Joseph Bennett

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An artist's statement that I wrote nearly 20 years ago spoke of the basement too. "...standing in front of my father's workbench and admiring all that lay before me... tangled wire and rust. Dusty cabinets hiding treasures beneath faded cobwebs."

My first workbench was in that basement in Wilmington, Delaware circa 1975 (I was 10 years old). I'd find old boxes and put objects inside of them — nuts, pine cones and dried weeds, carpeting from the upstairs hallway, nails covered in rust.

And so began a lifelong love affair with scavenging. Turning other people's trash into treasures. Long nights spent in the basement — considering, placing, digging through boxes of objects that others had long discarded.

A lifetime of making assemblages. A lifetime of scavenging through stuff others have thrown away and making art out of it.  

Joseph Bennett

Colleen Sorenson

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Eleven years a full-time resident in San Miguel, Colleen is Azulejo Dama, the Tile Lady.

A mosaic artist of 30 years, her main focus is on mosaic-tiled "arte urbano" graffiti art. In 2005, she presented her first series of collaborative work with graffiti writer Supher in San Antonio, Texas. A series of thirteen large-scale pieces were completed to open the dialogue of "graffiti is art" in colleges and universities. Her work is the first of it's kind, applying handmade mosaic tile to wild style images painted in aerosol. The tiles are glazed according to the colors of the aerosol paint used, portraying a burst of three-dimensional visual enhancement .

A secondary series of works are the thoroughly whimsical garden ladies for indoors or outdoors. Each lady is one of a kind and has something important to say using quotes found on San Miguel friend's facebook postings. All translated to Spanish. Some are inspirational, some humorous, some just a bit irreverent. All are very fun and colorful, guaranteed to bring a smile.

And of course, Colleen is best known in San Miguel for the Muros en Blanco street art project and Guadalupe Distrito de Arte. Murals of any kind were once illegal and, after tenacious persuasion, permission was finally granted in 2013 for legal street art. Since then, around 130 murals have been painted by local, national and international artists. The Muros en Blanco project all began in Colleen's studio, patio and house. There are plenty of stories!

Angelina Pérez

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My inquiry and source of inspiration is “The repetitive nature of everyday life .      I love to watch and portray daily gestures common to us all 

Born and raised in Mexico City I live life and portray it with a sense of fragility and a precarious equilibrium

I choose humor and a language that can change with space, time, dialogue and the imagination of the viewer. 

Characters made in clay are almost flat and double sided

 In Installations I overlap them, like the many layers of society in a given place and moment

 Clay is my media, however, I also work with or incorporate:   wood, metal, paper, computer parts and packing material.

Angelina Pérez