2015 American Mosaic Summit: Featured Presentation Program
Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Friday, March 13 and Saturday, March 14, 2015

2014 SAMA Board of Trustees

SAMA Annual General Membership Meeting: (Breakfast with the Board of Trustees)

Friday, March 13, 2015 – 8:00am – 10:00am
Regency Ballroom, 4th Floor, Loews Philadelphia Hotel

We are so excited to have you join us for breakfast and the 2015 General Membership Meeting. Definitely worth getting up for! Meet the officers, board members, and committee chairs who head up our programs and initiatives, as well as SAMA’s hard working staff. In addition to our annual report on SAMA’s many accomplishments since the last conference, we’ll bring you up-to-date on the status of the organization and preview plans for the coming year. Included in this year’s General Meeting will be elections to the SAMA Board of Trustees (you can find a list of nominees in your conference materials).  Join us and find out how you can be a part of SAMA’s future!

Isaiah Zagar (image: Emily Smith)

A Legacy 40 Years in the Making: Mosaic, Folk Art and Philadelphia with Isaiah Zager

Friday, March 13, 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Regency Ballroom, 4th Floor, Loews Philadelphia Hotel

Includes Lunch at 1:00pm with Full Package Registration.
Slim Package Registrants may attend presentation at 2:00pm

Mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar is one of the most well-known artists in Philadelphia. His work adorns more than 100 walls in the city and 3,000 square feet of space at his visionary art environment Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, now a non-profit visited by more than 70,000 people each year. Zagar will discuss how this work began more than 40 years ago and his role in transforming the South Street neighborhood where he lives. Zagar will discuss his influences, from outsider art to Peruvian folk art, and how, at 75, he continues to learn and grow as an artist through recent projects in Mexico and Philadelphia. A question and answer session will follow the talk.

Isaiah Zagar is an award-winning mosaic mural artist whose work can be found on more than 200 public walls throughout the city of Philadelphia and around the world. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Brooklyn, Zagar received his B.F.A. in Painting and Graphics at the Pratt Institute of Art in New York City. When he was 19 years old, Zagar discovered the folk art installations of Clarence Schmidt in Woodstock, New York. Influenced by Schmidt, Picasso, Jean Debuffet, Kurt Schwitters, Antonio Gaudi, Simon Rodia and Joseph Ferdinand Cheval, he was inspired to include the concepts of untrained artists as manifestations of fine art.

Zagar’s largest public installation is the visionary art environment Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens (PMG), which now operates as a non-profit gallery and community art center. PMG inspires creativity and community engagement by educating the public about folk, mosaic, and visionary art, and preserves, interprets, and provides access to Isaiah Zagar’s unique mosaic art environment and his public murals. Zagar’s work is also included in the permanent collections of numerous art institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and has been featured in solo exhibitions throughout the Philadelphia area. Zagar has received grants for his artistic excellence from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Charitable Trusts. ~PhillyMagicGardens.org 

Rachel Sager

The ART of Placing Art: Putting Western Pennsylvania on the Mosaic Map with Rachel Sager

Friday, March 13, 2015, 3:15pm – 4:15pm
Regency Ballroom, 4th Floor, Loews Philadelphia Hotel

Listen to mosaic storyteller, Rachel Sager, as she weaves adventures through the mountains and valleys of her native Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Come away with a deeper understanding of what it means to stay local as Rachel shares her faithful commitment to PLACE in the context of mosaic. Whether transforming raw geology into tesserae or embracing the imperfections of her often marginalized Appalachian geography, Rachel insists on an elemental approach to solving problems. Travel with this innovative artist and dynamic teacher as she illuminates her philosophy of advancement through multiple fronts: teaching, talking, working, showing, and collaborating. Learn the secrets of transforming a weakness into strength within your art and out in your community through Rachel’s often brutally honest storytelling, all while viewing high quality imagery of her latest art. From Marcellus as mosaic, to maps of the past and our unknown future, to material being subordinate in comparison with technique; the narration within this presentation will help you pioneer your own unique path through the vast opportunities that contemporary mosaic is offering us.

