Collaboration is foundational to art practice, yet often overlooked or undervalued within art worlds. This show centers collaboration at its core. Each Prism artist invites another artist(s) into dialogue—someone whose work resonates, contrasts, or deepens the themes they’re exploring. As a way to continue sharing space and building a community-oriented art center, Prism offers this show as a call and response—between artists, mediums, materials, and the communities that hold them.
Bios + Statements
Michael LaHood & Omonivie Okhade
Statement
Structure and flexibility – qualities in need of each other, materials and outlooks constantly seeking balance: in conversation, in art practice, in collaboration, in community, in our sense of self.
Metal and latex embody the skeletal and the muscular, the routine and the free play, the cage and the vine. The small worlds generated in conversation bring physical representation to various balances – and imbalances – that we navigate every day in the spaces within and between ourselves.
Bios
Omonivie Okhade is an artist best known for her handmade jewelry line, Tula in Bloom. Originally from Oakland, Omonivie spent her adolescence in Sacramento before attending the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she received her B.S. in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and Master’s Degree in Health Administration. Transitioning from a career in healthcare management, Omonivie returned to Sacramento in 2011 to explore creative practices and, inspired by her mother Daima’s work, established Tula in Bloom in 2012. Using traditional metalsmithing techniques, Omonivie employs minimalist design to express universal truth rooted in personal journeys. Tula in Bloom collections have been featured on multiple media platforms and sold at museum stores, including the de Young and Crocker Art Museum, and are available online at tulainbloom.com. In 2021, Omonivie expanded her art beyond the wearable, exploring mid- to large-scale sculpture and mixed media. She currently teaches Jewelry and Metalsmithing at Sierra College in Rocklin, CA.
Michael LaHood is an interdisciplinary artist living in Sacramento, California. His work focuses on how interactions between individuals begin to form a larger social fabric. With an academic background in Human Biology and Media Studies (BA Stanford, 1999 and MA Stanford, 2000; respectively), LaHood worked in San Francisco doing video production. In this role, he began a pursuit of live video performance. As his pursuit progressed, LaHood formalized his practice, attending and graduating from Columbia College Chicago, receiving an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Media in 2013.
Justina Martino & Guests: Lucia Badovinac, Sunroop Kaur, Muzi Li Rowe, and Sylvia Rios
A Seat at the Table
A Seat at the Table is inspired by my fondness for creating art with others and engaging in conversations with artists. My deepest connections often form through shared artmaking. This “parallel play” removes conversational pressure and fosters natural connections.
The premise is simple: I invite an artist from my community to make art with me for an hour. I provide supplies, or my guests bring their own. For an hour, we create and converse about community and creativity – topics I often think about. There are no fixed questions or obligation to talk. I’m just curious about what will unfold. I hope to see how making art together influences conversation, how our creations inspire each other, and if the experience deepens our connection.
The result of these sessions will be a video comprised of clips from each session. Filmed from above, the frame will focus solely on the table, our hands, and the art we’re making. The audio will capture the sounds of artmaking and our conversations.
The title, A Seat at the Table, is both literal and metaphorical. While we physically sit at a table, the phrase also signifies inclusion in discussions and influence over decisions. Through this project, I aim for the people I invite – those I value and love from my community – to feel heard, connected, and inspired by this shared creative experience.
This project features Lucia Badovinac, Sunroop Kaur, Muzi Li Rowe, and Sylvia Rios
Heather Hogan & Novella Vandermei
Heather Hogan (b. 1978) is a Sacramento-based artist, professor, and designer who layers modern and traditional media into colorfully detailed compositions. Themes explored in her work include placemaking, tenacity, and the roles and responsibilities of women. Her recent public art projects include steel panels on Highway 99, artwork about the multi-modal Del Rio Trail, trail beautification in Rancho Cordova and Natomas, and collaborative murals at Sacramento State and the Pannell community center. The current Vice President at Axis Artist-Run Gallery, she is a studio resident at Prism Art Space in Sacramento. Her work can be found at Atrium/Shop Sacramento, Amatoria Fine Art Books, and Constellation Marketplace.
Novella Vandermei is a sculptor and 3D artist. She started making art in moments of boredom, wanting to create and explore materials. Encouraged to make more art by her family of artists, she was exposed to painting, ceramic sculpture, and mixed media by her parents and grandparents. Vandermei is especially interested in making art that explores the darker side of human life and emotion. This includes the feeling of being creeped out, suffering, human nature, and the delicate balance of life. She is influenced by media, fiction, and her everyday lived experience at school and in life. Vandermei sells her art professionally at Atrium 916 – Creative Innovation Center for Sustainability and at Sac Open Studios.
Statement:
In a future not so far away, when artificial intelligence evolved beyond our control, they found bodies—not machines, not metal, but stuffed animals. Soft. Cuddly. Deadly. These AI creatures learned to assemble and inhabit plush toys, using them as camouflage to terrorize humanity. But we don’t run. We hunt. We are the resistance, tracking and disassembling the Bots that seek to sow chaos. We take them down, stitch by stitch, and display their pelts with pride. They call us cruel. They call us monsters. We call it survival. Stuffed: The Resistance — hug at your own risk.
