Artists-in-Partnership
Matt Witt
Matt Witt is a photographer and writer, who lives in Talent. He has been Artist in Residence at Crater Lake National Park, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, PLAYA, and Mesa Refuge. We are grateful for his guidance and support that he provides to Vesper Meadow as well as non-profits like Rogue Action Center, Rogue Climate, and KS Wild.
Sarah F. Burns
Sarah F. Burns is an observation-based painter working in the European tradition. For over two decades, Sarah has been painting timeless subjects that include Figures, Still-life, and Landscape, while exploring her personal and cultural history. Just like she preserves the truth and beauty of each of her subjects in her paintings, her paintings are physically able to stand the test of time using proven traditional methods and techniques.
Burns is based in Southern Oregon and has exhibited in group exhibitions at the Schneider Museum of Art, The Maryhill Museum, The Arkell Museum, Grants Pass Art Museum, Coos Art Museum, and other notable institutions. When she is not in her studio, she teaches at Project Space and Southern Oregon University. Her work has been featured in American Art Collector, Southern Oregon Magazine, among other publications. In 2016, Burns was awarded the Hudson River Fellowship by the Grand Central Atelier.
Evelyn Yin Hang
Hailing from Hangzhou, China, studying at UC Berkeley and at San Francisco Art Institute before landing in Los Angeles, her work investigates personal experiences moving between two countries and the influence on her cultural identity. Encountering Vesper Meadow Education Programs at its inception, Evelyn quickly fell in love with butterfly monitoring. As she works on her MFA in Photo and Media we are excited to host her at Vesper Meadow in 2019.
Linda Thomas
Linda Thomas is a retired teacher and videographer living in Ashland, Oregon. She loves the outdoors and enjoys doing volunteer photography for local environmental groups such as Vesper Meadow and the Southern Oregon Land Conservancy. We are so pleased to work with her!
Megan Young
Megan Young is an artist and technologist who grew up in the southern Oregon foothills around Ashland. Megan has been inspired to capture the area's natural beauty through her artwork. Plein air painting has become her preferred medium for sharing her appreciation of the region. The unique and inclusive environment at Vesper Meadow offers artists like Megan the opportunity to explore, unwind, and gain a deeper understanding of the native flora and fauna that grace the region, further enriching her artistic journey.
Hollis Peach
Musicians Jacqui and Danny share in the vision of strengthening local networks for an enriched community. We are grateful for their support.
Gabriel Barrera
Originally from Southern California, Gabriel is a Mexican American/Chicano visual artist living in Southern Oregon. He works in various mediums from traditional art methods to multimedia and graphics. The identity of his art work is rooted in social justice, advocacy, and mentorship. Gabriel seeks to work together to advocate for the empowerment of BIPOC creatives. Read more about Gabriel and his 2021 Tinderbox -Art Beyond Residency at Vesper Meadow sponsored by our partners at Signal Fire Arts and the SOU Schneider Museum of Art.
Kelly Todd
Kelly Ashton Todd is a multidisciplinary artist in the performing arts, film, and environmental activism. Based out of Brooklyn, NY, Kelly creates new, innovative pathways for individuals to engage with our environment, so we can spark the important political change needed to protect these irreplaceable, beautiful and truly wildlands.
Anna IAleggio
Anna Ialeggio is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born by the ocean and raised in the mountains. Their work takes a winding path through sculpture, performance and image to consider our collectively fuzzy perception of change, as each generation redefines for itself what is "natural” or “normal.” Vesper Meadow has been a touchstone for several current projects exploring ecological reclamation, wild clay bodies, and land use policy. Ialeggio is a new faculty member of College of the Atlantic, a founding member of The Soil Factory (Ithaca, NY), and an old washed up bit of debris from The Miss Rockaway Armada.
