Abstract Picnic
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Members
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Abstract Picnic 〰️ Members 〰️
Billy Bilbro has been a ceramic artist for over 30 years. She creates narrative sculptures using stream of consciousness illustrations with personal and collective symbolism to simplify complex ideas, to reflect the minutiae of her inner world and the expansiveness of universal concepts. Currently based in Madrid, New Mexico, Bilbro draws inspiration from the high desert landscape where she lives and works. Her daily conversations with the crows and her meandering explorations through the desert inform her practice, bringing an element of natural observation and interspecies connection to her work. This environment provides both solitude for deep creative work and a profound sense of place that permeates her artistic vision. Her current body of work has expanded to include performance, illustration, and multi-media installations. Billy often tricks people into thinking that she is more serious than she really is. Follow Billy on Instagram.
Andrew Brant is an artist, illustrator and woodworker born in Kansas City, Missouri. Armed with a dip pen & a chisel, he creates wild and frenetic illustrations & luxuriously refined wooden bathtubs, often inlaid with exotic wood, elevating the functional to fine art. Find him on instagram: @_andrewbrant & @redwoodofuro
Emily Lauren Burg (The Startup Artist) builds paintings the way others build companies: through systems, intuition, and systemic curiosity. Working under the moniker The Startup Artist, she re-layers and repurposes her materials and canvases in an ever-evolving process that mirrors the experimental rhythm of creation itself. Her abstractions capture the dialogue between strategy and surrender, intellect and instinct. Through color, texture, and transparency, Burg transforms each surface into a record of resilience, creating a visual language of reinvention and becoming.
JESHAKA (pronounced Jes-Ha-Ka), aka Jes LaVecchia, is a mixed media artist, absurdist, Reiki Master, Meow Wolf Project Coordinator & Pittsburgh native living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In line with the idea that nothing should be taken seriously except for self-love, her body of work explores & celebrates the gift of the human experience through a whole lot of hotdogs. As Jes has traversed her healing journey over the last several years, hotdogs took center stage in her art as the quintessential embodiment of what it means to be human, especially American: horrifying, delicious, sensual, hilarious, revolting and everything in-between. She uses them to help spread joy & share the wisdom she’s gained along the way. In 2024, Jes received the lifetime title of Hotdog Ambassador by the National Hotdog & Sausage Council and revisited a mixed media style that is prevalent in her artwork today. Find her on instagram @jeshaka
Shakti Kroopkin is a contemporary abstract artist known for dynamic, intuitive paintings that lean into curiosity, movement and joy. Born in Chicago in 1976, they began painting early, creating landscapes and clowns in oils at age seven (yes, clowns). She earned a degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998, with focuses in painting & art education. After years of traveling and bouncing around, New Mexico became home in 2005. A recently built 16’ x 24’ pitched-roof studio on her property against the historic Cerrillos Hills is home to ShapeSpace Studio. Art sits at the center of everything Shakti does. She owns and operates Mad Contemporary—an integrated gallery & art center in Madrid, NM—where they curate exhibitions, host workshops, offer open studio time and showcase rad local artists alongside their own work. Teaching is another vital part of their practice. At The Masters Program at Santa Fe Community College, Shakti facilitates art-making through an Art & Games Club and a weekly school beautification service-learning project. Inspired by their own high school art teacher, this work is grounded in empathy, inclusivity, and creative risk-taking. Beyond the gallery & classroom, Shakti’s work extends into public art, wearable art, live painting and performance. Affiliations include Walter Wickiser Gallery (NYC), Jezebel Gallery, Abstract Picnic and the Santa Fe Society of Artists. Their work has appeared in over 50 exhibitions nationwide and is held in international collections.
Mudmittens is a collaboration between Lori Swartz and Billy Bilbro exploring new and old mediums through questions of identity, time, death, presence, and connection. They use raw video, images, and projections focusing on the finite (or is it infinite? )nature of time and place. Through hand drawn animation, spontaneous interactive performances with nature, and found object installations, Lori and Billy aim to highlight the continued need for raw, analog, unpolished expression as we move into the digital unknown.
Brooke Reiche works with layers of paint and mixed media to create imagery of memories, stories, dreams, and emotions. With a background in both illustration and fine art, her pieces balance graphic lines and shapes with subtle textural experiments and collage. Inspiration from the language of nature and animal personalities has become a through line in her work. Her self published graphic novel Moonbones is an expression of the wisdom and mystical qualities of the high desert, which teaches compassion and interconnection. Born in Placitas, NM, she is now based in Santa Fe.
