Susan Lynn Smith’s color photographs investigate the peculiarities that often go overlooked within the everyday spaces we inhabit, revealing an unexpected sense of humor and anxiety.  Her work has been featured in several exhibitions, including shows in New York at the Visual Studies Workshop, Gallery Henoch, Gulf and Western Gallery, Clearview 62nd & Broadway Cinema, The School at the International Center for Photography, and at Cantor Film Center.  Recent Bay Area exhibitions include Depth of Perception at the MarinMOCA, Eighteen Months: Taking the Pulse of Bay Area Photography at San Francisco City Hall, Inhabited at the Diego Rivera Gallery, TASTE at Root Division, and On Second Thought, her MFA thesis, atthe Fort Mason Center.  Her recent work can be seen at www.susanlynnsmith.com
 
Susan received her M.F.A degree in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in May 2008. She also earned a B.F.A. in Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2002.  While residing in Manhattan, she worked a freelance photographer, a Gallery Associate, and as an Art Instructor.  Her teaching experience includes positions with Excel Amherst College & Spain (Putney Student Travel), New York University (Community Collaborations), and Good for Kids Foundation in San Francisco, CA.  Additionally, Susan has assisted classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and the International Center of Photography.  She currently is the Program Manager at Good For Kids Foundation.  Susan is very excited to return for a 3rd amazing summer at Oxbow.

Cherie Hackerwas born and raised in Chicago.  Early on, she experimented with all types of media.  At twelve she spent her earned allowance on art supplies and painted with oils on an easel in her bedroom.  Her personal high school fieldtrips embodied taking the “L” to the Art Institute where she was influenced by Picasso and Dali.  Cherie holds a MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, a BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Davis, as well as Associate Degrees in Art, General Education, and Railroad Technology.  An educational highlight for Cherie was a Smithsonian Graduate Level Internship in 2000-01.  She attended over thirty comprehensive workshops, seminars, and museum tours.  Assigned to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, she assisted in Exhibition Design and on the NEA Artists Archive Project.   

Cherie has installed and currated many gallery and student shows.  Most recent, she was Gallery Director at Asylum Gallery in Sacramento, and taught Art Foundations at Folsom Lake College.
Cherie Hacker is a conceptual artist and abstract painter whose work is process oriented.  She is an avid nature lover, experienced at hiking volcanoes and rafting big rivers.  She knows the value of allowing your art ideas to develop over time.  “I am in the seventh year of an environmental project, The Lamp & Endtable Project, in which respect for the earth is my ultimate message.  This has taken me on wilderness journeys from Alaska, thru the Northwest mountains, beaches, and deserts.” says Cherie.  “I began from dreams and sketches.  Now the lamp and end table appears in paintings, sculpture, photography, and printmaking.”  She is quintessentially a mixed-media artist with a studio in Sacramento.

Cherie has exhibited her art in group and solo shows in Minneapolis, Montreal, New York, Alaska, California, India and China, and with the project: The Faces of Courage – 911 Heroes in which larger than life portraits traveled throughout the east coast and in two World Trade Centers.  With several bodies of work, Cherie moves in and out of each as the inspiration calls from portraits to nature to coyotes, to abstracts, to ceramic sculpture and installations.  “I tend to use several media within one piece.  One painting may contain charcoal, ink, gesso, collage, oil, latex, alkyd, and enamel.  I use recycled wood, paint, wallpaper books, and found objects from flea markets.  I aspire to work on the Lamp & Endtable project indefinitely, and to document the changes in our environment thru it.” 

Ryan Converse hails from the moist mossy north and is currently a junior at the Evergreen State College studying mythology and film-making. His art began as drawings, and eventually transitioned to sculpture, costumes and film. Ryan received a grant earlier this year and is making a short 16mm film and book. It will be the culmination of a year if sculpting, writing, and learning. The finished product will be published by Container Corps in Portland by the end of the year. He also enjoys synthesizers, moss, and puppets. It will be his first year experiencing camp, but he has been chasing after it for awhile. He eagerly awaits the summer and interacting with the Oxbow community.

Ben Fash started using a camera before he lost his first tooth. Born in San Diego, he celebrated half of his childhood in Copán, Honduras and the other half between the Illinois cornfields and Boston suburbs. He went on to study art and other ideas at Newton North High, Wesleyan University and the San Francisco Art Institute. At Wesleyan, he received a Freeman research grant to study and make photographs about Buddhist nuns in Ladakh, India and the Jamie Hulley Prize to make photographs about work and play in Honduras. He also won the Tishler Prize for Best Student Exhibition, which supported his third journey to the Himalayas and a photo series about day-to-day life in and around sacred places. While there, he lived with monks, nuns and families, learned to make and enjoy butter-salt tea, taught English and helped lay mud bricks for nunneries. Nowadays he enjoys making sculptures out of photographs.

Ben loves life, jokes, and being outside. He and his brothers founded New Root, a non-profit organization dedicated to forest conservation and education, especially in Honduras. He enjoys planting trees, climbing them, picking their fruit and eating it too. He is looking forward to his first summer at Oxbow.

Camp Counselor Bios and Art