Q
Ashley “Q” Quast is an interdisciplinary artist and nature enthusiast. She grew up in Southern Oregon and has created a life that merges art and the wonder of nature into her day-to-day life. She is BFA alumni from SOU and completed her MFA in sculpture from Washington State University, 2020. Her art practice revolves around recurring figures and often has an air of humor. She is interested in storytelling and has a folk-art sensibility. Q is a naturalist invested in lifelong learning, appreciation, and conservation of the Southern Oregon landscape. If she’s not in her studio painting another deer, you’re most likely to find her outside on her belly trying to ID a mushroom, or wildflower. She always has a couple agates in her pocket.
Daniel Thiede
Danny is a talented designer/photographer. He exercises great skill in distilling complex concepts into elegant designs. We are fortunate to work along side Danny as he brings awareness to local research on the Vesper Sparrow and designed our program logo.
Mabrie Ormes
Mabrie has painted outdoors for most of the (40) years she has been a painter. The challenge is always daunting in the beginning: so much equipment to haul! Once settled, she
loses herself in the place and in creating its visual record. Her long experience outdoors now
informs her work from photographs. Her paintings are intimate views of the natural order:
close-up and personal.
Deb VanPoolen
We are glad to work with this hyper-local Greensprings-based artist, activist, and educator for programs at Vesper Meadow. Her most recent work highlights the renown biodiversity of the Cascade-Siskiyou region.
Marga Laube
With an eye for aesthetics and a gift for storytelling through film, and desire to make positive change, Marga is a top-notch filmmaker. We are grateful to Marga for her work that kickstarted our communications.
Renée Rhodes
Renée is an artist, gardener, and arts organizer who lives two miles from the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco—on land that was once part of a rolling range of sand dunes. She makes social sculptures, videos, books, gardens, and walks that explore geological empathy, mimicry, and the creation of place-based memory through somatic practices. Renée has a small native plant nursery in her backyard and is currently working on a collaborative intercropping project that interplants native grasses in a small urban vineyard.
David Gordon
David Gordon, southern Oregon local is an intuitive painter whose process is based on looking and seeing. David likes to work from a place of inspiration and to share the inspiration with viewers. We are honors to have David setting up his easel in the meadow.
Zoe Keller
Artist Zoe Keller is a nature artist and illustrator from Woodstock, New York. Her meticulously detailed graphite and digital drawings explore biodiversity and wild places. Keller weaves drawings that explore the interconnectedness of fragile, vanishing ecosystems. By highlighting the biodiversity at risk in an era of human-driven mass extinction their work aims to inspire reverence for the natural world and action to defend what we have left. Keller's studio work draws upon months of research, collaborations with the scientific community, and on-the-ground experiences in wild places through artist residencies and self-directed expeditions. Keller has worked with Vesper Meadow to illustrate our Native Plant Coloring Cards as well as provide educational materials for our Fire Ecology and Human Relationship curriculum.
Tuula Rebhahn
Tuula is an Ashland based journalist and blogger who loves to share her outdoor experiences and supporting conservation groups through writing. We are glad to collaborate with Tuula as she has a passion “(to) translate my vast experiences into word nuggets that are philosophical, poetic, interesting and useful – sometimes all at the same time. “
Silvia Trujillo
Silvia Trujillo loves plein air painting; her particular passions being water, earth, sky, fields, and botanicals. Her focus is to foster a respect for our natural environment through art, and to increase the appreciation for the beauty that is beheld in a natural setting.
Hannah Bakken Morris
Hailing from Malheur County, OR Hannah works in print media, performance, sculpture, photography and installation to explore identity, the body, landscape, and place. Her works comment on land use in the United States and how the historical and contemporary narratives of the American West intersect with constructions of identity, economies, nationhood, and the environment. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Southern Oregon University in 2017 and her MFA in Print Media and MA in Critical Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2020. Hannah is currently the Assistant Director for the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA
Thomas Doty
Thomas Doty, the late native storyteller. He learned his art and native cultural traditions from elders, including listening to Grandma Maude, the family storyteller. His stories have been broadcast on Public Radio, and he is the recipient of a Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the national American Indian Program. As Thomas has been called, "A Cultural Treasure" and "A Master of his Art.” We are honored to been able to develop programs with his guidance and friendship. His legacy has become an integral part of the living oral tradition of southern Oregon through his stories.