“How to Move a Tree,” by Picnic Collective, is a collaborative, process-oriented project culminating in a book publication. The project aims to document a group of Maine-based artists manifesting an instructional score in their chosen medium. The score, fashioned as a poetic “how-to” guide, involves a series of instructions that engage ideas of uprooting, transplanting, and finding agency and community.
Artist bios
Carolina González Valencia (b. Bogotá-Colombia)
Carolina’s practice lies at the intersection of personal, social, and political narratives. She weaves multiple media–animation, video, film, performance, writing, drawing, painting–to create documents that challenge social and historical representations of migration, otherness, diaspora, and labor. She has worked on projects in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Lebanon, and the United States. Carolina’s work has been shown internationally at such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Quito, Ecuador; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME); GAZE (San Francisco); International short films showcase (Jakarta, Indonesia); Full Frame Theater/International short films and videos (Durham, NC); Broward College (Davie, FL); Contra el Silencio Todas Las Voces (Mexico City); Cinemateca Distrital (Bogotá, Colombia); Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). Her films have been screened on public access TV on such sites as Can TV (Chicago) and Videonautas (Colombia). She is the recipient of LEF Foundation Production Grant, the Lyn Blumenthal Scholarship (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), the Gelman Travel Fellowship (School of the Art Institute of Chicago); and the Programa Nacional de Estímulos (Colombian Ministry of Culture). She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation). Carolina is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
Asha Tamirisa is an intermedia artist and researcher whose work engages media materiality, histories/pastness, and identity. She primarily works with sound and video in performance and installation. Her work has been supported by The Kitchen’s L.A.B Research Residency, the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Project Grant, the Maine Arts Commission Fellowship in Media Arts, the Media Archeology Lab, Perte De Signal, Hewnoaks, and I-Park Foundation. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal for Popular Music Studies, the Feminist Review, and in edited volumes. She has performed at the ICA Boston, the Boston Museum of Science, Bitforms Gallery (NYC), the Waterworks Museum, for Indexical’s Digital Alchemy series, and at several community spaces. Between 2013-2017 Asha was part of OPENSIGNAL, a collective organized around concerns for gender and race in electronic media practice. She is now part of PICNIC COLLECTIVE, a collaborative and process oriented community art endeavor. Asha holds a Ph.D. in Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, and has taught at Street Level Youth Media, Brown University, RISD, and Bates College.
Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary poet and cultural studies scholar. Ian-Khara’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut, Hinchas de Poesía, The Volta, Writing the Land: Maine, and From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast. Ian-Khara is a 2023 Cave Canem Fellow and has received the New Millennium Award for Poetry and the Ashley Bryan Fellowship. Their critical writing, including the essay “Radical Sovereignty, Rhetorical Borders, and the Everyday Decolonial Praxis of Indigenous Peoplehood and Two-Spirit Reclamation,” has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Families in Society. Ian-Khara is a Point Foundation Scholar and an alum of the University of Memphis (BA) and the University of Arizona (MA and PhD). Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and most recently, in southern Maine, where they are an Assistant
Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College.
Verónica Pèrez (they/them) is an artist whose work is deeply rooted in the community, exploring themes of erasure, identity, and interdependency through her braiding circles workshops. In 2020, they were awarded the Ellis-Beaureguard Visual Arts Fellowship, followed by the inaugural fellowship at the David C. Driskell Black Seed Studio at Indigo Arts Alliance in 2021. In 2022, they were a fellow at the Lunder Institute at Colby College, and subsequently had their first solo exhibition titled voices, whispering at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. In 2023, Perez was awarded the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist award and the Amelia Peabody award for sculpture excellence. They also had their second solo show at the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery in Gorham titled shadow / echo / memory in the summer of 2023. Recently she was named one of the Maine Artist Fellows for 2024 in fine arts from the Maine Arts Commission. Currently, Perez works as the Administrative Assistant at a Black-led arts and residency organization, Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine. They are also
a co-organizer at Tender Table, an organization dedicated to uplifting Maine’s Black and Brown community through storytelling and food. Veronica Perez resides in Westbrook, Maine, with their partner and child.
Bukola Koiki is a Nigerian-American transdisciplinary artist whose work strives to collapse the single-story of the immigrant experience by engaging and interpreting the liminal spaces she inhabits through research and explorations of linguistic phenomena, cultural ontologies, generational memory and more. Her multidimensional fiber works reflect her material and technical curiosity and include hand-pulled prints rendered with embroidered collagraph plates, giant beads employing Nigerian hair threading techniques, handmade and hand-dyed paper and Indigo dyed and hand-printed Tyvek head ties. Her work has been exhibited in galleries at the Haystack and Arrowmont Craft schools and at the Portland Building Installation Space, Nationale, and PDX Contemporary Art’s Window Project, amongst other art spaces in Portland, OR. Her work has also been featured in print in American Craft Magazine, Surface Design Journal, and online on Art 21 Magazine and Art Practical. Koiki was recently nominated for the Textile Society of America’s 2020 Brandford/Elliot Award and was a finalist for the 2019 ACC Emerging Artist Award. She completed the Haystack Open Studio Residency in 2018, the Rainmaker Summer Residency (Portland, OR) in 2016, and was awarded an Oregon RACC Professional Development Grant in the same year. Koiki received her MFA in Applied Craft + Design from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2015 and her BFA in Communication Design from the University of North Texas in 2006. She was nominated for the Textile Society of America’s Brandford/Elliott Award and named a 2019 Shortlist Finalist for the American Craft Council’s Emerging Voices Award. Koiki has exhibited nationally, including in Chicago, IL and Portland, OR. Koiki and her work have been featured in American Craft magazine, Surface, Design Journal, online on Art21 Magazine and Art Practical Journal websites and she has been
interviewed on NPR. She was awarded the AICAD Teaching Fellowship/Visiting Assistant Professorship at Maine College of Art from 2017-2019 and recently completed the 2019-2020 Fountainhead Teaching Fellowship/Adjunct Professorship in the Craft/Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.
Stacey Tran (they/them) is a community organizer, author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018), and creator of Tender Table, a project celebrating Black and Brown community by connecting and honoring our identities, traditions, joy, resilience, and fight for collective liberation through storytelling and food.
Social media
Picnic Collective | Instagram
Asha Tamirisa | Instagram
Carolina González Valencia | Instagram
Verónica Pèrez | Instagram
Bukola Koiki | Instagram
Tender Table | Instagram
Cover image: Carolina González Valencia, How To Clean a House- A Family Album, 2018, artist book publication.