AIR x #notwhite collective 2026
#notwhite: A Constellation Dreaming Forward
Our residency with Artist Image Resource is rooted in shared learning, access, and mutual support. Within AIR’s print studios, knowledge circulates through mentorship, conversation, and hands-on experimentation. Printmaking becomes communal ground, breaking down hierarchies and allowing the process itself to carry meaning.
This year marks thirty years of Artist Image Resource and ten years of the #notwhite Collective. These milestones meet in Pittsburgh at a moment when public memory feels unstable and narratives are being narrowed, revised, and erased. In such a time, the voice of thirteen women artists committed to using non-individualistic, multi-disciplinary art to make their stories visible as they relate, connect, and belong to the Global Majority is essential. The record remains incomplete. Histories continue to be told without the bodies that carry them. Erasure is not theoretical, it is lived. Through a non-hierarchical process, the collective rejects colonial frameworks and claims cultural fluidity as a way of seeing and being seen.
Each member declares her existence, individually and collectively, through voice, body, and art. They utilize their arts practice, singularly and collectively, to Excavate Histories, Expose Realities, and Exorcise Oppression. As bi/multi-racial and multicultural artists, immigrants or descendants of immigrants, the #notwhite collective lives within the tension of being seen and not seen, named and misnamed.
As artists, they are recorders of history. In moments when facts are contested and truths are blurred, the act of making becomes an act of holding. Through print, pressure, repetition, and labor, they mark this time.
Each artist moves in her own direction while remaining in relation to the whole. Some works emerge independently, others collaboratively.
The exhibition that follows is not a single statement. It is a constellation of presence. A record of who we are, here, now.
ALISON ZAPATA
ZAPATA STUDIOS
Alison Zapata is a Pittsburgh-born, second-generation Mexican-American visual artist and art educator. She works in oil, acrylic and watercolor. Her expertise lies in painting, portraiture, murals, collage, and sign painting. She is the owner/ lead artist of Zapata Studios. She has studied fine art/art education at Carlow University and is currently in the process of obtaining a teaching artist certificate at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She recently exhibited her work with Aqui, the Latino visual arts collective, in the Capitol Building, Education Department and the Vault Gallery at Susquehanna Museum of Art in Harrisburg PA through the invitation of State Representative Leslie Acosta as a part of Latino Heritage month. Her Sea Turtle painting was the featured image for the children’s tents at the Three Rivers Arts festival. She assisted on the mural, Lend Me Your Ears, in East Liberty. Alison has developed engaging arts programming in classrooms throughout Pittsburgh over the past eighteen years. Yearly, she leads several visual art residencies for students, including an Autism Support Classroom. Alison has received art education training through Gateway to the Arts, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Lincoln Center’s Aesthetic Education, and Wolf Trap Institute. She is a resident artist in the Lifetime Arts and the Artists in Education program through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She was awarded participation in the Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad Art and Society: Brazil/U.S. Educational Partnership. She has professional experience in educational leadership. She is inspired to make art to build community and start conversations about identity and heritage.
AMBER EPPS
HOLLYHOOD A.K.A. DR. HOOD
Dr. Amber Epps is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and musician that creates using sound, and various found and discarded objects from nature and unexpected places. Although she allows the form, structure, and medium of each piece to develop on its own, her work most often manifests as word art, assemblage, installation, and song. She is inspired by spirituality, humanism, social justice, and abolition, drawing from raw emotion, current and past life experiences, and the things she sees through her "other eyes." In 2022-2023, Amber's installation, "Homage" was on display at the Pittsburgh International Airport, and was the first time Black/African spirituality had been presented to the public in this space. Her work was also used as the cover art for a book entitled "Makeshift Altar" by Amy Alvarez. In 2023 she published a book entitled “mushroom logic, vol 1: doves cant cry. thats stupid” and also wrote the introduction for “Life Sentences: Writings from Inside an American Prison.” Her work has been exhibited in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Buffalo, Englewood (Colorado), and in West Virginia. However, her most important work, which has been featured in two exhibits, has been produced in collaboration with her brother, Oscar Brown, who is serving a death by incarceration sentence in a Pennsylvania prison.
