To Begin, Again Exhibition Preview

A citizen of the world, Jerri Allyn is an artist, activist, and scholar (MA, Art and Community) interested in civic engagement through projects that provide forums for multiple voices. Allyn moves fluidly between art settings, academia, and targeted communities, employing the most appropriate form based on theme and intention: audio, radio, video, electronic signs, and billboards; sculptural books and printmaking multiples; site-oriented, interactive installations and performance art events that become a part of public life. Allyn’s projects often include interdisciplinary, education programs that expand on scholarly and secular concerns. With exhibited internationally, she has been the recipient of residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation (Italy) and Lila Wallace (Mexico) as well as grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

Stephanie K. Blackwood is a development and marketing/communications professional with a history of working to support causes and ideas that she believes in. Her career has included extensive marketing and community relations experience, starting at the University of Kansas and The Ohio State University, where she worked in athletics, administration, and the arts as assistant director of the University Gallery of Fine Art. Stephanie credits eight years at Ohio State with sparking her lifelong love of the arts and her commitment to LGBTQ inclusion and equity. After moving to New York, she launched three successful marketing agencies that focused on the LGBTQ+ consumer market and community and primarily served Fortune 500 clients. In 2010, she project managed the launch of a volunteer-led health clinic in Senegal, which led to her current work as a development professional. She has served on numerous nonprofit boards, including STREB, the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and the Hospital of Hope.

Julian Myers-Szupinska is an art historian and editor based in Los Angeles. A scholar of contemporary art, exhibitions, and the politics of space, Myers was founding faculty in the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, 2003–20, and was senior editor of Exhibitionist, a journal of exhibition making, 2014–17. Since 2011 Myers has worked with Joanna Szupinska in grupa o.k. Their practices include editing, curating, criticism, and research, with a focus on the history and future of exhibition making and the forms and complexities of collective organization. Over the last decade, grupa o.k. has produced projects for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland; Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada; and other institutions.

Mark Svede teaches contemporary film in Ohio State's History of Art Department. His publication and curatorial activity focuses on modernist, Soviet-era, and contemporary art, film, and visual culture in Latvia, where he worked as the acquisitions agent for the Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union (now located at Rutgers University). He was on the three-person curatorial team for University Gallery's final exhibition, AIDS: The Artists' Response.