COMMUNITY ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
Laumeier Sculpture Park’s Community Artist In Residence series provides opportunities for local artists to expand their practice and engage with the community through workshops, events and discussions. The goals of the Community Artist In Residence program include:
Introduce Laumeier Sculpture Park’s supportive community to the artist and their practice.
Diversify the Park’s programs and events to better enrich staff and visitor experience.
Inspire the artist to develop innovative projects, activities and/or discussions and leave a lasting impact on the Park and its visitors.
Each Community Artist In Residence will design and facilitate activities and content for programs throughout the year of their residency.
The Community Artist in Residence program is on hold in 2024.
2023 Community Artists In Residence
Emily Hemeyer
Emily Hemeyer, a teaching and community artist with a career spanning twenty years, holds a passion for arts integration in education through events, classes and conversations rooted in citizen science, resilience skills and sustainability. Throughout her career, Emily has worked with numerous organizations and individuals of all ages. Her current community arts project, The Wild Seed Field Museum, serves as a catalyst for a wide array of activities and programming with partnerships throughout the region.
Emily is an Artist-In-Residence at Artscope where she’s worked for the past seventeen years in a variety of capacities. She is a fellow with Project Dragonfly through Miami University, Ohio with the Advance Inquiry Program at the Missouri Botanical Gardens Cohort. Emily holds a BFA in Fibers and Photography from the University of Missouri, Columbia and studied at the Aegean Center for Fine Arts in Greece. She is a Community Arts Training (CAT) Graduate and Tiger Graduate with the St Louis Regional Arts Commission. Emily is a member of the Missouri Mycological Society (MOMS), and the North American Mycological Association (NAMA).
Click here to check out Emily’s Laumeier Biodiversity Project!
Lindsay Pichaske
Lindsay Pichaske is an artist and educator based in St. Louis, MO. She received her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and her BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work is exhibited throughout the country, including Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery in New York City, SOFA Chicago, and Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, DC, and is represented by Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis. This past fall (September 2022) she had a solo exhibit titled “Bodies in Time” at Duane Reed Gallery and is currently part of an exhibit at the Fuller Craft Museum titled “Lagomorphs: Rabbits and Hares in Contemporary Craft.” She was a long-term resident artist and Taunt Fellow at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts (2011-2012), and an Artist in Residence at the Craft Alliance (2018-2019). She received an “Emerging Artist” Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (2013) and the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award (2014). She currently makes work in her home studio and teaches ceramics at St. Louis Community College, Meramec.
Tamara Eberle / 2022
Tamara Eberle is an artist and art therapist living, working, and exhibiting in St Louis. Tamara has been practicing art therapy for 10 years and has been exhibiting art work for 20 years. She earned her BS in Art Education and MA in Art Therapy Counseling from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville (SIUE). Her early experiences teaching art began through Art Camp at Laumeier Sculpture Park. Her work ranges from fibers, photography, drawing, and sculpture, and she has been featured in a diverse range of group and juried exhibitions between Missouri and Illinois. Tamara has been the recipient of multiple fine art awards, including from SIUE, Art Saint Louis, and ArtMart. Tamara’s work was published in 2019 on the cover of Art Therapy: the professional journal of the American Art Therapy Association. Tamara is a professional member of the Missouri Art Therapy Association and Art Saint Louis.
Mee Jey / 2022
Mee Jey’s artmaking process relies on being resourceful while repurposing a variety of materials into intricate sculpture installations. As an immigrant from India, Mee Jey recalls developing these skills while growing up in a large farmer family working with limited resources. She began to study nature and had an interest in the way humans interacted with it and each other.
After receiving her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in the field of History and Archeology, Mee Jey began an art practice focusing on bringing art and creativity to those around her. In 2013, the artist and her husband embarked on a traveling project, “Artologue: Art for All,” which focused on reintroducing artmaking to people’s daily lives through murals and installations using only local materials. After working with about eighty families and visiting seventeen states in India, Mee Jey was recognized by both the Indian State government and the United States government. The artist then immigrated to the United States to pursue her Masters in Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Mee Jey recently began working with larger communities through “Artologue: Art for All” across several U.S. states with the support of local artist grants , including the Community Arts Training Fellowship at Regional Arts Commission. She was also honored with the St. Louis Visionary Emerging Artist Award for the year 2022. The artist and her family currently reside in St. Louis, Missouri.
