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Artist Talks

Mira Musank

Mira Musank is a textile upcycling artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her creative garments are inspired by runway experiences from her fashion blogging days. Mira’s medium is sewing, weaving, and hand embroidery.

Mira’s materials of choice are pre-owned clothes, factory cut-offs, and fabric samples. These so-called “textile wastes” are actually treasures that she transforms into custom garments and home decor. She also works to redistribute rescued materials to the local community for creative reuse.Her works of reimagining, repairing, and refashioning garments can be seen at fafafoom.com and @miramusank on Instagram.  She’s always looking for new channels and collaborations to expand awareness around textile overconsumption and waste. Mira and her works have been profiled in publications such as California Elegance book (Rizzoli New York) and Simply Sewing Magazine (United Kingdom).

David Solnit

David Solnit is an arts organizer, sign painter, printmaker, puppeteer, and carpenter who lives and works in Northern California.

His artwork – signs, banners, flags, puppetry, and street murals created in collaboration with social change activists and artists – has been exhibited in strikes, blockades, occupations, sit-ins, and mass marches.

He is the editor of Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World (City Lights Books).

Klara Maisch

Klara Maisch documents landscape change in oil paintings created on location. She travels to remote regions of Alaska to paint throughout the seasons. Scientific research and direct experiences with the physical forces that shape a landscape inform the visual dynamics in her work. Her current projects center around climate change in the context of specific landscapes, including areas affected by wildfire, glacier retreat, and advancing treeline. Klara’s work has been featured in exhibitions throughout Alaska, California, Washington, and Hawaii. She lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska. You can see more of her work at www.klaramaisch.com and @klaramaisch on Instagram.

Rose McAdoo

Rose McAdoo is a visual artist using cake as her medium for raising awareness around global issues. Her unique edible art centers around human stories and the environment, leading her to make cakes with remote populations in some of the world’s most extreme environments.

Calling both poles home, Rose works as an ice climbing and helicopter glacier guide in Alaska and co-manages a NASA atmospheric research camp in Antarctica. Throughout her career, Rose’s work has been layered between journeys abroad: making sweets in the desert with Kenya’s Maasai tribe, alongside Congolese porters on Virunga’s volcano summit, and behind bars at Los Angeles County State Prison and NYC’s Rikers Correctional Facility. She recently completed a 10-day backcountry art residency with the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project and makes environmentally educated desserts in the wild using the earth as both tool and ingredient.

Minori Murata

[Minori’s talk was only available for a limited time.]

Minori Murata is an art director and visual artist born in 1992 and based in Tokyo, Japan. Murata’s practice is based on compositing, processing, and collaging. She originates high-calorie visual expressions and motion graphics videos with a large amount of information. 

Murata primarily directed and produced visual art in advertising for fashion brands such as Adidas, NIKE, GAP, BEAMS, and fashion department stores such as Laforet Harajuku, PARCO and she also directed art for “Imma-ten” which was organized by imma; the world’s first virtual model. 

Murata was invited as an AR visual artist to exhibit at “work to eat” in NYC NFT 2022. After Murata stayed in India in 2019, she created the artwork and installation “GODS AND MOM BELIEVE IN YOU” for Stealable Art Exhibition at SAMA GALLERY. She founded “HYPE FREE WATER” with the artist KOM-I in 2020. Murata produces fictional advertisements based on environmentalism and the theme of water for visual art to inspire artivism in Tokyo.