Material Transformations

Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts) works in Altadena, California. She received her BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics from Brown University and MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute. Her practice utilizes installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunsthalle Osnabrück; Times Museum, Guangzhou; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; ICA, NYU Shanghai; Pitzer Galleries, Claremont; and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Lin has been included in recent group exhibitions including the 2021 Prospect.5 Triennial; 2021 Gwangju Biennial; 2018 Taipei Biennal; and 2018 Athens Biennal; and at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; New Museum, New York; and Sculpture Center, Long Island City. She is the recipient of several residencies, grants and fellowships, including the Gold Art Prize (2021); American Academy in Berlin Fellowship (2021); Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019); Artists Project Award (2018); Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017); Davidoff Art Residency (2018) and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Beatriz Cortez (b. El Salvador, 1970) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, memory in the aftermath of war, migration, and imaginaries of the future. Cortez has received the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches at California State University, Northridge. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council.

Kristine Thompson is an artist and educator working primarily in photography. Her work considers how contemporary photographic imagery circulates and often addresses representations of death, memorial practices, and mourning. She is the recipient of several awards, including a DAAD Fellowship in the Arts and an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Antenna Gallery, New Orleans; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena; the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Denver; Texas Woman’s University, Denton; and School 33 Art Center, Baltimore. She holds a B.S. in Education and Social Policy from Northwestern University and a M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Louisiana State University.

Mel Y. Chen (they/them/ta+) is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Mel is also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Science, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Haas Disability Studies and LGBTQ Citizenship Research Clusters. Previously, they served as Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College, and the Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. Their training spans the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, with a doctorate degree in linguistics that they transitioned to from computer engineering. Their 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, which won the MLA GL/Q Caucus Alan Bray Award), explores questions of racialization, gender, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of animacy. Chen’s second book project, which they are now completing, concerns the conceptual territories of toxicity and intoxication and their involvement in 19th century archival histories of the interanimation of race and disability. Their writing on the racialization and transing of pollution, cognitive disability and method, trans media, gender pronouns and linguistics, and more can be found in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Discourse, Women in Performance, Australian Feminist Studies, Signs, Medical Humanities, South Atlantic Quarterly, and GLQ, as well as a number of arts catalogues and scholarly anthologies such as the Handbook of Language and Sexuality, Meat!, and Unwatchable. Chen coedits a Duke University Press book series entitled “Anima,” highlighting scholarship in critical race and disability post/in/humanisms. They are also part of a small and sustaining queer/trans of color arts collective in the SF Bay Area.​