Featured Artists
The best of art is not separate and apart from us. It is the human soul working out where we are and what we can envision. It connects us with our highest selves and helps to manifest better realities. We need our artists as we head into this unprecedented era, as art — and particularly social artistry — will be what leads us to new and necessary connections and thinking.
To support these efforts, ModNomad offers creative and healing space to artists in all categories. Come for the day to our studio in a charming Sausalito cottage, or apply for a residency and stay in the ModNomad guest suite, which offers views of the bay and Mt. Tamalpais as well as an inspiring collection of books and eclectic, vintage and salvage-inspired décor.
We also host events, including house-concerts, open studios, readings, lectures, workshops, guided discussions and potluck salons. To inquire about a visit or the residencies, or to suggest or produce an event, please contact us here.
ModNomad Studio is currently featuring work from various artists around the U.S. and Canada, including:
Photo by Bart Nagel
Brittany Powell holds an MFA from San Francisco State University and is an adjunct professor of photography and video at Napa Valley College. Brittany has exhibited work at SF Camerawork, Flux Factory New York, Smack Mellon, Root Division, SOMArts, Secession Gallery, California College of the Arts, San Francisco State University, and Headlands Center for the Arts. A former regular contributor to the SF Bay Guardian, Brittany's work has been published in the Washington Post, Fast Company, Featureshoot, Hyperallergic, USA Today, National Geographic, the San Francisco Chronicle, Yoga Journal, Chronicle Books and on Slate and HuffingtonPost. Brittany's commercial work includes campaigns for many commercial clients including Stub Hub, Levi's and BMW. Brittany has twice been a finalist for the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor prize in documentary, and she's been awarded fellowships from both the Vermont Studio Center and the Headlands Center for the Arts for her work-in-progress, The Debt Project.
Roger Bonair-Agard is a native of Trinidad and Tobago, a Cave Canem fellow and author of the poetry collections, tarnish & masquerade (2006), GULLY (2010) and Bury My Clothes (2013), which was the recipient of the 2013 Midland Society of Authors Award for Poetry and a finalist for the National Book Award. Artistic Director and co-founder of New York City's louderARTS Project, Roger is currently Young Chicago Author’s Artistic Fellow and he teaches poetry at Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. A two-time National Poetry Slam champion, he has performed and taught around the world and his poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Roger is also featured in the documentary "Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy" and here's a clip of him performing a poem ("for you who could know me who might love what i love') on the day Jennifer Nix interviewed him for the film. You can also read her essay about the power of his work, This Love Trumpet Kills Racism.
Tracyshaun is the singer/songwriter project of Tracy S. Ruggles, a wandering musician, poet and technologist currently living in the San Francisco bay area. After launching out of Naropa University in the early 90's, he has been busy bringing three children into the world and has now returned to his roots in songwriting inspired by deep somatic explorations over the past few years. His songs bridge the personal and the global in spurious moments of insight, challenge and integration. Lyrically, he explores alternative narratives and the relational spaces in between self & other. Musically, he explores new ways of fingerstyle guitar that complement the vocal textures of his songs.
Marta Elise Johansen is an architect, designer and artist based in Sausalito, California. Born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in 1980, attended USC School of Architecture. She worked as a designer in the architecture firm of Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects for 5 years. She also is responsible for establishing and maintaining the Sustainable Resource Materials Library. Having taught design and drawing studios to graduate students at Cal Poly and USC, Ms. Johansen remains committed to her own art. Her formal training informs her minimalist designed representations of the natural world. Marta has had 12 art exhibitions in the last five years. She has also mounted productions from fundraisers for building schools in Haiti by Architecture For Humanity to planning weddings. Her work spans from graphics for business entities to film and television treatments.
Born in Slovenjgradec, Slovenia, Velibor Božović moved in 1970 to Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, at age four. He remained there through the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian War, before immigrating to Montreal in 1999. This experience impacts his award-winning photography and video work, which inspires us to reconsider fact and fiction, memory and history. Božović’s video My Prisoner reinterprets and fictionalizes a 1994 event: a young man and an officer drive to visit the young man’s father, who is imprisoned. In real life, Božović was a soldier of the army that held his father as a prisoner of war. The piece was screened in 2016 at Les Rencontres Internationales, New Cinema and Contemporary Art festivals in Paris and Berlin. His collaboration, The Lazarus Project, with the writer Aleksandar Hemon was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. Božović is now working on a project supported by the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art, which will be presented in Montreal’s Dazibao gallery in spring 2017.
Jeff Smith is a sculptor, filmmaker and conceptual artist based in Boston, Massachusetts. In the early 1990s, he pioneered a technique using found materials to create rolling sculptures, or interactive works on wheels. His kinetic sculpture can be seen in the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, and other works have been shown in galleries and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. His latest work falls somewhere between the second and third dimension--abstract wood collage. Jeff has designed and built numerous architectural spaces, using entirely reclaimed materials. His designs include restaurants and offices in Boston, as well as the Argot Studios in New York. Since the late 1980s, Jeff has also worked as an art director, fabricator and special effects technician in film and video, on projects for MTV and films for artist William Wegman. Smith recently directed and produced the film “Smallest House in the World” and appeared on ABC's "To Tell the Truth."