The official launch party for Tool Book Volume III: Work Book took place at The Bronx Museum's Block Gallery in New York. Four of our featured artists from Work Book discussed how our daily labor and leisure intersect with the ways we relate, resist, and create.

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Asha Canalos and Jeanette Hart-Mann outlined an ongoing series of events in which zines that address social, health and environmental crises related to fracking in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico were censored by the New Mexico Museum of Art. Bronx-based artist Gina Goico presented a series of publicly engaged artworks “Pelliza Projects” which map the effects of global capitalism on culture, community and individual lives. Baltimore artist Jaimes Mayhew discussed the confluences of his art practice with the research practice of Lamont Stanley Bryant, Mayhew’s partner and a community psychology PhD student.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Asha Canalos is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, herbalist, community organizer and climate justice advocate based in Albuquerque, NM. For over eight years, she has fought the oil & gas industry, first as a member of an impacted community in upstate NY, and more recently, as an artist-activist working with The Greater Chaco Coalition and other allied groups in Northern New Mexico. Canalos received a B.A. in Visual Arts from Antioch College, as well as a M.F.A. in Painting, and a M.S. in Art History, both from The Pratt Institute. She is currently teaching in the Art & Ecology program at The University of New Mexico.

Jeanette Hart-mann is Director of Land Arts of the American West and Assistant Professor of Art & Ecology in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is an alumni of Land Arts of the American West (2000), earned a BFA, summa cum laude, and University Honors, summa cum laude from the University of New Mexico (2001), and a MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts (2012). She is co-founder and collective cohort of SeedBroadcast, a creative multi-platform agri-Culture project employing collaborative engagement, grassroots story making, and free-source seed action. Her artistic practice is centered in a desire to counter oppressive power structures through examining and cultivating transpecies relationships and ecologic processes as acts of resistance to germinate resiliency. Her methodologies are interdisciplinary spanning across video, sculpture, photography, installation, experimental media, print, performance, farming, writing, and activism.

Through her work, Gina Goico navigates her identity and the spaces where she exists in theDominican Republic and the United States. Through her career she has come to create a diverse body of work that ranges from embroidery to installations, ink drawings and performance. Goico, being an artist and also an educator, facilitates spaces for temporary communities and dialogues around healing in the current status quo. Besides the commonalities that reside in the conceptual process, her work tends to share bright
magentas, floral patterns, fabric and imagery that connects to the Caribbean. Goico has participated in Artist In the Marketplace (AIM) at The Bronx Museum of the Arts; The Laundromat Project, Kelly Street Resident Artist, Bronx, NY; Bronx Art Space Summer Resident Artist; Red Bull House of Art, Resident Artist, Detroit, MI and was a NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentee. She holds a AAS in Fine Arts and Illustration from Altos de Chavon the School of Design in the Dominican Republic and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons. She is currently a Van Lier Fellow with Smack Mellon.

Jaimes Mayhew is an artist and educator based in Baltimore, MD. His artwork is collaborative, interdisciplinary and concerned with ecological systems, which includes relationships in SLGBTQI+ communities, queering nature, and public space. His work and collaborations have been shown at The Baltimore Museum of Art, Arlington Arts Center, Eyebeam (New York City), Mass MoCa (Massachusetts), Collar Works (Troy, NY), The Red Dawns Festival (Slovenia), This Is Not a Gateway (London), 808 Gallery (Boston), The Transmodern Festival (Baltimore, MD), Goucher College (Baltimore, MD), Transformer Gallery (Washington, DC), Hoffmannsgallerí (Reykjavík, Iceland) among others.