Amber is currently a member of the Musician Changemaker Accelerator (MCA) Academy, and has been a resident artist of Most Wanted Fine Art and folkLAB. Amber was also a member of the Pittsburgh Filmmakers Flight School Fellowship, and was selected to participate in the New Hazlett Theater Community Supported Art Performance Series. Some of her music can be found in the Carnegie Library’s STACKS collection.
Outside of her art practice, Dr. Epps is a nonprofit leader, strategy consultant, speaker, and professor. She also owns Arts & Crafts: Botanica & Occult Shop, which was founded in 2016. Amber holds degrees in higher and postsecondary education, information systems & communications, information systems & technology, and business administration.
CAROLINA LOYOLA-GARCIA
CAROLINALOYOLAGARCIA.NET
Carolina Loyola-Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and performer from Santiago de Chile. She works primarily in media arts, including documentary films, single-channel video art, video installations, video design for theater, and digital photography & imaging. As a performer she has worked in theater productions, dance ensembles, and as a flamenco artist. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University.
Through her work she has explored topics related to social justice, the dislocated identity that results from colonialism and migration, and questionings around issues related to aspects of human existence such as relationships, the transient nature of the postmodern experience, memory, and the tense interaction between economy and the environment.
Her work has been shown in art galleries, museums, and film/video festivals both in the United States and abroad, including such venues as the 10th Havana Biennial; Bangkok Experimental Film Festival; Chicago International Latino Film Festival; Biennial of Video and New Media in Santiago, Chile; Three Rivers Film Festival; Biennial Arte Nuevo InteractivA in Merida, Mexico; SPACE Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA; Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and the Pittsburgh Biennial; among others. She has received recognition for her work at various international film festivals and her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and the Multicultural Arts Initiative, among others.
MADAME DOLORES
MADAMEDOLORES.COM
CaMadame Dolores is a multi-platform, multi-disciplinary artist employing sound, vision, text, and performance as storytelling tools creating radical, controversial cultural engagements. At the root of her practice are questions about our humanity as she rewrites new mythologies. The questions emerge from political, cultural, natural, and sensual experiences acting as her muse, dictating the medium and discipline of her work.
A recent recipient of an Advancing the Black Arts grant for her upcoming musical/visual project, Navigating Earth Manual. Named by NEXT Pittsburgh as an essential Pittsburgher in 2019. Founding member of the #notwhite collective and member of both Women of Visions and Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. Winner of the Pittsburgh Business Times WomenFirst award in 2017. Commissioned by The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to create a song and lead Pittsburgh’s inaugural Complaints Choir, during the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival in 2014. Winner of a 2010 August Wilson Center Fellowship; received a grant in 2011, from Advancing the Black Arts to market her second solo release, Amor Fati; a 2007 honoree at the New Hazlett Theatre “Celebrating Women in the Arts; a 2003 winner of the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship for World/Jazz/Blues musical composition; and a 2002 Pittsburgh Magazine “40 under 40” award winner. She received funding from Sprout for two MiniM Music Festivals for the Blues and Jazz genres and for “Listen to This”, featuring poetess, Ursula Rucker; a commission from Pittsburgh Foundation to write her first play, Saffronia; funding from Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative to produce Saffronia: the Mulatto Slave, which came in 2nd place at the Trinidad Theater Festival, in 2016.
