(Image courtesy of Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Art and Agriculture)

Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Art and Agriculture (PMRCAA) will host its sixth annual residency program, which brings world-class artists and environmental scientists to the small town of Sisters from March through November. Through a juried application process, 28 artists, culture bearers, and scholars from around the US have been selected for either one-month or two-week stays at PMRCAA.

As part of the open call process, applicants were invited to focus on the theme of Transitions and Migration. PMRCAA Arts Program Manager Ana Varas, explains, “By encouraging participants to delve into the diverse connections between human and non-human migrations, we aspire to initiate a profound transformation that cultivates empathy, understanding, and a sense of stewardship towards our environment.”

The concept of Transitions and Migrations also connects the residency program with the work of umbrella organization, The Roundhouse Foundation, which focuses on supporting rural and Indigenous spaces — where land stewardship is vital to livelihoods and communities.

All participants selected will develop work around this year’s central idea and will engage with the broader local region through workshops, lecture series, and open studio events. In addition to the annual residency program, PMRCAA also hosts a variety of events throughout the year, which are regularly published on the events calendar at roundhousefoundation.org/events.

The 2024 Residents:

Visual Arts

Mychelle Moritz (She/Her) – Portland, OR
Mychelle Moritz is a multimedia sculpture artist who incorporates clay and scavenged bits into her works. Drawing from a narrative base, each series she creates tells a story, and is especially concerned about the damage that humans are perpetrating on our wild. Creating is a way of advocating while also working through her internal landscape.

Megan Wiessner (She/Her) – Queens, NY
Meg Wiessner is a researcher and artist based in NYC making work about the environmental and infrastructural aspects of media systems. She is currently researching the role of digital technologies in the emerging political ecology of mass timber architecture in the Pacific Northwest. At PMRCAA, she will be working on illustrations for this project.

Minal Mistry (He/Him) – Portland, OR
Minal Mistry is a biologist/scientist working in the industrial sustainability arena with an emphasis on the impacts of material production and consumption upon the living Earth. His focus area is at the intersections of environmental, ecological and social justice. His art has evolved from those intersections, primarily as sculpture and writing.

Giuseppe Ribaudo of Giucy Giuce (He/Him) – Portland, ME
Giuseppe Ribaudo (aka Giucy Giuce) is an avid modern traditionalist quilter. Residing in Queens just outside of Manhattan, he spends his time designing fabric for NYC-based Andover Fabrics, writing quilt patterns, and teaching different quilting techniques. Most of his work utilizes various foundation paper piecing methods.

Esperanza Cortés (She/Her) – New York, NY
Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian-born multidisciplinary artist based in NYC. Exhibitions include: USA, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Japan, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. Awards include: Guggenheim Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, NYSCA, NYFA, LMCC.
Residencies include: Ucross, Caldera, Joan Mitchell Center.

Rosa Valladares (She/Her) – Sarasota, FL
Rosa Valladares is a visual artist focusing on printmaking media as well as metal, watercolors and installations. She is proficient with manipulating digital images, non-toxic techniques, and the use of pliable materials. With a contemporary vision, Valladares utilizes the media in a three-dimensional manner. She combines printmaking with metals, clay, fabric, transparencies and papers as a new way to engage in dialogue among these mediums and to produce multi-media artwork. In her recent work, Valladares is exploring new interpretations of nature through printmaking.

Jennifer Rabin (She/Her) – Portland, OR
Jennider Rabin is a mixed-media sculptor who began a visual art practice later in life, after a fifteen-year career as a writer. In the past, she began each sculpture with an exact image in her head of what she wanted the sculpture to look like. This recent body of work has been a complete departure for Rabin, entirely process-driven, exploratory, and free.

Alfonso Fernandez (He/Him) – Baltimore, MD
Alfonso Fernandez is a visual artist whose evocative creations traverse the delicate intersection of culture, identity, and historical narratives. His artistic journey began with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts in 2013, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from MICA 2016.

Christie Lower (She/Her) – Halfway, OR
Christie Lower is a 3D fiber artist with a focus on needle felting. She uses the animals and nature from her home in the Pacific Northwest as inspiration, with a deeper focus on birds, and capturing their likeness in wool. Christie is a self-taught fiber artist who wishes to show how needle felting can be more than just a craft, but a beautiful form of art.

Beatriz Guzman Velasquez (She/Her/Ella) – Edinburg, TX
​Beatriz Guzman Velasquez was born and raised in the border region of southwest Texas. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an alumna from the New York Studio School and the University of Texas-Pan American. Her work speaks about the present issues of migration, identity and regeneration.

Pato Hebert  (He/They/All) – Los Angeles, CA
Pato Hebert is an artist, teacher and organizer whose work probes the challenges and possibilities of interconnectedness. Their solo exhibition about long COVID, Lingering, debuted at Pitzer College in 2022. Hebert serves as chair and teaches in the Department of Art & Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Eliot Spaulding (She/Her) – Santa Barbara, CA
Eliot Spaulding is a California-based visual artist with a focus on sustainability, craft, and community. Her interdisciplinary work explores human involvement in vulnerable ecosystems. During her ritualistic visits to the ocean, she gathers inspiration, studies the local geology, and collects washed-up waste material for use in future works.

