A Creative Excuse

Jaydan Moore

Jaydan Moore grew up in the Bay Area inside a family that has sold tombstones for four generations, an early apprenticeship in how objects hold a whole life. He went to CCA at eighteen, found metals, and never really left. Fifteen years ago he picked up a silver-plated platter at a junk shop and has been working in that single material ever since. We talk nostalgia, tragedy versus comedy, and how he got to metal.

Kat Kinnick Returns!

Kat Kinnick is back on A Creative Excuse for her third solo appearance, and we get into it. We talk process over product, how the animals in her paintings sit at the edge of cuteness and brutality, and how the desire to connect, to nature, to people, to the things we don't say, runs underneath all of it.

Haley Greenfeather English

Haley Greenfeather English is an artist and educator born and raised in Tiwa territory. Their paternal family is from Red Lake Nation and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and their maternal family is of European/Irish descent. Their art is an extension of their love of storytelling. It is something that deeply connects them to being and understanding what it means to be human. Through collections of loose drawings, written journals, and sentimental random objects, English visually brings pieces of stories together. English incorporates portraits of their family, warped perspectives, historical narratives, Indigenous and medicinal plants, cigarette smoking spirits, insects and animals.

Kate Wood

Kate Wood (voted most likely to have bangs for her entire life) is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in painting/illustration, and paper mache sculpture. Kate considers herself a play-based artist whose works explores themes of relationship, body language and communication, family, and the point at which personal experience transcends identity and becomes collective consciousness. The daughter of a school teacher and an archaeologist, story and artifact became loci for Kate’s experience of and orientation to the world beginning in early childhood. Using a cast of glyphs rooted in archetype and mythology, Kate constructs visual narratives that invite and encourage viewers to have fun finding and experiencing themselves within the work. Kate grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and currently lives with her family in a rural mountain village on the High road to Taos.

Juana Estrada Hernández

Juana Estrada Hernández is a Mexican artist and Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. Born in Luis Moya, Zacatecas, Mexico, she moved to the United States at the age of seven and grew up as an undocumented immigrant — an experience that became central to her artistic practice. She received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of New Mexico and her BFA in Printmaking from Fort Hays State University. Estrada Hernández's work draws on Mexican folklore, Hispanic cultural traditions, and her family's intergenerational migration stories, with a particular focus on the social and political realities facing Hispanic migrant communities. She is a DACA recipient and self-described "DACA-mented" artist, and her prints speak with both intimacy and urgency to the experience of living, creating, and belonging across borders. Her printmaking — primarily lithography and intaglio — is luminous, narrative, and dynamic, with a touch of the surreal. She has exhibited across the United States, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Her work is held in several collections including the Janet Turner Print Museum, Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, Zygote Press Archives, Laval University, and Engramme, National Library and Archives of Québec.