researcher based in Chicago, IL. Her practice explores histories of displacement, diaspora, and culture, considering how we make sense of and exist in the unclear boundaries of identity and place. She is the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Kim received a B.A. in Art History and English at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2019 and a dual M.A. in Art History and Arts Administration & Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.