FRAN (LEDONIO) FLAHERTY
FRANFLAHERTY.COM
Fran Flaherty is a Deaf artist, curator, and educator practicing in Pittsburgh, PA, USA and Rochester, NY, USA. As a first-generation immigrant from the Philippines, her work is centered in issues surrounding migrant family relations and assimilation, maternal feminism, & disability aesthetics that synthesizes traditional media and physical computing. Flaherty is the founder of Anthropology of Motherhood, an ongoing curation of artwork and design that engages in the complex visual, material, emotional, corporeal and lived experiences of motherhood, care-giving, parenting, nurturing and maternal labor. She is also the Director of Dyer Arts Center for the Advancement of Deaf Culture at RIT/NTID, serves on the Advisory Board of the Office of Public Art, in Pittsburgh, and Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY. She is also a board member of Kassia Ensemble, and Protohaven. Flaherty is a proud member of the #notwhite collective.
María Eugenia Nieves Escoriaza, better known in artistic circles as Geña, is an interdisciplinary international recording artist residing in Pittsburgh, PA. She’s a singer, percussionist, dancer and teaching artist. Geña hails from Quebradillas, Puerto Rico where she was the lead singer for “Cannabix” and “Doppleganger”. In 1997 she moved to New York City. Through her work at the Theater for the New City, she received a full scholarship to attend a theater arts program at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. While in the Big Apple, Geña was honored to sing on the soundtrack for the film “The Believer,” Musical Director Joel Diamond. In 2004 she relocated to Pittsburgh to pursue her music education. She graduated with a Music major and French minor from the University of Pittsburgh in spring 2009.
Geña collaborates in the duo Geña y Peña playing traditional Latin American songs of love and life. This sublime duet is comprised of Geña on vocals and percussion, and Colombian-American Carlos Peña on guitar. Her latest musical projects include Calle Bomba, a music ensemble based on Puerto Rican Bomba; and Rumbón de la Calle, a percussion ensemble that features extraordinary musicians from the African diaspora, Anicet Mundundu, Elie Kihonia, and George Jones interactively performing their native/ancestral traditional songs. She is the lead singer for America’s Latin Orchestra. Geña is a guest artist on Christiane Dolores’ Amor Fati and Pantry of Salt and Sugar; and Phat Man Dee and Liz Berlin’s Social Justice Disco. She was the music director and lead singer of the Puerto Rican rebel roots and riot salsa band Machete Kisumontao. Geña was one of the original members of the group Preach Freedom & Connect. She’s collaborated with Noel Quintana and his Latin Crew; and with Herman "Soy Sos” Pearl on a “latin-techno" project called Ivivi Mori. Her recordings with Tuff Sound Recording Studio and collaborations with DJ Soy Sos in the documentary film “New Muslim Cool” led her to sing along El Mujahideen Team on the film’s soundtrack. In 2012, Geña wrote and recorded on an international collaborative album for the IR26 entitled “This Land is not for Sale‐ Ivere.” Her past projects include collaborations with Preach Freedom, Kenia, Colter Harper, Mathew Tembo, Cha, El Manjar de los Dioses, Dem Brooklyn Bums, and more... Geña is the recipient of the 2015 Fuerza Awards. This year she received the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council Artist Opportunity Grant to study at Escuela de Bomba y Plena Doña Caridad Brenes de Cepeda. She was also a recipient of the New Sun Rising and Heinz Endowment Transformative Teaching Artist Award. Geña is the proud mother of a 13 year old girl, Alondra Inarú and currently is a resident teaching artist with the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Geña is extremely proud of her collaboration with #notwhite.
LIANA MANEESE
Brazilian born, Pittsburgh raised Liana Maneese, LPC, NCC, M.A. Clinical Applied Psychology is an award-winning activist, visionary entrepreneur, doula, liberation psychotherapist, and catalyst for creative engagement. She is the founder of The Good Peoples Group's: The Center on Interracial Relationships, where they use identity navigation as a key component and foundational tool toward building social justice and personal transformation.
