E17: Ayana Zaire Cotton and Jennifer Lillis

Guests: Ayana Zaire Cotton and Jennifer Lillis

Hosts:  Christopher Kardambikis and Adriana Monsalve

Recorded on July 29th, 2020 in collaboration with Transformer as part of the E17: Zines program.

Ayana Zaire Cotton is a transdisciplinary artist, designer, technologist, and educator, visualizing and collectively crafting a post-work future. Her practice is rooted in black feminist, pedagogy, mutual aid, open source philosophy, labor, and black aesthetics research. This research has manifested in her work via independent publishing, virtually teaching software engineering to students worldwide, and an experimental clothing line as a platform for researching labor studies and aesthetics. As an artist, designer, and software engineer Ayana feels “educator” is a title that most resonates with the full possibilities of her mediums, goals, and practice.

Jennifer Lillis is a multi-disciplinary artist, teacher, and administrator in Northern Virginia. She received her MFA in Visual Art from George Mason University in 2019, and her BA in Studio Art from Marymount University in 2012. Jennifer’s work explores the theme of transformation in the function and materiality of objects through the ritualization of her creative practice. She is currently the Gallery Manager at the McLean Project for the Arts, on the coordinating committee of MPAartfest, Adjunct Professor in Printmaking at George Mason University, co-producer of Paper Cuts, and founder of the print and book collective ELEMENTS.

Adriana Monsalve is an artist, book maker, and educator, located in the DMV. She is the co-founder of Homie House Press, a skeleton bones crew of femmes creating, publishing, and reclaiming their space and power in the foto book medium. Within her photographic practice, Monsalve is a storyteller & visual communicator producing in-depth stories on identity through the nuances in between race, gender, and immigrant adjacent experiences.

Transformer’s annual spring Exercises for Emerging Artists program is a peer critique and mentorship program created to support a selected group of DC-based emerging artists at critical points or crossroads in their professional growth and creative development. Centered on a different artistic discipline every year, this year’s iteration - E17: Zines - focused on zines and DIY publishing. E17: Zines artists include: Ayana Zaire Cotton, Jennifer Lillis, Athena Naylor, Late Comeback Press (Rachna Soun and Caroline Kim), Evyan Roberts, and Julie Sheah.

Intended to both advance artists' careers and build peer support, Transformer’s Exercises consists of comprehensive bi-weekly peer critique and mentorship sessions spanning several months to stimulate and encourage the participating artists as they create new work. Facilitated by Transformer staff, the participating artists receive mentorship and feedback from a series of mentors comprised of more established artists, curators, and other arts leaders.

In response to COVD-19, all E17: Zines peer critique & mentorship sessions were conducted via Zoom calls this spring. As the traditional, in person, culminating summer exhibition of works created through the program is not feasible this year, this poster highlights the artworks each artist created through E17: Zines. Each artists’ zine artworks are available for purchase through Transformer’s online store: https://flatfile.transformerdc.org/collections/e17-zines

--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/paper-cuts/support