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Dayton Claudio

Visual Arts: Bas-relief, Painting

I have enjoyed a successful career in public art from 1995 to the present having successfully completed many projects around the country. I have an MFA and 12 years college teaching experience. My work is an investigation into the processes of nature. Using clay, with it’s unique primordial properties, I capture highly detailed textural surfaces. Painting with oils on these, “clay-formed canvases,” yields a versatile and ever changing platform of expression.

Bill FitzGibbons

Visual Arts: Other, Sculpture

My work is based on the philosophy that public art should complement and enhance the surrounding environment by creating engaging, yet practical, creative elements. As detailed in my resume, my projects have elevated this approach to evoke “place making” in public areas. My approach to public art provokes the elevation of space into an engaging, human experience.

Gerry High

Visual Arts: Abstract, Fine Art, Murals, Painting, Printmaking

Started my life in art with a commission to create 100 30” x 40” watercolor paintings for the Ocotillo lodge in 1984. The started showing my art at The Art Connection in Palm Springs in the 80’s. Worked with designers to make paintings for the many new country clubs all through the desert. Opened an art studio in Cathedral City in the 90’s on Perez Road. Created many paintings and started a faux finish business. Worked with Marshal Arts Studio for a few years working to decorate chain restaurants like El Toritto’s and Chi Chi’s. Opened a new Gallery on Highway 111 in Cathedral City for a couple of years. Opened and maintain Artspresso Gallery in Idyllwild,Ca.

Jeni Bate - Skyscapes For The Soul

Visual Arts: Murals, Other

“I paint the skies with peace and passion, because that’s the way they paint me.” My aim with my work is to provide an uplifting yet peaceful feeling for a space, to counteract the busy lives we tend to lead. I create realistic and impressionistic skyscapes in a variety of media, and sky-inspired abstracts in mixed media. My mixed media work is based around my signature refractured style. I also include poetry I wrote for the painting in many of my works. I am also available for commission paintings of many other subjects and can work from your photographs and ideas. I’ve painted pet-portraits, landscapes, concepts, even the words of a song. I also love working with unusually shaped spaces.

BJ Krivanek

Visual Arts: Media & Visual Communications, Mixed Media, Other, Sculpture, Site-specific; public art, inscription

BJ Krivanek is a professor emeritus of visual communication at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, principal of Krivanek+Breaux/ Art+Design, and founding artistic director of Community Architexts. He has an MFA in Art+Design from the University of Illinois/ Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Applied Arts from Iowa State University. During the past 25+ years, he has completed over 25 public art projects throughout the country, including activated structures for the CTA Brown Line Chicago station, an interactive artwork at the University of Florida, and a commission for the Oklahoma City Municipal Courthouse. Most recently, he has completed an activated plaza for the Municipal Courts Building in Oklahoma City and has received a commission with the Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield, IL. BJ’s work has been honored/ published in many design annuals, including the American Center for Design100 Show, American Institute of Graphic Arts, Society for Environmental Graphic Design, ID and Graphis, and included in the inaugural National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum/ New York. A feature article about his work appeared in Graphis 310/ Zurich. His work has received an NEA Federal Design Achievement Award and the Art Directors Club of New York Gold Medal as well as numerous SEGD honor/ merit awards, Illinois Arts Council fellowships, and grants from the Chicago and Los Angeles cultural affairs departments.

John Melvin

Architectural; Visual Arts: Sculpture, Site-specific

John Kenneth Melvin (MFA-SFAI), is a multi-disciplinary Eco-Artist inspiring cultural exchange via commissions and exhibitions internationally. A born & raised Bay Area native, he divides his off-project time between the USA and France, where he holds an ‘artist visa’ granted by the French government. He taught graduate level Art for 5 years and worked 10 years in the corporate world. He achieved over 20 funded ‘artist in residencies’ at institutions internationally from Cambodia to Colorado, 15 years of consecutive professional exhibitions including over 22 solo exhibitions and collaborates with both non-profits and ultra-luxury hotels, from Missouri to Maldives.

MIDABI MIDABI

Visual Arts: Mixed Media, Murals, Sculpture, Site-specific

Early in my life I established a deep commitment to divergent acts in hopes of attaining uncommon insight into the nature of reality. I utilize the power of text and compose my findings into an artistic practice as a means of sharing information; philosophical public intervention. I come from blue and white collar artists, salesmen, engineers, veterans, and progressive cultural pioneers. I began making art and seeking knowledge at the age of 15, from which my current work is a direct extension. I do not have a formal education in art, I have a bachelor’s in media & cultural studies, and a master’s in international counseling psychology. My influences include one grandmother who was a painter of female nudes in NYC, another who founded an art school in Los Angeles and retired to Palm Springs in the 1950’s, continuing art education out of her house, and my living 90 year old godfather who founded the world’s first LGBTQ fine art museum in NYC.

