Black Bucket Essays
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  • Essays: Volume 2
    • Volume 2, Issue 1 >
      • Eileen Wold
      • Leah Cooper
      • Fritz Horstman
      • Phil Hessler
      • Billy Friebele
      • Nicole Herbert
      • Bart O'Reilly
      • Michale Dax Iacovone
      • Kristen Letts Kovak
      • Natalia Gonzalez
      • Jassie Rios
  • Essays: Volume 1
    • Volume 1, Issue 1 >
      • Eileen Wold
      • Leah Cooper
      • Fritz Horstman
      • Phil Hessler
      • Julie Benoit
      • Billy Friebele
      • Nicole Herbert
      • Bart O' Reilly
      • Michael Dax Iacovone
      • Kristen Letts Kovak
      • Natalia Gonzalez
      • Elena Volkova
    • Volume 1, Issue 2 >
      • Eileen Wold
      • Leah Cooper
      • Fritz Horstman
      • Phil Hessler
      • Julie Benoit
      • Billy Friebele
      • Nicole Herbert
      • Bart O'Reilly
      • Michael Dax Iacovone
      • Kristen Letts Kovak
      • Natalia Gonzalez
      • Elena Volkova
    • Volume 1, Issue 3 >
      • Eileen Wold
      • Leah Cooper
      • Fritz Horstman
      • Phil Hessler
      • Julie Benoit
      • Billy Friebele
      • Nicole Herbert
      • Bart O'Reilly
      • Michael Dax Iacovone
      • Kristen Letts Kovak
      • Natalia Gonzalez
      • Elena Volkova
    • Volume 1, Issue 4 >
      • Eileen Wold
      • Leah Cooper
      • Fritz Horstman
      • Phil Hessler
      • Julie Benoit
      • Billy Friebele
      • Nicole Herbert
      • Bart O'Reilly
      • Michael Dax Iacovone
      • Kristen Letts Kovak
      • Natalia Gonzalez
      • Elena Volkova
    • Volume 1, Issue 5 >
      • Eileen Wold
      • Leah Cooper
      • Fritz Horstman
      • Phil Hessler
      • Julie Benoit
      • Billy Friebele
      • Nicole Herbert
      • Bart O'Reilly
      • Michael Dax Iacovone
      • Kristen Letts Kovak
      • Natalia Gonzalez
      • Elena Volkova
  • Contributing Artists
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Eileen Wold is a Baltimore artist interested in issues of sustainability, landscape, and the politics of energy production. Through research and art making, her work questions ideas of nature as a cultural phenomenon and explores how the structures of power production and distribution are changing our ideas of landscape and environment. Using a range of media such as photography, drawing, sculptural objects, painting, and video, Wold creates visual notations that express a sense of heightened awareness and playful curiosity.  Eileen Wold received her MFA in Studio Art from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010 and has been an art professor at Loyola University Maryland, Maryland Institute College of Art, Anne Arundle Community College, and Notre Dame of Maryland University. She has exhibited her work at Universities and galleries around the country.   Eileen Wold Artist Website 

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Leah Cooper is a Baltimore artist who is captivated by the everyday. Her focus often narrows to the smallest of cracks on the sidewalk and the faintest of shadows on the wall. Using contextually dependent installation she explores an expanded notion of drawing that questions where the liminal state exists between what is noticed and what is overlooked. She is an artist who designates a piece successful when it has generated more questions, rather than illustrated a single answer. Leah received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009.  Leah was a 2010 Sondheim Finalist, a 2011 recipient of a Maryland State Art Council Individual Artist Grant, and a Sondheim Semifinalist in both 2012 and 2014. She has shown in The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, Arlington Art Center, Montpellier Arts Center, and RTKL Architecture Firm.  Leah Cooper Artist Website

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Phil Hessler is an artist/art teacher who works and hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His 
work includes photography, installation, text, sculpture, and drawing culled primarily from the 
steel mills of the rust belt and the presences of the workers who inhabited them.  
Selected exhibitions include the upcoming Festival Internacional de Video Arte, Camagüey, 
Cuba (2015); Displacement, Future Tenant Gallery, Pittsburgh PA (2013); Delineadores, Centro 
Cultural Simon I. Patino, Santa Cruz, Bolivia, (2012); SIART Biennal, La Paz, Bolivia (2011)
Phil Hessler Artist Website 

