True Inspiration Artist in Residence

Alexa Wheeler is an artist and educator whose practice is shaped by an interdisciplinary background in printmaking, electronic art, and multimedia storytelling. Born in Minnesota, she has lived and worked across the United States—including Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and the Southwest—before relocating to New Mexico more than twenty-five years ago to study at the Tamarind Institute, a formative experience that continues to inform her work. Wheeler holds a BFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute, a Master Printer Certificate from Tamarind, and an MFA in Electronic Art from the University of New Mexico.

Her work draws on lived experience to explore memory, resilience, and transformation, using making as a process of reflection, connection, and care. Wheeler has collaborated with artists and print studios throughout the United States and Germany, and since 2008 has served as Principal Lecturer III in Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico–Valencia. Her teaching practice emphasizes the studio as a space for skill-building, shared inquiry, and the cultivation of individual and collective voice.

Derek Reese is an interdisciplinary artist whose creative journey traverses the tapestry of Appalachian heritage and the evolving socio-political landscape of contemporary America. Hailing from the former coal mining village of Maidsville, West Virginia, and now based in the post-industrial milieu of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his artistic practice is deeply rooted in the transformative power of transitioning environments.

Reese is a graduate of West Virginia University and holds a Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State University. He represented the United States in the Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo in Antofagasta, Chile in 2021, where he premiered the critically acclaimed short film, Masculine Artifacts (The Miner and the Miner Stripped of His Clothes) Part II. Other recent exhibitions include The Myth of the American Dream at Tyler School of Art and Architecture (Philadelphia, PA 2024); You’re Doing it Wrong at Associated Artists of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA 2024); and Masculine Artifacts at Fairmont State University (Fairmont, WV 2023).

Danni OʼBrien is an environmentally conscious artist who creates whimsical sculptures from found materials and common detritus.  Her works are fantastical, absurd, and uncanny ruminations on bodies, machines, conspicuous consumption, dystopian survival, and queer-futurism.

Claire Whitehurst explores queer entanglement, memory and time through color, form, surfaces and composition in her paintings. She draws from the physical and emotional landscape of the deep South, exploring queer narrative, memory, time and identity through color, form, surface and composition. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she received her BFA from the University of Mississippi in 2015 and her MFA in painting from the University of Iowa in 2020 while being a recipient of the Stanley Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 2018. She lived and worked in the Dordogne region of southern France where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings. She has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, and her work has been featured in numerous publications She has participated in solo exhibitions in New Orleans, Louisiana, Iowa City, Iowa, Oxford, Mississippi and Los Angeles, California. She now lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“My work is about the creation of intimate spaces and how to find them. Growing up queer in the American South, my time was spent inventing places to escape. I relay that same task into my studio practice where I find overlap between mediums and use them as passageways to direct visual and poetic narrative. My formal choices reflect the biological world and hint towards the body and the landscape, while ultimately eluding any direct representation. My paintings, prints and sculptures also reference one another, while maintaining an ability to stand on their own. I use wall sculptures as stencils for paintings and those paintings as references for a print or book form. I use translation of mediums as a way of shape shifting, and I relate this to ideas of the self, and the negotiation of where and when to hide or to seek.” – Claire Whitehurst