LEAPs
LEAPS – Local Emerging Artists Projects – is an exciting new initiative at Mural Arts that provides opportunities for emerging artists to interact with our work. Each year, we will commission new, temporary artwork from local artists that have not worked with us previously or are experimenting in new mediums.
This year, our Big Picture art education program and muraLAB, our innovation hub, joined forces to produce LEAPs. This spring students visited artists’ studios and co-created temporary works of art. The resulting artworks will be exhibited at our headquarters June 13th to July 15th, 2011.
Artists chosen for LEAPs' inaugural year include:
Gaia – www.gaiastreetart.com
Gaia grew up in New York City and is a recent graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. His studio work and gallery projects have been exhibited in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. His street work has been documented and featured in several recent books on urban art, including most recently, Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art, (Berlin, 2010). Gaia lives and works in Baltimore and Brooklyn.
Jessie Hemmons - www.ishknits.com
Jessie Hemmons is Philadelphia's Yarn Bomber. She stealthily slips colorfully knitted pieces onto unsuspecting targets in an urban environment. She believes in empowering individuals in urban neighborhoods by celebrating areas of their environment that would otherwise go unnoticed. With an almost inherent love for street art and a talent for knitting, combining these two passions was an inevitable evolution. Jessie has been featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Juxtapoz magazine, and on WHYY.
Sebastien Leclercq - www.sebastienleclercq.org
French-born Sebastien Leclercq was home-schooled on his family sailboat around the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean. He received a Masters of Fine Art in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Most recently Sebastien had a show at Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art. He was part of the 2009 Works on Paper exhibition juried by Joao Ribas at Arcadia University and was part of Fleisher-Ollman Gallery's Seventh Annual Invitational. He lives and works in Philadelphia.
Jess Perlitz – www.jessperlitz.com
Jess Perlitz, born in Toronto, Ontario, lives and works in Philadelphia. She has exhibited internationally in venues such as the Cue Art Foundation in New York, the Canadian Sculpture Centre in Toronto, and Kulture Berlin in Germany. She is an upcoming Open Studio resident at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota. She was recently an Emerging Artist Fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. Jess has been the recipient of the Canadian Sculpture Centre’s Artcast Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s MFA Grant Award. She has received degrees from Bard College, Tyler School of Art and clown training from the Clown Farm in Manitoulin Island, Ontario. She is an instructor of art at Arcadia University and Tyler School of Art at Temple University.
Mauro Zamora – www.maurozamora.com
Mauro Zamora is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work focuses on the subject of the land through painting and installation. His works concentrate on the politicization of the landscape as he asks questions that concern our world: socially, politically and environmentally. Highlighting the delicate balance between our romantic desire for the landscape and our pragmatic need to make changes to the land. He is the recipient of many awards including the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Visual Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He received a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His work has been included in numerous solo group exhibitions in the US and abroad.