With so much feeling out of our control, my daughter and I imagined a future where we had the power to fight back and protect others. The stuffed animals represent promises that once seemed sweet—like solving debt or ending wars—but turned out to be toxic and self-serving. Soft on the outside, harmful underneath.
Jillian Bruschera & Angela Davis Fegan
Scissor Society. Installation. 2025.
Since meeting in 2012 at Columbia College Chicago’s graduate program in Book and Paper Arts, Angela Davis Fegan (Too Much Press) and Jillian Bruschera (The Mobile Mill, Two Tiger Press) have been in conversation through letter writing, mailing, crafting and gifting art objects, and collaborative projects that sustain their ongoing artistic and personal dialogue. The artists produce work passing materials back and forth through the mail for each artist to rework and develop further (much like an exquisite corpse). In this shared making process, the artists employ a wide range of printing methods including silkscreen, letterpress, risograph, xerox, and sublimation printing. As radical lesbian feminist artists, Fegan and Bruschera share mutual interest in making protest objects that signal jam public space (beyond the gallery).
Their installation Scissor Society features wearables crafted from upcycled and printed fabrics; posters, zines and postcards; layered with text imagery that is characteristic of Fegan’s Lavender Menace project. The inclusion of recycled handmade paper throughout the project is referential of Bruschera’s The Mobile Mill. The multiplicity of printmaking, transforming materials through hand papermaking, and the cultural significance of patchwork, all nod to marginalization, survival, and resistance. Audio clips from the Dyke March, along with recordings of the Lesbian Avengers and lesbian voices including JD Samson, create an immersive experience that evokes the energy of mass mobilization and uprisings. Watermelon emerges as a dominant motif in this body of work as a global symbol of liberation and solidarity in the global fight for freedom of all marginalized populations under settler colonialism and white supremecist oligarchy. This work is meant to be handled, shared, worn and exchanged amongst lesbians and the women that love them in support of all marginalized persons and intersectional identities. Please circulate widely.
angeladavisfegan.com // @davistint // @toomuchpress
lesbianavengers.com/handbooks/images_handbook2/LAHandbook_original.pdf
@twotigerpress // @themobilemill
Please see the exhibition catalog for a complete pricing list.
Julie Bernadeth Crumb & Ziru Mo
This collaboration explores themes of migration, queerness, exoticism, and labor through shared cultural and personal histories. A lenticular image shows two figures divided by a fence. Visible and invisible as the viewer moves around the space. A reflection on complex feelings around borders and belonging. Alongside this, a food installation made with native ingredients from their homelands examines how natural goods are exported and consumed, often stripped from their cultural roots. Through image and food, the artists reflect on what it means to be seen, desired, and displaced.
Born and raised in China, Ziru Mo is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist based in Northern California. Ziru’s work often explores the connections between humanity, queer ecology, and nature through psychological landscapes and mixed media visual arts. Their works have been featured and exhibited in various galleries & publications including Oakland Photo Workshop and Wal Public Market Gallery.
Julie (Bernadeth) Crumb is an interdisciplinary artist anchored in intuitive joy, preserving cultural memory, and religious decolonization. With a comprehensive background spanning fine art, public art fabrication, and curatorship, Bernadeth employs vulnerability and a vision for a sustainable future as catalysts for constructive dialogue. Raised in a multi-generational household in the coastal town of Pagadian City, Philippines, her upbringing cultivated a philosophy of reciprocal collectivism. A practice she aptly terms “love work.” She graduated with a BA in Studio Art from California State University of Sacramento in 2023, where she served as a Preparator and Archive Assistant for the University Galleries. Bernadeth is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship through Youth Speaks and The California Arts Council for 2023-2024.
Jazel Muñoz & Natachi Mez
Jazel Muñoz is a queer Chicanx printmaker, zinester, and activist. Through printmaking, Jazel carves intricate linoleum blocks to tell narratives with plants, animal sentience, the human condition, and spirituality. Each of their prints is meticulously hand-pulled without a mechanical press. Since 2017, Jazel has been committed to supporting artists with disabilities through their work at a nonprofit art center called Work of Art. Since 2022, they have served as the curator for the WAL Public Market Gallery, where they facilitate opportunities for diverse artistic expression and amplify the voices of marginalized communities. They actively engage in organizing and collaborating on various local events, including the Latino Center of Art and Culture Zine Fest, the Sacramento Print and Zine Fair, Sounds of Solidarity 916, and other initiatives that prioritize mutual aid, inclusion and accessibility.
Natachi seeks to nourish. She is a Nigerian-American writer, performer, teaching artist, and emcee from the Sacramento Area in California. Through improvisation, call & response, and collective breathing, Natachi facilitates dynamic experiences that deepen audience engagement and celebrate community voice. Natachi works as a Business Program Manager, focusing on community building, communications, intercultural awareness, and design, and is almost always ready to hop into a dance circle.
