Artspeak

• Jason Hirata

  Jason Hirata lives and works in Seattle and New York. He holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Washington. He has presented exhibitions recently at Muscle Beach, Portland (2015); American Medium, New York (2014); James Harris Gallery (2014); Frye Art Museum (2013), and Hedreen Gallery, Seattle (2010). He was an artist-in-residence at Seattle University in 2014-15, which culminated in an exhibition at the Vachon Gallery. Hirata is the 2015 recipient of The Brink Award and will be mounting a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in 2016.

• Garry Neill Kennedy

  Garry Neill Kennedy is an artist and educator based in Vancouver. He taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax for over forty years, serving as president from 1967–1990. He has exhibited extensively, including solo museum exhibitions at The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Owens Art Gallery, and Portikus (#86) (Frankfurt am Main). He received the Order of Canada in 2003 and the Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts in 2004. He is the author of The Last Art College, NSCAD (1968-1978) (MIT Press) and is currently an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia.

• Kim Nguyen

  A curator and writer based in San Francisco, where she is Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute. Nguyen was formerly Director/Curator of Artspeak from 2011-2016. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues and periodicals nationally and internationally, with recent texts in catalogues published by Pied-à-Terre (San Francisco), Gluck 50/Mousse (Milan), and the Herning Museum of Art (Denmark). Nguyen is the recipient of the 2015 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Emerging Curators in Contemporary Canadian Art and the 2016 Joan Lowndes Award from the Canada Council for the Arts for excellence in critical and curatorial writing.

• Laura Owens

  Laura Owens earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Solo exhibitions include Soccer Club Club, Chicago; Secession, Vienna; Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2015); 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles (2013); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2011); and a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2003). She was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and is a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum’s 2016 Hugo Boss Prize. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the CCA Wattis, San Francisco in 2016. Owens lives and works in Los Angeles.