OUR MISSION

The John and Susan Horseman Foundation for American Art is committed to advancing interest in and appreciation of the art of the United States. The Horseman Foundation firmly believes that an American art history without the contributions of women, Black, and Native/First Nations artists is not just incomplete, but incomprehensible. Since its inception in 2012, the Foundation has championed artists working outside the narrow parameters of the art historical canon due to their race, gender, or geographic locale. Through its Art Answers initiative, the Foundation facilitates access to, lends, and donates works of art; organizes and sponsors exhibitions and programing; and provides financial support for artists and scholars seeking to expand the dialogue of 20th and 21st century American art.

MISSION STATEMENT

Founded in 2006, The Petrucci Family Foundation (PFF) actively responds to the needs of the communities it serves. The PFF mission is to support education and create opportunities for Americans at every stage and station of life.

In 2012, The Petrucci Family Foundation began to collect the works of Black Artists in the belief that we cannon truly understand American history without understanding African American history.

Acting on this belief, the Foundation lends works from the Collection to museums and campus-based galleries for exhibitions and projects that engage audiences in meaningful conversation.

Now home to more than 500 works of art in all media, the PFF Collection continues to grow with new additions selected on the advice of professional educators, curators, and artists, emphasizing projects whose goal is to inspire the next generation of storytelling and cultural literacy in America.

The Foundation actively partners with host institutions in forging connections with surrounding communities, assisting with publications and programs associated with these exhibitions, and providing the entire collection online.

Familiar materials and found objects are used as a way to understand substance and context as the progenitors of meaning in a work. Salt, paraffin wax, books, ceramic, dirt, oil and milk are used in my works to evoke notions of preservation in domestic, institutional and cultural realms. These materials used in installations, videos and performances question traditional expectations of materials while revealing the complicated relationships between the social and psychological dimensions of material conditions and physical circumstances.

Brian’s work is a thoughtful combination of intuition and a delicate familiarity of figurative and representational painting, resulting in multi-layered images that reference many elements of the human condition. He focuses on the issues of memory and communication, often incorporating text into his narratives, thus redefining or challenging the way we perceive the written word and contemporary communication as a whole.

Casey McGuire was born in Shrewsbury, Vermont. The daughter of a taxidermist and decoy carver she was subject to object making at a young age. Growing up in Vermont has left a lasting impression and fuels the work produced today. McGuire received her BFA cum laude in Studio Arts from Alfred University; She received her MFA in 2007 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. In May of 2009 she was a full fellowship resident at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson VT. She has exhibited widely, at the Diary Center for the Arts, Boulder, Colorado; The Arvada Center, Arvada, Colorado. In 2010 she had solo exhibition at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids Michigan. Recently she was featured in the October 2009 issue of Sculpture Magazine. She currently is an Assistant Professor at the University of West Georgia, Carrollton.

In a culture oversaturated with imagery, how do we distinguish foreground from background, signal from noise, language from gibberish? In one sense, this is a physiological question. The way the brain processes visual information - seizing on certain shapes and colors while ignoring others - suggests that our own cognitive limitations could provide a representational logic of their own. I started a series of large amorphous collages to investigate this complex thread that courses through the history of our visual language. All of the infinitesimal shapes and colors that create meaning in art are ultimately derived from our experiences in nature and the natural limitations of the human brain (structure, light, tone, texture, the feeling of space, etc.). Nevertheless, we receive all of that sense data filtered through the images of our culture.

Christine Owen is a sculptor and video artist, and is a member of The Bridge Club collaborative performance art group. Owen received an MFA in ceramics from the University of Colorado, A BFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and lived for three years in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, as a traditional apprentice to artist Shige Morioka. Her works incorporate Eastern and Western influences, utilizing simple utilitarian forms to provoke a metaphoric dialogue with the senses. Owen lives and works in New York state.

Christopher M. Lavery has exhibited his work nationally in Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, San Francisco, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Denver Art Museum, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as internationally in Columbia, Czech Republic, France, Israel, Mexico, Palestine, and Peru. In 2008, he was awarded the Emerging Public Artist Project Grant from the Colorado Percent for the Arts at Denver International Airport for his project entitled Cloudscape; a monumental scale project that won an award in 2010 from the Americans for the Arts Public Art Network. Christopher has held residency at the well-known Vermont Studio Center where he began to develop a new body of work about the rapidly developing global warming crisis and the melting
of the polar icecaps.