Mike Root is a Santa Fe-based multi-disciplinary artist working across interactive installations, experimental music composition and live audio-visual performance. Mike’s interactive work allows audiences to become creators as their body movements generate musical sounds and colorful visuals. His solo performances fuse generative sound, reactive visuals, and live guitar and vocals into hypnotizing immersive experiences. Find Mike on instagram & facebook
Eleanor Ryburn lives in Santa Fe, NM where she makes illustrated essays and poems, teaches mindfulness & visual art, and practices Craniosacral therapy. She is also a walker, meditator, life long learner and lover of community, the natural world, and soul satisfying conversations. She studied printmaking, book arts and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, received a Masters in Art Education at Portland State University, and has received certifications in Craniosacral Therapy and as a meditation teacher. She loves to learn through creating, like discovering theories about the formation of our moon, and through her art explores themes of impermanence, interconnectedness, the interplay of destruction and creation, and spiritual practice. She hopes to make art that feels connective, generous, and nutritious.
::Savor:: Arts aka Mani has been described as the love child of bob ross and bob marley. He is endlessly in pursuit of knowledge and practice in multiple forms of artistic expression. This includes drawing, painting, printing, chalk and pastel, writing, music, ceramics, origami, textural & interactive pieces, storytelling, puppetry, and with homemade organic healing skin/lip balms. In Mani’s poetry, he uses the double colon before and after a word to indicate the ::experience:: of something and calls his art studio/practice ::savor:: because in his art he is always trying to communicate his experiences of savoring things that touch, bewilder, and fascinate him. Mani also hosts free community drop-in picnics in Santa Fe. Find him on Instagram
Carol Schrader’s artistic practice explores connections between mythology, dream and contemporary issues. Using cyanotype, painting, sculpture, fiber arts & ritual she investigates the archetype of the muse, women’s roles and climate change in our culture. The repetitive practice of sewing is ritualistic and can also become structural and architectural in fiber/mixed-media installations. Carol’s entry point to art is creating community and working for social justice. She worked in the US Senate, ran a circus and taught at youth & college levels. She is currently completing an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. She says, “Making art is a political act in and of itself. Art is key to the health of the community, tying us together as creators, not consumers. More than any traditional definition of beauty, I look for the embodiment of energy, intention, and experience in an object.” Find Carol on instagram
Will Slayden has worked in the arts for over 25 years, primarily focused in theatrical scenic design, and arts education. His career has taken him all over the U.S, most recently working with Meow Wolf as a Technical Director and bringing him to Santa Fe. His current creative work focuses on process and abstraction. Will enjoys experimenting with unconventional mediums like wood and hair dyes in combination with acrylic paint to tell stories about alcoholism, love inspired movement and microscopic universes. He also enjoys facilitating group creative practices and finds true joy in helping others find their creative voice. You can find examples of his work on instagram
Rachael Stubbs is an experimental film photographer based in Santa Fe. Their art is, currently, non-commercial and untraceable but nonetheless omnipresent and evolving. Stubbs' creative practice is fueled by their intuitive connection to subjects of metaphysics, mother nature, and the female form. Stubbs leans into the destructive and serendipitous, intentionally subverting perfectly developed images via manipulations like multiple exposures, burned negatives, and film soup. Utilizing a variety of imperfect cameras, from vintage polaroids to disposable point and shoots to antique twin-lens reflexes, there is always an emphasis on time, emotion, and allegory over results and refinement. Stripping the act of photographing down to instinct and perspective, Stubbs finds comfort in obsessively documenting the world around her in all its inexplicable multiplicity and intensity.
Lori Swartz makes art across media because the universe is too weird to be contained in a single discipline. She make things. Clay things that fire and hold. Painted things that stare back. Sculptural things that occupy space the way a good story occupies memory. Lori performs, writes, collaborates with her creative co-conspirator in a venture we call Mudmittens (don't ask, or ask!). It is promiscuous devotion—one grand love affair with making, expressed in multiple positions. Find her work in galleries nationwide, @loriMetals or loriMetals.com, or at her studio in Madrid, New Mexico, where the sky is still having that affair and everyone's invited. The sky is in love with the earth….and with you. Don’t miss the whole sordid, glorious thing.
Jake Trujillo is a contemporary artist and musician based in his hometown of Santa Fe, NM. His primary medium is oil paint. He is best known for his oil and acrylic landscape paintings of the Southwest which feature innovative and dynamic color and layout choices, blending traditional landscape oil painting approaches with modern design and psychedelia. Trujillo’s work seeks to emphasize the craft and qualities of the held and staged object within the home or space, with most paintings being hand-framed by the artist himself. Trujillo was the recipient of the Jury’s Choice Award at the Art In The West exhibition at Museum of the Southwest in Bend, OR in 2025, the 2022 recipient of the Ferran Fine Art First Time Exhibitor Award at Santa Fe’s Contemporary Hispanic Market, and is a featured artist at Sun & Dust Gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe and Madaras Gallery in Tucson. Find Jake on instagram