Faythe Levine at the Typo San Francisco conference in 2013
Faythe Levine (born 1977 Minneapolis, Minnesota) is interested in archival research as a creative tool with varied output history involving many mediums. She has worked as a curator, photographer, director, and author, and at one time was a prominent figure in the D.I.Y. Ethic indie craft movement. Her work is centered on community, empowerment, and documentation. She grew up in the suburbs of Seattle in the 1990s and has lived in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Birmingham, New Orleans, rural Middle Tennessee, and Sheboygan. She currently resides in the Hudson Valley, New York.
In 2002, she co-curated Flying Fish Gallery with filmmaker and musician Brent Goodsell. Flying Fish closed in 2003. From 2003 through 2009, Levine designed, made, and sold a small line of handmade goods under the moniker Flying Fish Design. In 2004, she founded a popular Midwest craft fair called Art vs. Craft that was successful for ten years until Levine moved from Milwaukee. Art vs. Craft and Flying Fish Design led to her producing and directing a documentary called Handmade Nation: The Rise of D.I.Y. Art, Craft, and Design, independently released in 2009. A companion book with the same title was released in 2008 and published by Princeton Architectural Press. In 2005, she opened Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with business partner Kimberly Kisiolek, where she curated the gallery until it closed in 2009. While living in Milwaukee, Levine played the musical saw with the band Wooden Robot from 2002 to 2006. Wooden Robot is also the soundtrack of her first film, Handmade Nation. In 2013, Levine and co-director/author Sam Macon began producing her second documentary, Sign Painters, about the trade and tradition of hand-painted lettering in America, released in 2013. A companion book under the same title was published in October 2012 by Princeton Architectural Press. Between 2010 and 2013, Levine was the curator at Sky High Gallery in Milwaukee. That same year, Levine was selected as one of seven mid-career artists to show work in the two-year traveling exhibition Alien She, the first retrospective on Riot Grrrl and its influence. In 2015, While living in rural Tennessee, she met and became friends with activist Merril Mushroom and collaborated on releasing Mushroom's one-act play written in the 1980s, Bar Dykes, about lesbian bar culture in the 1950s. Bar Dykes was designed and published by Pegacorn Press. In 2017, Levine began working as a curator at the John Micheal Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI. She became the Director of the Arts/Industry residency hosted at Kohler Co. and curated related exhibitions at the Arts Center. Since 2017 Levine has been researching the lives and partnership of Charlotte Partridge and Miriam Frink resulting in a book "As Ever, Miriam" slated for publication by OK Stamp Press in October 2024 and a related exhibition at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2025. In 2020, Levine moved to the Hudson Valley in New York. In June 2023, she was hired as the Hauser and Wirth Institute Archivist for Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY.
Her father, Rick Merlin Levine, is a master astrologer practicing since 1976 and the co-founder of Kepler College. Levine's mother, Suzanne Wechsler, is an organic farmer and co-owner along with her husband Roger Wechsler of Samish Bay Cheese in Washington State.
Sign painting is the craft of painting lettered signs on buildings, billboards or signboards, for promoting, announcing, or identifying products, services and events. Sign painting artisans are signwriters, although in North America they are usually referred to as sign painters.
Lowery Stokes Sims is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, Romare Bearden, Joyce J. Scott and others. She served on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has frequently served as a guest curator, lectured internationally and published extensively, and has received many public appointments. Sims was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
Adam Lerner is the JoAnn McGrath Executive Director/CEO of Palm Springs Art Museum, a position he assumed in July 2021. In this capacity, he oversees the museum's permanent collection of over 12,000 art objects including the Architecture and Design Center, Edwards Harris Pavilion, and Frey House II. Formerly, he was the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and Chief Animator in the Department of Fabrications. He was the founder and Executive Director of The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar until The Lab merged with the MCA Denver in March 2009.
Beatriz Colomina is an architecture historian, theorist and curator. She is the founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture and director of graduate studies in the School of Architecture.
Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic, and educator. Known for her love of typography, Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at Maryland Institute College of Art. Previously she was the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and was named Curator Emerita after 30 years of service. She is the founding director of the Graphic Design M.F.A. degree program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. She has written numerous books on graphic design for a variety of audiences. She has contributed to several publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., Metropolis, and The New York Times.
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center is an independent, not-for-profit contemporary art museum and performing arts complex located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, United States. The center preserves and exhibits artist-built environments and contemporary art. In 2021, the center opened the Art Preserve, a satellite museum space dedicated to art environments.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor. In 2021, Grabner was named a Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2024 Grabner was inducted into the Wisconsin Academy of Art and Science.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Beth Lipman is a contemporary artist working in glass. She is best known for her glass still-life compositions which reference the work of 16th- and 17th-century European painters.
Myra Mimlitsch-Gray is an American metalsmith, artist, critic, and educator living and working in Stone Ridge, New York. Mimlitsch-Gray's work has been shown nationally at such venues as the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Museum of the City of New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Museum of Arts and Design. Her work has shown internationally at such venues as the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Stadtisches Museum Gottingen, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is held in public and private collections in the U.S, Europe, and Asia.
Melissa Potter is an American interdisciplinary artist who works in handmade paper, printmaking, traditional crafts, writing, and video. She is a three-time Fulbright award recipient and was Director of the MFA in Book & Paper at Columbia College Chicago from 2014 – 2017. She holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and a MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Judy Kensley McKie is an American artist, furniture designer, and furniture maker. She has been making her signature style of furniture with carved and embellished animal and plant motifs since 1977. She is based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Shannon R. Stratton is a Canadian artist, writer and curator. She is currently executive director of Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists' Residency in Saugatuck, Michigan.
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center, and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists." Writer and curator Jo Lauria described Selvin's tableaux as "elegiac and stylistically unified" works that serve as "forceful essays on the relationship between realism and abstraction, object and subject, decoration and use." Selvin lives and works in the Berkeley, California area.
Elke Solomon was an American artist, curator, educator and community worker. She was known for her interdisciplinary practice that combines painting, drawing, object-making, performance and installation. Solomon exhibited widely in the United States and abroad.
Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.
Yesomi Umolu is a British curator of contemporary art and writer who has been director of curatorial affairs and public practice for the Serpentine Galleries since 2020.
Ruth DeYoung Kohler II was a museum director and teacher from Wisconsin who championed under-recognized, self-taught artists and vernacular art. She was the director of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center from 1972 to 2016. She led the development of the Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the first museum dedicated to the exhibition and conservation of artist-built environments.
Alicia Boutilier is the Chief Curator and Curator of Canadian Historical Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston. She has been Curator of Canadian Historical Art since 2008 and was appointed Chief Curator in 2017. In 2020, she served as the Interim Director at the gallery and received a special recognition award from Queen's University at Kingston for her work as a team leader, adapting to the new realities caused by Covid. She is a Canadian art historian with wide-ranging concerns with emphasis on women artists, artistic groups, regional scenes and collecting histories.
Aditi Ranjan is an Indian textile designer, educator and researcher involved in the field of Indian crafts. She taught textile design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad from 1974 to 2012. Ranjan is known for her book Handmade in India: A Geographic Encyclopedia of Indian Handicrafts based on Indian arts & crafts that she edited along with her partner and fellow design pedagogue, M. P. Ranjan.
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