Drawing the Line
Influence, Inspiration, and Appropriation in Printmaking
“Drawing The Line: Influence, Inspiration, and Appropriation” is a discussion series hosted by SPA and facilitated by Cleo Barnett. The recordings for all panel discussions can be found below.
MEET OUR Facilitator
CLEO BARNETT is a curator, creative director, post disciplinary artist and emergent strategist working in the arts & civic engagement. For the past decade, Cleo has worked internationally with renowned artists, city councils, movement leaders, global brands, and foundations to build campaigns and public space interventions that explore the relationship between storytelling, community empowerment and human rights. Barnett has directed and produced more than 300 public space interventions across five continents, reaching hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Born in New Zealand and raised in Seattle, Washington, Barnett currently lives in Los Angeles, California. Barnett is currently the Executive Director of Amplifier, a non-profit design lab that builds media experiments to amplify social movements. Her work has been featured at the Brooklyn Museum, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, CNN, VICE and elsewhere. Cleo holds an M.A. in Art and Public Policy from New York University, and a double B.A. in Political Science and International Business from the University of Auckland.
I. DRawing the line with Tracy Rector & Gregg DEAL
TRACY RECTOR is a multicultural filmmaker, curator, community organizer, and programmer. She has directed and produced over 400 shorts and other films and is in production on her sixth feature documentary. As an impact producer, Tracy served on the team for the Emmy Award winning feature documentary Dawnland, which premiered on Independent Lens’ 2018/19 season to 2.1 million viewers in its opening week.
GREGG DEAL (Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe) is a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and "disruptor." His work is informed by his Native identity and includes exhaustive critiques of American society, politics, popular culture and history. Through paintings, murals, performance work, filmmaking, spoken word, and more, Deal invites the viewer to confront these issues both in the present and the past tense.
II. DRAWING THE LINE WITH Ann LEWIS & Kate DeCiccio
ANN LEWIS is a multidisciplinary activist artist using painting, installation, and participatory performance in our public spaces to explore themes related to American identity, power structures, and justice. Her work interrogates power imbalances such as mass incarceration, police brutality, and the desecration of women’s and trans rights.
KATE DeCICCIO is an Oakland based artist, educator & creative strategist. Her work centers portraiture for counter narrative, community storytelling & cultural strategy on behalf of abolition and collective liberation. DeCiccio is the Cultural Strategist for Performing Statistics, a project that supports youth organizers to close youth prisons across the country.
III. DRawing the line with JUDE Vesvarut & TANN PARKER
JUDE VESVARUT (LETRONIK) is a non-binary QTPOC artist/ tattooist, currently tattooing at Lilith Tattoo, Seattle, WA, Unceded Coast Salish territories of the Duwamish People. Jude started tattooing in 2012 and over the years has worked as a tattooist, concept artist, muralist, and illustrator in LA, Vancouver, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Seattle.
TANN PARKER is a tattoo artist, archivist, Tattoo Consultant, and creator of Ink The Diaspora. Tann created Ink The Diaspora in response to pervasive colorism, anti-blackness, and discrimination in the tattoo industry. Tann specializes in offering specifically dark-skinned Black women and femmes a curated experience to rethink and decolonize how they collect tattoos and who they allow to tattoo their skin. As an archivist, Tann creates and collects imagery for Black trans people and women to see representations of themselves in the tattoo industry.
IV. DRawing the line with MONYEE CHAU & Gabriel-Bello Diaz
MONYEE CHAU is a queer Taiwanese/Chinese American artist. Receiving their BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2018, they further their analysis of diaspora and decolonization with themes of labor, ancestral healing, and community. They have curated and exhibited at institutions both throughout Seattle and internationally, with the intent of cultivating and empowering communities by sharing intimate and vulnerable stories.
GABRIEL BELLO-DIAZ is a Puerto Rican artist, designer and instructor. As founder of Efficio he combines 3D printing and laser cut technology with leather to create custom high end leather products. Ancestral Future is his proudest fashion vision, highlighting indigenous and ancestral traditions of textiles and symbols through digital fabrication to help hidden stories of our community emerge. Gabriel has spent his career focused on highlighting underrepresented voices through multidisciplinary collaboration.