Assets for Artists is thrilled to welcome our first ever cohort of North Berkshire artists to the Capacity Building Program! We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read, meet and follow them as they progress through our program!
Regan Drouin
North Adams
Regan Drouin approaches art and the creative process as a practical, poetic and philosophical method of engagement-with and inquiry-into Mind.
“Through my image-making processes / ‘Voicings’, I explore aesthetic paradox, rhythmic chaos, and articulate imperfection. ‘Divinatory Poetics’ is my phrase for the way language emerges from these patterns of the sensuous body, meaning-seeking mind and the landscape in which they are embedded – this is the crossroads where divinity sits. Mystical (contemplative) practices and perspectives are the soil for my work; learning to ride the storms of emotional reactivity and environmental turbulence within the holy struggle of an artistic practice is a life-long undertaking.
My current foci: abstract painting (mixed media & oils), photography (analog preferred), somatic movement and ‘Voicings’ (written & voiced lyricisms) iterate the interplay between stillness and gesture, contemplation and utterance. I am interested in the geography of what is built up and worn down organically over time and what moves beneath surfaces. Texture, saturation, subtlety, depth, asymmetry and contrast are critical compositional considerations.
For the purposes of good 'conversation', I curate absurd, atmospheric, loosely-ritualized, non-dogmatic, experimental, improvisatory workshop environments in which people can be alone-together, immersed in imaginative play where the capability to listen and respond to the instinctual body, emotional weathers and natural environment is of central interest.”
Golly Annie
North Adams
Golly Annie is a digital collage artist based in North Adams. Annie’s works incorporate stock photos, historic images and her own photography to create mini-narratives laced with autobiography, humor, visual puns, and a self-proclaimed “responsible amount of whimsy.” She discovered collage when laid off during the pandemic, and subsequently taught herself PhotoShop - an unexpected change that developed into a second act in her life.
As both artist, and marketer / merchant behind Golly Willikers, Annie sells art prints, clothing, and household items in the hope that her art could be affordable and giftable to all. Her philosophy is that a collage is finished when it makes her smile - and hopes you will too!
Her work was exhibited in a solo show entitled So This Is What You’ve Been Up To at Images Cinema in Williamstown, MA. Her works were also featured in Smorgasbord at the Lodger gallery, in the Fragmented Collective’s Black & White ebook, and in the Art Vending North Adams machine at MASS MoCA. Annie was Threadless.com’s Artist of the Day in Sept 2023. She participates annually, making a collage a day in a challenge from the Edinburgh Collage Collective’s “Februllage” project.
Henry Kunkel
North Adams
Henry Kunkel is a visual artist whose recent paintings examine his relationship to memory by interpreting his own MRI scans, distilling spaces through a colorful expressive lens of mythology, color poetry, and wallpaper. In 2018, he attended the Elsewhere Studios Art Residency in Paonia, Colorado, where he afterward was hired as residency program manager. He relocated to North Adams in 2022, and since has been featured in New Visionary Art Magazine, shown work at Future Labs gallery in North Adams, and begun working at Jenny Holzer Studios. During the pandemic he exhibited work at Straight Line Gallery in Snowmass, CO, in addition to the Madonna building and Blue Sage Arts Center in Paonia, CO. He was awarded the Mass Cultural Council’s LCC grant in 2016 and again in 2019. He has also attended the Drop Forge and Tool residency in Hudson, New York; ArtHub Artist Residency in Kingman Arizona, and the Pilotenkueche residency in Leipzig, Germany. Henry holds a B.F.A from Massachusetts College of Art and Design where he graduated in 2012.
Mac MAcdaniel
North Adams
Mac MacDaniel is a high school dropout who grew up going to punk shows in Virginia. He tries to bring the chaotic energy and DIY ethos of the punk scene into his various work with Shakespeare, from writing and teaching, to acting, to photography. Mac is one of the founders of Elsewhere Shakespeare, a punk band masquerading as a theatre company. His first play, The Killer of Camp Arden, was a semifinalist in the Shakespeare's New Contemporaries competition and received its premiere at Atlanta Shakespeare in 2023. Mac is the author of the book The Play's The Thing: A Beginner’s Guide to Seeing and Enjoying Shakespeare. His favorite play is King Lear, and his favorite Avail album is Over the James.
Landon A. Marchant
williamstown
Drawing on their experiences as a queer transgender person and disabled veteran, Landon A. Marchant combines ancient pigment and paint-making techniques with repurposed modern materials to provide glimpses of a world where their advocacy is no longer necessary. Landon served as a USAF metals fabricator and trained as a union pipe trades apprentice before attending Williams College, where they earned degrees in philosophy and sociology. Much of their adult life has been dedicated to improving economic outcomes and access to healthcare for underresourced populations.
Landon is a member of Common Folk Artist Collective in North Adams.
melissa mendes
adams
Melissa Mendes grew up in Hancock, MA. She has been self-publishing her comics since her senior year at Hampshire College in 2006. After getting her MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies, she moved back to the Berkshires to pursue cartooning full time.
Her first graphic novel, Freddy Stories, received a Xeric self-publishing grant in 2010. Her second book, Lou, was published in monthly issues by Oily Comics, and then collected into a book by Alternative Comics in 2016.
For the past 10 years she has been working on a graphic novel titled The Weight, a family saga that centers around a character named Edie, who is born in the 1930s into a family struggling with rural poverty and generational abuse. The story is inspired by the life of her late grandfather, who grew up in upstate New York.
The Weight is available to read online and in self-published mini-comics, and it will soon be collected into a book by Drawn and Quarterly.
Aidan Meyer-Golden
North Adams
Aidan is an author and songwriter. His idiosyncratic poetic work draws on themes from linguistics, philosophy, world poetry and religions. Musically, his influences are varied, ranging from Hindustani classical, math rock, jazz, and an adolescence spent entrenched in Boston's DIY music scene.
peppa
North Adams
Peppa is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work joins experimental video, installation, writing, herbalism, pedagogy, and community engagement. Her art offers a psychiatric survivor’s lens on medical history and healing practices. Honoring her multi-cultural heritage, Iranian diasporic experience, and family history, her work activates historical research and personal narrative to challenge frameworks of institutional care and the mental health industry. She is the founder and director of After School Art Space, an after school art program based in relationship building and material experimentation.
Benne Perkins
north adams
Benne Perkins is a multidisciplinary artist with strong ties to the Berkshires. As a musician and songwriter, his musical style skirts mainstream genres, and he has enjoyed collaborations with artists from backgrounds in jazz, classical, and theater, as well as outsider artists. His current focus is on production and recording; he plans to release an album in early 2024. Benne also works in sculpture, painting, and graphics.
eva schegulla
North Adams
Eva Schegulla is a full time writer, publishing under multiple names in fiction and nonfiction, often as Devon Ellington. She is an internationally produced playwright and radio writer and was a member of Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre 3.0 Creatryx unit in 2023. She is best known for her comic noir radio plays, but also writes novels, short stories, poems, serials, and articles under her various bylines. She participated in Word X Word’s large collaborative poem in 2022 and 2023, and in their “Poets in Conversation” series. She is part of the Boiler House Poets Collective, and is doing a series of ekphrastic text pieces inspired by visual art. She spent most of her professional life in theatre, film, and television production, including years on Broadway as a dresser. She is a script writer, doctor, and analyst for agencies and independent producers, a freelance copywriter, and sometime ghostwriter. She teaches online and in person all over the world. She plans to expand her storytelling capacity by adding movement, music, fiber arts, and clay to the words, working in more collaborative, activist, and community-centric projects.