Rachel Sager, Artist, Teacher, Speaker and Fayette County, Pennsylvania native. Rachel works on the cutting edge of the contemporary mosaic fine art movement. Her innovative work has been represented in cities throughout the U.S. and internationally and has been awarded multiple Best of Shows in juried exhibitions. Her Marcellus Shale Series stands as a true Pittsburgh success story and her work is collected with passion by private clients and corporations all over the world. Rachel’s time spent studying with Italian maestros has shaped her mosaic philosophy, and she brings these classical techniques home to the here and now of Western Pennsylvania’s sandstone, limestone, slate, and coal seams. With feet firmly planted in the Allegheny Mountains, Rachel confidently shouts from the rooftops…“look at this beautifully imperfect corner of the world!” ~rachelsagermosaics.com

The Work of Kelly Knickerbocker, Erin Pankratz-Smith, Jo Braun and Kate Jessup

Beyond Technique: That Elusive “Something More” Panel Discussion

Moderator: Karen Ketterin Dimit
Panelists: Kelley Knickerbocker, Erin Pankratz-Smith, Kate Jessup, and Jo Braun
Friday, March 13, 2015 – 4:30pm – 5:30pm
Regency Ballroom, 4th Floor, Loews Philadelphia Hotel

It’s not uncommon for members of the mosaic arts community to claim passionately that mosaic art must embody Something More than just good technique in order for the discipline to claim its place as a form of contemporary fine art expression. All four artists on this panel have made some version of this claim at some point, but what do they mean by Something More? Why isn’t good technique enough? Why isn’t it sufficient for an artwork to be well-executed and pleasing to the eye? What is this Something More that mosaic art should embody or express? If we figure out what the Something More is, how do we cultivate it? Where can we study this Something More if institutions of higher education in North America don’t even offer mosaic as a course of study?

Using the fast-paced visual Pecha Kucha format (each artist presents 20 slides and speaks to each slide for 20 seconds) to touch on various factors such as collaborative acts, conceptual inquiry and the phenomenon of collective movements. Kelley, Kate, Erin, and Jo will share their thoughts on the process of critical making and how they create work in the mosaic medium, but without a medium-centric mindset. Presentation will be followed by a Q&A, moderated by Karen Kettering Dimit.

Visual artist Kelley Knickerbocker began studying mosaic in 2005 with various artists around the US, then left a 22-yr administrative career at the University of Washington in 2006 to found a mosaic studio (Rivenworks Mosaics, Seattle, WA) and began designing/ fabricating/installing mosaic artwork for public, commercial, residential and gallery environments. Kelley’s ruggedly dimensional mosaic artworks – in natural materials, found objects, sometimes even the waste of the studio process itself, such as paper towels and random blobs of hardened cement mortar – are a textural distillation of her fascination with contrast, material properties and the technical challenges of mosaic construction. Her work is widely collected and regularly exhibited in the US and abroad. Believing that interaction with other art makers is key to the freshness and depth of her mosaic practice, Kelley travels extensively speaking, collaborating, and teaching in-depth workshops on mosaic style and technique. ~rivenworksmosaics.com

Erin Pankratz-Smith has been honing her intuitive understanding of color since her childhood in the Northwest Territories. Erin studied ballet until the age of 20, and then art at Alberta College of Art and Design. In 1998 she began to explore mosaic, and in 2011 she “turned pro” with a 436sf mosaic for the Edmonton International Airport. In 2013 Erin received the Innovation in Mosaics Award from the SAMA juried group exhibition Mosaic Art International, and began sharing her innovative approach and techniques in workshops across North America. She continues to create mosaics for public, corporate and private clients and builds a robust body of personal work that pushes color boundaries and blurs the lines between the traditional elements of mosaic: substrate, adhesive, and tesserae. ~erinpankratz.com