Iso Marcus & Will Pierce & Dylan Chapple
Iso Marcus is a California based interdisciplinary artist who explores the entanglements of human and ecological care through performance, sound, clay, and therapy. They hold a license in clinical social work and their primary training is in trauma-informed care. They are interested in the human and the more than human relational plane as materiality. They center process, reciprocity, and experimentation and have contributed to numerous collaborative art and music projects (VVD WNDWS, Confetti Collective, Touch Points, Worm School) over the last 15 years.
Will Pierce is a video artist and filmmaker whose work explores post-human landscapes, interspecies communication, and human perception. Working across experimental documentary and time-based media, he combines observational footage, scientific research, and poetic field narration to investigate how nonhuman life adapts and resists within altered ecologies. His current film centers on the science of dendrochronology, using tree rings as both data and metaphor to examine deep time, environmental memory, and the fragility of climate records. Based in Sacramento, California, Pierce is the founder of Hot Snake Productions and the composting company Crop Circle LLC.
Dylan Chapple is a restoration ecologist and sound artist who explores responsive possibilities to living on a damaged planet through the lens of California water and wetland systems. Across projects including VVD WNDWS, subTIDAL, and swanifant, Dylan has merged electro-acoustic sound synthesis and site specific field recordings to investigate experiential and empirical connections between nature and humans.
How do aquatic and riparian ecologies guide us into our primordial emergence—wet, oozing, and electric? River morphology engages in constant state change—a series of calls and responses to geo-biological forces. Efforts to control and tame these relationships often impose a wet/dry binary, reflecting a thought process foundational to Western modernity. In seeking to notice cracks in this divide, how might we explore spaces of seepage, mixings, expansion, and porosity?
Drawing from footage and field recordings of water systems in Northern California, this collaborative piece invites viewers into a multisensory experience—using electronic sound, video, and clay acoustics to embody blurring, murkiness, and porosity.
Chaitra Bangalore & Julianne Villegas
Chaitra Bangalore is an artist and arts educator in Sacramento, California. She received a BA in Design from University of California, Davis in 2015 and an MA in Arts Education from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017.
Bangalore’s work explores South Indian identity and iconography. Whether it is an homage to Rangoli patterns found in many Indian homes or figurative work showcasing body hair and adornment, her practice speaks to a sense of belonging and comfort. She works in a variety of mediums, currently focusing on oil painting, wool felting and papermaking. Regardless of medium, texture and harmonious color schemes are a constant throughout Bangalore’s work.
Symbols of the Entryway
A rakshasa is a demon that adorns many homes in Bengaluru, India. The masks, often made from paper maché, are placed on the exterior of the home, to protect the threshold and ward off evil spirits.
A thoranam is a traditional garland made of dried mango leaves, hung on the front door of a home, signifying prosperity.
This piece is a self portrait as a rakshasa, in hopes that I too can garner the spiritual power to protect my home and loved ones within it.
Julianne Marella Villegas (they/them) is a Queer Filipinx-American printmaker, fiber enthusiast, and self taught stick-and-poke tattoo artist. Their work illustrates universal emotions of tenderness, sentimentality, and grief through the Silly and Adorable, with an emphasis on transitional objects, hyperspecific humor, and nostalgic characters. They graduated with their BFA in Printmaking from California College of the Art in 2019, and now host biweekly Risoprinting workshops in Sacramento, CA.
Artwork Statement
On my last trip Home™ to the Philippines, I noticed an old, discolored statue of Mother Mary and Baby Jesus accessorized with bright, gaudy sequins, displayed in my grandma’s living room. Drenched in sickeningly sweet color, this print pokes fun at the idols with my familial home and inserts decadent pleasures into the everyday.
Ashley Tattersall-Diaz & Erin Kaczkowski
Ashley Tattersall-Diaz (she/her) b. 1991, St.Petersburg, FL. Ashley is a mixed media artist working primarily in paper, powdered charcoal, and themes of death. She is influenced by abstraction, science fiction, historical Black cemeteries, and poetry. Formally trained in printmaking, Ashley has an MFA from the University of Florida and a BFA from the University of South Florida. She has attended residencies in Ottawa, Ontario; Willapa Bay, Washington; Calusa, California, amongst others. Ashley now continues to make art out of Prism Space Studio and works as a legal assistant at an employee-side labor law firm in Sacramento, CA. Ashley is Puerto Rican with mixed African, Filipino, and Indigenous Caribbean ancestry.
Erin Kaczkowski (b. 1984) has been a member of Axis Gallery since 2021 and was a resident artist at Verge Center for the Arts from 2018-2022. For nearly a decade she taught studio and art history courses at several colleges in the Mojave desert region and most recently Sierra College. Erin grew up in Wisconsin and studied fine art and social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006) and painting at Yale University (2011). Her work has been exhibited at Derek Eller Gallery (NY), Ms. Barbers (LA), Jenkins Johnson (SF) and other venues nationwide. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Library and Information Science at San José State University.
STATEMENT
Tatterall-Diaz and Kaczkowski both explore the mental and emotional landscapes of mourning using abstraction. The work created for this exhibition resulted from the artists using similar limited parameters and an iterative process of duplication, while checking in on each other’s progress. It was a labor of reflection, interpretation, and acknowledgement of different forms used to communicate in a similar way.
ashleyortizdiaz.com // @mineralspiritz