PANELIST BIOS:

AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides is a femme-led binational artist collaborative that works along the U.S./Mexico border to build migrant support systems through craft, care, and mutual aid to advance pro-migrant narratives in the U.S. and Mexico. Founded in 2016 by the artist Tanya Aguiñiga as a way to make visible issues that affect the transnational population in Tijuana, the project has grown organically in scale and scope in reaction to a changing border landscape. AMBOS Projects reside in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago. Current and past collaborators include Karla Aguiñiga, Tanya Aguiñiga, Jackie Amézquita, Cecilia Brawley, Gina Clyne, Cog•nate Collective, Natalie Godinez, Diana Ryoo, and Juan Villavicencio, among other artists in both the United States and Mexico.

Astri Swendsrud is a Los Angeles-based artist whose multi-disciplinary practice investigates the ways in which humans form meaning, posing questions regarding belief, interpretation, and the instinct to seek and place significance in patterns. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including at JOAN, The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Visitor Welcome Center, Richard Telles Fine Art, TSALA, Irenic Projects, General Projects and the Vincent Price Museum. Additionally, Swendsrud is part of the collaborative project Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, and their book The Semi-Tropic Spiritualist’s Guidebook was published by Insert Press in 2018. She was also co-founder and co-director of Elephant, an artist-run space in Los Angeles from 2010-2023. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2008.

Elana Mann is an artist and activist who explores the power of the collective voice, the embodiment of language, freedom of speech and disability. Mann is Hard of Hearing and for over twenty years she has researched the act of listening through sculpture, sound, works on paper, and public performances. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Art and History (Lancaster, CA), 18th Street Art Center (Santa Monica, CA), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), Artpace (San Antonio, TX). Mann has received numerous awards, including an Artist-In-Residence at Artpace San Antonio, the Jenni Crain Foundation award, the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award, the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla, the University of Chicago, the Getty Research Institute and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, among others.

Amy Lyford is Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history. Her research and writing center on 20th-Century artistic practices in the US and Europe, with a special interest in the politics of art, issues of race, gender and sexuality. She is also a scholar of interwar European and US artists and collectives working against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.  Her books include Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Univ of California Press, 2007), Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor and National Identity, 1930-1950 (Univ of California Press, 2013), and Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning (Reaktion Books, 2023). She is working on a new book about the Paris-based surrealist photographer Dora Maar (under contract with Reaktion Books).

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Forrest Kirk is a Black American painter, whose work is a visceral exploration of identity, history, and resilience. Using acrylics and Gorilla Glue, he layers, binds, and distorts surfaces to reflect the complexities of the Black experience—its strength, its fragmentation, and its reconstruction. In the artist’s own words, “My art is both a mirror and a battleground, where color, texture, and adhesive tension speak to the struggles and triumphs woven into our cultural fabric. Gorilla Glue, a material meant to repair, takes on a deeper meaning in my work—it holds fractured narratives together, just as Black Americans have continually rebuilt and redefined themselves in a society that often seeks to dismantle. My paintings are textured testimonies, confronting themes of systemic oppression, resilience, and self-determination. Through abstraction and symbolism, I challenge the viewer to see beyond the surface—to witness the layered realities of Black existence. The thick application of paint, the erratic glue trails, and the rawness of the materials are intentional acts of defiance and reclamation. My work is not just about telling a story—it’s about demanding recognition, about creating spaces where Black voices are seen, felt, and understood in their full complexity.”

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to educational museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California, locating these collective acts of violence within the larger history of anti-immigration, white supremacy, and racial terror lynchings.

Works from the Profiled Series and the award winning PAC Prize publication Profiled (LACMA, 2011) have been exhibited internationally and grew out of his research into the history of educational displays on race, by drawing on the collections of over forty museums including, L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Getty Museum and LACMA in LA, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Washington D.C., the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), among others.

Gonzales-Day received his MFA in art from UC Irvine; his MA in art history from Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.; and was a Van Leer Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP). Other fellowships include: the Getty Research Institute (GRI), The Smithsonian SAAM fellowship in American Art, and the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship (SARF); He was a Senior Fellow at The Terra Foundation in Giverny, France; The Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy, and  Gonzales-Day has received fellowships and awards from Art Matters, The Avery Foundation, California Community Foundation, Creative Capital,  L.A.s' COLA Award,  and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. His work is in the permanent collection of The Getty; LACMA; MOCA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; MoMA, NYC;  Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, among others.

Laurie Lipton was born in New York in 1953 and began drawing at the age of four. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honors). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, London and moved back to the USA after 36 years abroad. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA.

Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. "It's an insane way to draw", she says, "but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail."

Zak Smith is an artist whose work is included in several public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the author of several books including We Did Porn, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow and the recent career retrospective Drown In It . He lives and works in Los Angeles.