Kate Jessup is a visual artist whose practice is rooted in mosaic-based processes. A graduate of the Comparative History of Ideas program at the University of Washington, she divides her time between studio work and consulting on the design of tiled spaces. Her studio work is often motivated by a desire to apply the formal language of mosaic to the process of self-expression. Her space-design practice is influenced by the need to infuse the formal language of tile with elements that reflect the dynamic nature of life itself. In combining these modalities, she celebrates a durable medium, its timeless language, and the way in which objects of expression are as much their physical presence as the space they create around themselves. Her artwork is held in private and public collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the MAR museum in Ravenna, Italy. ~katejessup.com

Jo Braun is a visual artist with a background in sociocultural anthropology. She began teaching herself how to create mosaic art in 2002 at the age of 30, with no formal art instruction. She spent a few years taking workshops; studying “how-to’s” posted in internet mosaic art forums, and working in her garage studio until she gained competence in basic mosaic techniques. Then her academic training kicked in and she turned her attention to addressing conceptual issues. Jo maintains an active public art and studio practice, and co-curates group exhibitions that seek to elevate the mosaic medium as a form of contemporary fine art expression. She teaches and lectures occasionally, and creates art that isn’t “mosaic” by any definition when she’s pretty sure nobody’s looking. Jo lives and works in Seattle, WA. ~jo-braun.com

Karen Kettering Dimit co-founded the LIC Arts Open festival in NYC, where she maintains her studio. She has shown extensively throughout the U.S., most recently at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, InScape in Seattle, The Gallery at Penn College of Technology, the LIC Art Center Gallery, the Museum of Man in San Diego, and Gold Coast Art Gallery in Great Neck. In NYC she has been in numerous shows, including “Idle Hands…”, “Go.Figure” and “Light, Sound, Movement!”. Her “Medusa” won the “Best in Show” in the MAI show at the High Risk Gallery in Chicago; and “Miss Willendorf 2008” won “First Place” in the Pen and Brush 62^nd Annual Sculpture Exhibition in NYC. Ms. Dimit’s work is in collections throught the U.S, Canada and Europe. She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Compleat Sculptor in New York, and Orsoni Mosaics in Venice, Italy. ~kkdimit.com

Art Underground: Mosaicking the New York Subway with Stephen Miotto

Date and Time: Saturday, March 14, 2015 – 1:00 – 2:00pm
Location: Regency Ballroom, 4th Floor, Lowes Philadelphia Hotel

Stephen Miotto is one of the mosaic artists responsible for the creation and installation of many of the New York City subway mosaics.  Like many other master mosaicists , he has an incredible ability to interpret unique and complex visions of artists from a variety of disciplines.  Mr. Miotto will be discussing NYC subway projects from the past 5 to 10 years.  He will be focusing on a particular project for a new station at 34^th St and 11 Ave.  The artwork designed by Zenobia Bailey,  presented many challenges due to the unique shapes of the substrates.  Mr. Miotto will be discussing how they dealt with the variety of issues from beginning to installation.

To Be a Mosaic Artist a Three Point Perspective with Yakov, Angele and Yulia Hanansen

Saturday, March 14, 2015 – 2:15pm – 3:15pm
Regency Ballroom. 4th Floor, Loews Philadelphia Hotel

A family of artists Yakov, Angele, and Yulia Hanansen will discuss what it means to be a mosaic artist. As a family these three artists have experienced different paths of becoming professional art makers. Their paths intersect, run parallel, merge, or go separate ways. For Yakov becoming a mosaic artist meant a thorough research of ancient mosaic arts, site visits, and paper writing. He will present his search for an original expression and how the studies of ancient mosaics resulted in his modern mosaic artworks that have been admired by many patrons around the world. Angele’s quest for a mosaic expression has a different path rooted in her native Lithuanian culture’s love for nature. Angele’s mosaic artworks originate from her instinctive sensibility to the beauty and poetry contained within every living thing. When the creative forces of Yakov and Angele are combined they result in powerful mosaic collaborations that adorn many public buildings and private collections around the US and the world. And one more result from combining creative forces- Angele and Yakov passed the skills to their two children. Yulia, who has become a mosaic artist on her own, will discuss how her mosaic heritage and a formal art education in other art forms helped shape her own mosaic style. The presentation will feature images of multiple personal and commissioned artworks that Yakov, Angele, and Yulia have created during their mosaic careers.

