She is Here: Project Spaces

Kelly Taylor Mitchell (b. 1994, USA) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Atlanta, GA where she is currently an Artist-in-Residence with the Studio Artist Program at The Atlanta Contemporary and a Working Artist Project Fellow at MOCA GA. Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture and the Art Program Director at Spelman College. Kelly’s multidisciplinary practice centers oral history and ancestral memory woven into the fabric of the Africana Diaspora, in order to present speculative futures, specifically related to concepts of community autonomy, swamp marronage, and inherited/constructed identity. Utilizing printmaking, papermaking, sculpture, and textiles her work manifests as immersive installations, performative objects, and partnered artists books offering a venue for the sensorial –specifically smell- to connect to, convey, and reimagine rituals and rites of autonomous kin, collectives, and individuals of the Africana Diaspora.

Pam Longobardi’s parents, an ocean lifeguard and the Delaware state diving champion, connected her from an early age to the water. She moved to Atlanta in 1970 and saw her neighborhood pond drained to build the high school she attended. Since then, she lived for varying time periods in Wyoming, Montana, California, and Tennessee, and worked as a firefighter and tree planter, a scientific illustrator and an aerial mapmaker, a waitress and a bartender, a collaborative printer and a color mixer. Her artwork involves painting, photography, and installation to address the psychological relationship of humans to the natural world. After discovering mountains of plastic on remote Hawaiian shores in 2006, she founded the Drifters Project, centralizing the artist as culture worker/activist/researcher. Now a global collaborative entity, Drifters Project has removed tens of thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situated it in social space. Winner of the prestigious Hudgens Prize and Distinguished Professor at Georgia State University, Longobardi has been featured in National Geographic, SIERRA magazine, the Weather Channel and in exhibitions across the US and in Greece, Italy, Monaco, Germany, Finland, Slovakia, China, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Poland and the UK. The work provides a visual statement about the engine of global consumption and the vast amounts of plastic objects and their impact on the world’s most remote places and its creatures. Longobardi’s work is framed within a conversation about globalism and climate change.

Daricia Mia DeMarr is from Los Angeles, California. She launched her collegiate career at Clark Atlanta University but received a BA in Art History from Georgia State University and master’s degree in Visual Arts Administration from New York University. DeMarr served as assistant director at the NYU Kimmel Center Galleries, organizing and curating over 100 exhibitions in 6 years. She curated, ‘Respectfully Yours,’ at the Queens Museum, Bulova Center and was a member of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Art Program public art team. She founded Pi Arts Projects and is co-founder of Black Women in Visual Art. DeMarr is currently gallery manager at Peg Alston Fine Arts in NYC and serves as an independent curator, arts administrator and consultant.

Kristen V. Cahill is an independent art advisor and curator living in Atlanta. In 2019, she became the curator for The Lola, a women’s club, where she curates rotating exhibitions featuring female-identifying fine artists in the Southeast. As the principal of her design firm, she’s consulted on creative and strategy projects for corporate clients and curated art collections and designed interiors for residential clients throughout the US. Prior to creating her own firm, she worked with Peace Design and Tim Hobby Design on national, high-end residential projects. She also spent ten years in the fashion industry working with Calvin Klein, Barneys New York, Saks Fifth Avenue, KCD and up-and-coming designers. In 2012, she curated and produced the single U.S. showing of Lightscapes, an exhibition of fashion designer Dries Van Noten and photographer James Reeve’s collaboration. She also served on the board of Flux Projects from 2010-2015, where she spearheaded the 2015 Nick Cave original performance piece, Up Right Atlanta. Kristen is a Founding Partner board member of The Lola and a board member of the GA Committee for the National Museum of Women in the Arts.