Mark Pagano / 2021
Mark Pagano performing. Image courtesy of the artist.
Mark Pagano, is a singer/songwriter, touring musician, recording artist, and educator. Since moving to St. Louis, Pagano has worked with youth from early childhood to seniors in high school through songwriting workshops. He has served as the musical and artistic director for the non-profit group, International Playground Performing Arts Ensemble, for refugee teens. He has also directed rock-band programs for Camp Jam, Power Chord Academy, and New City School. In 2013, Pagano developed MusicMaker through Springboard’s St. Louis Public Schools partnership program, bringing song-writing curriculum to more than 100 St. Louis Public School District classrooms. He continued this endeavor with his Song Shaper program, working with different communities in the St. Louis region.
As a musician, Mark Pagano has shared his talent in music with diverse populations. Since 2004, Pagano has released eight albums of original music and has toured nationally both solo and with his band FIRE DOG. Locally, he performs his music at venues such as Nine Network’s Public Media Commons, Missouri History Museum, Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, as well as regional library systems. He has also enjoyed fruitful collaborations with innovative collectives, such as New Music Circle, the HEARding Cats Collective, Artica Festival, The People’s Joy Parade, and more.
Pagano recently launched his “Endangered Species Project”, a collection of songs that focuses on animals with whom we share this planet. One song, “Hellbender”, celebrates the hellbender salamander currently listed as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act.
Mark Pagano is also working on a solo family music record, coming this fall, with Grammy Award Winning indie music producer Dean Jones, funded by an Artist Support Grant from the Regional Arts Commission.
Kelly Jimenez & Alejandro Franco / 2021
Alejandro Franco and Kelly Jimenez, Ferris Wheel, 2019. Plastic on paper; 8’ x 4’; Commissioned by Granite City Art and Design District. Courtesy of the Artist.
Kelly Jimenez and Alejandro Franco are both Colombian-born artists now working in St. Louis. After meeting in Miami, Florida, the two artists discovered that they shared similar reasons for moving to the United States of America. Frano is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily with found objects assemblages and painting. Jimenez has worked as an Art Director, focused mainly on space intervention for film sets, editorial publications and visual concepts for set design.
These collaborative artists share their love of nature and are seeking ways to celebrate and preserve it. Currently they are working with stained glass imagery from single-use plastics, relying on the material’s translucency and color variety to invoke something beautiful that is worth preserving regardless of its transient and detrimental status. Jimenez and Franco’s current project is an effort to create awareness around the reckless use of single-use plastic.
Jimenez and Franco have shown work at Angad Arts Hotel, The Sheldon Art Gallery, G-CADD and Locust Projects.
Alejandro Franco and Kelly Jimenez, Serez Transitorios, 2020. Plastic on paper mounted on cardboard, 12’ x 8’; Commissioned by Granite City Art and Design District. Courtesy of the Artist.
Allana Ross, Atomic Garden, 2017. Mixed-media installation and event; 16’ x 16’ x 4’; Commissioned by Granite City Art and Design District.. Courtesy of the Artist.
Atomic Garden is a site-specific dye garden inspired by the gamma gardens of the Atoms for Peace movement. In a gamma garden, crops were planted in concentric circles around a radioactive isotope, testing the effects of radiation on plants. Atomic Garden’s circles are built of rubble from surrounding demolished and abandoned structures. The radioactive isotope at its center is a goblet of water from Coldwater Creek.
Allana Ross / 2020
Allana Ross is an artist and educator living in St. Louis. Her work explores the way we construct, teach, communicate and perpetuate our concept of nature and our place with(in/out) it. She leads alternative educational eco-tours, manages a native plant growing operation, runs a tiny pigment farm, and teaches in the visual arts department at Saint Louis Community College.
Ross’ work is interdisciplinary, rooted in drawing practices but incorporating fibers, critical spatial practices, multi-media, social practice, sculpture, and landscape interventions.
Allana Ross, Anti-Landscape, 2018. Mixed-media installation, 8’ x 12’. Courtesy of the Artist.
Anti-Landscape is a map of the St. Louis region dyed with plants grown in contaminated soils. The silk piece is surrounded by drawings of the plants and photographs and ephemera from contaminated sites throughout the region: West Lake Landfill, Coldwater Creek, Weldon Spring, Times Beach and Horseshoe Lake.
