Greetings Friend,

You're invited to join us for an evening of visual, literary, and musical art with the current residents of The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.

Artist presentations begin at 7:00.

Caroline Clerc is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. Her work responds to natural environments in the production of large-format photographs and sculpture. Her work is first performed though an immersion in the natural environment in long walks. Images are then digitally composited into a single photograph.

Problematizing the act of looking and disrupting the idea that it is possible to fully understand one’s relationship to the environment or to nature, her anxious images without stable perspectives evoke imminent collapse. They reflect a precarious relationship with environments under perpetual threat by the effects of climate change. Her work also incorporates sculptural forms: improvised installation with the landscape; or the incorporation of found materials into a final installation.

Caroline's current show, Elysian, is on exhibit at Taos Center for the Arts until August 9th. Check it out!
carolineclerc.org

Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño is a Philadelphia-based artist whose paintings, drawings and installations investigate intergenerational memory and relationships.

Eastwood-Riaño is the recipient of a 2022 Soaring Gardens Artist Residency and a 2021 grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation; she was also selected as a Wind Challenge artist in 2020, exhibiting at Fleisher in 2022. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions nationally, and is part of private collections in the United States and abroad. In December 2022, Eastwood-Riaño was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Mural Arts to create a mural in response to their recent exhibition, Matisse in the 1930’s.

The artist received her MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from The University of the Arts. Eastwood-Riaño has taught as an adjunct professor at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, The University of the Arts, and Moore College of Art & Design. She is currently an Assistant Professor at The Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.
kathleeneastwoodriano.com

Originally from Oregon, Robison currently resides in California teaching sculpture and serving as Art Department Chair at the City College of San Francisco. Robison holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Marylhurst University and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Oregon.

The sculpture of Stephanie Robison plays with multiple oppositional relationships. Working with industrial fabrics and wood, she creates large-scale installations that examine relationships between culture, nature and the built environment.

Her latest series of work combines traditional stone carving and the process of needle felting wool. By merging incongruous materials such as wool and marble, she works to synthesize and fuse: organic and geometric, natural and architectural, handmade and the uniform industrial. Focusing on materiality and color with this new work, Robison creates charming, often humorous or awkward forms referencing aspects of the body, relationships and the environment.
stephanierobison.com

Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.
alyssemccanna.com

Eliza Edens is a Berkshires-bred, Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter. On her sophomore album We’ll Become the Flowers, Brooklyn-based songwriter Eliza Edens explores the emotional terrain that follows loss—of love, of certainty, of a loved one’s health. Drawing inspiration from folk legends like Nick Drake and Karen Dalton, she transforms personal grief into luminous, introspective songs that balance sorrow, playfulness, and resilience. Written after a breakup and her mother’s diagnosis with a neurodegenerative disease, the album became a creative lifeline. Recorded with close collaborators in a Minneapolis attic, the songs pulse with vulnerability and experimentation, capturing scenes both raw and tender: shouting on highways, dancing in the wild, planting seeds of hope. What began as a way to process grief ultimately blossoms into a generous offering: a reminder that healing can coexist with heartbreak, and that every ending contains the possibility of something new.
eliza-edens.com

Leigh Gallagher will read an excerpt from a short story completed during her residency, called "The New Blazing World," in which a woman confronts the changing terms of her marriage as a wildfire approaches. The title references an early example of utopian/science-fiction prose by the 17th century radical Margaret Cavendish.
Leigh N. Gallagher is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Philadelphia. Her first novel, Who You Might Be, was published by Henry Holt in 2022, and her fiction, essays, and writings on visual art have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Lit Hub, Full Stop, American Short Fiction, Salt Hill, and the Reading Room anthology, as well as in nontraditional formats through collaborations with painters, filmmakers, and musicians. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, she’s led writing classes and workshops at a range of institutions, including the Pratt Institute, CUNY, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, InsideOut Detroit, Blue Stoop, and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. She's currently at work on a novel about nostalgia for a lost counterculture, set in her home state of California
helloleighgallagher.com

Sarah writes and performs music under the stage name Wolf Larsen - her grandfather's name. Her songs have been praised for the aching clarity and expansive stillness they evoke, capturing the essence of her rare live performances that leave audiences spellbound. Most recently, her song “If I Be Wrong,” was featured in Tim Burton’s Netflix show Wednesday, a testament to the cinematic quality of the work.

Beyond her music, Ramey is also the author of the acclaimed book, The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, (Doubleday) which details her personal battle with severe chronic pain and illnesses and advocates for the millions who suffer from invisible disabilities. Her writing has also appeared in The Paris Review, Ms. Magazine, and Salon.
wolflarsenmusic.com

Creating deep emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges, the music of Andrea Clearfield is performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. She has written 175 works for opera, chorus, orchestra, chamber ensemble, dance and multimedia collaborations, exploring subjects ranging from freedom and oppression to ancient cultures, environmental sustainability, health and healing, gender and technology. Among her works are seventeen cantatas including one for The Philadelphia Orchestra with librettist Charlotte Blake Alston. She has been awarded a Pew Center International Residency Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, two Independence Foundation Fellowships, two Fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and Fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, MacDowell and Copland House among others. Dr. Clearfield has served on the Board of the Recording Academy/Grammy’s Philadelphia Chapter and currently serves on the executive board of Wildflower Composers, supporting young female, transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer composers. Passionate about building community around the arts, she is also founder and host of the Philadelphia SZALON featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, multimedia and world music since 1986. She was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Musical Fund Society in May, 2025. She is represented by Black Tea Music.
andreaclearfield.com

Sincerely yours,

- Nic Knight, Executive Director