David Alcantar (b. 1978) is an American artist currently residing and working in San Antonio, Texas. David was born in Laredo, Texas, a border town, but moved to San Antonio at age 5. Alcantar’s work is largely absent of hispanic political and cultural promotion typical of the south Texas region that might earn him the label of Chicano or Latino artist, and instead broadens its scope to the politics of human culture and experience. Since the beginning of his interest in art, as a child, Alcantar has been moved by “big picture ideas”, as he puts it. Alcantar’s work, which he often refers to as abstracted narratives, explores formal construction in pursuit of conceptual expression to ultimately create a context for meaningful experience.

References to time form undercurrents in much of Crean’s work - cyclical and paused, geological and momentary, lost and seized, contemplative and purchased. Crean divides her studio time between Ireland and Georgia USA, and is Associate Professor of Art at University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA.

Bivens uses found and made objects to forge narratives, provoke or encourage interaction, and reveal fictional and non-fictional mysteries. These objects shift from prop to subject to evidence when used in performance, video, and installation. Characters or identities are created to act as subjects, authors, inventors, and curators of the work.

My paintings employ a figure/ground compositional strategy as a metaphor for the paradigmatic pattern of binary opposition: internal/external, nature/culture, reality/illusion, image/material, feminine/masculine, flat/dimensional are primary motifs in my work. In my pictures, I manipulate the body’s position in space to explore the dynamic between place and identity. My paintings often reflect the decentered, placeless zones of suburbia or urban peripheral as a function of a dislocated identity or collective fantasy. I construct narrative clashes, where the protagonist participates in the pictorial space of the painting surface, residing in the logic of an allegorical perspective.

Julie Wills is an interdisciplinary visual and performance artist with a background and active interest in art theory and criticism. Her works in drawing, performance, installation, sculpture and video feature physical hardship or brutality as a stand-in for, or guide to, psychological hardship or brutality. She received her MFA from the University of Colorado, and MA in art criticism from the University of Montana. In addition to her individual studio practice, Wills has worked since 2004 as one of four members of The Bridge Club collaborative.

As an artist, Gregory Sale brings together a multitude of individuals implicated in and working with the criminal justice system in contexts that mitigate defining institutional positions. His aim is to soften and collapse boundaries, thereby encouraging reciprocal dialogue and mutual learning.

LISA IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF DRAWING & PAINTING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA AND A NEW MOTHER. SHE'S A SNOWBIRD WHO RETURNS TO NYC FOR THE SUMMER MONTHS.

LisaNa Macias Red Bear is an Awarded Interdisciplinary Glass Artist, Community Educator and Humanities Scholar. She is also a Credentialed Mental Health Professional, Native American Mental Health Specialist and Mental Health First Aid USA Training provider. LisaNa possesses a unique cultural perspective and background in the Arts and Humanities. She is an innovator in conceptualizing and facilitating creative community education projects that bring together diverse people to participate in her community-based Reclaiming Sacred: Healing Art, projects, workshops presentations, and installations.

The constructive nature of identity, the conflict that individuals face constructing their identities, and the duality of private and public lives are the main elements in my creative artwork. Many of the stories depicted in my work are metaphors of family secrets, personal struggles, and shared experiences – both in public and private places. O. Gustavo Plascencia was raised in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. Plascencia attended the Escuela de Artes Plasticas Ruben Herrera in Saltillo, Coahuila, before immigrating to the USA. He received his Master in Fine Arts at the University of Colorado in Boulder in Photography and Media Arts and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Arlington.

Rick Silva is an Assistant Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Oregon. His work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including Transmediale (Germany), Futuresonic (U.K.), and Sonar (Spain). His research has been supported through grants and commissions from places such as Rhizome and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sama Alshaibi (Palestine/Iraq) multi-media artworks disinters negotiations in spaces of conflict: the causation and aftermath of war and exile, the clashes between nation and citizenry, the vexatious dynamics of humans competing for land, resources and power, and finally, one’s own internal battle for control through fear and fearlessness. Although she frequently uses her own body, Alshaibi is rarely representing herself directly. The body situates itself in allegorical contexts, trapped in time and space. The body juxtaposed with symbol, backdrop and gesture, constructs contexts of her physicality. The body as evolving metaphor. The body as site. The absence of her body in her artwork is still the context of the body absent.

The Artnauts artist collective was founded in 1996 by Dr. George Rivera, Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The collective uses the arts as a tool for addressing global issues while connecting artists from around the world. The group has exhibited work in museum, university, gallery and public spaces on four continents and has captured the attention of art critics both in the United States and internationally. The work of the collective is rooted in an engaged practice that draws from Joseph Beuys’ construct of “social sculpture,” Paulo Freire’s “conscientization” or critical consciousness and Nina Felshin’s definition of “activist art.” The collective has worked at the intersection of critical consciousness and contemporary artistic practice to impact change for almost two decades. The collective started with George Rivera and four other founding members (Garrison Roots, Dennis Dalton, Luis Valdevino, Beth Krensky).