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Bart O'Reilly is an Irish artist who has been based in Baltimore for 11 years. O'Reilly makes interdisciplinary work that includes painting, drawing, poetry and video.  He has eight years experience working with under-represented artists who have special needs. He teaches painting, two-dimensional design and color theory at Harford Community College.  O'Reilly has shown his work extensively in Ireland and the United States.  He received my BFA from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 2000 and his MFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. Bart O'Reilly Artist Website 
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Natalia González Requena is a Bolivia artist currently moving between the cities of Santa Cruz, 
Bolivia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The scope of her inquiry includes examining what it 
means to draw through various media, looking for ways to interrupt, obscure, or otherwise 
stress/extend existing delineations or boundaries.  Intersecting with her exhibition practice, Natalia remains active as an art teacher.  Selected exhibitions include upcoming Festival Internacional de Video Arte, Camagüey, Cuba (2015); Drawing/Weaving, itinerant group exhibition, Bolivia (2014); Registros, solo show, Centro Cultural Santa Cruz, Bolivia (2012); XVIII Santa Cruz Biennal, Bolivia (2012); and Factory 
Installed, Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2011).  Natalia Gonzalez Requena Artist Website
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Nicole Herbert explores how meaning is assigned to ordinary objects and contexts. Within these investigations, she uses a strategy of translating everyday objects and aspects of selected spaces into different materials. She seeks to encourage active perceptions of the physical environment by challenging conventional ways of looking. This perceptual shift opens up the possibility for experiencing the world less reflexively and by implication questions the mechanisms that filter and mediate our experience.  Nicole Herbert received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009.  Nicole has exhibited her work and participated in public arts projects in California, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Beijing, New York, and Washington D.C.  Nicole Herbert Artist Website 
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Kristen Letts Kovak earned her MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010. She is based in Pittsburgh, PA where she teaches art at Carnegie Mellon University. She has a cross-disciplinary practice; creating drawings, paintings, sculptures, and surface articulations. Her work investigates the links between visual, perceptual, and cognitive patterning. "The results are part Wunderkammer, part artifact, and part academic still life."  Kovak has been teaching and exhibiting for the past fifteen years. She has served as a visiting artist/critic at the Rocky Mountain College of Art, University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan Art Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art, and DePaul University. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the country.  Kristen Letts Kovak Artist Website 
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Elena Volkova was born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved to the U.S. in 1994. She earned two degrees from the Maryland Institute College of Art: an MFA in Studio Arts as well as a BFA in Photography.Elena’s current body of work follows the post-minimalist aesthetic and focuses on the idea of liminal space, as well as legibility and the limited amount of information that is needed for a viewer to perceive a subject.  Volkova’s work brings attention to the everyday overlooked moments as  well as addresses the viewer’s interaction with an art space.  Volkova has received several recognitions and awards, including the Janis Meyer Traveling Fellowship, Hamiltonian Fellowship, Sondheim semi-finalist awards well as Vermont Studio Fellowship.  She has exhibited her work regionally and internationally.  Volkova resides in Baltimore, MD.

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Michael Dax Iacovone holds a BFA in Photography and an MA in Art Education from the State University of New York, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from VCU, and an MFA in Studio Art from MICA. He lives in works in Washington DC as a teacher and artist. He shows his work internationally, and locally, and to his dog who doesn't really care for nerdy art.  His work revolves around maps, systems, rules, public space, borders and boundaries.  Michael Dax Iacovone Artist Website 
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Julie Benoit was born in Gambrills, Maryland and currently resides in Colorado.  She  
received my MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently working on 
some drawings and some quilts.  She owns and operates a dog walking business in Baltimore 
City, and spends plenty of days walking around the city with handfuls of dogs. Through 
wandering about the city Benoit has developed an interest in all of the small, unnoticed  moments that surround us. She has shown work in galleries in cities such as Baltimore, DC, New  York, Portland, Los Angeles.  She has been an art professor since 2009, and occasionally writes for local blogs and magazines.  She spends her time wandering about and paying attention to all  of the tiny things that are typically overlooked.  Julie Benoit Artist Website 
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Fritz Horstman (Bethany, CT) reads theory and art history with breakfast, because it is best to do the mental heavy lifting early.  He rarely makes sculpture after dinner.  That is time for music.  He also makes videos, photos, drawings, and when the time is right, performances.  They all generally deal with the virtually indefinable seam between nature and culture, which permeates every corner of our lives.  Every aspect of the dialectic is in response to its opposite.   For the last two years he has been making videos of vocal experiments and wooden models of and derived from construction sites.  MFA Maryland Institute College of Art (2011), BA Kenyon College (2001))   Fritz Horstman Artist Website 
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Billy Friebele lives and works in Washington, DC. He received a Masters in Fine Arts in from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Bachelors of Arts in Philosophy from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His work examines the intersection of new media and public space through video, animation, and installation. Billy has exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Orlando Museum of Art, and the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC. He has also recently exhibited in Sarajevo, Bosnia; Jatiwangi, Indonesia; Detroit, MI; Boston, MA; and St. Louis, MO among other places. He teaches as an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.  Billy Friebele Artist Website 
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Jassie Rios is a sound artist working at the intersection of computer music, sculpture and drawing. Her visual and sonic work explores light, time, space, sound, motion, and language in relationship to the land or the everyday. By applying a conceptual and theoretical framework, her practice crosses wires, disciplines and borders, focusing on the ephemeral and immaterial as material to draw attention to what lies at the edge of perceptibility. Rios studied Interdisciplinary Drawing at the Maryland Institute College of Art, earning a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art (2011); she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Painting from Texas State University (2002); Currently, she is working towards earning a Master of Arts in Audio Technology at American University, concentrating in Computer Music (2018). Jassie Rios Artist Website 
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