Ren Allathkani (She/Her/They/Them) – Elk Grove, CA
Ren Allathkani is a Palestinian artist raised across the U.S. and Jordan, where her family hails from Jaffa and Nablus. With a BA in Art Studio from UC Davis, she now practices at Verge, focusing on Palestinian tatreez and natural materials. Her art reconnects her to spirituality and her Palestinian heritage, reclaiming lost roots.

Sandee McGee (She/Her) – Simi Valley, CA
Sandee McGee is an artist and curator who received her BA in Studio Art from Mills College in Oakland, California where she was the recipient of the Ralph DuCasse Award for Excellence in Art. She received her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2010.

Sylvia Friday (She/Her) – Alsea, OR
The ancient art of basket weaving lives in the ancestral memory of all human hands. Sylvia Friday is a traditional basket maker, folk artist and writer. Weaving with willow combines her love for rivers, creeks and wetlands with her love of making things with her hands.

Literary Arts

Diane Wilson (She/Her) – Shafer, MN
Diane Wilson is a Dakota writer, educator, and bog steward, who has published five award-winning books as well as numerous essays. Her novel, The Seed Keeper, received the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for Fiction, and her memoir, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past, won a 2006 Minnesota Book Award. Wilson is enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation.

Jen Karetnick (She/Her) – Miami, FL
The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), Jen Karetnick is the author of 20 additional books. Her work has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors. She is co-founder/co-curator of the not-for-profit organization, SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami).

Dr. Natasha Varner (She/Her) – Seattle, WA
Dr. Natasha Varner is a historian and writer whose bylines include The Nation, Atlas Obscura, Public Radio International, and Jacobin. Her first book, La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico, was a finalist for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book Award in 2021.

Jackleen de La Harpe (She/Her) – Portland, OR
Jackleen de La Harpe retired as executive director and founder of Underscore News, a digital news team covering Indigenous issues in the PNW. She oversaw Underscore’s Food Sovereignty Project (2023) and was a Contributing Editor for The Conversation U.S. Her reporting has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal, ICT (Indian Country Today) and Ecotrust.org.

Multidisciplinary

Atif Akin (He/Him) – New York, New York
Atıf Akın is an artist from Turkey living in New York. His work is about technoscientific criticism in the context of contemporary art, science, and politics. Integrating technology as both subject and means of expression, Akın explores issues that are considered sensitive in public, unlocking them from the rigid categories in which they reside.

Kathleen Caprario (She/Her) – Springfield, OR
Kathleen Caprario traded the concrete canyons of New York City for the broad skies of the Pacific NW where she has established herself as a visual artist, art educator and writer. Caprario exhibits widely and is the recipient of an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship and the Jordan Schnitzer Black Lives Matter Artist Award.

Christina Martin (She/They) – Portland, OR
Christina Martin is an explorer of material and identity. Their material exploration transforms the print past paper, introducing and interlacing new forms of media with various printmaking techniques, including ceramics. Martin’s work is rooted in intersectionality, navigating cultural spaces, defying binaries, and reflecting on tensions of transition and boundaries.

Michelle Swinehart (She/Her) – Ridgefield, WA
Michelle Swinehart is an artist who utilizes collaboration and community engagement in her art practice. She is currently an instructor in PSU’s interdisciplinary general education program and School of Art & Design. She lives on Full Plate Farm in Ridgefield, Washington with her husband, three kids and fourteen chickens.

Michelle Illuminato (She/Her) – Portland, OR
M. Michelle Illuminato creates events, public-exchanges, and artworks to help reveal the complicated and often contradictory relationship between people, their culture and the land they live on. Her projects are shown nationally and internationally and have received numerous awards. She lives in Portland and teaches at Portland State University.

Environmental Science

Dr. Gail Langellotto (She/Her)
Gail Langellotto, Ph.D. is an entomologist and Professor of Horticulture at Oregon State University, where she leads the Garden Ecology Lab. With her students, she studies the plants, insects, microbes, and decisions that improve or degrade a garden’s ability to promote environmental and human health.

Dr. Jamie Cornelius (She/Her) – Corvallis, OR
Dr. Jamie Cornelius is a biologist interested in how birds cope with challenging environments and how their ability to cope defines the range where they can live. She uses new and old technologies to study their behavior and physiology in the wild. Cornelius is excited to partner with artist collaborators to expand the scope of her thinking and approaches.

About Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture:
Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture (PMRCAA) is located on the historic Pine Meadow Ranch, a 260-acre working ranch in Sisters, Oregon at the base of the Cascade Mountains. The vision of PMRCAA is to connect sustainable agriculture, conservation arts and sciences with traditional and contemporary crafts and skills integral to ranching life including: metal, glass, wood and leather work, ceramics, fibers and textiles, writing, painting and drawing, photography and music.

PMRCAA work is grounded in a strong sense of place and community, and the diversity and multiple perspectives of the people that call this region home are deeply valued. PMRCAA is located on the traditional territory of the Wasco, Warm Springs, and Paiute peoples. The ranch strives to support the long-term resilience of this ecosystem, and its people and recognizes the many ways indigenous peoples continue to shape, create and care for these lands.

Today, Pine Meadow Ranch operates as a program of the Sisters-based Roundhouse Foundation and continues to operate as a working ranch. This program is developing and expanding its work in the arts, agricultural and ecological projects working with the unique assets on the property.

About Roundhouse Foundation:
The Roundhouse Foundation is a private family foundation based in Sisters, Oregon that supports creative solutions to the unique challenges associated with rural culture and the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.

RoundhouseFoundation.org • 541-904-0700