Join us for a conversation with Tim Gibbons, Heather Raquel Phillips, Melissa Beatriz Skolnock and Wit López about their work in the third group of <em>Nuestro Tema: Llamada y Repuesta</em>. The artist will talk about their process and the intentionality in their work. The artists will talk about their process and the intentionality in their work, including their engagement with the themes of identity and the role of the artist in the community. The conversation will be facilitated by curator Rafael Damast, and audience participation is encouraged!

<em>Nuestro Tema</em> looks at Taller’s community through a sample of its art collection. The works in the collection are the “Call” invoked in the title. In turn, Taller invites outside artists to respond to the work as well as encourages the community to comment – the “Response.”

Learn more about the show <a href="http://tallerpr.org/2017/10/16/group-3-nuestra-tema-llamada-y-respuesta/">here</a>.

<strong>About the Artists</strong>

<p class="textbox" dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.heatheraquelphilllips.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Heather Raquel Phillips</a> is a mixed race, multi-media artist working in performance, video, text and photography. As a Philadelphia native &amp; resident, she creates her work with a tight knit community of friends to create intimate works &amp; visibility for her subjects. Phillips received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from University of Pennsylvania where she was the recipient of the prestigious Toby Devon Lewis Fellowship, as well as the Stuart Egnal Scholarship Award. She has recently showed work at Mama Gallery, LA, the Ice Box Project Space and Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia and BLAM Gallery In Brooklyn, NY. She is currently lecturing at The University of Pennsylvania and Ms. Philadelphia Leather 2017.</p>

<p class="textbox" dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.timgibbonsphotography.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tim Gibbons</a> is a Philadelphia-based artist and educator. His teaching and studio practices are rooted in the collaborative production of socially engaged public artwork, in a variety of mediums. Tim holds an MEd from Tyler School of Art, and currently works as Director of PCCY's Picasso Project.</p>

<p class="textbox" dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.melissabskolnick.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Melissa Beatriz Skolnick</a> is a multimedia artist, writer, and producer who advocates for social justice and human rights. Since 2010, she has been working with nonprofits and arts organizations throughout Philadelphia, while using a range of tools for community building and storytelling. Her multimedia projects have screened at local film festivals, conferences, and community centers, in order to spark dialogue and action across communities. As a Uruguayan-American, her identity is strongly tied to much of the work she creates, by collaborating closely with Latin American and immigrant communities to document multifaceted stories of arts and culture.</p>

<p class="textbox" dir="ltr">Wit López is a Brooklyn-bred and Philadelphia-based disabled, gender non-conforming/nonbinary trans mixed media creator, performer, and independent curator of African American and Boricua descent. With two visual artists for parents, creating has always been a part of López’s world. Their work combines the skills their parents taught them: fiber art, painting, collage, and photography. The work also contains elements of their formal training in theatre and classical music, including costuming, staging, and props. Their visual work and performance art uses their background in Anthropology and Africana Studies as a lens to examine, decolonize, and reconstruct aspects of their own identity. Through fiber and imagery, López explores hairiness, accessibility, queerness, gender identity, Blackness, and Latinidad, while also nodding lightly at absurdity and the macabre</p>