Guest Editorial Contributor Chris Sauter grew up on his grandparents’ ranch in Boerne, a small German settlement north of San Antonio. He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Artpace San Antonio, Cueto Project (New York), Finesilver Gallery (Houston/San Antonio), Elizabeth Dee (New York), Galerie Valerie Cueto (Paris) and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Group exhibitions include OPEN ev+a (Limerick); Domicile: Public.Privé, Musée d’Art Moderne (Saint-Etienne); Wall to Wall Drawing, The Drawing Center (New York); Drawing Outside the Lines, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Out of the Ordinary at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Christopher Collier’s project High Yield was undertaken as part of the FRED international festival of site-specific installation in Cumbria, UK, with the support and collaboration of local farmers and countryside organizations. The project consists of 100 pairs of inverted boots installed in a sheepfold on Helvellyn Mountain referencing both the declining fortunes of hill farming in the region and Eleanor Antin’s seminal work 100 BootsCurator and writer Jennifer Davy is more often than not a deer in headlights hailing from Jersey currently living in a flat in Berlin yet still calls Tortilleria La Popular in San Antone her home away from home whereupon this writin’ commenced.
Fallen Fruit Collective formed six years ago through a project by Los Angeles-based artists David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Using fruit as their lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. A number of their projects look at the social, political and ecological issues surrounding local food, public food and land use.
Artist Buster Graybill harvests memories, stories and objects from the rich cultural geography of rural America. His themes of adaptation, displacement and recontextualization are spawned from the artist’s personal experience and observation of changes in the landscape of his native Texas.
Sarah Higgins’ artistic output deals with the subjectivity of identity: the ways in which we view and define ourselves versus the ways in which we are viewed and defined by others. She focuses on rites of passage and coming-of-age rituals in American subcultures, using photography and embroidery as her primary media.
Ben Judson is a poet and writer based in San Antonio. He is a corresponding editor of Art Lies.
Artist Karen Lubbock produces Karen magazine, which explores daily life in a small English village. Lubbock is central to all aspects of production, recording, photographing, designing, editing and publishing herself. She presents an ordinariness based on her engagement with people and her immediate environment as a counterpoint to celebrity culture and how information is mediated and consumed.
Andrzej Maciejewski is a Polish-born artist currently living in rural Ontario.
Matthew Moore is a fourth-generation farmer whose land and life is quickly being overcome by suburban sprawl. He creates large, site-specific earthworks on and around his family’s land, which highlight the grounds on which the urban and rural collide and compete. Moore also works with video and installation art, addressing issues of ecological, cultural and economical sustainability revealed through his artistic narrative regarding the potential loss of the romanticized American farm.
Emily Morrison is the founder and director of Trouser House, an upstart art space and urban farming project in New Orleans.
Rosemary Shirley is an artist and writer based in Winchester. She is a regular contributor to a-n Magazine and the editor of the artists’ fanzine Leisure Centre. Shirley’s primary interests include explorations of the everyday and non-urban artistic practices.
Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson have been collaborating since 2001. Their work explores issues of history, culture and the environment in relation to the individual and his/her sense of belonging or detachment. Recent projects use the relationship between humans and animals as a springboard to posit questions on cultural and individual location between domesticity and the wilderness.
Hills Snyder is an artist, writer and musician based in San Antonio. He is the director of the artist-run space Sala Diaz.
Cover artist Amy Stein is a photographer and teacher based in New York. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is featured in many private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Nevada Museum of Art, SMoCA and the West Collection. Stein’s first book, Domesticated, was released in fall 2008. It won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival.
Kurt Wagner and Richard Saxton’s collaboration Cool Pastoral Splendor includes a selection of pictures from Saxton’s “Research Archive” and writings by Wagner. With a narrative built on post-punk irony and images made from the migration of ready-made ideals, their collaborative effort seeks to evolve the art object. Saxton is an artist working in the fields of sculpture, architecture, design and public art. He currently holds the position of Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Artist and musician Kurt Wagner is best known as the singer/songwriter for the Nashville-based band Lambchop. Lambchop’s sound is described as an eclectic mix of country, rock, R&B and avant-pop.
Allison Weise is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in San Diego.