Lori Nozick

Architectural; Visual Arts: Installation, Murals, Other, Sculpture; Patinaed Metal Panels

Concurrent with my voyage through time and geography, my work explores time through unexpected passages. The forms and reference of my work are of architectural structures and organic materials with primal approaches, an intuitive dynamic informed by the materials and transcending its’ history to new forms. My work is deeply referential, structures we create and discard, offer a mixing of hidden narrative and exposed layers, examining ongoing cycles of cohesion and disintegration. My large-scale drawings and collages use maps and found images, and architectural structures whose scale and perspective is distorted or exaggerated. Art historian and critic Robert C. Morgan has written, “…structure signifies an inventory of shapes and elements that pull together even as they move in different directions…” The archetypal images and forms of my work function as a repository of individual and collective moments, forming a visceral bridge to a blending of time-frames, real and imagined.

Tanya Thamkruphat

Visual Arts: Media & Visual Communications

I’m a Thai-Vietnamese American poet and essayist. I’m the author of the poetry chapbooks, Em(body)ment of Wonder (Raine Publishing, 2021) and It Wasn’t a Dream (Fahmidan Publishing & Co., 2022). My writing appears in The Orange County Register, Button Poetry, Honey Literary, The Cincinnati Review, Rio Grande Review, and elsewhere. I’m a 2023 Kenyon Review alumn.

Hans van Meeuwen

Visual Arts: Installation, Sculpture

Apart from making shows in exhibition-spaces, I love to go outside and work with an external spot. I let my work play its role within, and interact with this larger environment. I enjoy considering how to relate to the people who use the space in their daily lives and routines. I love to work in a situation where people will unexpectedly come upon my intervention in their surroundings. I seek to elicit a moment of awareness in the flood of anonymity. We mostly go through life in an automatic-pilot state of mind. I would love to have the artwork see the environment with a fresh look for just a second, before going back to the automatic pilot. I would love to have my artwork given a few thoughts someone may pick up. And with that, inspire the passer-by for a moment to think outside the box of our day to day routine mindset, before she/he rushed back into life. I wish to design a work that gives a symbol to the space, to the building and/or the area.

Ravi Wilkie

Visual Arts: Fine Art, Illustration, Mixed Media, Murals, Other, Painting, Wall Treatments, Watercolor; Art Restoration

Growing up in an unstable household I began to use art as my own form of meditation at a really young age. When I was 13 I got my first job in Boulder Colorado, as an artist’s assistant, and have been working as a professional artist ever since. Before I graduated high school I studied art at Colorado University, and at 18, I left Colorado, and moved to New York City. There I got a job hand finishing at one of the top fine art frame shop in the industry and began to master my craft. After several years I ended up in showbiz where I managed the paint department at a scene shop in Brooklyn. There I spent most of my time painting back drops and set pieces for film, theater, television and trade show events. This enabled me to hone my faux finishing and paint treatment skills. While living in NYC I also ended up doing a fair amount of freelance illustration and even a bit of tattooing. During that time I met my wife, Elena and in 2013 we got married. Then we decided to move, and we started our new life in Redondo Beach, California in 2015. I landed a job at Poster Mountain, an art restoration shop, conserving and restoring original artwork and print media. In 2020 when the pandemic hit we decided to move out of LA and head to the desert, where we settled in La Quinta. I worked part time as a chalk artist, but by that point I was really itching to do my own thing. I started getting more commission work, which began to grow really quickly and before long I was booked up with murals. I was growing so fast that I needed help. Elena decided she also needed a change and she left her 25year career as a hairstylist. We were then able to focus on growing our business together and finding a new creative outlet for Elena. This gave way to making her own jewelry and me creating more art, so we sort of became an artist hub for each other and Wilkie Studios was born. Since then we have been busy painting murals, doing pop up festivals and finding more local shops to partner and grow with.

Kelly Witmer

Architectural; Furniture; Visual Arts: Bas-relief, Fences / Gates, Fountains, Glasswork / Neons, Installation, Mixed Media, Mosaics, Murals, Painting, Sculpture, Site-specific

I work out of my Joshua Tree studio to create paintings and sculptures in ceramic, glass and steel. Public art has been an exciting field to explore, since I love working in different mediums and relish a challenge. I have worked with many interior designers and art consultants for specific installations, and enjoy collaborating towards an envisioned environment. I received my BFA from University of the Arts in Philadelphia,PA, with additional studies at Parsons School of Design in Paris. I have attended residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Maine, ArtVallarta in Mexico and Can Serrat in Spain. My public art installations can be found in Los Angeles, Santa Rosa, CA and Las Vegas, NV.

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