Transparently Built
Artist Bios

Mildred Howard

Mildred Howard (American) was born in San Francisco in 1945. She grew up in Berkeley, California, where her mother, a labor and political activist, was an important role model for her daughter and other young African-American women. Growing up in the 1960s, the Black Panther Party and the rise of feminism were also major influences on the artist, as was her early training in dance, textiles, and fashion design. In 1985, she received an MFA in fiberworks from John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California.

Well known for her use of ordinary objects, Howard creates her installations with mixed media, often using stereotypical images, such as Aunt Jemima, to deal with issues of domesticity, gender, and race. Her work often includes repetition and accumulation of identical forms which, she states, “suggest memory and the passage of time.” This installation includes hundreds of glass apples. In other works she has used such unique objects as 400 casts of human feet, 700 lockets, 1,500 glass bottles, and 4,000 eggs.

Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; the Neuburger Biennale in Public Art, Purchase, New York; and the Nielsen Gallery in Boston. In 2004, Howard was invited by the American Embassy in Cairo as a Visiting Artist/Cultural Specialist to Alexandria, Cairo, and Minia, Egypt. Howard has received many awards, including the Adeline Kent Award from the San Francisco Art Institute, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, a Fleishhacker Eureka Fellowship, a Flintridge Award, a grant from the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, and recognition from Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest/Arts International. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Oakland Museum of California; Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Capp Street Project, San Francisco; Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin County, California; Gallery Resche, Paris, France; and at the Berkeley Art Center. She was named an O’Brien Distinguished Professor at Scripps College in Claremont, California, in 2003.

The artist lives and works in Berkeley, California.

Jean Shin & Brian Ripel

Jean Shin (American) was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1971. She earned her BFA in painting in 1994 and her MS in theory, criticism, and history of art, design, and architecture from Pratt Institute in New York in 1996. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1999. Her work is largely influenced by the urban landscape where she collects ordinary objects such as old prescription bottles, discarded umbrellas and clothing, and, as shown here, recycled wine bottles, using them to create site-specific, community-based sculptures and installations.

As Shin states, “The process of accumulating hundreds of a particular discarded object becomes an informal survey that reflects our identity as a society—ultimately creating a ‘collective portrait’ of our immediate community that reflects who we are, how we live, and what we value.”

Shin was awarded Artist-in-Residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2004. She won a fellowship in sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was the recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art award in 2001. Her installations have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, all in New York City, and the Sculpture Center in Hamilton, New Jersey.

Brian Ripel (American) was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1973 and is a New York–based architect and the principle of RSVP Studio. In his work with artists as both collaborators and clients, Ripel explores the boundary that has typically divided art and architecture. In addition to his independent practice, Ripel is an Adjunct Professor in the Urban Studies program at Vassar College and a Visiting Professor of Architecture at Pratt Institute.

The artist and architect currently live and work in New York.

Anna Skibska

Anna Skibska (Polish) was born in Wroclaw (Warsaw), Poland, in 1959. She studied painting, glass design, architecture, and graphic arts at the Academy of Arts in Wroclaw, where she completed her degree in 1984. After graduation she worked as a teacher at the Academy for the next twelve years. Her teacher’s salary would not afford her the means to purchase art supplies, so she turned to using recycled materials that could easily be obtained at no cost. Using found glass, a torch, and a pair of tweezers, she began experimenting by pulling and shaping glass threads into sculptural form.

Skibska’s sculptures and installations are often composed of multiple sections reassembled and suspended in abstract, geometric configurations that seem to defy spatial realities. She works mostly in clear glass, and her ethereal visions invoke mystical, otherworldly experiences. Skibska’s art has been widely shown and exhibited in such venues as the Gallery of Modern Art and the National Museum, both in Wroclaw, as well as in Italy, Sweden, France, Germany, and Japan. Locally, her sculpture has been exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, the William Traver Gallery, and the Bullseye Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and at numerous locations throughout the United States.

Skibska has taught at the Niijima Glass Art Center in Tokyo, Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, Washington, Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, and the Academy of Art in Wroclaw, Poland. She has been a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an Artist Trust Fellowship, a Soros Foundation Research Grant, a Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship, and numerous other awards and scholarships.

The artist currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington, and Wroclaw, Poland.

Jo Yarrington

Jo Yarrington (American) was born in Fort Lee, Virginia, in 1950. In 1975, she received a MFA in printmaking and drawing from Ohio State University in Columbus. The artist is most noted for her experimentations with light and its effect on both secular and religious architectural sites, in addition to her exploration of the relationships between history, cultural practices, and community.

Her drawings, photographs, and architecturally based installations have been shown in exhibitions at Artists Space, Exit Art, Broadway Windows, St. John the Divine Cathedral, Museum of Catholic Art and Rotunda Gallery, all in New York City; the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, near Boston; Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia; I Space, Chicago; and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, and William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, both in Connecticut. Internationally, her work has been exhibited at Galeria Sala Uno, Rome, Italy; Centro de las Artes de Guanajuato, Salamanca, Mexico; Christuskirche, Cologne, Germany, and Glasgow Cathedral, Glasgow, Scotland. Recent articles on her art appear in Glass Magazine and World Sculpture News. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Brandywine Institute, and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts. In 2001, she was one of four artists representing the United States at the Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates. She is a professor of studio art in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.

The artist currently lives and works in Norwalk, Connecticut.