Angele Hanansen

Yulia and Yakov Hanansen

Angele and Yakov met as students in the 1960’s in Luthuania’s Kaunas College of Applied Arts. After earning degrees in ceramics they continued their studies at Moscow Textile University mastering the art of tapestry, textile technology, and applied arts that included mosaics. After graduating with Master of Fine Arts degrees Angele and Yakov created numerous mosaic, tapestry, and multi-media projects for local public spaces. They also completed and exhibited projects nation-wide and internationally. For their efforts in promoting arts they both were rewarded multiple national awards and a membership in the honor-based National Artist Foundation. In 1991 the Hanansens moved to New York City and their new life began. Their hard labor, knowledge, and determination paid off. In 1995 they opened Unicorn Art Studio, Inc. that is celebrating its 20th year in 2015. The studio specializes in mosaics for public and private spaces, large scale, architectural, and functional pieces. Yakov and Angele’s projects include series of mosaics for New York’s Penn Station, NJ Hazzlet Station, multiple NYC buildings, private residences, and projects nation-wide. In addition Yakov and Angele instruct mosaic courses in their beautiful studio space filled with mosaic art and energy.  ~MosaicMaster.com 

Yulia Hanansen, an award-winning artist, was born in 1972 in Moscow, Russia. She lived in Russia, Uzbek Republic, Lithuania, New York City, Ann Arbor, MI, and is currently residing in the charming city of Baltimore, MD, USA. Yulia earned her B.F.A. from New York City’s Cooper Union, an M.A. from University of Michigan, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is a second-generation mosaic artist and has been professionally involved in mosaic making since 2001. Yulia’s works have been exhibited nation-wide and have been a subject of multiple national and international publications. Her Mosaic Sphere Studio, LLC. is known for providing a superb mosaic education to anyone passionate about learning mosaic art. In addition to making mosaics Yulia is a professor at Maryland’s Towson University where she teaches printmaking and drawing courses. ~mosaicsphere.com

Tiki Love Truck by Carrie Reichardt

The Revolution will be Ceramicised with Carrie Reichardt

Saturday, March 14, 2015, 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Regency Ballroom, 4th Floor, Loews Philadelphia Hotel

The Revolution will be Ceramicised by a very personal, 15 year account of the life and work of Carrie Reichardt, told through a series of slides. She will explain how her activism influenced her mosaic work, and how she has been using her skills as an artist to bring about social change.

At present, her Tiki Love Truck (mosaic covered car) is one of the star exhibits in the Disobedient Objects show in the Victoria and Albert Museum.  She will show how this truck was made and why it is such a disobedient object. This presentation will hopefully inspire others to see the how mosaicking can be politicized and used as a way of creating civil disobedience and positive change.

Carrie Reichardt is a leading contemporary artist, who works from a mosaic-covered studio in London, The Treatment Rooms. Carrie is a self-titled craftivist. Her work collapses the boundaries between craft and activism, using the craft techniques of mural, mosaic and screen-printing to create intricate, highly politicized works of art.

Carrie has been involved in community and public art projects for over 15 years. Carrie’s most recent work is to be found both outside and inside the Victoria and Albert Museum. As a figurehead of the craftivist movement, Carrie is frequently called upon to speak on the use of craft and art as protest. She was invited to speak at National Museums Liverpool’s International Women’s Day lectures in March 2012, and also at the British Association of Modern Mosaic forum, held at the V&A, October 2012. She was the key note speaker at the Mosaic Association of Australia and New Zealand (MAANZ) 2013 conference. ~carriereichardt.com