Artists Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist were in residence in VCAM in late March and early April 2019, during which time they hosted a People’s Paper Co-op Pop-Up Exhibit and Conversation with Members of the People's Paper Co-op and Reentry Think Tank, along with a Friday Crosslisted Conversation and open lunch.

Tuesday, March 26: People’s Paper Co-op Pop-Up Exhibit + Conversation with Members of the People's Paper Co-op and Reentry Think Tank. Their pop-up exhibition dealt with the creative solutions these organizations deploy in transforming the stereotypes, social services, and platforms that impact our lives and communities.

Friday, April 12: Crosslisted Conversation with Mark Strandquist and Courtney Bowles. Artists Mark Strandquist and Courtney Bowles held an informal lunchtime conversation on using art as a vehicle to connect diverse communities and to amplify, celebrate, and power social justice movements.

About the Artists

Mark Strandquist and Courtney Bowles have spent years using art as a vehicle to connect diverse communities and to amplify, celebrate, and power social justice movements, in particular criminal justice and incarceration reform. Their media campaigns and immersive exhibitions have reached tens of thousands of people, and have helped advocates close prisons, pass laws, and train an entire police force (Richmond, VA).

They have received multiple awards, fellowships, national residencies, and have reached wide audiences through the New York Times, NPR, the Guardian, the Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, and VICE. Their work has been exhibited at Project Row Houses, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and galleries across the country. Beyond traditional art spaces, their work has been seen and engaged with by tens of thousands of people through exhibits in legal clinics, parades, church basements, conferences, state legislatures, and city streets.

Mark Strandquist is the founder and creative director of the Performing Statistics project in Richmond, VA and they both co-direct the People’s Paper Co-op at the Village of Arts and Humanities, and founded and co-direct The Reentry Think Tank through fellowships from A Blade of Grass and Open Society foundations.

Multidisciplinary artist Mariel Capanna was in residence in VCAM for the first three weeks of April 2018, during which time she visited courses, discussed her work in fresco and landscape, and hosted an open studio, creating an immersive three-walled painting. She also held a public workshop teaching the art of fresco on Saturday, April 7th.

Events

• Project: Collaborative Painting in VCAM
• Limited Space Event: Fresco Workshop with VCAM Philadelphia Artist in Residence Mariel Capanna

Mariel Capanna

Mariel Capanna lives and works in Philadelphia. She received her BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include the site-specific fresco Little Stone, Open Home at Good Weather gallery in North Little Rock, Arkansas; Left at Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Con/Safos, a collaboration with artist Rafa Esparza at the Bowtie Project in Los Angeles, California. She is the recipient of an Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship and a Kittredge Fund grant, and has attended residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting (Skowhegan, ME), Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology Residency (Michoacán, Mexico), the Mountain School of Art (Los Angeles, CA), and the Tacony LAB — a project collaboratively managed by MuralArts and the Free Library of Philadelphia.