Growing up as an international transracial adoptee, Liana learned early on that her difference would be a source of pain that she would have to transmute if she wanted to live a full life. Liana is passionate about providing an educational process that enhances individual experiences and improves the culture of the world we live in. She believes that through building strong, equitable, and informed relationships, with ourselves first, we can begin to shift toxic societal narratives that have created cycles of trauma for far too long. Liana holds degrees in Marketing (FIDM, Los Angeles), Cultural Studies (Chatham University, Pittsburgh), and clinical mental health and applied psychology (Antioch University, New England), and is also a certified doula. As a social practice artist whose work centers around interracial relationships and her experiences as a transracial adoptee, Liana has won numerous grants and awards that have allowed adoption narratives to be considered in the art world. Her current work is an experiment in art as identity navigation entitled, Adopting Identity: The Explorations of Lies, Luck, and Legitimacy. Always pushing her own boundaries of self-discovery, her story motivates many through speaking, creative projects, and her commitment to understanding people, processes, and pleasure.
Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
MAGGIE NEGRETE
MGGLNTCREATES.COM
A SWPA native & Vassar College alum, I am a multidisciplinary artist and designer specializing in illustration, zines, and hand-lettering. My work explores femininity, community, and the occult with aesthetics influenced by 19/20th century illustration, psychedelia, and my heritage of printers. An important part of my practice is as an educator, focusing on elevating youth voices and promoting civic engagement through zines, drawing skills, and typography.
Currently, I am a freelance teaching artist having worked as the Education Coordinator at the Brashear Association as well as providing programming for MGR Youth Empowerment, Neu Kirche and many other Pittsburgh based institutions. Additionally, I have coordinated events for the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council and sit on the organizing board of the Pgh Zine Fair.
MARITZA MOSQUERA
MARITZAMOSQUERA.NET
Maritza Mosquera is a visual artist, poet, painter, and cook whose creations often are accompanied by dialogues with community. Her visual works are installation diaries about relationships and ideas referencing personal and public desires such as the earth’s healing from fracking, sexual intimacy, criminal justice, the story of skin, the end of racism, home recipes, and the power of voice. Her most current works are drawings and prints realizing the female body and its large, intelligent, emotional and viscous presence.Mosquera received her MFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Massachusetts. She attended skowhegan School of Painting as a fellow. Her written and visual work has been presented regionally and nationally, as well as in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ireland, and Chile. Her work has been funded by the Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative of the Pittsburgh Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, Americans for The Arts, The Buncher Foundation, The Snow Foundation and Arts Midwest.
She currently works with elders and youth who face special challenges such as Dementia, incarceration, refugee status, Alzheimer's, poverty, sexual victimization, and regular life. Mosquera was born in Ecuador and is a citizen of the USA. She works in her studios in Natrona Heights and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
SARA TANG
DRAW ME IN
Sara Tang is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, and creative facilitator who uses reclaimed and discarded materials and creative processes to illuminate the sacred deeply embedded in our lives and surroundings. Sara’s creative practice and process is mindful of drawing people in to a deeper empathic encounter with themselves, with their communities, and with what is strange and beautiful about humanity and existence.
Sara is proud and honored to be a member of the #notwhite Collective, JADED Asian American Pacific Islander collective, the Digital Content Curator for Anthropology of Motherhood, a member of the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators, and a co-founder of the creative collaborations community Sip n’ Sketch Pittsburgh. She identifies as a multicultural woman with Appalachian Pennsylvanian and Maine roots and is second generation and third generation immigrant. Her familial and cultural roots reach to northern Thailand, Guangdong in China, the Tuscan region of Italy, Bavaria in Germany, Scotland, and Wales. Deep faith traditions from both the West and East have been a part of her life. Mountains, stones, the sea, the forests, the land have all formed and continue to form her, as does the excavation of humanity's stories that are found in the layers of the everyday.
