background
This project is organized and edited by Annie Buckley and Mary Anna Pomonis. Both are exhibiting artists with multidisciplinary practices that embrace visual, social, and collaborative art as well as writing, editing, and curating. They are also credentialed teachers and university faculty. Between them, Buckley and Pomonis have a total of 36 years of experience teaching at the primary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels, working throughout Southern California with diverse student bodies almost exclusively in public schools, colleges, and universities.
Radical Actions began as a conversation between Buckley and Pomonis in 2012, when their work was included in “Critology," a group exhibition featuring artists/writers that opened at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, CA and traveled to Western Carolina Fine Art Museum in North Carolina. Through this discussion, Buckley and Pomonis discovered a shared commitment to teaching and art and a mutual curiosity about connections between their active lives as artists and writers and their relationships to teaching, students, community, and the world. This interaction planted the seeds for an ongoing dialgoue about the interrelationships between contemporary art and education. Their shared fascination with writing as evidence of radical thought and practice since evolved into this project and helped them to formulate its guiding questions. They look forward to growing the conversation.
About the Editorial Team:
Annie Buckley is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, editor, and curator with an emphasis on art and social justice. Her writing about contemporary art has been published regularly since 2005 by publications including Artforum.com, Art in America, The Huffington Post, KCET Artbound, Artillery, Make Magazine, and Glass Quarterly. She is a contributing editor the the Los Angeles Review of Books and was editor-in-chief of Artweek from 2008-9. Buckley is the author of two books of fiction, Psychic Outlaws and Navigating Ghosts, both published within the context of collaborative, interdisciplinary art projects, and more than twenty non-fiction books for children and teens, including two with Chronicle Books. Her recent participatory and multiform project, "The People’s Tarot," was included in “Tapping the Third Realm” at Otis College of Art and Design and Loyola Marymount University and traveled to the Hollywood Art and Culture Center in Florida as part of Miami Basel 2014. Her work has been included in solo exhibitions at Carl Berg Gallery and Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles and she has a print edition with de Soto Gallery in Venice, CA.
Buckley is an associate professor of Visual Studies at CSU San Bernardino, where she is also the director Community-based Art (CBA). Since her hire in 2011, Buckley completed a curriculum revision to reflect multi-age and community-based teaching, public practice, and socially-engaged art. She began CBA, in which students and alumni facilitate art at sites in the local community including a shelter for teens, youth probation, and three CA state prisons. The work in corrections evolved into the Prison Arts Collective. She has presented CBA at conferences nationally and internationally, including the European Association for Prison Education Conference in Belgium in 2015. In 2015, Buckley was the recipient of the College of Arts and Letters Outstanding Faculty in Service Award and took First Place in the University Innovative Teaching Contest. She has a BA with academic honors from UC Berkeley, an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design, and a California Teaching Credential with Bilingual/Bicultural and Art Specializations.
Mary Anna Pomonis is a Los Angeles-based artist specializing in painting, performance and social practice, she is the founder of the Association of Hysteric Curators and co-collaborator, with Allison Stewart, of the Resurrecting Matilda Project , mapping the erasure of women through history. Pomonis has shown at galleries and institutions including the Torrance Art Museum; the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Annie Wharton Los Angeles; Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, Miami; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; Space B Gallery, New York; and I space, Chicago. Her artwork has appeared in The Huffington Post, Saatchi Online Magazine, National Public Radio, Whitehot Magazine, and Artweek and her curatorial projects and essays have been featured at commercial and college art galleries such as the Vincent Price Art Museum, The Whittier College Greenleaf Gallery, PØST, Peter Miller Gallery and Circus Gallery.
Pomonis is currently on faculty at Cal State Long Beach in the department of Art Education and at Cal State San Bernardino in the department of Visual Studies. Pomonis also teaches part time in the new CalArts Teaching Artist program, training MFA and BFA candidates to teach in the Community Arts Partnership program founded at CalArts by Glenna Avila. Pomonis has a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was granted the Mary McLellan fellowship as the outstanding painter in Fine and Applied Arts, and received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. From 2005-2007, Pomonis was the Director of Curriculum at the Chouinard Foundation School of Art in South Pasadena. Pomonis also has a California Teaching Credential with a Single Subject Art Specialization and taught for sixteen years at Hoover High School in Glendale, CA. In 2009, Otis College of Art and Design named her the Outstanding Teacher in Los Angeles County.