Ross’ Artist Statement: Our survival as a species depends on the acknowledgement of our dependence on the landscape and recognition of our place within nature instead of apart from it. The belief that humans are independent from the natural world facilitates a cycle of exploitation—we don’t think that what we put in the ground can harm us. My locally-focused artistic practice seeks to make our relationship with the environment explicit. Through physical participation and remediation, my practice responds to urgent issues, generating action through re-kindling lost relationships with our landscape.
Simiya Sudduth, Fort Defiance, 2018. Courtesy of the Artist
Simiya Sudduth / 2020
Simiya Sudduth is a mother, visual artist, designer, spiritual and healing arts practitioner currently living and practicing in St. Louis, MO.
Her practice explores the intersections of art, landscape, design, health, social justice and spirituality. Simiya’s visual arts practice informs her work as a healer while the study and practice of a variety spiritual and healing modalities inform her visual arts practice, equally. Her work fluctuates between attending births as a doula, facilitating group sound healing, breath work, movement, meditation experiences, creating drawings, installations and facilitating social justice-based community arts programming for youth.
Simiya Sudduth, Living Yoga Studio, 2017. Mixed-media installation. Courtesy of the Artist.
Above: Dryden Wells, Deconstruction of My Rubber Ducky (detail), earthenware & industrial porcelain tiles, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.
Dryden Wells attending the opening of Sam Falls exhibition.
DRYDEN WELLS / 2019
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Dryden Wells recently returned to his hometown after spending 14 years studying ceramics in the USA and China.
Upon the completion of his MFA at Texas Tech University, Wells moved to Jingdezhen, China, to manage and oversee production of the Pottery Workshop (PWS) – Design Studio. Wells returned to the U.S. and spent a year (2011-12) teaching Ceramics at Missouri State University in Springfield, MO, before moving back to China to work at the PWS in Shanghai. It was there that he had the opportunity to instruct weekly studio classes, college courses, and continue developing his own creative work. During 2016 and 2017, Wells taught at Northwest College, Powell, WY and spent the following academic year running the ceramics program at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, FL.
Tiffany Sutton, Girl in Pink with Apples, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
TIFFANY SUTTON / 2019
Tiffany J Sutton is a St. Louis, MO, based artist/photographer. Using Polaroid, film and digital cameras, she studies the symbolic link between women and fruit. With this in mind, she creates images of women in classical and candid poses. Originally interest in classical portraiture, her work is expanding to depict womanhood and nature in more conceptually diverse ways.
Andrea Coates / 2018
Andrea Coates, Parts detail, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Andrea Coates has over ten year of experience in graphic design and visual arts while also working with nonprofits. She has worked with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Island Press at Washington University in St. Louis and earned two mid-America EMMY nominations for her illustration work in documentaries originally aired on the Nine Network of Public Media and PBS.
Her practice incorporates collage, photography, digital photomontage, animation, video and sound. Recent works have been featured in national publications and exhibitions, including LBIF’s National Juried Exhibition of Works on Paper, 2016 and 2017, juried by Carter E. Foster, Curator of Drawing and Jane Panetta, Associate Curator of Drawing, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, a Bachelor of Art in Art Studio and a Bachelor of Art in Integrated Strategic Communication from the University of Kentucky.
José Guadalupe Garza / 2018
José Guadalupe Garza, Beyond the Sea, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
José Guadalupe Garza is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator who most recently exhibited work at the 2017 Biennale of Spazio Pubblico in Rome. He earned his BFA in Drawing from the University of Florida and his MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently the Museum Educator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Addoley Dzegede / 2018
Addoley Dzegede, Ohio Bell detail, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
Addoley Dzegede is a Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist based in St. Louis. Through a combination of words and images, she investigates notions of belonging, home, migration, location and hybrid identities. Dzegede’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Africa, and she has held residencies in Finland, Portugal, Iceland, St. Louis and Kansas City, as well as an apprenticeship in Philadelphia. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and was awarded a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, where she completed her MFA in Visual Art. Recent museum and gallery exhibitions and screenings include Kansas City; Spain; Milan, Italy; St. Louis; Moscow, Russia; Philadelphia; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Recent awards include the 2018 Great Rivers Biennial award; the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition; a St. Louis Regional Arts Commission Artist Support Grant; and a Creative Stimulus Award from CriticalMass for the Visual Arts.