Our Board of Directors

Matthew Chase-Daniel was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1965 and lived in New York City in the 1960s. In the mid and late 1980s, Chase-Daniel studied at the Ojai Foundation in Ojai, California, at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York (B.A.), and in Paris, France, where he studied cultural anthropology, photography, and ethnographic film production (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes & Sorbonne). Since 1989, he has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, making family, and roaming the landscape to make his art. His photography and sculpture have been exhibited across the U.S. and in Europe. He is the co-founder of Axle Contemporary, a mobile gallery of art, founded in 2010. Chase-Daniel serves on Santa Fe’s Railyard Art Committee and is a past member of Santa Fe’s Art In Public Places Committee. He hosts a radio interview show and podcast about the arts in Santa Fe, Coffee and Culture.

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Carol Cooper has over thirty years of experience in arts and culture programming, management and capacity building, working with artists; communities; nonprofits; state, federal and international agencies; and as an independent consultant. At New Mexico Arts, she facilitated statewide and grassroots partnerships as a grants manager for emerging nonprofits and rural arts enterprises, and founded/managed the New Mexico Fiber Arts Trails, a cultural tourism partnership with 70 sites statewide. Her previous experience includes ten years as director of education at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, consultancies on rural women’s development with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Indonesia and Save the Children in Nepal, and regional management and training for the Smithsonian Institution's Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) program. Her MSEd in Adult Nonformal Education and Multicultural Community Development is from VPI&SU.

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Brian Fleetwood is a multifaceted artist, an Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) faculty member, and a proud member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. Informed by traditional stories and making practices, a youth spent in rural Oklahoma, a background in biology and ecology, and lived experience with autism, Fleetwood’s work examines jewelry’s ability to mediate between a body and the space it occupies. He uses collaboration and experimentation with material and process to create work that aspires to behave in similar ways to living things, as a way of exploring parallels between the way ideas and living organisms grow, spread, and evolve. This work investigates the connections between different ways of knowing, acts of making, and the unexpected and complex kinship between ourselves and everything else.

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Raised in the northern New Mexican village of Truchas, Alicia Inez Guzmán has written about histories of place, identity, and land use in New Mexico. Alicia is a former faculty of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and is currently an investigative journalist at Searchlight New Mexico. Alicia holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in New York and is a recipient of the Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

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Celebrated for her deeply influential and interwoven work—as author, activist, and curator—Lucy R. Lippard is recognized as one of contemporary art’s most significant critics and as a was an early participant in conceptual, feminist and activist art. Born in New York in 1937, Lippard began her career as a writer in 1962 and subsequently produced numerous groundbreaking exhibitions and 25 books .She was a cofounder of the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee, Printed Matter, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PADD), the Heresies Collective and journal, and Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. She has received nine honorary degrees and many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary award, and a lifetime achievement award from the College Art Association.

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Jerry Wellman is a Santa Fe based artist whose cultural work includes curatorial projects, performance, writing, video and studio production. Wellman earned an MFA from CalArts. Wellman’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City, Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, The Downey Museum, and The Orange County Center of Contemporary Art in California, The El Paso Museum of Art, The Revolving Museum in Boston, and The Paseo Project in Taos, NM. His drawings were selected for a traveling show sponsored by the Smithsonian. His work with Axle Contemporary has been exhibited at SITE Santa Fe, 516 Arts in Albuquerque, The. Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock AZ, The Western Heritage Museum in Hobbs NM and the Roswell Art Center in Roswell NM. Awards of note include: Art Matters Foundation Grant, LINE Grant, Puffin Grant, and an NEA grant. Wellman has taught at the Pasadena College of Art and Design, CalArts, and New Mexico State University. He was formerly the head curator at Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. He is the co-founder of Axle Contemporary artspace