Sarika Goulatia is an Asian America artist. She was born in 1973 in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India and immigrated to the United States in 2002. As a Textile Designer, with a masters in Textiles Design and Development (printing, surface embellishments and weaving), she pursued extensive residencies and worked in rural India, England, Hong Kong and the United States. In 2004 she changed her career path and received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University where she successfully completed her bachelors in two years instead of four. As a diaspora artist her work stems from the intersection of her dual national identity; the synergy of this distinctiveness allows her to break through cultural barriers. Goulatia is a visual artist best known for her large-scale sensory sculptures and installations. Her extensive practice touches on the frailty of human experience, often drawing on personal challenges and socio-political and cultural issues affecting our community and our country at large. Her work ranges from sculpted ceramics to cast bronzes and aluminum, fabricated acrylic panels, digital prints to extensively drilled/nailed wood to assemblages using found objects.
Goulatia has had solo exhibitions at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and was named the Emerging Artist of 2016. She has exhibited work in group and solo shows through the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for the International Society of Sculptors Conference (2016) and as part of the India in Focus Festival (2015). Important group exhibitions include shows at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art (2016/2019), The Mine Factory (2013 and 2015), the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s Annual at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2016), and Double Consciousness at the Mattress Factory Museum (2007).
Goulatia was the recipient of the prestigious 2017 Carol R. Brown Award Creative Achievement Award, provided through the Investing in Professional Artists grants program, a partnership of The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation. She is also the recipient of the Sally Gehl, Samuel Rosenberg and Elizabeth Jones Award in Humanities and Art at Carnegie Mellon University (2006). She has been awarded residency/exhibition opportunities at Neu Kirche, the Alloy at Carrie Furnace and The Facebook.
Her site-specific public works include Shade-Sail- a community-based project done through Neu Kirche and The Children’s Museum in Deutchetown. Sculptures inspired by the stories of the steel workers related to their life at the mill installed at the Carrie Furnace. Her work “a million marks of home, revisited'' is installed at the Tryp hotel in Pittsburgh. Goulatia recently completed a Facebook residency and installed a large-scale installation at their Pittsburgh office that alludes to displacement, gentrification and references our industrial past. Her ongoing community-based project prosecutrix, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Education focusses on telling the stories of sexually assaulted victims without victimizing them.
Goulatia served on the Pittsburgh Art commission for five years, she also served on the board of the Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition, and the Brewhouse Association. She currently serves on the board of the Pittsburgh Cultural trust and the and a proud member of the #notwhite Collective. Her mission is to create works that elevate and make visible the stories of others.
VERONICA CORPUZ
Veronica Corpuz is a first generation Filipina American poet and multimedia artist. The former director of the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, Penn., she has previously served as the program assistant for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City; as adjunct professor at Naropa University and Chatham University; and as guest speaker and poet at New York University and the Kelly Writers House at University of Pennsylvania. She has co-authored with Michelle Naka Pierce a book-length series of experimental poems exploring gender, sexuality and identity entitled TRI/VIA (Erudite Fangs/PUB LUSH, 2003). She is currently working on a memoir of prose poems about her late husband, Michael Grzymkowski, and his battle with brain cancer. Ms. Corpuz received her BA in English and American Literature with Honors in Creative Writing from Brown University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She resides in Wilkinsburg, Penn., with her two sons, Nico and AJ, and husband Alex Thomson.
ZENA RUIZ
Zena is a mother, a lover, and optimist from Houston, Tx. They use their mixed media practice in drawing, printmaking, performance, and sculptural installation to process and communicate what their body holds. As a first generation Mexican-American in the states, cultural motifs from their childhood in Texas and summers in Mexico vibrantly appear in their works. Their process includes tending to the earth, lineage research, oral histories, examination of their personal experience, asking for guidance and just practicing.
Outside of Zena’s studio practice is where the magic of BEING and LONGING TO BE is manifested, as a mother and in community. Among their gifts is the ability to pollinate, a practice they deeply value and is ever so gently invisible. This cross pollination practice is essential to their community practice which combines deep listening, curious questioning, and inspired visions.